All posts by Andre Salles

Catching Up Is Hard to Do
Some Albums I Really Should Have Reviewed By Now

Playing catch-up this week, with a few releases I haven’t gotten to yet. Let’s dive right in…

When I first heard that Aerosmith was recording a blues album, I had just one question: how bluesy would it be? This is not as stupid as it sounds. While Boston’s best band has certainly built its whole mansion on the foundation of the blues, they haven’t always treated it well. Aerosmith is blues-rock, with a heavy emphasis on the rock, and I’m only treading into genre waters because the band did it first. They made a big deal of calling the recently released Honkin’ on Bobo a blues album.

Is it one? Well, kind of. There’s a bit in the movie version of Ghost World in which Steve Buscemi’s record-collecting character goes to see a classic, pure blues player. This guy is the real deal – he’s ancient, he has a voice like liquid gravel, and he plays and sings real, unadulterated blues traditionals from the heart. Thing is, he’s playing in a crowded sports bar, and no one’s listening. Everyone there came to see the headlining act, a band called Blues Hammer. And when Blues Hammer takes the stage, we see that they’re a bunch of young blond frat boys who crank up the amps and play George Thorogood-style power blues tunes, with screaming guitars and shouted vocals.

Honkin’ on Bobo could be a Blues Hammer album. The Aerosmith boys are not purists in any sense of the word, and while they play traditional tunes here, they kick them up in typical party-rock fashion. So if you’re looking for a blues album, you might be better off sticking with Muddy Waters and Corey Harris. But if you’re an Aerosmith fan, then there’s no reason at all you won’t enjoy this. Once you get the genre labels out of the way, Honkin’ on Bobo is the most kickass record Aerosmith has made in almost 20 years.

The first 30 seconds are embarrassing, I’ll grant, but once “Road Runner” kicks in, it’s non-stop dirty blooze for 45 minutes. The song titles should be somewhat familiar to fans of this music – the band stomps through “Eyesight to the Blind” and “You Gotta Move” and Willie Dixon’s “I’m Ready” with force and joy. There’s no question that Joe Perry owns this project, too – he hasn’t sounded this invigorated in a very long time. Just listen to his smoking work on “Shame Shame Shame.” This is the Joe Perry of 1975.

In fact, the whole band sounds re-energized. Joey Kramer hasn’t been called upon to actually be a great rock ‘n’ roll drummer in a decade or more, but he’s still got it. And Steven Tyler is having the time of his life. The band has made some interesting choices here as well, diversifying the proceedings somewhat with a creepy “Back Back Train,” a great take on Fleetwood Mac’s “Stop Messin’ Around” (from the Peter Green years, of course), and a closing acoustic rip through “Jesus is On the Main Line.”

The most important thing to note about Honkin’ on Bobo is that it’s the first Aerosmith album since Done With Mirrors that isn’t preoccupied with hit singles and radio play. Even their one original song (“The Grind”), while treading closer to the likes of Big Ones than anything else here, sticks with the blues and avoids “Cryin’”/“Crazy”/“Amazing” schmaltz. Even the title is non-commercial. (And, oh yeah, terrible.) This is the sound of Aerosmith having pressure-free fun, and even though I would have paid twice the price for an unaffected blues album from these boys, this insanely enjoyable romp is more than welcome in my collection.

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If we’re to believe the hipper-than-thou indie reviewers that scatter the ‘net like head lice, there have been very few albums this century as mindblowing and inventive as Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica. Really, you’d think that lead singer Isaac Brock went around giving each of these writers a hundred bucks. It’s brilliant, it’s breathtaking, it “justifies our existence,” as one hyperbolic hipster put it. I have to ask this: what the hell are these guys talking about?

I don’t want to crap on the album, really, because it’s pretty good. It’s jagged and raw and full of Sonic Youth-ness, but to call this disjointed, half-finished, sloppy thing any more than pretty good is overstating the case. I wonder if any of the folks who called Moon “expansive” have ever heard anything truly expansive, like the Autumns, or the Moon Seven Times, or even Sigur Ros. Modest Mouse play indie rock with potential and ambition, but that’s about all.

And when I bought The Moon and Antarctica, on the strength of a dozen glowing reviews, what I was looking for was something more like Good News for People Who Love Bad News, the band’s latest outing. Perhaps it’s the complete lack of attendant hype, but I can’t help thinking that this one is much, much better. It’s still snarling indie rock, but Brock and company have added more ambition, and explored more of their potential.

The first three songs, in fact, sound like the band has been reading their reviews. These tunes are dreamy, especially the joyously repetitive “Float On.” The amplifiers don’t even get turned on, really, until “Bury Me With It,” a song that kills the mood completely. (But in a good way.) Modest Mouse has added colors to its palette here in the form of toned percussion, horns, mellotrons and big ol’ studio productions. While Moon sounded like something they jammed out, Good News sounds like something they worked on.

Midway through the record, Modest Mouse starts letting the influences show, and they’re not who you’d expect them to be. Tom Waits gets a stylistic shout-out on “The Devil’s Workday,” and also on “Bukowski,” which sounds for all the world like Primus doing their Tom Waits schtick. Throughout the rest of this challenging album you can hear bits of David Byrne, Wayne Coyne and Joe Strummer. The Modest Mouse sound is still not quite expansive, but it is expanding.

The band has the good sense to close on a graceful note, with “The Good Times Are Killing Me.” It’s a comparatively hushed and lovely song, and Brock even reins in his caterwaul, hitting some Brian Wilson notes. Yes, that Brian Wilson. Throughout this record, Brock and company impress with the sheer number and variety of influences on display. There’s no telling where Modest Mouse will go next, but Good News for People Who Love Bad News opens lots of doors, and even steps through a few of them. It still falls far short of brilliant – the only thing truly brilliant about this album is its title – but it’s getting there.

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I don’t usually accept CDs for review.

There are several reasons for this, most of them centering around my idealistic vision for this site. I hope to keep TM3AM as free of obligations and you-scratch-my-back deals as I can, and even the very act of accepting a free CD from someone feels to me like a contract. I’m always upfront about not promising a review, which usually deters people from sending their work my way. While that obviously means I may not get to hear some music I would enjoy, it just feels better for me to work this way.

Another big reason that I don’t usually take freebies is Sturgeon’s Law, however. When I worked at Face Magazine, we got free CDs all the time, dozens each week, and 90 percent of them sucked. I have enough trouble wading through music I’ve bought. Honestly, the thought of getting piles and piles of truly awful CDs sent to my door is horrifying. So when an artist decides to send me a freebie anyway, despite my not promising a mention, I usually approach with skepticism and trepidation.

This is all to say that when one of those rare free discs makes a positive impression, it’s had to fight an uphill battle, so you know it must be pretty good. Such is the case with Jen Gloeckner’s Miles Away. This record sounded good the first time I heard it, and has only deepened since. Gloeckner could dismissively be described as a folk artist – she has a crisp, clear voice and plays acoustic guitar – but her textured music is broader than that.

Take “Nothing Personal,” a creepy bass-driven dirge with a captivating vibe. Or “Only 1,” a sweet ballad with a breathtaking vocal arrangement over minimal instrumentation. Miles Away is an album built on atmosphere and mood, and Gloeckner sometimes sacrifices melody for feeling, but it’s a sacrifice she knows she’s making. When she pulls out the melodies, as on the 6/8 gem “Glue,” they’re winners. The album is subtly augmented with cellos and saxophones, and drums and bass are used sparingly. It’s all about the mood it sets.

This album is full of little surprises. The Eastern-tinged “Clear the Sand” floats above a bed of congas and features some nifty flute solos. The beautiful “Mountains” features an airy plucked mandolin and some of the record’s best cello playing from Kameron Cole. A Stevie Nicks influence crops up on “Hazy Sky,” and later on “Otherside,” with its piano-led arrangement. There’s a simplicity to this record, both musically and lyrically, but it’s an effective one.

I know I’m setting a dangerous precedent here by giving a freebie a positive review, but Miles Away is something I would have been pleased to have paid money for. I fully expect the next nine free records I get to be terrible, because Miles Away is quite good. Check it out at her website.

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Next week, some music, some TV. Thank you for your kind attention.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A Man of Letters
Stephin Merritt's Magnetic Fields Return With i

Lyrics used to mean nothing to me.

There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when I honestly couldn’t have told you what my favorite songs were about. Oh, I knew what they meant to me, of course, and I knew even then that the melodies were the important bits, especially those melodies that got stuck in my head for hours and days and weeks. But I would hum the melodies, you see, without the slightest clue what words the singer was passionately trying to get across.

A number of different musical experiences contributed towards changing my mind, notably Christian rock and “Weird Al” Yankovic (and I can’t believe I just typed a sentence that contains both the phrase “Christian rock” and the name “Weird Al” Yankovic, and moreover, I can’t believe that the absurdity of the sentence disturbs me more than what the sentence says about me), but the one song I can remember really putting me over was Asia’s “Only Time Will Tell.”

Not because the lyrics to “Only Time Will Tell” are good, of course, but because they’re terrible. My young brain found the music so majestic, so important-sounding, that when I finally read the words, the stupid pop love song sentiments really diminished the song in my eyes. (It helped that I first heard the song in an instrumental version, arranged for my high school concert band. I played alto saxophone and got some really cool parts in that song, if I recall.) How could they saddle such a great song with such sappy, brain-dead lyrics?

I still have the same mental block, if only in limited degrees. I sometimes have to remember to engage the English-speaking part of my brain (as opposed to the music-speaking part) when listening to a new record, or the words will float right by me. Sometimes, as with Asia’s song (and in fact Asia’s whole repertoire), it’s better that way. Sometimes I come across songs that are so dumb lyrically that I would probably dismiss them out of hand if I hadn’t already fallen in love with the melodies and harmonies through four previous lyrics-oblivious listens. Like, say, those on Sloan’s entire last album.

If there is any criticism to be leveled against the Beatles, still tops in my Best Band Ever in the Whole Wide Universe list, it’s that their lyrics are often sub-par. If I were to be uncharitable, I could say that the first half of the Beatles catalog is so cliché-ridden it’s almost laughable, and the second half is so nonsensical it’s almost befuddling. But if you cut right to the heart of the thing, the songs still rock. “I Saw Her Standing There” is still a terrific rock and roller, despite its schoolyard crush inanities, and “I Am the Walrus” is still an amazing piece of music, despite imagery that refuses, over and over again, to cohere.

So the question, then: do lyrics matter? This was the subject of a recent point-counterpoint-style article in Entertainment Weekly, which anticlimactically boiled down to one writer’s distaste for Bob Dylan. Still, it’s a fun subject to bat around. But unlike those highly paid music scribes (grumble grumble) at EW, I don’t think there’s a definitive answer to that question. Do lyrics matter? Yeah, sometimes. Does the music matter more? Yeah, sometimes.

It’s a sign of my ever-expanding perspective on music that I now own many, many CDs from artists who are all about the lyrics. Take Ani DiFranco, for example. She’s a terrific poet, a swell guitar player and a first-rate singer, but she has rarely inspired me with her songwriting. There have been times, especially recently, when she has hit upon a winning melody and carried it off, but most of the time I’m drawn to her arrangements (especially when she uses horn sections) and her words. DiFranco occupies the exact opposite end of the spectrum from a guy like Prince, whose lyrics do nothing for me. Prince, though, is all about the song.

Another of those wordsmiths I enjoy is Stephin Merritt. He rarely records under his own name, but leads and guides a host of projects – Future Bible Heroes, the Gothic Archies, the 6ths. The one for which he is best known, though, is the Magnetic Fields, and it’s with this group that his material shines brightest. Merritt is an old-school songwriter, and when I say old school, I mean Irving Berlin and George Gershwin old. He’s an unabashed romantic who always finds clever spins on old saws like broken hearts and first dances.

Here’s the thing, though. While Merritt writes a good lyric, he sometimes stumbles on the melodic end of things, keeping to one or two safe chord progressions. He has an interesting voice – a wavery baritone most of the time, but he can hit tenor notes – and his arrangements are sometimes quite odd, with synthesizers where there ought to be pianos and strings. He has the good sense to utilize different singers, most notably in the 6ths, but also on Magnetic Fields albums, because his melancholy vocals can get dreary over extended listens.

But his words are extraordinary, always. Whenever I buy a new Merritt project, I read the lyrics first, and that experience is more often than not more enjoyable than hearing the songs for the first time. Merritt’s best-known project is the Fields’ 69 Love Songs, a three-CD set of romantic pop ditties that surveys six decades of cliches and recasts them beautifully. Thing is, after more than two dozen or so listens through the whole thing, I can only remember a few melody lines.

But I remember the words: the unsentimental sentimentality of “The Book of Love,” the delightfully specific desperation of “Come Back From San Francisco,” the mock-pompous hilarity of “We Are King of the Boudoir.” In fact, I don’t really remember that last song at all, musically speaking, but I have no trouble recalling that it contains the non-word “prowesslessnesslessness.” (Meaning, of course, “prowess.”)

I used to complain that Magnetic Fields albums were all too short, but if 69 Love Songs proved anything, it’s that Merritt’s work is better digested in small doses. And thus we now have the follow-up, a 43-minute album called i. That’s right, lower case. While i may be shorter and less ambitious than Love Songs, I’m finding that I can grasp it more fully, and that I remember it more completely. Merritt seems to have condensed the various styles of 69 Love Songs here, so that the result sounds like a sampler disc for the box set, even though none of the songs appear.

Though the styles are similar, there are two major differences between the last album and this one. First, Merritt sings everything, and i is just short enough that his vocals don’t get overly grating. Second, he has banished the synthesizers that have cropped up on every Magnetic Fields album, replacing them with gentle guitars and Sam Davol’s haunting cello. This choice results in Merritt’s best-sounding work to date, even though it gets a little melancholy and ballad-heavy near the end.

