Once every so often, a work of music comes along so powerful, so original, and so masterful that it not only adds a new dimension to one’s musical experience, but also has the potential to redefine our very concept of what music is all about.

Better Than Ezra’s Paper Empire is not one of those albums, but it’s still quite good.

Like many, I first became familiar with their 90′s hit Good, which is probably still their best known work. I heard a few more songs on the radio in subsequent years, like Desperately Wanting and King of New Orleans, but it was only after a change in direction with the experimental album How Does Your Garden Grow that I started to follow them regularly.

Despite being thought of as a 90′s band by many, BTE has produced several well-received albums since 2000, including Closer, whose life was cut short by the demise of the record label, and Before the Robots, which sparked the singles A Lifetime, Our Last Night, and the Desperate Housewives-linked Juicy.

Paper Empire is more accessible than How Does Your Garden Grow, and kicks off with Absolutely Still, one of their best songs in years. Nearly all of the songs on the album are good, and there aren’t really any I’m tempted to skip while playing. At times, Paper Empire can be a bit disjointed, with energetic songs like the football anthem Hell No! and the pseudo-techno Nightclubbing flanking the mellow ballad Hey Love, but in today’s world of electronic music, you can reorder the album how you like anyway.

iTunes is probably the best source for Paper Empire, given that the Keane-esque bonus track In Between Moments is included.

While a bit more mainstream than some of their prior efforts, Paper Empire is a great listen and an impressive display of Kevin Griffin’s mature songwriting.

The video for Absolutely Still is below:

Socks are one of the most frustrating pieces of clothing ever invented. What makes them particularly frustrating is the need to be used in pairs, which necessitates the need to find two equivalent items in the morning, when I’m usually half awake and can barely see anyway. They are somewhat unique in this regard. Shoes also requiring matched pairs, but it never seems to be much of an issue: since they don’t get washed, they can easily be stored together.

Socks are a different story. I often find that a pair ends up split between two loads of laundry, leaving me searching in vain for a companion to my selection. Other times, as in the picture above, one member of the pair develops holes while the other remains intact (why is this? it’s not like I use one foot more than the other!). I keep the undamaged sock out of the often vain hope that there’s another pair in my drawer somewhere. The reality is that it will most likely serve as a decoy during my morning rummage.

I’ve tried a few approaches to this problem. At one point, the strategy was to buy only one type of sock, so there would always be a match. This only really works if you get rid of all your other similar-but-not-quite-the-same socks and buy a whole boatload at once. Whenever I do this, however, I inevitably need to replace a pair at some point and can’t find the same model. My most recent strategy is an algorithmic approach – take the first acceptable sock out of the drawer and search stepwise until a match is found, removing each sock as it is encountered.

Usually this ends with a pile of unmatched socks on the floor and a great deal of wasted energy.

Is any ARRA money going to solving this problem?