Calla is going to go far, and their new album, Collisions, is going to take them there.

In the past, Calla’s music has been marked by a raw, jagged intensity. The band has always shown promise, but Collisions is perhaps the first time they have fully realized it. Their new record is more focused, more melodic, and more lushly produced than their previous albums, Scavengers and Televise. That’s not to say that the band has compromised one bit of its authenticity, or lost its edge — it has simply honed its blade.

The opening song, “It Dawned On Me” (available for a free download on Amazon; the video is here), gathers like a storm before exploding with an anthemic guitar riff and a kicking drum beat that step with revolutionary force. The song announces movement — this band is driving forward; you can either get on board or step aside. But don’t stand in the way, unless you’re willing to be run over.

The new album is at times densely atmospheric — “So Far, So What” and “Testify,” in particular, recreate the thick sonic soundscapes and choking distortion of My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Other highlights include “Pulverize,” “Swagger” (which picks up right where one of the best songs on Televise, the pounding and amazing “Strangler,” left off), “Stumble,” and “Initiate.” The final song, “Overshadowed,” ends the album on a steadily rising crescendo.

If I’ve mentioned almost every song on this album as a highlight, I apologize, but the truth is that it’s all so good that it’s hard to leave any song out. In short, it fucking rocks.

If you are a fan of Bloc Party, Interpol, the Pixies, or The Breeders, you’ll like this powerhouse of an album. I feel confident that it will rise to the top of many year-end lists.

Check it out.

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I picked up James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces by chance at the library — the cover looked interesting, and the opening page caught my attention:

The story of how the twenty-three year-old Frey ended up in the back of that plane, and how he was able to beat the drug and alcohol addictions that brought him there, form the central narrative of the book. It’s a gripping read — Frey’s life has been nothing if not colorful. Drinking heavily at age ten, smoking pot and popping pills by age eleven, using coke, acid, and crystal meth at fifteen, and smoking crack by twenty-one, Frey was on a collision course with death until that fateful plane ride brought him back to his parents, who drove him to a treatment facility in Minnesota for a last chance to get clean.

If you or someone you know has battled addiction (and I imagine that that covers just about everyone, including me), Frey’s memoir will speak to you. But be warned: this is, at times, a difficult read. The most trying event he describes is a trip to the dentist that the clinic arranges for him. Because Frey is a patient at a drug treatment center, he is not allowed to receive local or general anesthetic as he undergoes two root canals and the construction of a dental bridge between his remaining teeth. His friend Hank, who works at the center, gives him two tennis balls to squeeze before he goes under the drill:

And that’s before the root canals.

As is probably apparent from the passages I’ve excerpted, Frey writes in a stream-of-consciousness style that bears some similarities to the work of Beat Generation writers such as William S. Burroughs. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of that style, but some reviewers consider it to be the major strength of the book:

“Nearly” is perhaps the operative word. While I agree that Frey’s style does make for a pretty compulsive read, I do think that the book could have benefited from a stronger editing hand to steady passages like this:

Much of the book is written in that style, which reminds me, at least, of the kind of stuff I was writing at age fourteen. But one thing that this book cannot be accused of is being dishonest. And that, in the end, constitutes its lasting value — this utterly naked memoir of pain and hard-won recovery is a brutally honest exploration of one man’s search for hope through the haze of addiction. Frey sums up the stakes of that battle when he describes his reaction to a lecture given at the clinic by a rock star who used to be a patient at the facility. After the star brags about the copious amounts of drugs he used to do, Frey wants to “give him his beating.” Instead, he lets his readers in on the central truth of addiction:

It’s an unpleasant truth, but it’s one that is worth exploring — provided that the reader has a stomach strong enough to bear the gory details.

Update (1/06): Recent investigative work by The Smoking Gun has shown that Frey shamelessly and repeatedly lied about many incidents described in the book. When I reviewed the book, I found Frey’s writing to be pretty weak, but I recommended the book based on the power of Frey’s personal experiences. Now that TSG has revealed that those experiences never happened, I must retract my recommendation of this book.

Memoirs achieve their power (and their sales) through a central emotional contract with the reader; the basis of that contract is the central notion that what is described in the book really occurred — something akin to Ishmael’s “I only am escaped to tell thee.” When you subtract the strength of that contract from Frey’s book, there really is little to recommend it.

Frey is a fraud, and his attempt to take advantage of those who have really had the experiences he described sickens me.

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It’s worth taking a look at Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science even if you’ve read the New Yorker essays from which the chapters of the book were drawn. Gawande, a surgical resident at a Boston hospital, writes about the rarely discussed moments in medicine when doctors come face-to-face with the limits of their own knowledge.

The titles of the three sections of the book–Fallibility, Mystery, and Uncertainty–are not words that we usually associate with surgeons. And yet, as Gawande explains in spare, well-written prose, those kinds of moments show doctors at their best and their worst. For even in the face of mystery, in the knowledge of their own fallibility, and in times of uncertainty, doctors must make split-second decisions that could harm their patients just as easily as they could save them.

As he examines various aspects of the decision-making process that doctors go through when they see patients, Gawande reminds us that doctors are fallible human beings:

Gawande does a great job of exposing that human side: he treats his subjects–gastric bypass patients, good doctors gone bad, and even autopsied bodies–with respect, care, and tenderness. But he never stops asking questions: how could this operation have been performed better? How could that decision have been made more responsibly? How can the hundreds of small decisions a doctor makes on a given day be abstracted and analyzed on a larger scale? In that last sense, Gawande’s work shares similarities with that of his friend and fellow New Yorker essayist Malcolm Gladwell, who has recently become something of a guru in the business community.

Despite the value of Gawande’s more theoretical musings on “the imperfect science,” it was his presentation of stories from the operating room that kept me most riveted. In the last, and best chapter of the book, “The Case of the Red Leg,” Gawande describes his treatment of a patient who arrives at the emergency room with a swollen leg. Gawande resists making the most probable diagnosis–that the patient suffers from a relatively benign condition of cellulitus, a basic skin infection–because he had recently seen a patient with an extremely rare condition called necrotizing fasciitis. That disease, sometimes called the “flesh-eating bacteria,” kills seventy percent of the people afflicted with it. The only way to tell the difference between cellulitus and necrotizing fasciitis is to perform a surgical biopsy, something that both the patient and the doctor are reluctant to do. But catching the disease early–and removing the bacteria, which can sometimes involve amputation–is the only way to prevent death.

After anguished conversations and second opinions, the patient decides to have the biopsy. The moment when the surgical team opens up her leg is almost painfully tense:

The drama rises when the surgical team confronts the patient’s father with their findings:

Although it may be these pulse-pounding stories that keep the reader of Gawande’s book turning the pages, it is the process of decision-making itself that haunts the author–how, he wonders, would that patient have been treated differently if she had not happened to see a doctor who himself had happened to see a patient with necrotizing fasciitis a few weeks earlier? How would her experience had been different if she had visited a hospital in the Bronx instead of Boston? What can medical facilities do to make sure that patients receive the same standard of care wherever they go? And how should doctors know when to trust their gut intuition, and when to ignore it?

As Gawande’s wonderful book shows, these are complicated questions. But by dealing openly with mistakes when they make them, and by admitting that mystery, fallability, and uncertainty are part of their jobs, doctors can do a better job of finding the right answers.

Want to find out more? Check out Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science on Amazon.com.

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