Looks like Explosions in the Sky has a new album out, All of a sudden I miss everyone. Like their other albums, it has about half the tracks of a standard album made up for by songs more than twice the length of standard tracks.

From the cover art of a man in a canoe going facing a sunken city, it looks like the album is conceptually based on the New Orleans disaster. The song titles also reflect this to some degree: “The Birth and Death of the Day” could be before and leading into the disaster, “Welcome Ghosts” once the disaster has passed, “It’s Natural to Be Afraid” the shock of everything destroyed, “What Do You Go Home To?” the disillusionment of having nothing left, “Catastrophe and the Cure” rebuilding, and “So Long, Lonesome” the final emotional healing. At least that’s the way it seems from the titles. I’m sure the music itself is symbolic of the different events, but as is the case with instrumental music, these connections have to be explained by the artists.

The album is certainly less boring/monotonous/pretentious than its predecessors. By tying it conceptually to a theme, their esoteric song titles actually make some degree of sense. There are fewer extended sections of a single repeating melody or rhythm, making it more of an interesting listen without the monotony.

Musically, I’m glad to see them using other sorts of instruments than their standard guitars/bass/drums. I heard a piano and bongos in “What Do You Go Home To?”, and a few different percussion styles throughout, some even venturing into the realm of more traditional rock and metal.

On a whole, the percussion is a lot less chaotic than their previous work. Though most of their drumming is in the same style as previous work, it blends with and complements the other instruments much better in this album than their others.

Explosions In The Sky for the most part isn’t music to put on shuffle with the rest of the music library - their song lengths alone can make them get old fast. More than anything, it sets an atmosphere: it’s something to listen to in order to create or satisfy a mood. With this album more than any of their others, I have to say that would be a pretty good mood.

I’m having mixed feelings with regard to the Wired article on image licenses. On the one hand, I completely agree that copyrights on digital images have put graphically uncreative or photographically challenged (me without camera) bloggers with a huge inconvenience in searching for cool images to put up. When I don’t use photos of things I’m reviewing, I like to create my own images - AllOfMP3/Russia and Universal/Borg, for example - but even these are based on copyrighted logos, though I like to think they’re protected under fair use, being parody and all.

NetUtopia is on its way, but until then, I’ll declare here and now: All images I create on this site for the purpose of blog posts are from this point forward under a creative commons license. Go use the Microsoft/China logo on your own blog. You can even email me to change the background to a different color if the dark gray clashes. Or to tell me that I’m just flattering myself thinking that people are going to use them. A link back here would be cool (it would be cool even if you didn’t use the images; I’m always happy for referrers!), but it’s not like I’m going to sue if you don’t. I probably won’t even complain.

If only the rest of blogdom were so magnanimous.

Secondly, on the topic of HTML bloat, I believe a license tag would be a non-solution that makes a completely unrelated problem worse. First, hardly anyone will use the tag, because it adds to their markup without adding to the site’s functionality. I’m all for markup that makes sense, but the W3C has already taken it to ridiculous extremes. What was wrong with the <i> tag that <em> had to replace it? What difference does it make if I “emphasize” a block of text rather than “italicize” it? Why can’t screen readers emphasize the <i> tag instead of creating a different tag?

The <i> and <b> tags will never go away for 2 reasons. They’re shorter than <em> or <cite> and <strong>, respectively, and elementary web design classes still teach them that way. This is just one example of the problem: the ‘alt’ attribute requirement for the <img> tag, for example. The argument that “the tag is already bloated enough” is an argument for getting rid of and condensing attributes (getting rid of ‘alt’ and using ‘title’ for that purpose would be a good start), not adding more.

The only tag I can think of that would warrant a license attribute would be the <body> tag to indicate content as a whole rather than individual elements thereof as creative commons or other licenses. I still wouldn’t agree with putting it there, but I could at least see why it would be wanted.

A license attribute on any tag would also not solve the underlying problem that images are not legally copyable. Stay tuned for more on that…