His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an "Atari dragonfly" on the Connecticut River, a joint smoked on a courthouse lawn, a trip to the gym, a Tyvek windbreaker.
The piano ballad Sandcastles isn't a bad song as such, and it boasts a startlingly raw vocal that occasionally threatens to turn into a distraught howl, but it sounds a bit commonplace compared to what's going on around it, not least the flatly astonishing Freedom, a dense swirl of sound containing everything from old Alan Lomax field recordings to 60s psychedelia from Mexico.
Jennie McNulty of Marie Claire said that the song "has a wonderfully ambient feel, echoing an arty electro band", while Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote that Tangled Up "begins disappointingly" with "Call the Shots" as the opening track because the song's structure is "a bit commonplace" compared to Girls Aloud's previous singles such as "Biology" (2005).
They teach us to upgrade, to refine, to jettison what is commonplace for something a bit more scarce.
But practicality is something of a commonplace; it feels a bit too aligned with the dreary expression "a woman's work".
The injury is very rare in the general population and even among most athletes, but it is a bit more commonplace among those whose job it is to shove very large people out of the way.
And like Mr. Gabriadze's sets, all seem to be made of commonplace stuff: string and bits of cloth, twigs and wire, skeins of fabric and lengths of board.
It's become a bit of a commonplace since, but I believe we were among the first to treat people not just as paying customers, but as part of the performance".
Not until recently (c. 2003 2004), with the advent of x86-64 archavectures, have 64-bit processors become commonplace.
And if it has to be Brahms — it's great stuff, commonplace as it is — isn't Brahms the Romantic a bit redundant?
