Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig came home from Lollapalooza with a doozy of a memento: a copy of The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham signed by Asher Roth. (Kind of puts the frontin’ in frontispiece, amirite?) Like Maugham’s 1944 novel, which follows the wanderings of an American expatriate through Paris and India in the 1920s, Roth’s debut album Asleep in the Bread Aisle captures the mindset of an adrift seeker from the upper middle-class suburbs in an era of unprecedented geopolitical and economic crisis. One can only guess at what other post-colonial literature Koenig might proffer to other artists. Our recommendations after the jump. Read More »
