Muffled Magnificence

These are the two words that came to my mind in order to describe The National - a band that exercise such an amazing restraint in creating such elegantly structured songs and somehow dont let themselves get carried away by the song - perhaps due to Matt Berninger's distincnt and sometimes melancholic baritone and maybe because the five piece band also has 2 pairs of brothers who probably understand each other well enough to keep it together...

its a Muffled Magnificence that makes Coldplay, sound like a loud American band - its like a giant pillow smothered over a nuclear explosion ...

Zoo Station

a long, lomg time ago I was pleasantly bludgeoned by Achtung Baby - easily one of the greatest and most seminal music masterpieces of our times/ my times and a truly defining moment in the trajectory of U2 - perhaps i would even say the maxima of that trajectory

anyways I was in Berlin end Sept 2010 and stayed at a hostel near the Zoologischer Garten which I realized is the Zoo Station - the distorted dream that begins the album

Interestingly the U2 train passes thru Zoologischer Garten so i did take a picture of the trainline

more about Achtung Baby later