Every Merritt album is tied together by a concept, even a loose one, and i is no exception: all of the songs start with the titular letter, and they’re arranged alphabetically. Who knows if the songs were written to this conceit, but the sequence works – you go from the downcast opener “I Die” to the lovely and romantic closer “It’s Only Time,” and the album leaves you feeling lighter and brighter than when it began. In between, you get the sprightly pop of “If There’s Such a Thing as Love,” the classical swing of “I’m Tongue Tied,” the faux-ballet “In an Operetta,” and the gay disco sendup “I Thought You Were My Boyfriend,” alongside Merritt’s trademark balladry.

But as usual, it’s the lyrics that shine here. Some highlights:

Old single “I Don’t Believe You” gets a full dressing-up on this record, and the words haven’t aged a bit: “So you quote love unquote me, well, stranger things have come to be, but let’s agree to disagree, ‘cause I don’t believe you.” And later: “So you’re brilliant, gorgeous and ampersand after ampersand, and you think I don’t understand, but I don’t believe you.”

“I Don’t Really Love You Anymore” is a screamingly funny stalker anthem. “I am a gentleman, think of me as just your fan, who remembers every dress you’ve ever worn,” Merritt sings, and he continues, “Just the bad comedian, your new boyfriend’s better than, ‘cause I don’t really love you anymore.” Later he opines hopefully that “there will be some day when your eyes do not enthrall me.”

“I Looked All Over Town” takes the old lyrical cliché of the sad clown and literalizes it: “I wandered in these big blue shoes,” he sings, admitting that “nothing’s going to change this painted frown, and I know, ‘cause I looked all over town.” At the end, he escapes in a sad yet beautiful way: “So whistling a circus tune, I inflated one more balloon, and as I floated up I looked straight down, and I looked all over town.”

“I Wish I Had an Evil Twin” is not as silly as it sounds – it’s about guilt and regret and wishing for someone else to take responsibility: “I’d get no blame and feel no shame, ‘cause evil’s not my cup of tea, down and down he’d go, how low I would not need to know, all my life there should have been an evil twin.”

I haven’t heard a more romantic line than this recently: “If there’s such a thing as love, I’m in it.” Later in the same song (“If There’s Such a Thing as Love”), Merritt whips out this verse: “When I was two-and-a-half, my mama said to me, ‘Love is funny, you will laugh, until the day you turn three.’ Like a kitten up a tree needs a fireman to rescue it, so your fireman I will be, and I’ll really get into it.”

There’s a song called “Infinitely Late at Night,” which is just a brilliantly impossible title, with a great line buried in its final verse: “It’s all black and white without the white.”

But Merritt reserves his sweetest lines for the final song, “It’s Only Time.” It’s a classic pop song, with classic pop song lyrics: “Why would I stop loving you a hundred years from now, it’s only time…” But for once, the real pleasure here is musical. Merritt unveils a slender, fragile falsetto that brings genuine emotion to this little tune. It’s a great way to go out.

Someday, perhaps, music historians will look back on Stephin Merritt the same way they look back on songwriters like Cole Porter. There will be Stephin Merritt songbooks, and standards bands will learn these numbers for weddings and other special occasions. His songs have the class and grace of revered chestnuts, and at the very least, his lyrics stand up to those of the best pop tunesmiths. i is another collection of witty and wonderful words, set to some of Merritt’s most memorable music, and when you see these songs appearing in a Broadway revue titled something like The Songs of Stephin Merritt, don’t be surprised.

As for the question of lyrics vs. music, well, ideally they should fit together to form a perfect whole. It’s taken me a while to come to this opinion, but asking which is more important is like asking which is more vital to the creation of water, hydrogen or oxygen. It’s true that you need twice as much hydrogen, but without that one part oxygen, you have no ocean.

And with that pitiful stab at profundity, I bid thee adieu. Next week, I play catch-up.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Two For Tuesday
Come Back to Prince and Discover Spymob

I heard the new Cure song this week. It sucks.

And that’s all I have to say about that. The self-titled new album comes out June 22, and if it taints the legacy that Bloodflowers would have left as the final Cure album, I will be mighty pissed off.

Lots of releases have been announced since last time I reported on them, and here are some more I’m looking forward to:

Underrated synth-popper Joy Electric (who is Ronnie Martin) returns with an album (Hello Mannequin) and an EP (Friend of Mannequin) on June 1. I have been lax in reviewing Martin’s work, and I plan on rectifying that sometime after the new stuff hits. Two weeks later, the Beastie Boys deliver an honest-to-gosh hip hop album with To the Five Boroughs, which includes the carbon-copy single “Ch-Check It Out.” If you never liked the Beasties, you probably still won’t.

Same goes for Phish, who will release Undermind on June 15. They worked with pop producer Tchad Blake for this one. A week later we’ll see Brian Wilson’s first solo album since Imagination in 1998. It’s called Gettin’ In Over My Head, and as good as it may be, it will probably be overshadowed by the long-awaited unveiling of the Beach Boys’ Smile album later this year. If you don’t know what that is, or why people would be excited about it, then I don’t know what to say except read up.

There are more, including records from Wilco, Old 97s and Bill Mallonee, but I’m tired this week, so let’s get on with the main event:

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The career of the man called Prince has been a fascinating one to follow. He’s always teetering back and forth between pop star and idiosyncratic (yet brilliant) oddball, and it’s rare that his commercial and artistic tendencies line up these days. Oh sure, during the ‘80s, he could get away with anything – there are very few multiple-times-platinum albums as daring as Sign O the Times – but the ‘90s were a different story. It was during the grunge years that Prince discovered he could no longer make any kind of record he wanted and still please his label, and thus began a decade and a half of veering from one extreme to the other.

Hindsight makes recent history seem like a war between Prince, Darling of the Radio and Prince, Maverick Supergenius. His troubles began when he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and began painting the word “slave” on his face, true enough, but they were only exacerbated when he split from Warner Bros. and released Emancipation in 1996. Here was three hours, three single albums’ worth, of incredibly accessible material, which Prince made sure no one would buy by releasing it all in one big chunk with a $30 price tag.

He stayed maverick for a while, putting out great stuff like The Truth (idiotically packaged as the “bonus disc” in the four-CD Crystal Ball, and I know I mention this every time, but it still baffles me), and he was on an artistic high when he came crawling back to the major labels in 1999. His bid for reigniting his popularity was Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, a tepid turd of an album that received 20 times the marketing push of Emancipation. People bought it. People hated it. Prince went independent again.

And he put out The Rainbow Children, a classic jazz-funk-prog album of sheer genius, which no one heard. Since then, he’s released some terrific pop-funk stuff through his website, thus ensuring that the radio-friendly material would never hit radio. Instead of releasing that style of music to stores, he pushed NEWS, an hour-long instrumental jam session, into the market. No one bought it.

And now, after eight years of seemingly trying to maintain his obscurity, Prince has exploded back into the spotlight with a monster tour and some high-profile appearances. One would expect, then, that the new album around which all this hype should coalesce would be awful. That would be only fitting, only true to form. Get everyone excited about listening to Prince again and then hit them with something impenetrable, or something dumbed down and unlistenable. That would be just like Prince.

But holy crap, Batman. The album’s pretty damn good. Musicology, Prince’s 26th (!) record, marks the first time in ages that it’s all come together for him. This is not a 75-minute fusion experiment about Jehovah’s Witnesses, nor is it a three-hour collection of outtakes, nor is it a watered-down stab at commerciality. This is a great Prince album for the masses, a concise (48 minutes), funky, superbly played record that deserves the wave of popularity it’s riding. And major label Columbia is here to make sure everyone hears it.

Okay, so first, while Prince may be qualified to teach Musicology, he could use a few classes in packagingology. The album’s nifty-looking half-size overlay never stays closed, the spine text is upside down, and the booklet is only held in by the shrink wrap. As soon as you unwrap it, the book falls right out, and there’s no pocket or flap or anything to return it to. It’s frustrating. But hell, don’t let it detract from your enjoyment of the album itself.

Much has been made of Prince’s return to his “classic” sound here, but the elements in question are all superficial – a tinny drum sound here, a synth noise there. Prince has never really stopped sounding like this, but on Musicology, he’s just plain better at it than he’s been in some time. He’s sharpened his focus here, and stripped away the concepts and flourishes. There are dozens of pop-rock tunes like “A Million Days” all over his catalog, but somehow this one sounds more Prince-like than most of them. Ditto the soul ballad “Call My Name” – he’s done maybe 30 songs just like this one, but it clicks this time, and clicks beautifully.

Prince has always tried to elevate pop music into the realms of the spiritual and the political, and it hasn’t always turned out well for him. On Musicology, though, it all works. He knowingly cops Neil Young’s title for “Cinnamon Girl,” turning in a charming guitar-pop song with peacenik lyrics, and he delivers a mini-rant on “Dear Mr. Man” that will even have the song’s targets clapping along. Compared to the head trips of Lovesexy and The Rainbow Children, these are softballs, granted, but they infuse Musicology with a conscience and a complexity missing from Prince’s recent stabs at pop radio.

In the end, though, this is just another really good Prince album. As usual, weak tracks are few – only “Life of the Party” is without merit – and the performances are excellent. There’s a long line of these now, and while some are easier than others to absorb, it’s my hope that kids introduced to Prince though Musicology will explore his catalog and uncover some of those forgotten albums that dropped between 1990 and now. It would be easy to call this a comeback, but Prince is right – he never went away. This is just a fortunate alignment of a big label, a great album and an interested public, and that, at least, has definitely been a long time coming.

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I have long maintained that the unexpected discovery is the best part of following new music. At least once a year, I hear something new, something brilliant, that I never would have found if not for my obsessive buying habits. I’m thinking of instituting a new category in the Top 10 List, something like Discovery of the Year, and if I end up doing that, then I already have a likely winner for 2004. They’re called Spymob, and their album Sitting Around Keeping Score is too much fun.

Spymob, you may know, is the backing band for N.E.R.D., that overhyped project launched by the Neptunes. This association has already proven to be something of a detriment to Spymob, because on their own, they sound nothing like the slinky rap-funk proffered by N.E.R.D. In fact, many critics have derided Sitting Around Keeping Score for hitting different musical notes, and the reason is obvious – N.E.R.D. sounds modern, street, and sexy. Spymob, by contrast, is an old-fashioned bunch of pop-rockers who take the time to actually write songs. N.E.R.D. is of the now. Spymob, to these ears, sounds timeless.

It doesn’t hurt that they take several cues from Ben Folds and his Five, tossing the piano lines about and writing lyrics full of bratty smirk. “2040” kicks things off with a funky intro and lyrics about a cliched future. “It Gets Me Going” might be the best song ever written from a dog’s point of view, with a thumping piano chorus and lovely falsetto verses. “National Holidays” is a sprightly little song with an unexpected kick – it’s a tragedy about divorced parents and unfair visitation rights.

The whole album pumps along at a brisk pace, except for the one moment of quiet beauty – a song called “I Still Live at Home.” The song is about Internet dating while co-habiting with one’s parents, and here frontman John Ostby has a chance to be sarcastic and mean, especially on lines like, “If things did get serious it would be convenient to walk right up the stairs and have you meet my folks.” But he plays it straight, and the song is full of desperate empathy.

It’s so refreshing to hear bands like Spymob, who come at this music thing with wit, literacy, charm and heart, and most importantly, well-written songs. Those are the qualities to which I’m always most drawn, and Spymob has joined a long line of groups in my collection (like Sloan, Jellyfish and Human Radio) with similar strengths. Undoubtedly, Sitting Around Keeping Score will end up being the discovery of the year, because records like this one don’t come around all that often, and the chances of finding two CDs by unknown bands this good in 2004 are too tiny to contemplate.

* * * * *

I owe Dr. Tony Shore a big debt for turning me on to Spymob. He’s an accomplished music commentator himself, and he runs a website called Obvious Pop. Check it out. (He also thinks that Fish is a better singer than Steve Hogarth, but we can’t expect him to be right all the time…)

Next week, the new Magnetic Fields.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The Marbles Revolution
A Brief History of Marillion Part Three

Marillion’s new single, “You’re Gone,” just hit number seven in the UK charts. It’s their first top 10 single since 1987.

And I just can’t stop grinning whenever I think about it.

The single’s extraordinary success is the big payoff of a concentrated long-term campaign designed to show the music business a thing or two about independent creativity. The band stated at the start of this journey that they wanted to take the established idea of fan power and “blow it through the sky.” And that’s just what they’ve done.

There are hundreds of little tricks record companies use to get their singles in the top 10, including arranging playlistings at radio stations, bargaining for prime shelf space at record stores and expending huge marketing budgets. Marillion did none of that. They got their single to number seven by doing two very simple, yet deceptively difficult things.

They told their fans when it was coming out, and they asked them to buy it.

The fans listened and bought because this is a band that means something to them. Marillion has cultivated this relationship for years through their website, which should become the model on which band sites are patterned before long. The band is able to call on its fanbase for support because for many, many years, the Marillion camp has prided itself on keeping every promise to come from its ranks. If you get the small things right, like great customer service (through their own label, Racket Records, and online store), they lead to bonds of trust and great leaps of faith.

The current campaign has centered around an album called Marbles. Eight months ago, Marillion tapped their sizeable fanbase with an idea: complete and total independence. They asked the fans to pre-order Marbles, just as they had done with Anoraknophobia in 2001, only this time, they weren’t looking for a record deal. They were looking for the funds to record, mix, master, manufacture, release and promote Marbles all on their own.

They got 13,500 leaps of faith this time, at roughly $55 each (depending on exchange rates). And they followed through. Marbles is out May 3, on the band’s own label, and thanks to a dedicated group of promoters and pluggers, Marillion’s music is receiving more press and attention now than it has since leaving EMI in 1995. New interviews appear every day, the band has done numerous radio appearances, and will be on the Dutch version of Top of the Pops this week.

