Home improvements have kept me away for more than a week. The long weekend didn't help – a flurry of activities that included selecting a bathroom floor tile, dim sum, barbeques, a couple of record reviews, and "Beverly Hills 90210: Season Two."

A recap of what's been in my player:

The National – Boxer: I understand why my colleagues are so in love with them: the tunes are pretty, the production and arrangements fulsome, and Matt Berninger's John Cale-esque rumble avoids the declamatory vigor that so many young bands mistake for power. "Mistaken for Strangers" is likely the best Interpol song I'll ever hear. But pretty tunes and fulsome arrangements don't compensate the well-meaning vacuity of what Berninger has to say about love and loss. "Subtle" in this context means "polite." Paul Banks is a tool but at least he shows signs that he's conflicted about it; I don't hear conflict on here at all, unless I'm missing something. I guess I want declamatory vigor after all.

Jarvis Cocker – Jarvis: In which Jarvis falls victim to the common affliction when massively compelling frontmen go solo: he's writing about his well-worn subjects with a verve he hasn't shown in years, while his backing band, so besotted with their leader's conviction, drags the tempos. In this case the backing band is mostly Jarvis, and welcome entries to his canon like "Disney Time" and "From Auschwitz to Ipswich" simmer instead of cook. "Running The World" is cool because Jarvis gets to say "cunt" in his most self-piteous manner, but in the end it's not so much a statement as an epitaph, and not a particularly eloquent one at that (burying it in thirty minutes of silence - so 1993! – doesn't help). I don't doubt that my affection for Jarvis will keep me returning to it in the next few months despite my having not played Tom Verlaine, Stephen Malkmus, and Rei Momo in years.

Finally, this unearthed Robert Christgau essay about one of my favorite bands made my day (Key line: an album "doesn't qualify as great junk unless the possibility remains that it's really pretentious.")