So it's pretty funny that the Midlake wiki says their newest album The Courage of Others "garnered generally good reviews," when it got a 3.6 on the Fork. Seems a UK/US divide, with a sharp turn among the Stateside tastemakers away from such beardo sincerity in 2010. Pretty much every person I ask who's listened to it hates it soundly, except my psychfolk superhero Neil, who wrote the band a personal letter to thank them for their 21st century reanimation of the Pentagle tradition. I guess Neil's letter is the reason obscure weird bands keep going round the world, so bravo to him. Less public fan art, more private fan mail.

I too love the heavy British folk influence and adore moments on the album. And I'll come right out and say I love it for the reason the US nerds hate it - it's tots sans irony. I do agree that the vocals are flat, lifeless, both in delivery and in the mix, but still...

"Rulers, Ruling All Things" has been on constant rotation in the glum moments that overtake me when I start wondering how it is that I am so far from home, which are less often then they were when I got here but somehow more acute in the spring. Yes, this is a song that contains the word "maidens" and they aren't for torturing, and it features the lower register of the flute for dramatic effect, but it also has the lovely, melancholy opening couplet "I have been cruel and kind without knowing/I fell in the silence overwhelmed by these days" that somehow describes exactly my non-research or teaching life right now. Quiet, a little medieval, and frankly humorless.

Except today, after Fleck left my house and I realized that I had no keys to get in but the window was open. One text message, ladder appropriation, and a few laughs later and I was back in, thanks to Keith - who is not just punk in Africa, but every damn place he goes.

So yeah, I guess Midlake might be a bit staid, but I guess right now I'm a bit staid, or feckless or simply between. I just started reading the anthropologist Michael Jackson's At Home In the World, and he has a lovely passage in his introduction about conjuctions as verbs. Right now I work, but in my private life, I am living a conjunction. And it sounds like Midlake.