THE WAR ON THE DRUGS - LOST IN THE DREAM

The War on Drugs is a smartly-named band that is basically one man's vision now - but the new album, Lost In The Dream has the sound of an entire canon, an entire back catalogue, echoing through it. There is a lot of talk these days of mash-ups, fusions, hybrids, influences, and eclectic splicing, but few decisive aesthetic acts of total comprehension and compression that occur when a tradition meets an individual talent. This album, just out in the UK in 2014, is such a moment. The list of fully absorbed influences is long, and almost comical - but let's start with the big two - Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen - mostly in terms of vocals for the former, and the chugging guitars, and epic sax bits of the latter; then move on to the Eagles, Chris Rea, Joshua Tree era U2, Tom Petty, Dire Straits - in short, a whole range of Americana-influenced rockers whose greatest songs are best played in cars with the top rolled down driving to Malibu at sundown, or to the Mojave.

So far, so what, you might ask - but then comes the twist that makes everything shine and flash - for this is fused with an ambient sensibility, a gift for abstract airy soundscapes, and dream-pop, part Tangerine Dream, part Talk Talk, part William Orbit. What results is a guitar and synth masterwork that has the driving pulse of a revival meeting that has just been joined by Jesus bearing peyote. Yelps of extraordinary joy and rhapsodic sequences spiral out and spin in to the rambling, open form songs, that expand and swim about the rock formula in a dream swoon like kissing a wannabe starlet you love in a diner on the edge of town. 2014 has given us albums of majestic pop beauty by Beck and Warpaint, but this surpasses them for intelligent design.

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CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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