Most impressively (and importantly), though, everyone who tuned in to the chart show on BBC Radio 1 this past weekend heard “You’re Gone.” If you have any doubts that charting a single this way is a revolutionary act, check this: as a direct result of “You’re Gone” appearing in the Dutch Top 10 (at number eight), the overlords have decided to change the way the chart is compiled. Now it will be based on sales and airplay, instead of just sales, so the big record companies can retain control.

They wouldn’t pull things like this if they weren’t scared. For the first time in recent memory, good music has pulled off a significant coup against bad music. Hell, “You’re Gone” even out-charted the new Franz Ferdinand single, “Matinee,” and that one had a major record label, several important music magazines and every radio and video station on its side. This is huge.

It gets better, though. In addition to financial independence, the Marbles pre-order also bought Marillion something more precious to a musician: complete creative control. And they used it to make the album of their lives. Marbles is a massive work – 100 minutes long, wildly diverse and challenging. It comes packaged in a gorgeous slipcased hardcover book, which includes the names of all 13,500 fans who pre-ordered it. The album contains three songs that zoom past the 10-minute mark, and it follows no trends and caters to no radio markets whatsoever. No record label on Earth would have paid for this album, especially considering that it took two full years to make.

You can hear, in virtually every minute of this record, why the fanbase is so emphatic in its support of this band. This is a labor of love, a deeply emotional piece of music that involves, astounds, inspires and amazes. The band again worked with producer Dave Meegan, who brought a clarity and depth to this recording that you just don’t hear very often. After two years of intensive work, the sound of Marbles is naturally dense and meticulously constructed, and yet there isn’t a moment of this album that sounds labored or fussed over. It is direct, it has heart, and listening to all 100 minutes end to end is a remarkably moving experience.

Marbles may be separated into two discs, but it is absolutely one complete journey, broken up into five distinct trips, if you will. Most of Marbles bears out the idea that the band has been heading toward this record since leaving EMI. All of the tricks they’ve picked up through their relentless experimentation have been incorporated here, and grafted onto the classic Marillion sound. It’s the first time since Afraid of Sunlight that all of the experiments work. The album contains not one bad track, and I cannot imagine the album working as well without any of them. (This despite the existence of a one-CD retail version that omits four songs…)

Marbles opens with its darkest and trickiest track, the 13-minute “The Invisible Man.” It’s a bold choice for an opener – pop radio fans who pick up the album on the strength of “You’re Gone” will be greeted by this monstrosity right up front, and they may not know what to do with it. Here Marillion picks up the ball dropped by Radiohead during their electronic ambient phase and scores a touchdown. Multiple sections, multiple time shifts, an amazing bass performance by Pete Trewavas, creepy synth beats and textures, and one of the best vocal performances Steve Hogarth has ever given. When he pushes the final shoutings of the title phrase right up and out of his range, it’s one of the bravest things I’ve heard in a long time.

The song is about disappearing, about becoming immaterial, and it sets the theme. Marbles is about losing it, in a nutshell – losing one’s youth, one’s sanity, one’s love. And it’s also about the difficult yet rewarding struggle to get all of that back. The main metaphor of a child literally losing his marbles is stated in the four linking sections, each about two minutes, that divide and yet connect the record. These bits are sad and sweet, with hints of Paul McCartney’s solo work.

The second section is made up of a trio of atmospheric ballads, which almost blend together into one terrific 18-minute piece. “Genie” is the closest this album comes to a weak track, with its simple chorus, but it takes flight halfway through with a decidedly Neil Finn-style bridge. “Fantastic Place” may be the album’s emotional high point – a deeply felt ballad with a great vocal and a full “Bridge Over Troubled Water” string arrangement from Mark Kelly. And “The Only Unforgivable Thing” unfolds slowly over its seven minutes, gloriously ending where it began. The song, and in fact the entire trilogy, is about guilt and regret, and you feel every second.

“Ocean Cloud” is the album’s centerpiece and masterpiece. It’s an 18-minute progressive epic, full of atmosphere, but it has a chorus, and its phenomenal arrangement carries you along. I can’t even put into words how stunning this track is. Hogarth sings with desperate sadness, Rothery turns in a pair of heartfelt solos, and Kelly is note-perfect throughout, especially in sections designed to sound like storms and choppy waters. This is not, however, some technical exercise, as if Marillion has ever made one of those. “Ocean Cloud” is as personal and deeply moving as anything they’ve done – more so, in fact. It’s a draining, powerful song, and when it’s over, you feel as if you’ve really been somewhere. And you really want to go back, and soon.

After the hugeness of “Ocean Cloud,” you need the relative catchiness of the five pop songs that make up the fourth section. Marillion is one of the few bands on Earth that is equally superb at the 20-minute epic and the five-minute radio single. And this time out, they’re as good as they’ve ever been at both. “The Damage” is the album’s one electrified rocker, with a pounding Beatlesque piano part and a swooping, cracking vocal that’s just outstanding. (This song connects lyrically with “Genie,” further solidifying the album’s themes.) “Don’t Hurt Yourself” is the album’s most infectious tune, with some wonderful slide guitar from Rothery and a soaring falsetto chorus from Hogarth.

And then there’s “You’re Gone,” here in its full six-minute glory. Putting this into the top 10 so that everyone could hear it would mean nothing if it weren’t a good song. “You’re Gone” is fantastic, a perfect single – it catches hold immediately and grows deeper from there. It is very much like the pop song version of Anorak’s “This Is the 21st Century.” It pulses forward on a trippy breakbeat, and features some marvelous processed guitar work and another (yes, another) great vocal from Hogarth. I said it before, but this song is what Pop-era U2 should have sounded like.

“Angelina” brings the blues back in for the smoothest seven minutes this band has ever delivered. It’s a new entry in an old genre – the ode to late-night DJs. But man, listen to Rothery on this song. He just glides, playing perfect subdued lines that no other guitarist, no matter how revered, could improve. The section wraps up with “Drilling Holes,” a crazy slab of psychedelia with a Beatles vibe, complete with a harpsichord breakdown. It’s a great conclusion to the lighter part of the record, and it leads in (after the fourth “Marbles” bit) to the grand conclusion.

Marbles concludes with “Neverland,” a return to the intensity of the first disc. It sounds to these ears like Pink Floyd’s take on “Hey Jude” – a nearly gospel-inspired four minute powerhouse with a joyous, ecstatic eight-minute playout, Hogarth’s voice echoing over and under Kelly’s analog synth lines and Rothery’s melodic guitar. It’s an enormous explosion of a finish, but it’s never bombastic, and where you’d expect a huge finale, you get a mesmerizing bed of windchimes. “Neverland” is about letting go of childhood dreams, and it gently deposits you back into the real world after 100 minutes of wonder. It also contains Hogarth’s best line this time out: “I want to be someone someone would want to be.”

It is too early to call Marbles the best Marillion album, since there are so many over so many years with which it must be compared. It’s fighting an uphill battle against emotional connections forged with earlier records, but it’s largely winning – only Brave and Clutching at Straws stand in its way, and that is a high watermark indeed. It is perhaps the finest proof to date of my theory – this is an album full of intense, complex music, played with extraordinary skill, and yet it has an emotional core that runs deep and true. It’s head music that you feel.

It’s also a testament to creativity unfettered by the suffocating music business. Marbles is the sound of a band in love with music, in love with the transformative power and beauty of what can be created when the heart is there. It’s not about success – this album was a success, financially speaking, before the band ever hit the record button. It’s about a band making the best music it can, and then getting that music directly to those who will love it as much as the band does.

It may be optimistic to think that Marbles sounds like the future. But if I ever need a reminder of what faith in and working for a better way can produce, I can always pop on this album and reflect on the fact that by every music business rule, Marbles should not exist, and Marillion should never have had a top 10 hit 25 years into their career. Marbles exists. “You’re Gone” is in the charts. These things are true because we made them so. In a way, despite all the lyrical darkness, this is Marillion’s most optimistic album, because it’s predicated on the belief that things can change, if we only work to change them.

So, to sum up. The album is a work of genius. The band is in the best position, creatively and financially, that it has ever been in. And the future looks bright. It’s a great time to be a Marillion fan, and an even better time to become one. The one-CD version of Marbles comes out in the UK on May 3, but the two-CD version is available now at www.marillion.com, as is all of their back catalog, including some inexpensive sampler discs. There aren’t a lot of bands I would pimp this heavily for, but then, there aren’t a lot of bands like Marillion. For even attempting what they do, they deserve respect, but for pulling it off time after time, they deserve to be treasured.

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Next week, some CDs that weren’t made by Marillion…

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Brought to You by the Letter H
A Brief History of Marillion Part Two

It’s constantly amazing and amusing to me that even after 17 years and 13 albums with Marillion, Steve Hogarth is still considered by many to be “the new guy.”

Hogarth had the unenviable task of replacing Fish, the man who for seven years defined Marillion with his voice and outsize personality. And rather than enlist a Fish clone, the band ingeniously went with someone nearly Fish’s opposite in voice, temperament, and even height. Hogarth is a small, spry man with a high, airy voice of often surprising power, and a typically English sense of humor – dry and reserved.

Though it may have seemed an odd choice at the time, Hogarth has proven to be a perfect fit with the band, moreso even than his predecessor. The second phase of the band has produced nine albums ranging from very good to spectacular, and has tackled an almost mindboggling array of styles. They have, of course, remained Marillion through it all – a phenomenally talented progressive pop band – but with Hogarth, they have opened up their sound, allowing those prog tendencies to sit next to dozens of other influences. It doesn’t always cohere, but it’s always surprising, exciting and rewarding listening.

Yet still people ask when Fish is coming back. It’s incredible. One of the least charitable reviews of the new single, “You’re Gone,” began like this: “So’s Fish. Some Bono wannabe sings instead.” For many, the Hogarth era of Marillion has been one diminishing return after another, with Fish fans waiting in vain for the band to make another Misplaced Childhood. It’s never going to happen. Nor should it. The band has moved past the limited sound they exhibited on their first four releases, and as reviewer John Hotten once famously put it, “[Hogarth] may be no Fish, but then, Fish is no Steve Hogarth.”

Seasons End (1989)

Hogarth came to Marillion after stints in radio pop acts the Europeans and How We Live. He almost immediately became known simply as H, to avoid confusion with guitarist Steve Rothery. Along with his MTV-ready good looks and charm, H brought a musicianship to the table that Fish couldn’t have matched. He’s a terrific songwriter (as a perusal of his solo album, Ice Cream Genius, will reveal), and a fantastic singer. Where Fish got by on emotion and strength, H has a rich, technically proficient voice with a perfect, soaring falsetto at his command. Plus, the guy can sing pretty much anything.

The quality of H’s voice must have been the first thing fans noticed when playing Seasons End, the new model Marillion’s maiden voyage. Rather than call attention to itself as the focus, Hogarth’s voice is like another instrument, perfectly complementing the ringing guitars and keyboards on “King of Sunset Town,” the album opener. That song, with its two-minute fade-in and ambient sound, set the tone for this largely quiet and atmospheric record.

Seasons End is the very antithesis of the maxim about making a splashy first impression. It’s a grower, a thoughtful record that deepens with each play. It slowly seeps into your consciousness on waves of clean guitar and sustained synth lines. It is, above all, a powerfully emotional recording – the band hadn’t lost a note from the Clutching sessions, and H took the melodies to new heights. How anyone could listen to Hogarth’s vocals on the second half of “Berlin,” for example, or the incredible climax of “The Space,” and wish for Fish’s return is beyond me.

As the legend goes, H arrived for his first rehearsals with a red plastic bucket full of demo recordings on cassette. Much of the music for Seasons End was constructed from aborted sessions for the band’s fifth album with Fish, and whenever those bits weren’t working, someone would ask H if he had anything in the bucket worth trying. As fate would have it, one of the songs in the bucket was named “Easter,” and it became the enduring classic of this album. A gorgeous acoustic guitar and keyboard backing, a superb vocal melody, a soaring 90-second guitar solo, and a final third that shifts into the stratosphere – “Easter” is one of Marillion’s best songs, and they’ve played it at nearly every show since its release.

Unfortunately, they did make one colossal blunder on Seasons End, and it’s called “Hooks in You.” It’s a straight ‘80s rock song, one that’s almost crying out for a sleazy video. It’s full of guitar heroics and stupid lyrics, it sounds completely out of place on this contemplative record, and inexplicably, it was the first single. So the first taste many fans had of Hogarth came in the form of a glam-metal throwaway, and many just walked away, assuming Marillion had pulled a Phil Collins-years Genesis. And sadly, the band would only compound that problem next time out.

Holidays in Eden (1991)

If anyone wished to accuse Marillion of selling out, this album would be the evidence. Holidays is the most pop-based, compressed, radio-ready album the band has ever released. It has not one, but two Phil Collins-style ballads, a couple of unimaginative rockers, and an overall hit single vibe that was the last straw for fans of the old progressive style. It’s the weakest album they’ve made, by a mile.

And you know what? It’s still really good.

It’s easy to blame Hogarth for the poppy direction of Holidays. After years of being defined by their lead singer, it’s possible (and many have assumed) that the band took direction from their former pop idol frontman, especially since both “Dry Land” and “Cover My Eyes” date back to H’s days with How We Live. Even the liner notes seem to suggest this – Hogarth’s essay is the only one that feels completely positive about the album and its direction.

But it’s just not a fair assessment. First, Hogarth’s solo stuff is almost anti-pop. Second, the rest of the band is all over Holidays, in a good way. Listen to Rothery’s solo spots in the creepy opener “Splintering Heart,” or even on mid-tempo ballad “Dry Land,” and you’ll hear just as much emotion as he’s ever poured out. Listen to how the band clicks into a groove on “This Town,” or the title track. They’re having fun, and Chris Neil’s echoey production can’t mask that.

