Thanks for the umlaut

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Go and buy Maxïmo Park's new album Our Earthly Pleasures because it's brilliant. There's more synth, more energy, more random wordplay and more emotion than ever before. The "difficult second album" has been pulled off magnificently. It just feels like after the massive burst of energy they burst onto the scene with via A Certain Trigger, they've gone away, calmed down (a bit) and come back with a new, refined sound. It's good.

The following joke is aimed squarely at physicists: the first single from the album, Our Velocity, was originally going to be called "Our Speed", but they thought it lacked direction.

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