A DAY IN BLACK AND WHITE + THALI TOO

MUSIC:

if there is an upside to being recently single and bummed out, it's that i can better justify my love of screamo. i came across A DAY IN BLACK AND WHITE's "my heroes have always killed cowboys" a couple years ago and listened the shit out of it. today i gave it another listen after months and months of not going anywhere near it. musically, this band, at least on this album (i think their later stuff is much more straight forward), is pretty in-line with CITY OF CATERPILLAR and a bunch of bands from europe that i won't take the time to name. that means there are a lot of build-ups and a lot of shouting. shit can also get pretty heavy, especially in the last minutes of the last song, an 11.5 minute instrumental called 'the illusion of the end.'

the clear highlight here though is 'the gaze.' at about 5 minutes, it still manages to capture the scope of some of the aforementioned longer songs but is generally much more listenable. it also features the album's only real catchy vocal part. on the whole, A DAY IN BLACK AND WHITE are by no means essential, but they're a pretty good bet when you're looking for something short (it's a 5-song record), loud, and impassioned. also, maybe not as embarrassingly unabashed as other bands in this genre? what do i know though, i still like SAETIA.

http://www.mediafire.com/?3op4bcj1ds18kj8

FOOD:

today, my dad thought that buying me lunch at this mostly vegan indian restaurant in new haven might cheer me up. i guess he was right because i feel pretty good now. the place is called thali too. it's an offshoot of a much more upscale and expensive new haven restaurant just called thali. unlike the latter, thali too is entirely vegetarian, and no item on the menu is over $10. this, coupled with the fact that it's pretty much surrounded by yale's campus, makes it pretty clear who the restaurateurs are targeting.

regardless, the food was good. since my dad was paying, i ordered more food than i could possibly eat but still finished most of it anyway. i started with a mung bean, ginger, and cumin crepe, which came with some strange but tasty sauces. the crepe was about twice the size of my head but was really light and easily consumed. after that, i split an entree of eggplant and rice in a sesame/peanut/tamarind sauce. it was rad, and i still have some in my fridge. most items on the menu were vegan and the ones that weren't were pretty explicitly labeled so, which was cool. i would return here.