That said, though, Hogarth owns this album. Impressive as he was on Seasons End, he cuts right to the heart of it here. His powerful vocals on “The Party” will haunt you, especially in the unadorned opening and closing sections. His falsetto is flawless on “Cover My Eyes,” which was, before “You’re Gone,” Marillion’s most perfect radio single. Even “No One Can,” the album’s most top-40-sounding track, benefits greatly from H’s delivery. (Of course, it being the weakest and most typical track here, “No One Can” was the disastrous first single…)

A lot of people who bought Holidays only listened one or two times before giving up, which is a shame. This album is as much a grower as Seasons End, even if it doesn’t share that record’s meditative qualities. You need a few listens to hear past the production sheen and get to the songs, because there are some gems here. Still, if you’re only going to buy one H-era Marillion album, it shouldn’t be this one.

Brave (1994)

It should probably be this one.

You’ll find a lot of disagreement amongst Marillion fans regarding songs and albums, which is to be expected when a band jumps genres like this one does, but most will agree that Brave is a masterpiece. The band worked on this album like they’d never worked on anything before. Holidays in Eden was a disappointment on many levels, and vowing not to repeat that process, they took EMI’s money, holed up in a castle in France, and made a 70-minute concept album that plays like a single devastating song. The guys in Marillion still chafe against the prog-rock label they’re often tagged with, but how can they argue when they make albums as progressive as this one?

Brave was inspired by a news story about a girl found wandering the Severn Bridge in Bristol, an apparent suicide risk who refused to talk to police about her identity. The album tells the story of how she may have ended up there, and about what happens to her in the end. It’s a difficult, complex and brilliant album, one of the finest conceptual works I have heard. The opening draws you in, from the haunting guitar foghorn noises to the hushed piano and vocals of “Bridge,” and the grand finale – the ambient stunner of a title track, the dramatic “The Great Escape” and the delicate “Made Again” – is shattering. It breaks you apart and puts you back together again, all in 20 minutes.

Brave is also notable for its sound. This is an old-fashioned concept record, one in which every second was sculpted and labored over. The sonic quality of Brave is pretty much perfect, and credit must go to Dave Meegan, in his first production effort for the band. Meegan is now unofficially the sixth member of Marillion, and his amazing contributions to Marbles were so essential that he’s pictured with the band in their only liner note photo. Meegan painted Brave like a classical artist, bringing the best out of Marillion. The result is perhaps their finest work.

And of course, it tanked. No one makes a 70-minute concept album and expects it to sell millions, but Marillion were kind enough to EMI to provide them with a catchy hit single, “Alone Again in the Lap of Luxury.” But just as they fumbled the ball with Holidays (an album just screaming for radio play it never got), they wrote off Brave quickly. It was becoming obvious that the band was no longer welcome at their label.

Afraid of Sunlight (1995)

They decided to bang one more record out for EMI, and the label warned them against doing anything like taking two years to make an expensive concept album in France again. Afraid of Sunlight was knocked out, as the back cover says, in a few months, and it examined the pitfalls of fame, particularly the sudden kind, from many different angles. It was almost like the band’s farewell to their major label, a cautionary tale warning against what Radiohead would later term “the bends.”

Sunlight may have been made quickly and cheaply, but it certainly doesn’t sound like it. The band worked with Meegan again, and the sonic layers of Brave are in (slightly diminished) evidence. The songs on Sunlight are tighter than those on Brave, with fewer sprawling sections, but no less depth and power. It’s a very American album, with nods to the Beach Boys on the hilarious “Cannibal Surf Babe,” Phil Spector on the mono-mixed “Beyond You,” and several American figures that serve as lyrical metaphors. It’s a deep, atmospheric record, almost a sequel to Seasons End.

Smack in the middle of the album is a trilogy that stands with the best work the band has produced. It starts with the lilting “Afraid of Sunrise,” but soon moves into the stunning epic “Out of This World,” which contains more than one magical moment. And the title track, which caps it off, is goosebump-raising. Hogarth shines throughout, and Mark Kelly delivers the goods with swirling keyboards in all the right places. And Rothery soars, as usual.

The album ends abruptly, much like the band’s relationship with EMI Records did after Sunlight’s release. Marillion gave the label one last stab at a hit single with the defiantly simple “Beautiful,” and called it a day. They headed off towards the minor leagues, ready to explode into the future.

This Strange Engine (1997)

The band’s debut for Castle Records is the first installment in what some fans call the “unholy trinity,” three albums for which Marillion took the production reins themselves and began restlessly experimenting. Engine is so radically different from what came before that it left many long-time fans scratching their heads, especially in the wake of prog-heavy albums like Brave and Sunlight. That not all of these experiments worked only added to the confusion.

Marillion began their reinvention by stripping away almost everything definably Marillion in their sound. Engine is acoustic-based, for the most part, and comparatively sparse. “Memory of Water,” for example, is strictly voice and keyboard strings. Opener “Man of a Thousand Faces” is so simple and folksy it defies belief, and then it switches halfway through into a vocally layered crescendo. “One Fine Day” opens like an Aerosmith ballad, but takes it down a notch to end up with a subtle, emotional pop song.

Engine is largely hit or miss. Highlights include the gorgeous, Celtic-flavored “Estonia” and the pulsing electric tune “An Accidental Man,” the only one of its kind on the album. Lowlights, though, include “80 Days,” with its overpowering and cheesy synth trumpet lines, and “Hope for the Future,” a foray into island music that’s fun, but not worth revisiting too often.

And then, on the final track, they sucker-punch you. “This Strange Engine” is a 15-minute masterwork, one of their finest pieces. It glides from section to section with a flow so perfect that it feels like five minutes. H sings his little heart out, especially on the propulsive closing section, and Rothery takes a solo (right after “on the horizon…,” and those who have heard it are nodding their heads right now) that approaches perfection. It’s a superb song, perhaps the best example of Marillion combining their trademark emotional connection and musical skill.

Too bad the album doesn’t hold up as well. This Strange Engine catches Marillion at the cusp of an evolution, one which they’ve only just completed (or so it seems) on Marbles. It’s still an enjoyable record, but in the canon, it doesn’t rank very high.

Radiation (1998)

The second independently produced record finds the band replacing everything they stripped away last time with dirty, growling guitars. Radiation contains the band’s heaviest material to that point, especially “The Answering Machine” and “Cathedral Wall,” and yet continues their genre-hopping experimental streak.

Many fans objected to the production on this record, since most of the subtlety seems drowned in furious noise upon first listen. Radiation is a loose, fun album, a brief dive into spontaneity and loudness. Opener “Under the Sun” is a soaring rocker, with a high melody that makes room for an unconventional theremin part. “The Answering Machine” sounds like the loudest folk song ever written, with torrents of electric guitar and distorted keyboards raining down upon it.

But elsewhere, the band leapfrogs styles again with abandon. “Born to Run” is an understated blues jam with no chorus, “These Chains” is a delightful Beatlesque pop song (and the single), and “Cathedral Wall” is almost goth-metal, complete with some of Hogarth’s most unnerving screams. The band quiets down to an almost ridiculous degree for “Now She’ll Never Know,” sung so high that H’s voice always seems on the verge of breaking. And closer “A Few Words for the Dead” is a 10-minute wonder – it almost serves as its own dance mix for its first half, and then abruptly shifts into a joyous pop finale.

There’s nothing really wrong with Radiation, but like Engine, it doesn’t coalesce into more than the sum of its parts. It’s certainly fun and surprising, but it doesn’t hold up to repeat listens the way that Brave does. Still, they continued to evolve while making this record, and considering where they’ve ended up, Radiation was a necessary step.

Marillion.com (1999)

Marillion is not a band that works quickly. So when they burned off their Castle Records contract with three quick albums, one a year, one might have expected at least one of them to be lousy. Marillion.com, named after the website that has become their main connection with the world, proved that to be false. It’s just as good as, if not better than, Radiation and Engine, even if it still fails to reach the heights of Brave and Sunlight.

But that’s largely down to the experiments, which continue here apace. This album contains some of their poppiest material since Holidays in Eden, but with some of the sheen wiped off. “Rich” is an exceptionally catchy tune that was also the only single, and its vocal line is incredibly hard to sing, which H has proved with numerous gasping live versions. “Deserve” bops along uncomplicatedly, with a sax solo thrown in. And “Tumble Down the Years” steps into Neil Finn territory, which the band pulls off well.

As interesting as the first seven tracks are, though, they’re merely prelude for the last two. “Interior Lulu” is another 15-minute epic that plays like five, with its quirky bassline and sweet melody exploding into a lightning-quick keyboard solo. The extended playout, with its mesmerizing bass workouts courtesy of Pete Trewavas, is worth the whole song. The album ends with “House,” a 10-minute leap into dub-style pop with trumpet solos and a great chorus.

There are very few bands who would include “Tumble Down,” “Lulu” and “House” on the same album, let alone sequence them all in a row. For that type of musical surprise, Marillion is practically unbeatable. Marillion.com is another album that doesn’t gel completely, but when it’s on, it’s the best of the trilogy it concludes.

As a side note, this album contains the first interactive moment between the band and their online fanbase. Marillion asked their fans to send in pictures of themselves, and dozens of these photographs adorn the liner notes of the album. It was an interesting trick for a record largely about human contact through technological means, and it led to the amazing preorder stunt they pulled for the next one.

Anoraknophobia (2001)

This is the album that blew the doors off.

In 2000, Marillion found themselves without a record contract, and with a dissatisfied feeling towards labels in general. So they took it to the fanbase, asking them whether they would pre-order an album that hadn’t been finished yet, just based on the band’s word. Pre-ordering, they said, would finance the recording of the album, thus freeing them to secure a distribution deal for a finished product that sounded exactly the way the band wanted. According to the band, they expected only a few thousand responses.

They got 12. Thousand, that is. And hundreds more besides.

Anoraknophobia reunited Marillion with Dave Meegan, and it’s not exaggerating to say that together they completely reinvented the band. The experimentalism of the last three albums wove its way into the writing process, and the album incorporates drum loops, dub sounds and computer effects all over the place. But it’s not trendy-sounding in any way. Anoraknophobia takes hold of the trip-hop electronic thing and uses it to enhance a terrific set of songs, ones that are at once more pop and more prog than anything they had done since Brave.

Many bands, when they reach the 20-year mark, slow down and start making quieter records about growing old. Marillion went the opposite direction – Anoraknophobia is the loudest, most alive-sounding record they had yet made. Just listen to Ian Mosley’s thundering drums on “If My Heart Were a Ball It Would Roll Uphill,” or Rothery’s explosive guitar on “Separated Out,” or Trewavas’ stunning bassline on “Quartz.” Hogarth pulls out all the stops, too, shouting sections of “Quartz” at the top of his lungs and building “This Is the 21st Century” to an extraordinary climax.

It’s hard not to equate the band’s revitalization with their newfound financial freedom. They felt no need to deliver a single, so when they came up with two (“Between You and Me” and “Map of the World”) it was obvious that they were included because they’re both great songs. Anorak is an immediate stunner that still manages to be a grower as well. Songs like “21st Century,” a modern classic, are great on first listen and get better with repeat plays. Anorak is not easy – four of the eight songs hover around the 10-minute mark, and most have multiple sections – but it’s apparent on first go-round that this album is worth investing time in.

And what of that financial gamble? Did it work? Glad you asked. Those who pre-ordered Anorak through the band got a special hardbound book with their names in it, and a bonus disc of demos. They also helped the band set up their organization, and paved the way for Marbles. It’s become clear that Anorak was, both in its creative direction and its business plan, a dry run for Marbles, and we’ll explore next week just how fruitful that direction and that plan have been this year.

But here’s a snippet of the revolutionary way they’re doing things now, straight from their own email list: “By selling our album straight to you, we become completely free to take the decisions which affect the future of the band and we can also remove the middle-men who stand between you – our listeners – and us. For the first time we’ll OWN our own music. We’re going to kick out as many of the cynics and the businessmen as we can, and replace them with our own team of accomplished professionals who are driven as much by faith as we are.”

Viva la revolution, I say, especially when the creative rewards sound like Anoraknophobia.

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Next week, Marbles. Is it any surprise that I love it?

Again, all Marillion albums are available at www.marillion.com.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A Fish Tale
A Brief History of Marillion Part One

I have a theory about why I think Marillion is one of the best bands in the world.

It goes like this:

Taking together all the disparate styles of music one can make, and not being a guy who likes genre labels very much, there are really only a couple of kinds of great music: those songs that blow your mind, and those that touch your soul. Musical impulses hail from two different regions, most commonly called head and heart, and it’s easy to tell from which one a song emerged. It’s the difference between hearing one song and saying, “Wow, that was well done, what a difficult and original thing to pull off, I think I’ll have to study that,” and hearing another and saying, “I love that, and I want to hear it all the time, because it gives me a big wide grin and brings tears to my eyes.”

The thing is, skill and emotion cannot often coexist. The more complicated and difficult a song is to play, the less likely there will be room within its passages to really connect with the listener in a straightforward manner. No one will disagree that the guys in King Crimson can play, but then I doubt many would say that “Larks Tongues in Aspic” really touched them, or made them cry.

At the far end of the skill spectrum, at least as far as this column’s purview is concerned, is progressive rock. Here are songs written for the express purpose of flaunting one’s musical skill, songs that stretch to 30 or 45 minutes, songs full of dazzling instrumental prowess and, it must be said, very little heart. And at the other end is simple folk music, a singer and his or her guitar strumming a few simple chords and bleeding all over them with emotion. And yet the songs, when broken down, are almost laughably easy to compose and play. Neither skill nor emotion can withstand the other’s scrutiny.

