I'LL TEAR DOWN THE EIFFEL TOWER IF I HAVE TO!

I've done some unfortunate shit in my time. At the age of three I robbed an egg from the fridge and sat on it to see if it would hatch. In junior infants I walked out of the classroom jacks with little gardenhead waving in the breeze and asked the teacher for toilet roll. In second class I called my teacher "Mammy" in front of a ruthless audience of sneering Kells boys. At the age of twenty, when at a house-party, I necked some extra virgin olive oil from a fancy bottle thinking it was white wine. This week, the chronicle of shame continues. I rented the preposterous, cinematic chunderfest that is 'Taken' from Xtravision in Kells and accidentally brought it to Dublin for a week. Then I lost it. That's right, Xtravision have been charging me round the clock for it since Sunday and as far as I am aware it is either on the floor of Bus Aras or near the big log fire in Whelans. Of course, that's if it hasn't been nicked by a crudely stereotyped Albanian child trafficker. If it has, I will look for him, I will find him and I will kill him. Pffnar.

Everyone and their pet dogs are reviewing the new U2 album. I haven't heard it and probably never will. Weirdly, I've never heard a full U2 album from start to finish. I heard my dad calling Bono a smug bollocks when I was young and that coloured my impression of them until I was old enough to make up my own mind, but by then I was too self-consciously into grunge to listen to something so mulletty. I've also never been to a wedding, smoked a fag, drank tea or seen the film Titanic. Once I've avoided doing something long enough I wear it as a freaky badge of pride and try not to do/see that thing ever. I don't know whether this is a minor character quirk or the signifier of some deep mental sickness. For example, over the years my avoidance of tea has taken on a life of its own and developed into something bordering on phobia. When someone near me leaves the last slurp of cold grey tea in their cup my skin crawls until the moment I can wash it down the sink. If the bad guys from Oceania ever caught me and locked me into room 101, they'd only have to chain me to a chair and leave the dregs of a really milky cup of tea with a fag butt in it inches from my face. I'd break down and blub like a baby in seconds.

For what it's worth I'll review the U2 album cover which is probably a lot more interesting than the music contained therein.



Earlier this year Animal Collective set the standard for album covers with Merriweather Post Pavillion, a bonkers Briget Riley tribute that you could not only watch like a telly but, cunningly, actually hypnotised bloggers into writing hyperbolic gobbledigook about the band. Excited critics proclaimed it album cover of the year despite it only being January. Now, from waay left of field, veteran Irish rockers U2 have thrown their stunning effort into the ring. A striking, minimal and downright mysterious exercise in tonal greys, the cover of 'No Line on the Horizon' uses a photograph by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto overlaid with an equals sign. Imbued with an eerie, sad calm, the cover is so evocative it could nearly be taken as a negative of a Mark Rothko painting. If I didn't know it was a load of self indulgent Dadrock tarted up by Brian Eno I'd wager that the music on this album was serene, instrumental, stately and melancholy, like the decaying loops on William Basinski records. I give this cover 5 out of 5.

MP3: William Basinski-Melancholia 1