Spoiler alert! The new Midlake record is not from the band that you grew to love with The Trials Of Van Occupanther. With each successive album, the members of Midlake transformed, foregrounding a different favorite section of their record collections. Now comes Antiphon (ATO), which announces itself with an opening title track that rocks harder and more insistently than anything in the group’s prior catalog. Midlake again sounds like a new band. And, this time it is: It’s Midlake’s first since the departure of principal singer/songwriter Tim Smith, its first with guitarist Eric Pulido stepping into those lead roles, its first with former touring members Jesse Chandler (keyboards, flute) and Joey McClellan (guitars) officially joining drummer Mackenzie Smith, multi-instrumentalist Paul Alexander and guitarist Eric Nichelson. Chandler and Nichelson will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Midlake feature.
Chandler: I try to tackle at least one doorstop-sized novel a year, and a few years ago, I finally read David Foster Wallace‘s Infinite Jest. This 1,000-plus page tome is the kind of book you just live with for an extended period of time. The words “sprawling masterpiece” gets lobbed at it all the time, but it really is true. It took me about eight months to get through it, and it felt like running a marathon, but living in that world of I.J. for so long just made me miss it and the characters when I finally did finish it. DFW was such a gifted and brilliant writer—I’ve read a lot of his works and am consistently amazed with the way he can capture human emotions so deftly. Next year, I’m shooting for Don Quixote!
Video after te jump.