This is not an argument for one over the other. To the contrary, I would say that the best artists are the ones who can combine the two impulses, creating music that challenges the brain and moves the heart. Examples of this are few and far between, of course, and like everything else, entirely subjective. Most of my favorite bands choose emotion over everything, and my heart sways my head. I have found a few that can deliver for me on both levels without having to switch back and forth, but even they can only do it sporadically.

Marillion has been doing it consistently for more than 20 years. If one were to use crap industry terms to describe their sound, it would probably come out as progressive-ambient-pop-rock, but they’ve also done blues, acoustic folk, techno, island music, dub, you name it. Basically, if there’s a style of music that can be played by five English guys, Marillion have ingested it and spit it back out with their own distinctive stamp. They gleefully jump from genre to genre. Their songs can last the better part of 20 minutes, or less than three. Their catalog contains three full-fledged concept albums, one of them more than 70 minutes long. They are a thinking person’s band.

And yet, everything they do is simply loaded with heart, bursting with emotion. There are moments in Marillion songs that have literally made me weepy. I get chills listening to Steve Rothery’s glorious guitar tone, whether dripping with sadness or soaring with delight. He out-Gilmours David Gilmour, and he can play rings around him, too. Marillion makes music you feel, on a strong gut level, and it’s only afterwards, when you’re really examining it, that you realize how meticulous and well-arranged their work is, how purely musical. To pinch an old title of theirs, they are the best of both worlds.

* * * * *

The first Marillion album I heard was Clutching at Straws, during my freshman year of college in 1992. It was thanks to Jess Quinn, a former student who had returned to direct a play I was acting in called You Were Born on a Rotten Day. (The actors ended up renaming it You Were Cast in a Rotten Play.) Jess lent me both Clutching and a compilation called Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other, celebrating both men – Fish and Steve Hogarth – who have fronted Marillion through the years.

I loved Clutching at Straws. I bought it on cassette almost immediately. But I will admit that the more recent material on the compilation didn’t pique my interest, so I lost track of the band for years. In 2001, I found them again, and bought the whole catalog on CD. The stuff I didn’t like on Six of One turned out to be not so bad in retrospect, and not at all representative of the albums. And the records I hadn’t heard between 1992 and 2001, well… wow. Some of them I now consider among my all-time favorites.

I have been ludicrously lax concerning Marillion and this column, a fact I hope to rectify over the next few weeks. For a band that sits so highly on my list to have received almost no analysis on this site is just plain silly. Both Marillion and their former frontman Fish have released career-defining albums this year – Marillion with the mammoth two-disc Marbles and Fish with the powerful Field of Crows – and this is the perfect time to explore their work in depth.

What follows is an attempt to define what makes this band so magical to me. I’m hoping in the process to turn a few people on to Marillion as well, considering that they’re largely ignored in the United States and only marginally better regarded in Europe. The band’s fans are mobilizing to take the new single, “You’re Gone,” straight to number one in the UK charts next week, and it would be great to see them get more exposure. Anything I can do to help that effort out would be my pleasure.

We’re going to start this week by exploring the early days of the band and the solo career of Fish, but we’ll catch up with Hogarth Marillion next week, and hopefully cap it all off with a review of Marbles. (I still don’t have my pre-ordered copy…) Buckle up, boys and girls.

* * * * *

Script for a Jester’s Tear (1983)

Marillion formed in Aylesbury, England, in 1981, and right from the start, the focus was on Fish. His real name is Derek William Dick, he’s an impressively tall Scotsman, and his theatrical delivery on stage became the focal point of the group’s buzz. Fish would dress up in war paint and prance about, always holding an audience’s attention in the palm of his hand. His voice was, and still is, unique and captivating. And his lyrics, though sometimes wordy, were literate and cutting.

But behind Fish was a band, and in the rush to create a legend from its lead singer, the press would often overlook the skill of the musicians who provided the lifeblood. Guitarist Steve Rothery, bassist Pete Trewavas and keyboardist Mark Kelly (drummer Mick Pointer would be replaced by Ian Mosley after Script) attacked epic tracks with aplomb. Marillion was heavily influenced by early Genesis at this point, with Fish in full Peter Gabriel mode and Kelly running through a full array of Tony Banks synth sounds, but in the early ‘80s, there weren’t many people playing this sort of thing. And Rothery really showed his stuff with his extended solos.

As you may expect, Script for a Jester’s Tear, the band’s debut, is full of progressive epics and sounds very 1970s. It contains a mere six songs, five of which run more than seven minutes each. It’s dressed up in a cover painting by Mark Wilkinson that puts it squarely in the Genesis camp. There’s no mistaking this for anything other than what it is. And it’s an image that has haunted Marillion to this day, with many in the British press accusing them of writing about goblins and dragons. Which, by the way, they never did.

No, there’s no mistaking this for anything but a progressive rock record, and in that vein, it’s a very good one. It opens with Fish crooning a sad lament (“So here I am once more, in the playground of the broken hearts…”), which instantly sets Marillion’s brand of prog apart – it’s autobiographical, from Fish’s point of view, with an undercurrent of deep feeling. In contrast, “Garden Party” is a bit of a romp, and the band still plays it live sometimes. Fish only steps into the ludicrous once – “Forgotten Sons” is difficult to take seriously, with its chanted amens. But overall, Script is an enduring, if derivative, album.

Fugazi (1984)

By the Fugazi sessions, Pointer was out and Mosley was in, and the core of the band was in place. The primary lineup (Rothery, Trewavas, Kelly and Mosley) hasn’t changed in 20 years. And with the new group in place, Marillion rushed into the studio to record their second album. In retrospect, even the band members agree that they may have taken it too quickly.

It’s hard to overstate what a sometimes difficult and angular album Fugazi is. It’s still heavily Genesis-influenced, only this time some of the early Collins material seems to squeak in, especially on “Jigsaw.” And there’s a keyboard moment on “Emerald Lies” that sounds like vintage Banks. Lyrically, it’s angry and depressing – Fish really lays it all out there on this one, especially in the latter half of the record. His voice shakes and trembles throughout “Emerald Lies” and “She Chameleon,” and it’s hard not to admire him for being so fearless.

But when I say this record is difficult, I mean it. More than any other Marillion record, this one took some time to get into. There are three catchy songs, and they’re all up front, leaving the remainder of the album to lengthy, shifting, meandering pieces dripping with bile. Hearing “She Chameleon,” “Incubus” and the first half of the title track all in a row might be a bit much for anyone the first time. It’s a slow, creeping record, but it turns about for the final section of the title track. Fugazi, by the way, means “all fucked up,” an apt description of the mental state of the lyricist.

This is a good album, upon repeated listens, but not as good as its predecessor. These songs only live on in Fish’s live sets, and even then only occasionally. Hogarth steadfastly refuses to sing anything from this one, and given the personal nature of the lyrics, I don’t blame him a bit.

Misplaced Childhood (1985)

For most older fans, this was their introduction to Marillion. “Kayleigh” was a huge hit everywhere but here in the U.S., and in fact U.K. fans of the band are really sick of hearing about it. That’s partially because it’s a really sappy song, with pretty standard love song lyrics and an insidious chorus that grabs hold of your brain and won’t let go. It was Marillion’s first pop song, and while it was a decent, even lovely attempt, it wasn’t at all representative of the band or their third album. It does win you over, though, especially Rothery’s simply wonderful solo after the first chorus.

The album, now, that’s another story entirely. The band took it upon themselves to write their first concept album, a 41-minute piece of music only separated by record sides. Fish took some mushrooms and came up with the concept: a man who has just lost the love of his life is visited by his boyhood self for some introspection. Fish used his own dissolving relationship with his own Kayleigh as inspiration, and Misplaced Childhood is a remarkably moving album because of it.

Since the theme of the album dealt with childhood and innocence, many of the musical themes became, of necessity, simple and small. Misplaced is a 41-minute song made up of dozens of little movements, very few of which can stand on their own. But it retains a musical and thematic consistency throughout. It collapses by the end – “White Feather” really doesn’t seem to belong, and it’s too simple a song – but as a single piece, it succeeds. This was Marillion’s first stab at extended song forms, and they learned lessons from it that they incorporated into every lengthy piece they wrote from here out.

Many consider Misplaced Childhood to be the band’s masterpiece, and it’s certainly the one for which they are best remembered. Sections of the album, like the great breakdown in “Blind Curve” and the guitar intro to “Childhood’s End,” are full of deep feeling, and while it would be out of character for me to call this album a classic, it would be an easily forgivable leap. Fish still plays most of this album live, and in fact has recently started performing it in its entirety at special shows. And even Hogarth is known to bust out “Kayleigh” now and then.

Clutching at Straws (1987)

Anyone who gave the lyrics to Marillion’s fourth album a close read couldn’t have been surprised when Fish exited the band in 1989. Clutching is a concept album about drinking your life away, and it finds Fish examining the “drinks like a…” connotation of his stage name to its fullest. It is also the band’s most fully realized effort with their original lead singer, a perfectly paced collection of lovely, sad songs that aim for the heart.

It opens with a trilogy about hanging out in bars, the middle part of which, “Warm Wet Circles,” is simply devastating. Its simple metaphor hides an ocean of pain and regret. This is an album that flows so brilliantly that by the time you realize how long you’ve been listening to it, you’re done. Rothery is at his finest here – his solo sections are beautiful, restrained and heartfelt. But the band truly gels on this album, with each member contributing to the whole. There aren’t any bad songs here, and there are some terrific ones, including the epic “White Russian” and the hopelessly sad “Sugar Mice.” If the band made a masterpiece with Fish, then this is it.

Fish has called parts of Clutching his resignation letter to the band, and it’s true. It’s an album full of self-loathing and recrimination, but it’s all wrapped up in such soul-wringing pain, and covered in a misty fog of half-awaken memory. Fish had said all he could with Marillion, and he left on the highest of high notes. Needless to say, I could listen to this album all day and not be bored with it, and if this column convinces you to buy any of Marillion’s albums with Fish, I think you should choose this one.

* * * * *

It’s constantly amusing to me that fans of early Marillion assumed that the band would fall apart without Fish, and that the singer would go on to a successful solo career. It’s a testament to Fish’s charisma that many thought the band was all about him, when in fact Fish would have to build a career with one-fifth of the Marillion sound, while the band still retained four-fifths. I would have given Marillion the better shot, provided they chose the right singer.

Fish, on the other hand, will always be at the mercy of his collaborators, since he plays no instruments. Hence his solo career is a spotty one, sliding from peaks to valleys and back again. Some of Fish’s solo work is downright embarrassing, but some is excellent. Along the way, both his voice and his lyrical ability seem to have atrophied, and his later material finds him singing in a much lower register, often with female backing vocalists to aid him.

Fish is still an extraordinary live performer, however. He’s bald, paunchy and aging at this point, but he still commands a crowd like few can. He’s amazing to watch. And when he gets the right group of musicians behind him, he can still make a great record. Fish has also made some disastrous business decisions that have cost him label support, and he’s taken his dedicated fanbase online, distributing his records himself. His Chocolate Frog Records has released his last two studio albums and a slew of live records and re-releases.

Fish’s solo catalog is littered with live albums, acoustic records, re-recordings and best-ofs. He’s released 29 solo CDs, and only eight of them are new studio recordings. Sifting through the mountain of material is daunting, but the good stuff is worth it.

Universally respected as his best work, Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors came out in 1990. The definition of “best” in this case means “sounds the most like Marillion,” of course, and this one does. The nearly nine-minute title track is one of Fish’s finest songs, and though he loses points for a pair of catchy dance numbers, he gets them back for the beautiful piano number “A Gentleman’s Excuse Me” and the concluding trilogy of solid songs. “Cliché” is a great love song, as well, and this album also includes “The Company,” which has become a Fish anthem, appearing at the end of virtually every concert he’s performed as a solo artist.

He rushed the follow-up, 1991’s Internal Exile, and it shows. He dips into adult pop balladry on “Just Good Friends” and “Dear Friend,” although both have their moments, and stumbles entirely with “Favourite Stranger.” Still, the album includes “Credo” and “Lucky,” two tunes that became staples of the live show, and the title track, which finds the big man embracing Scottish nationalism.

The less said about Songs From the Mirror, the better. Contractually bound for one more record, Fish delivered a covers disc in 1992, and the high points (Pink Floyd’s “Fearless,” Sandy Denny’s “Solo”) are practically drowned in embarrassing takes on Argent, Yes and Genesis songs. Between that and the six double live albums he subsequently released, Fish tried the patience of a lot of fans. The Mirror tour, however, produced the excellent live record Sushi, so it wasn’t all a loss.

Suits, released in 1994 on Fish’s own Dick Bros. label, was supposed to be a comeback, but its loping dance grooves and ultra-long songs put people off. It’s not a bad album, but it’s not a great one either, and good tunes like “Lady Let it Lie” and “Raw Meat” share disc space with lousy bits like “No Dummy” and “Bandwagon.” Fish seemed to be on a downward slide, and his insistence on releasing more live albums and a two-disc re-recordings project (Yin and Yang) only served to confirm this.

If you’re going to make a comeback, make it a big one, I always say, and Fish did so with Sunsets on Empire in 1997. It’s a big, loud, angry record full of guitars and snarling vocals, and featuring some of the best songs the Fishy One can claim under his own name. “The Perception of Johnny Punter” is an eight-minute Led Zeppelin workout, “Goldfish and Clowns” is catchy and well-written, and “Brother 52” sets its anti-government polemic to rollicking guitars and organs. Bring it home with a seven-minute title track that sounds like the best of Roger Waters’ stuff, and you have the best Fish record since Vigil, easily.

Sunsets seemed to kick off a modern Fish renaissance, as 1999’s Raingods With Zippos was also quite good. The first half pales in comparison to the side-long epic “Plague of Ghosts,” a techno-influenced suite that runs for 25 minutes and still feels too short. Raingods also began Fish’s short time with Roadrunner Records, who re-released all the older albums and some of the live discs.

