I was in Barnes and Noble tonight spending Xmas gift cards. I wandered into the music section and found myself in an amusing dilemma: I was standing in front of a rack of featured recordings and saw Ani DiFranco’s most recent album sitting next to the most recent album from My Chemical Romance.

My instinct was to pick up the Ani, as I’m pretty much current on my collection and like to stay that way; but something made me decide to switch up and grab the MCR album instead.

I couldn’t have told you who My Chemical Romance was if you’d held a gun to my head. I knew I’d heard the name, was all. Since I had free money I decided to just do something on a whim.

So let me just say that the decision to go for this album was a pretty damn good one. Completely different from my usual fare, and I like it a lot — will need to listen to this a couple of times before I decide what it is I like about it. It reminds me a little (not musically so much as emotionally) of when I first heard The Mars Volta — that same sense of being taken by something unexpected.

Shows the value of doing whimsical stuff sometimes.