From The Desk Of Del Amitri’s Justin Currie: Rachel Whiteread’s “Embankment”

There will always be a small bunch who will never forgive Justin Currie for the sins of his former band, Del Amitri. Namely, the speed and vigor with which the group abandoned the angular new-wave-ish promise of its 1985 self-titled debut for more conventional pop inroads. Currie makes no apologies for the 17 years and five albums of smart, well-executed, comparatively middle-of-the-road Brit Invasion melodies and country-rock yearnings that followed. It even netted him and his Scottish bandmates an American hit, “Roll To Me,” in 1995. Nowadays, Currie is still living in Glasgow while nurturing an intermittent solo career that now includes The Great War (Ryko). Coming eight years after Del Amitri’s last album, it resurrects the reassuring jangle of that band as it continues Currie’s middle-age explorations of the darker recesses of the male love muscle (i.e. the heart). Currie will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.

Currie: Rachel Whiteread turns things inside-out. Her Holocaust Memorial in Judenplatz, Vienna, is a cast of the outside edge of a library; the indentation of the books’ pages face out into the public square, pressing their secret knowledge into strangers’ faces. The Turbine Hall is the London Tate Modern‘s enormous exhibition space given over periodically to one-off commissions of renowned sculptors. With Embankment, she constructed a kind of frozen city from white plastic casts of the kind of cardboard box she had found herself filling with her deceased mother’s things. It was a piece of magic somewhere between a delightfully playful winter fantasy and a quiet tomb for all the vanished souls of history.

Video after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KItB-aQOFRs