That relationship was short-lived, and Fish returned to his own label for Fellini Days, a collaboration with Floridian guitarist John Wesley, in 2001. Fellini proved to be another valley, for while it had a couple of good tracks, all of them dragged on too long, and some were well below par. The production also drowned everything in Wesley’s guitar, even quieter pieces like “Obligatory Ballad.” And Fish’s voice showed obvious signs of wear on nearly every track. As with every less-than-great album he makes, Fish’s fans wondered whether he’d finally lost it.

* * * * *

Which brings us to 2004.

And would you believe Fish has just put out the best album of his solo career?

Field of Crows doesn’t officially hit shops until April 19, but Fish has been selling it from his website since December. I’ve had it since early January. Often Fish albums take time to worm their way into my brain, and assessing them after one or two listens often results in an incomplete picture. I can usually tell, however, which songs will be growers and which will sit and fester, and Fish has done his fair share of both.

Field of Crows is immediate. It takes hold right away, and only gets better each time you play it. It is the most straightforward rock album he has made, and yet it contains passages of great intensity, quiet moments that move unlike anything he’s made since Vigil. This is, finally, an album that shows Fish at the top of his game, one in which every song contributes to the whole. There are no bad tracks, and there are some songs here that are better than anything Fish has ever done.

It’s worth pointing out that my definition of “best” does not mean “sounds most like Marillion.” Fish has evolved throughout his solo career into an earthy, rootsy singer. His voice has dropped and decayed, much like Bob Dylan’s, so his natural timbre now is low, rumbly and full of menace. There is more weight, more gravity to his voice now, and he wrings passion from it in completely different ways than he did with Marillion.

The music is decidedly different as well, and those searching for a sequel to Clutching at Straws will be disappointed. Fish has reunited most of the musicians who helped him make Vigil for this album, but Crows is guitar-fueled rock and roll for much of its running time. Songs like “Moving Targets,” “The Rookie,” “Old Crow” and “Numbers” groove along on nasty, tasty guitar riffs, Fish spitting and snarling his way through them like a wolverine. Above all, Field of Crows is loud, but catchy as a flu virus.

I don’t want to give the impression that Crows is, musically speaking, like an AC/DC album, all rock and no heart, though. Opener “The Field” is an eight-minute folksy dirge, which consistently builds to a repeated refrain, complete with horn section. “The Lost Plot” is perhaps the most Marillion-like song here, carried along by sweet repeated keyboards. “Exit Wound” is a bluesy ballad. And halfway through the epic “Innocent Party,” the whole album changes.

That song, a jackhammer attack for four of its seven minutes, blossoms into a piano-driven wonder. And from that point on, the character Fish is playing sees the light. “Shot the Craw” is one of the big man’s best ballads, this one in 7/4 time and full of beautiful guitar sounds, courtesy of longtime collaborator Frank Usher. “Scattering Crows,” the closer, starts off weakly, but quickly becomes the most emotional piece here, and it concludes on a surprising yet resonant note. Field of Crows starts on top of the world and ends gently (yet mercilessly) back on the ground. It is entirely emotionally satisfying.

It’s also Fish’s first genuine concept album since Clutching. It’s about selling out one’s principles, about the moment when one realizes, with intense regret, just what one has given up to attain a position one no longer wants. It’s also about a body in a field, and how that body got there. During the journey, the album references 9/11 and takes aim at American foreign policies, and everything works toward the theme. Animal metaphors also abound, particularly in “Zoo Class” and “Old Crow.” This is the most complete set of lyrics Fish has composed in more than a decade.

His is also one of the most coherent responses to 9/11 I have heard. “Innocent Party” is the song that most directly addresses the tragedy, using America as a metaphor for his character’s fall:

“You once had the world at your feet, but your conscience wandered in clouds,
You lost sight of your goals, your vision was blurred when the towers one day disappeared,
Everyone stared, no one believed as the images burned on our screens,
That a world had just changed, the dream evaporates, no more innocent parties…”

The album, as a whole, is about finally remembering what is important, and Fish’s use of the world situation emphasizes his point with stunning clarity. I am slightly uncomfortable with the final destination of the plotline in relation to the imagery, but you can’t say Fish hasn’t carefully considered this album. He obviously worked intensely on Field of Crows, both on the solid music and the even more solid lyrics, and it’s the crown jewel of his solo career.

It’s also probably his last. Fish has expressed a desire to get out of recording and touring, and he’s said that he can’t imagine topping Field of Crows next time out. Fish turns 46 on April 25 (or 25 April, as he would say), and he’s had a good long run, both with Marillion and as a solo artist. If it turns out that Crows is his final record, well, it’s a good way to go out, but it would be a shame. His work still feels vital and invigorating, and his voice is singular and unique. It would be unfortunate to lose such a voice to the financial realities of independent music-making, especially since he’s still capable of making records like Field of Crows.

* * * * *

Wow, this column is huge, and it’s only part one. I guess I just need to get this obsession off my back, so thanks for coming along.

Marillion’s material is all available here. Fish’s can be purchased here. Next week, a man called H takes the stage.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The Truth Hurts
Todd Rundgren Takes Sweet, Sweet Aim at All the Liars

I feel guilty.

I should have mentioned Wonderfalls, the new show put together by Angel producer Tim Minear. I should have tried to get people to watch it, because it was quirky and wonderful and had the makings of something really special. But I kept quiet, thinking that within six episodes or so I could see whether this little show would blossom into something amazing. It certainly could have.

But Fox killed it this weekend, after only four episodes. Three of those ran on Friday nights, in a traditional death slot for new shows, and the final one ran on Thursday opposite The Apprentice. It had no chance. And I’m sure there will be a DVD release eventually, collecting the 13 episodes that were filmed, but of all the shows that premiered this year, Wonderfalls had the best chance of painting on a wider canvas than television normally does. I’d bet that year three would have been incredible.

And now we’ll never know.

If you count Angel, which begins airing its final six episodes next week, then this is two shows that Minear has worked on that have gotten the boot this year. It seems like a concerted effort to wipe out any and all thoughtful television before summer starts. The shame is, I just know Fox is going to replace Wonderfalls with some new reality crapfest like Who Wants to Marry a Big Fat Obnoxious Midget, and even more shamefully, America will watch that one.

* * * * *

I’ve fallen a bit behind in new release news as well, so here are a few upcoming albums I’m jazzed about:

Prince returns on April 20 with Musicology, and what I’ve heard has been fantastic. I hope he never loses this new band he’s formed, especially John Blackwell on drums and Rhonda Smith on bass. It’s the best rhythm section he’s ever had. As far as other new records for April, it’s slim pickings, with only Joe Satriani, Sophie B. Hawkins and an EP from BT capturing any attention at all. I was hoping for the new Tears for Fears album, Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, but financial troubles at Arista Records have caused that one to be shelved for the time being.

May is not much better, with a new Magnetic Fields on the fourth proving to be the high point so far. We’ll also see records from Peter Salett, Vernon Reid, Lenny Kravitz and Slipknot, as well as the final installment in a trilogy of discs from Pedro the Lion. The new one’s called Achilles Heel. Zipping forward to June, we have the new Joy Electric, Hello Mannequin, on the first. I’ve been lax in reviewing JE in the past, so I promise to get to this one.

June 8 sees an upswing, with Bad Religion’s The Empire Strikes First (I just love typing out that title), Cowboy Junkies’ One Soul Now, PJ Harvey’s Uh Hu Her (taking the prize for year’s worst title so far), Ministry’s Houses of the Mole and Fastball’s return, Keep Your Wig On. The new Wilco, A Ghost is Born, has been pushed back to June 22 so that Jeff Tweedy can finish rehab before the tour. The album does contain two songs that blow past 10 minutes in length, which is always an enticement for me.

And that’s about it for now. Summer release announcements should start cropping up soon, otherwise this is going to be a boring year…

* * * * *

I’d like to think I’d have discovered Todd Rundgren on my own eventually. As it is, though, I owe my vast Rundgren collection entirely to Mike Ferrier.

Mike has always been a computer kid, and for as long as I’ve known him he’s been fascinated by digital animation and computer generated effects. We made a couple of video flicks in high school that gave Mike the chance to show off his skills on his new Commodore Amiga (remember those?), and his immersion in that mighty machine’s graphics capability led him to Todd Rundgren. Or, more specifically, to Todd Rundgren’s video for “Change Myself,” released in 1991 and created on the Amiga. As a Christmas present that year, he bought me 2nd Wind, and a love affair began instantly.

Between me and Todd’s music, not me and Mike, you pervert.

I haven’t seen the “Change Myself” video in more than 10 years now, but I still listen to 2nd Wind, and that album launched me on the path toward collecting every one of Rundgren’s 19 albums, as well as his 10 records with Utopia, as well as numerous live records (including multi-disc live box sets from both Rundgren and Utopia last year). Rundgren is a restless artist, constantly flitting from one style to another, and always seeking out new technology and new ways of communicating his vision. For more than 30 years, he’s been making intelligent, tuneful music, usually with a splash of novelty.

Almost a decade ago, however, Rundgren turned to internet distribution, handing out songs and samples to his dedicated fans via a subscription service called PatroNet. Like most artists who explore this kind of thing, Rundgren started concentrating on singles and studio experiments and stopped making albums. His last full disc of new stuff, The Individualist, came out in 1995, and since then, we’ve feasted on scraps – remix records, live recordings, a best-of done bossa nova style, and a hodgepodge of PatroNet tunes called One Long Year. (That record, admittedly, had some gems, including the hilariously geeky “I Hate My Frickin’ ISP.”) While these were all fun projects, I wrote off the possibility of a whole new Rundgren album years ago.

And of course, just to confound expectation once again, there is now a whole new Rundgren album called Liars, released on Tuesday. If you’ve drifted away from following Todd’s career of late, you need to know this: Liars is not a mix-and-match collection of songs Rundgren had tucked away, it is not a remix project, and it is not another rehash. This is a bona fide new album, 74 minutes long, featuring 14 new songs. And the funniest cover photo you’re likely to see this year.

The good news keeps on coming, too: Liars contains the best group of songs Rundgren has given us since Nearly Human in 1989. With untruth as his theme, Rundgren has delivered some of his sweetest melodies in more than a decade, and used them to convey some of his angriest and most bitter lyrics ever. He rails against governments, religion and bad relationships, pointing out the festering cancer in each one – we rarely tell the truth. We’re all liars.

The album starts with a song called “Truth,” and ends with one called “Liar.” And in between the two extremes, Rundgren searches for veracity and meaning. “I’m gonna find the truth,” he swears at the album’s beginning, but by the end, all he’s uncovered are lies. There are lies of gender, used to keep us apart, in “Happy Anniversary”: “Men are stupid, women are evil, and that’s the way it’s got to be.” There are lies of education and leadership in “Stood Up”: “As soon as I was boss, the next one in line took my head clean off, ‘cause I stood up too fast.” Even music is a lie these days, as he details in “Soul Brother”: “We’re only here to entertain, and just pretend to be in pain… It’s a distraction, I’m told, I use it to hide my total lack of soul…”

The album is neatly subdivided by two central tracks, placed back to back, and titled “Future” and “Past.” In these sad laments, Rundgren notes that the past is gone and the promised future has never arrived. Both are lies, and his narrative voice plainly illustrates what happens if you believe in either one. “Where’s the better world that was declared at the 1964 World’s Fair?” he asks, and later admits that “my todays are gray, the seconds tick away.”

Naturally, Rundgren saves his most savage attacks for the realms of political and religious manipulation. Todd is a die-hard empiricist, refusing to believe in anything he cannot physically prove, and he holds those who dedicate their lives to any faith in contempt. He takes aim at greedy religions in “Mammon,” and then goes so far as to take up the voice of God on “God Said,” only to have the supreme being deny his own existence.

Quite a funny paradox in that song – he seems to be saying that believers will only accept that God does not exist if he tells them so personally, but by the very act of doing so, he’d be proving that he exists. Still, it’s a magnificent song, effectively using God’s voice to recommend personal responsibility: “I don’t dwell upon you, I dwell on something else, and I am not really here, so get over yourself,” he says, and then delivers the capper with “You will kill in my name and heaven knows what else, when you can’t prove I exist…”

“Liar” is the most incendiary track here, so naturally it closes the record. Its lyrics are evenly divided, with one half ripping on Islamic terrorist manipulators and the other on American arrogance, and both targets receiving a screaming repetition of the title phrase. “And with every lying breath, you send them to their death,” he spits, savaging both us and them equally. It’s the first time I have seen anyone equate America’s lies with Al Qaeda’s, and it’s certainly bold.

Given the piss and venom that pulses through these lyrics, you’ll probably be surprised by the insanely tuneful music. The best way I have found to describe the album’s sound is this: imagine Hall and Oates meeting the Chemical Brothers. And even that doesn’t quite do it. The album is full of whirring techno drums and plastic bass lines, but the songs (with a couple of exceptions) are all blue-eyed soul workouts. Rundgren played virtually all the instruments himself, using a computerized composition program, and though the result is almost completely synthetic, his warm and wide vocals add more than enough humanity to the proceedings. Just check out his soulful turn on “Afterlife.”

There’s a layer of (likely unintended) irony to the sound as well. The synth voices are all meant to emulate drums, bass guitars, pianos and strings, even though none of them quite get there. So in a way, every instrument on the album is lying to you, hence enhancing the theme. You would be forgiven for thinking that 74 minutes of synthesized pop might seem like a chore to sit through, but this is an extremely quick 74 minutes, vaulted along by Rundgren’s unceasing sense of melody and harmony. It may have been improved by real instruments, no doubt, and I would like to hear a live run-through of this record at some point, but even as it is, this is quite the Todd Rundgren album.

