Airborne Toxic Event Monday at Mr. Small's

Sure, it’s at least a little pretentious for a band to name themselves after anything taken from a DeLillo novel. But damn if it isn’t up there in my mind with Gatsby and Grapes of Wrath as holding some of the finest final pages of any American novel:

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers... There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

- Don DeLillo, White Noise

Airborne Toxic Event will be at Mr. Small’s tomorrow night. If you miss the show, still try and make it a point to read the book sometime in your life. And if you don't do that, maybe pick up the band's eponymous CD. It may not rock you like a DeLillo novel, but it's pretty solid stuff.

Download:
The Airborne Toxic Event – “Sometime Around Midnight” (Mediafire link)