And even with all the anger on display, Rundgren keeps his sense of humor and never lets the album tumble into didactic moralizing. And hey, if Rundgren can slip his observations about truth and manipulation into the public consciousness coated in sugary harmony, then more power to him. After more than a decade away, Todd Rundgren has racked one in the win column with Liars, an idiosyncratic and uncompromising artistic and political statement cleverly disguised as one hell of a pop record.

* * * * *

Those sick of hearing about Marillion from me may want to steer clear of this column for the next few weeks. I’m taking some time to explore the history and future of this band, including reviews of their new one, Marbles, and the latest from their former frontman Fish, Field of Crows. I’m starting with Fish next week, mostly because I don’t have Marbles yet – the pre-order edition has been shipped from England but has not yet arrived on these shores. Next week, though, for certain, I will get my hands on it.

For the time being, I’m salivating over pictures of the pre-order package, posted online by one of the chaps from the Marillion message board. Want a look? Okay, go here.

Pretty, isn’t it?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The British Are Coming… Eventually
Muse, Franz Ferdinand and Snow Patrol Finally Hit the U.S.

There’s this big dead tree in my back yard.

It’s been there for a long time, since before I moved in last year. It’s this enormous, hulking carcass that loses dead branches all the time. When that hurricane came up the east coast last year, I was certain that it would whip this tree out of the ground and hurl it onto the roof of my house, obliterating all of my earthly possessions. And I’d then have to do what any sensible guy would do after something like that: take it as a sign from God, swear off material things, and join a nomadic monastic order, traveling the world and fighting injustice wherever I may find it. And, um, learn how to use a sword. ‘Cause those guys always have swords.

I kind of found the whole idea of losing everything I’d collected over the years in one fell swoop comforting, and I’m sure it would actually take a disaster, like a fire or an earthquake that destroyed all my CDs and comics all at once, to get me to stop collecting like a madman with a trust fund. But it won’t be that tree that does it. As I type this, burly-looking men with chainsaws are removing that towering eyesore once and for all.

It’s fascinating to watch, too. They’re doing it in sections, starting at the top, which means that they’re counting on the tree’s root system to hold it in place while they climb it. Of course, the root system is dead, so who knows what might happen? But most likely, I will be minus one dead tree in a few hours. The odd writer part of me has been casting about for some metaphorical hook to hang this on – like maybe the tree symbolizes my childhood, which, though it died a long time ago, I’ve been holding on to, and now that I’m almost 30, it’s time to let it go? But the more practical, sensible part of me is telling the odd writer to shut up. And he’s right, I think.

Sometimes a dead tree is just a dead tree.

* * * * *

I mention this a lot, but I put an insane amount of time and thought into my year-end top 10 list. Most of that thought, recently, has gone into revising the rules of eligibility to reflect my new global audience, thanks to this wacky world wide web thing. For example, here’s a sticking point that I’m currently wrestling with: international release dates.

I have a noted aversion to import prices. It comes from not having a lot of money. For the cost of one import CD I can buy two, sometimes three domestic CDs, so I usually wait for stateside releases of albums from the UK and Japan and such. This is hard for me to do, especially when mags like NME and Q make these records I’m missing sound like perfection wrapped in plastic. Usually this isn’t a big deal when it comes to the list, however – UK and US release dates usually only differ by a month or two, and rarely is something so good that it makes me retroactively rewrite my list.

But sometimes, it happens. And it just did.

Muse’s third album, Absolution, came out in the UK last year. After months of reading about how swell an album it is, I finally picked it up when it hit these shores two weeks ago. Now, you have to understand that it’s also quite rare that I agree with British critics, who tend to alternately grasp hold of flashes in the pan and overpraise them, or heap derision on any artist that shows an ounce of ambition. There’s a definite too-big-for-their-britches mentality in UK music reviews, like they’re being written by childhood acquaintances of the band members – “Ooh, look at little Chris Martin, thinks he’s so important and aaah-tsy. Why I remember when he couldn’t tie his shoes. You sell a few records and you think you’re God’s gift, I swear…”

But I have to say, all the four-star reviews of Absolution are spot-on. This is an amazing record. Okay, to start, it does sound an awful lot like Radiohead used to, with the atmospherics and falsetto vocals and creepy minor chords, but since when is that a bad thing? So many bands have made inferior stabs at capturing OK Computer without recognizing what made it special – the songs, not just the sounds – that to hear a band really dig in, really try to pick up the gauntlet that Thom and company threw down, is astonishing in itself.

So yes, the blueprint is Radiohead’s, but Muse have taken hold of this sound and owned it. To call Absolution sweeping is almost an insult – it’s huge, boundless, almost visionary in its expansive landscapes. This band is fearless. They’re universal dreamers, and no sound is too big, no texture too vibrant, for them to embrace. Their frontman, Matthew Bellamy, has a voice wide and vast enough to encompass any sound the band makes. He’s part Yorke and part Jeff Buckley, but most of all, he’s an impressively emotional singer who gives every line his all.

And that’s kind of the motif for the album. There isn’t a wasted second here, nothing that doesn’t add to the drama and force of the album. It’s obvious with every track that they dreamed big, and then knocked themselves out to achieve the sounds they heard in their heads. It opens huge with “Apocalypse Please,” a snarling stunner that explodes out of the gate with pounding piano and a phenomenal vocal melody. “Time Is Running Out” and “Endlessly” are two of the most intelligent and soaring hit singles I’ve encountered in some time. “Sing for Absolution” is so beautiful it brings tears, and “Stockholm Syndrome” wipes those tears away with sandpaper and acid.

The most epic track among epics here is “Butterflies and Hurricanes,” a piano-fueled masterpiece with a breathtaking breakdown and comeback. And nestled within that song’s lyrics is the album’s mission statement: “You’ve got to change the world and use this chance to be heard.” So much attention is paid to bands and artists who don’t really have any ambitions, who are content to jam out two or three chords, look bored and get paid. Muse is the polar opposite of this kind of band – they’re wide-eyed and idealistic, and their canvas is beyond vast. Absolution begins by announcing, “This is the end of the world,” and it gets bigger and bigger from there. We need to cherish bands like this, who believe that we haven’t seen it all, and who want to take music to new places, to new heights.

In short, this is a top 10 list album if I’ve ever heard one. And there’s my dilemma – it’s quite plainly a 2003 album. But if I hear 10 albums better than this in 2004, I will be surprised. So I have to include it this year. But I can’t. But I have to. You see? I have nine months to think this over, of course, and who knows, this may be the best year for recorded music in a decade or so, and I may not have to worry about Muse come December. As it stands, this is the best thing I’ve heard so far this year, an album so uncompromising in its artistry that it deserves every accolade and more besides.

* * * * *

Whenever the UK press is right about a band like Muse, I so want them to be right about everything else, but it rarely happens.

Case in point. The British press has been practically wetting itself over Franz Ferdinand, a Scottish band that has just released its first album. Reading some of the notices this record has been getting, you’d think they’ve made Sgt. Pepper II: Electric Boogaloo. The hype, quite honestly, is out of control for this band. And unfortunately, the tidal wave of press will probably color your enjoyment of the album, because if you’re expecting genius unparalleled, you’re not going to get it.

What you will get is a fun little disc. And if that’s all you’re after, then Franz Ferdinand should more than fit the bill. They sound, to me, like Morrissey’s disco band might. The songs are upbeat, danceable, and full of nifty guitar melodies, and Alex Kapranos’ voice is low-key and sneering. The lyrics, particularly those for “Cheating on You,” are similarly sneering, calling to mind the Smiths frontman more than once. The album takes a couple of listens for the smarm to turn to charm, but it eventually does.

Also taking a couple of listens to appreciate are the impressive guitar lines. Very little of what the two guitarists are doing is typical, and especially on songs like “The Dark of the Matinee” and spunky opener “Jacqueline,” it’s unexpected and fun. Still and all, this band seems to have only the one trick, and if you like that trick, you’ll dig the album. For these ears, a whole album of this punky funk is a little draining. (I do, indeed, see the irony in so wholeheartedly embracing Muse one second and poking holes in the Franz Ferdinand hype machine the next, but trust me on this, the two records are not even comparable.)

Slightly more successful is Snow Patrol, another British band whose third album, Final Straw, hit the states this week. The British press has been more reserved about this record, probably because there’s very little here that will light the charts and the indie discos on fire, but they have compared it to Coldplay and Travis and other textured guitar bands. Snow Patrol is the brainchild of Gary Lightbody, and he certainly takes quite a bit from the British guitar-rock scene. For Final Straw’s first 10 songs, Lightbody delivers sweet yet simple pop songs with cranked guitars and interesting production, but I spent these songs waiting for him to do something magical.

And then at track 11, he did. “Somewhere a Clock is Ticking” is terrific, a web of guitars and vocals that sounds like the second coming of Catherine Wheel. Closing track “Same” is similarly excellent, and one wonders why Lightbody only delivered the goods at the end. The remainder of Final Straw is decent without being exceptional, but it ends on such a high note that you almost forgive the rest of the record for being somewhat bland. Neither Snow Patrol nor Franz Ferdinand will likely make a dent in the top 10 list for the year, but both have made pretty good records that I don’t regret buying.

But I would have regretted paying import prices, naturally.

* * * * *

The tree is down completely now, and the burly gentlemen are feeding the chunks of dead wood into a chipper – you know, the kind that Steve Buscemi found himself in near the end of Fargo. It’s the end of an era, truly. And I still don’t have a metaphor.

Next week, Todd Rundgren, Modest Mouse, and/or Trey Anastasio. And maybe Aerosmith.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Mommy, What’s a B-Side?
Join the Dots With The Cure

As a general rule, I dislike hearing songs I love in television commercials.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed that a lot of my previously held principles have fallen by the wayside, particularly when it comes to producing art for money, so it’s comforting to know that I can still be prodded into righteous rage by commercialism. I hate hearing Led Zeppelin’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll” being used to sell cars, for example, especially since the producers seem to have missed the point: “Rock ‘n’ Roll” is about sex, of course, not about driving moderately fast in your cushy SUV. Same with Creedence’s “Fortunate Son” being used to add “American flavor” to blue jeans ads, when the song is bitterly anti-American, or at least anti-American governmental injustice.

But the ad that has stung the most, recently, is the one for Hewlett Packard’s digital photography products. The song they’ve chosen to use is “Pictures of You,” by the Cure, and if you give that a moment’s thought, you’ll see why it’s a stupid choice. “Pictures of You” is about how photographs and mental pictures are wrong, how they can’t capture anything, and how real, living, breathing people will only put lie to your images of them and break your heart. It’s a gloriously sad song, layered and prickly, and using it to sell cameras because it has the word “pictures” in the title just… hurts.

I admit, it probably wouldn’t bother me if “Pictures of You,” and in fact the whole of the Disintegration album, weren’t so permanently enshrined in my pantheon of truly great, important records. There is, of course, a genuine disconnect between what I intellectually know and what I personally, emotionally feel when it comes to the most important bands and albums of the last century. Even though, for example, I know that U2 is the more important band, the Alarm is more central to me. And I know that the Cure represents something very small in terms of the overall picture of music, but to me, they will always be one of the best bands of the past 50 years.

The connection, I’ll grant, is largely emotional. I don’t mind saying that if not for Disintegration getting me through some bad patches in high school, I probably would not be alive right now. It is perhaps the most expansive claustrophobic album ever made – the sound is enormous, textured, vast, and yet the album itself is a small thing, almost stifling in its perfectly glittering sadness. A more gloriously depressing album I have never heard. I have such an attachment to it, that when the South Park guys had Robert Smith guest-star, and one of the kids blurted out to him that “Disintegration is the best album ever,” I yelped in agreement.

You understand, of course, that I know Disintegration isn’t the best album ever. Sometimes, though, when I’m alone in my head, I feel like it really is.

The Cure has had a 25-year career, and of course they are more than that one album, but the others have had a tough time measuring up. They began as a rough-and-tumble guitar pop act, slamming their way through the superb pop of Boys Don’t Cry before adding computers and atmospheres on Seventeen Seconds and Faith. They veered back and forth from there, making silly yet satisfying pop albums like Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Wish, and crafting dense masterpieces like Pornography and Disintegration. Along the way the goths embraced them and dozens of guitarists tried unsuccessfully to copy Robert Smith’s clean, echo-drenched tones.

Four years ago the Cure put out another of those dense masterpieces, Bloodflowers, which they called the concluding chapter in a trilogy that also included Pornography and Disintegration. This seemed to some like trying to tie their latest work in with their greatest, to increase sales, but to the band’s credit, the three albums really play like a single thought. Pornography is anger, Disintegration is depression, and Bloodflowers is resignation, and it isn’t hard to join the dots, even though they’re spread out over 18 years.

Speaking of Join the Dots, that’s what the Cure has called its latest project, a four-CD box set of B-sides and rarities spanning 23 years of album and single releases. Its 70 songs offer an embarrassment of riches, sort of a sprawling alternate history of the band. Smith has been quoted as saying that he expected great B-sides from the bands he loved as a child, and he tried to hold the Cure to the same standard. These are not throwaway tracks – for the most part, the songs included on Join the Dots would have fit just fine on the albums that housed their corresponding A-sides.

Before we explore the content of the box further, I wanted to point out that projects like this are something of an anachronism. Today’s generation of music buyers doesn’t even know what a B-side really means – they have only known CDs. The days when bands would record songs specifically to be released as flip-sides of 45 rpm singles are long gone, as are the days when bands would release singles without intending the A-side for album release. There are something like 30 Beatles songs that never made an album, including “Hey Jude” and “We Can Work It Out” and even “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” These days, CD singles are not even all that prevalent, and the extra tracks are usually remixes, demos or album cuts. The idea of compiling a B-sides collection, even for a singles band like the Strokes, is absurd. There’s nothing new to collect.

Me, I like these projects, particularly because I don’t go out of my way to collect singles. Join the Dots is like getting 70 new Cure songs – there are very few here I’ve previously heard, and none that I already have on CD. It’s arranged chronologically, so one can trace the evolution of the band’s sound from skilled guitar-pop act to gloomy purveyors of atmosphere to layered modern pop band. Disc One starts sloppily, with garage rockers “10:15 Saturday Night” and “Plastic Passion” (both earlier versions of songs that later made the debut album), and continues in a noisy, simplistic vein.

There are great early songs here, though, notably a pair of instrumentals (“Another Journey by Train” and the creepy “Descent”) and two versions of the recorder-inflected “Lament.” The shift comes with “Speak My Language,” a B-side from the Lovecats project (collected on Japanese Whispers). It’s amusing to note that while many (including myself) have chastised Smith for swallowing all those happy pills in the ‘90s, older Cure songs were actually pretty happy – “Just One Kiss,” “Do the Hansa.” The melancholy really kicks in with “A Few Hours After This,” the swirling B-side to “In Between Days.”

Throughout this set, Smith shows a tendency to pair effervescent A-sides with sad B-sides, and vice versa. Most of the Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me singles came paired with deep, beautiful ballads like “A Chain of Flowers” and “Snow in Summer,” both on Disc Two. Ditto the Disintegration singles, save “Lovesong,” which is backed with “Fear of Ghosts,” a seven-minute web of guitars and keyboards of a piece with the album. The second disc is rounded off with three (count them, three) covers of the Doors’ “Hello I Love You,” recorded for Elektra’s Rubaiyat project in 1991. There’s a previously unreleased six-minute “psychedelic” mix, a straight cover, and an 11-second takedown that’s chuckle-worthy.

Though this set covers an expansive timeframe, Cure albums were few and far between in the last 15 years, and so the later discs have less to work with. Disc One culls from six albums and a few EPs, for example, but the third and fourth discs only have Wish, Wild Mood Swings and Bloodflowers to pull from. Hence the inclusion of several soundtrack songs and remixes on the latter discs, which sort of weighs the set down. Here are the band’s songs from The Crow and Judge Dredd and the X-Files album. Here are acoustic mixes of songs. Here are two covers of “Purple Haze.”

Still, the later material holds its own. In keeping with tradition, the B-sides from the largely poppy Wish are moody and stunning. “This Twilight Garden,” the B-side of “High,” is the summit of this set, thick and powerful. And if you get through the mediocre cover of David Bowie’s “Young Americans,” you’ll find a treat – the three acoustic-based B-sides of Wild Mood Swings embarrassment “The 13th.” For most of that album, Smith led the band straight off the rails into horn-drenched happy land, and hearing these much better songs that were left off the record is a delight.

The fourth disc is the biggest hodgepodge, containing only four real B-side tracks. But there are some gems here – there’s “Coming Up,” the extra track on Japanese and Australian versions of Bloodflowers, for instance, and it’s a perfect fit with the rest of the record. There’s “Signal to Noise,” a B-side of “Cut Here,” a new track on the latest Greatest Hits album (their third, I believe). There’s Curve’s stunning remix of “Just Say Yes,” another new track from the best-of. And there’s unreleased track “Possession,” a nifty ditty. This set could have been shortened to three discs, no doubt, but for Cure fanatics, having some of these curiosities (like Paul Oakenfold’s run through “Out of This World”) is damn near essential.

The Cure plans on re-releasing its entire catalog through Rhino starting this year, and Join the Dots is a superb start to the reissue campaign. It also serves as a reminder that this band was always more than the gothic stereotype stuck to them, and that their catalog deserves pristine digital preservation. Plus, after promising that Bloodflowers was the last new album they would make, the Cure is back in the studio as we speak with (of all producers) Ross Robinson, and aiming for a new record this year. After 25 years, the Cure can still make affecting, lovely music, and I suppose I should take things like the HP ad (and like 311’s torturous cover of “Lovesong”) as testaments to their importance.

Regardless, Join the Dots is wonderful, an immersing treasury of nearly forgotten songs, and a project the likes of which we may not get to see too frequently. It’s a loving tribute to a great band.

Oh, and Disintegration is the best album ever.

* * * * *

It’s my sister’s birthday this week. Happy Birthday, Emily! It’s also Christine Reyno Guertin’s B-day. Odd to think that I’ve known her more than 10 years now. Happy Birthday, Christine!

Next week, some new music. Who’d’a thunk it?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Men, Men, Men! A Column Filled With Men!
It's The Man Show With Peter, Brian and Grant-Lee

I’m just barely over a nasty stomach flu as I write this, so please forgive any lapses in logic and grammar in what follows. (Sure, you say, but what excuse do you have for the other 160-odd columns? Har de har…)

Regular readers can expect to get sick of references to Marillion and their new album in the coming weeks, but Tuesday Morning is intended as a document of one music fan’s excitement regarding new tunes, and this music fan is more excited by the impending arrival of Marbles than by anything else on the horizon at the moment. The pre-release version of the album, specially made for those who pre-ordered last year, is being packaged right now (like, right now), and a copy should be in my greedy little hands in two or three weeks, if luck holds. It’s a double album, two hours long, packaged in a 128-page hardcover book with my name in it (as well as that of everyone who pre-ordered). So, yay for me!

I had to go to a Dutch radio station online to track down the first broadcast of the single, as well, but I did it. “You’re Gone” is a classic – it sounds just like Pop-era U2 should have, with a neat breakbeat, some atmospheric keyboards, supple guitar work by Steve Rothery and a typically emotional vocal from Steve Hogarth. There’s a massive campaign going on at marillion.com to get this single into the UK charts, and I think the band has made a superb choice. This is a song that plays to non-fans while still retaining almost everything that’s great about Marillion’s shorter works.

Since the band seems intent on not posting soundclips until the single comes out on April 19, you’ll have to either find it online or take my word for it. But this song, I think, will sell this record, and that fills me with absurd joy. Marillion has been too good for too long to languish in obscurity, and if the rest of Marbles lives up to what I’ve heard so far, it’s going to be magic. Stay tuned.

* * * * *

Just by coincidence, I have three new albums by three men who write acoustic-based folk-pop this week. First up is Peter Mulvey.

I’m fond of saying that Mulvey is the best-kept secret in New England, but since he moved back to Milwaukee last year, that’s no longer true. He is, however, still a very well-kept secret, a condition that really should have changed by now. And if any album should have done it for him, it should have been The Trouble With Poets, his excellent 2000 release. There was nothing at all wrong with that album – in fact, it represented a culmination point for Mulvey’s melodic songwriting, a combination of acoustic guitar heroics, lovely atmospheres and his commanding baritone voice.

Poets also presented a newfound focus for Mulvey. Whereas previous albums like Rapture and Deep Blue found him experimenting with styles and tones, Poets felt consistent, like a single thought. Going back and listening again, I found that it’s not any less stylistically diverse – sweet ballads like “Tender Blindspot” sit next to spoken rants like “Bright Idea” – but it feels more complete, somehow. Poets is a wonderful, mature record that announced an arrival after years of searching.

Mulvey seems to feel the same way. Since Poets came out, he’s been searching again, releasing Ten Thousand Mornings, a covers album recorded in the Boston subway stations, and collaborating on Redbird, a folksy collection of covers and originals, with Kris Delmhorst and Jeffrey Foucault. That restless spirit is in evidence on Kitchen Radio, Mulvey’s first all-new album in four years. Once again, he’s all over the map.

Kitchen Radio is a softer, lighter collection than Poets, one that rocks only occasionally, preferring to shuffle or waft along amiably. In many ways, it’s a deeper record, but it feels like a breezy ride on first few listens. Opener “Road to Mallow” is an airy travelogue with lovely understated guitars by Mulvey and longtime collaborator David Goodrich. The drums kick in on “Shirt,” the first single, but they don’t raise a ruckus until “29 Cent Head,” the third track. It’s a nicely cresting wave of an opening trilogy, one that doesn’t immediately grab but sinks in slowly.

Elsewhere Mulvey brings the moody (“Falling,” “You”), takes his lovely American melodic folk voice out for a spin (“Charlie”), and even delivers his first instrumental since the early days (“Bloomington”). He’s constantly shifting gears here, putting Radio more in line with a quieter take on Rapture than any other of his previous records. This is not a bad thing by any means, and in fact it just confirms that we’re in phase two of Mulvey’s journey. And so far, phase two is off to a much less rocky start than phase one.

Kitchen Radio is a grower, no question. Pieces of it, like the sprightly closer “Sad, Sad, Sad, Sad and Faraway From Home,” are immediately delightful, but as a whole, it needs a few listens. Those who jumped aboard with Poets and expect more witty, folksy rock from Mulvey might be surprised at the sparseness and depth of this album, but given time, it makes its case beautifully. The album is not without its spot-on observations of the stupidity of modern life, either – “Shops are full of nothing and the streets are full of fear, and if we’re all so connected why can’t we just get near,” he sings on “29 Cent Head.” It’s just that this time around he’s more about sweetness and simplicity.

Bottom line – Mulvey’s turned in another winner here, and while it sounds much less likely to bring him the attention he deserves, it’s a more open and natural portrait of where he is now. Mulvey is often about places, and about putting the listener there, but he’s just as often about opening his life and putting the listener in there as well. In many ways, Kitchen Radio is the most honest, homespun, natural album he has made, and while these songs may take a bit longer to get to know, they’re worth the time.

* * * * *

Grant-Lee Phillips has a voice that can best be described as incontrovertible.

Everything this man sings sounds more true than truth, more honest than honesty. It’s a powerful weapon, no doubt, and for more than a decade Phillips has been wielding it with grace and respect. He first came to prominence as the frontman for Grant Lee Buffalo, whose 1993 debut Fuzzy is still considered by many to be one of the best records of the ‘90s. I am fonder of Mighty Joe Moon and the band’s buzzing swan song, Jubilee, but GLB had a great run.

Since then, Phillips has quietly kept the fires burning with his own albums. Last year’s Mobilize was a feast for the ears, production-wise, but Phillips’ voice always seems better suited to stripped-down arrangements. Hence Virginia Creeper, his third solo disc, and by far the best of the bunch. Here Phillips employs a scattered group of folk musicians to make a sparse, loose, live-sounding acoustic album that matches his older-than-his-40-years voice perfectly.

Opener “Mona Lisa” even sounds like a classic folk song. I first heard it on a recent episode of Gilmore Girls, and if not for Phillips’ unmistakable voice, I’d have sworn it was some grand old chestnut that I’d somehow overlooked. That’s just how his songs work – they feel instantly reverential, like something passed down through generations, something that taps into the very roots of folk and rock music. There are very few modern musicians with this ability – only Bill Mallonee and Gillian Welch come to mind, really – and to Phillips’ credit, he’s never wasted it.

Virginia Creeper is yet another fine group of songs. No one-off novelty tunes or experiments for Phillips – he’s always been about getting to the heart of the song. The 10 originals here are more subdued than normal, but each sounds drawn from some carefully-guarded well of American music, the same bottomless reservoir that has fed everyone from Bob Dylan to Wilco. Just check out the timeless lilt of “Always Friends,” or the simple yet effective strum of “Calamity Jane.” Dig the banjos and slide guitar all over “Josephine of the Swamps.” And while you’re at it, listen to Phillips’ flawless falsetto on “Waking Memory” and try not to be moved.

This is exactly the sort of album someone with the voice of Grant-Lee Phillips should be making. It wears its allegiance to earthy, honest music on its sleeve, and makes its way with no pretensions. It even concludes with a winning rendition of Gram Parsons’ “Hickory Wind,” which sounds all the classier for its inclusion. I don’t want to oversell this – at its core, Virginia Creeper is an album of simple songs, simply delivered. But really, that’s what makes it so special. If it were this easy to make songs like these breathe and ring with conviction, then more people would be doing it. Since it’s not, I’m thankful that at least Grant-Lee Phillips is still making records like this one.

* * * * *

Of all the frontmen of all the grunge-pop bands of the ‘90s, I think it’s safe to say that Brian Vander Ark ranks pretty near the bottom of those expected to launch a successful solo career.

Yet here he is, with a decent little album called Resurrection. You may remember Vander Ark (or you may not) as the voice of the Verve Pipe, who hit huge with “The Freshman” in 1996, then drifted away. Well, they didn’t drift – they wrote and recorded two more albums, both better than the one that spawned their hit. The 20 or so people who heard Underneath, their 2002 album, will tell you that there’s a reason Vander Ark’s fans consider him vastly underrated.

Resurrection is surprising – it’s almost entirely acoustic-based, it only cranks up the tempos a few times, and its melodies are clever and winding. It’s a remarkably hushed album, made up primarily of sad, sweet ballads, delivered in Vander Ark’s atypical voice. The focus here is on the songwriting, which is quite strong – no surprise to Verve Pipe fans, especially of the latter albums. What’s interesting is how little of his former band’s sound he brought with him. Only the title track really screams Verve Pipe.

Specifically, the strongest area of Vander Ark’s writing is his vocal melodies. Listen as the melody line weaves in and out of the simple chords on “And Then You Went Away.” Vander Ark knows how to avoid cliché even when working within typical structures, the mark of any good pop songsmith. Lyrically, he’s grown significantly here – “Written and Erased” is a rueful glance back at his pop stardom, “When I’m Gone” is a plaintive plea for loved ones to remember him, and “Someone Like You” is that rarest of love songs that finds a new way to say the same old thing: “Heaven help the world when you’re no longer for our eyes, heaven rain the colors down to form another prize, she better be someone like you…”

Resurrection is a solid first stab from Brian Vander Ark, one that hopefully will lead to a fruitful solo career. This guy has always been more than “The Freshman,” and while he may never escape the curse of the one-hit wonder, if he keeps making albums like this one he can leave his past behind.

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Next week, the Cure, I think.

See you in line Tuesday morning.