I got a bunch of e-mails last time, hailing me for trashing Peter Gabriel, and I had to laugh. I felt like reminding people that I haven’t officially trashed the man yet. That’s this week.

Up is Gabriel’s first “real” new album in 10 years. To put that into perspective, Gabriel was the lead singer of Genesis for only seven years, and some folks still consider that an era. During that time, he made six studio albums with the band, one of them, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a double record that’s still hailed as a progressive rock classic today. He started his solo career in 1977, and within 10 years he had crafted five studio albums, a live record and an ambient soundtrack to Alan Parker’s Birdy.

The last of those albums you may be familiar with. So gave Gabriel his biggest chart success to date, and sported three huge, giant, almost unbelievably popular hits: “Sledgehammer,” “Big Time” and the classic “In Your Eyes.” Problem is, if you stack So next to any one of his four self-titled albums, it falls painfully short. In general, with massive popularity comes reduced creative drive, and Gabriel certainly seemed to succumb to that.

It took Gabriel six years to create So‘s follow-up, the halfway successful Us. It then took another 10 to bring us Up. In between, granted, he’s released three side projects that rank with the best work he’s ever done, including the amazing Passion, his soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Still, five releases in 16 years is pretty slim, especially considering the rapid-fire output of his first 17.

All by itself, that wouldn’t be much of an issue, but when you take a long, hard look at the relative quality of those last three “real” albums, it’s pretty disappointing. Gabriel is one of the few working musicians for whom the tag “genius” isn’t an exaggeration. His solo career has found him embracing musics from around the globe, and incorporating them much more successfully than his contemporaries, like Paul Simon. Passion, all by itself, is a world-spanning kick in the head to cultural and artistic segregation, a whirlwind of African percussion and techno-tribal hybrids that comes off as a new creation rather than a fusion.

And three years later, his weakest work to date, Us, splattered those influences over simplistic pop and pseudo-soul like a Jackson Pollock painting. Some of it worked – the lovely “Blood of Eden,” for example, and the mood-altering “Fourteen Black Paintings.” Most of it, however, tried to squeeze too much sound onto thin skeletons. “Come Talk to Me” is a mess, and “Kiss That Frog” is an embarrassment, a cancerous boil on his discography that should have been lanced.

And now, Up. I’m going to admit something here that you’ll hardly ever hear me say: I’m torn on this album. It’s certainly his most artistically rewarding “real” album in 20 years, which actually says more about his recent output than this disc. It’s a slowly unfolding collection of moods and melodies, at least in its first half, and is certainly a risky release, especially after a 10-year gestation period. If you’re looking for the crowd-pleasing pop of his last two albums, it’s almost entirely absent, which is a good thing.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot left that sticks in the memory. Sonically, this is an amazing disc – you probably won’t hear a more perfectly produced and mixed album this year. (The mixing process by itself took a whole year.) Opener “Darkness” starts off with a holy-shit moment that recalls Prodigy and their ilk, but slowly degenerates into tuneless piano moping, setting the dismally slow pace for the rest of the album. Only three tracks have what could be described as a beat, and by the fifth seven-minute dirge, it becomes clear that the album’s title is ironic. There’s very little up about Up.

Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but Gabriel forgot to write any truly compelling songs here. Like so many albums these days, it feels like Gabriel concentrated most of his efforts on the sound and didn’t save much for the substance of his work. Only one song here is less than six minutes long, and most of them can’t sustain their length. Only “I Grieve,” which was previously released on the City of Angels soundtrack in 1997, takes you somewhere from minute two to minute six, and even that one doesn’t rank with his best.

“Growing Up,” for example, introduces a throbbing techno beat to longtime drummer Manu Katche’s meticulous percussion, but then repeats ad nauseum. It’s catchy, but not very inventive. Likewise, “No Way Out” gets by on one superb melodic shift that plays a few times, but otherwise meanders pleasantly with no destination in mind. Even “Sky Blue,” a standout highlight that builds upon a track from Gabriel’s Long Walk Home soundtrack from earlier this year, repeats its celestial melody a few times too often.

I’m not sure what fans of “Sledgehammer” are going to make of tracks like “My Head Sounds Like That,” with its brass choir and pained falsetto vocals, and “Signal to Noise,” which sets a sweeping string section to a thudding funeral beat, a warbling Nusrat Fateh Ali-Khan, and almost no melody at all. These are perhaps the most disappointing numbers, ones on which you can feel Gabriel stretching out, aiming for new sounds and stopping short of actually nailing them. “Signal to Noise,” especially, is confounding – I’m not entirely certain what Gabriel was going for, but it’s pretty obvious by the finished product that he didn’t quite make it.

And then there’s “The Barry Williams Show,” the first single. It’s rumored that Gabriel wrote 150 songs for this project, and I have a hard time believing that 140 of them were less worthy of inclusion than this pile of feces. In an uninspiring seven minutes that rival “Kiss That Frog” in the Gabriel Hall of Shame, he prattles on and on about the evils of TV talk shows, blithely oblivious to the fact that it’s an easy target that’s been shot to pieces long before this. Even Weird Al Yankovic has covered this territory before. Gabriel’s lyrics on just about all of Up are thin and surface-level, and it makes me nostalgic for his Genesis days, when no one had any clue what the hell he was singing about, but damn, it sounded cool.

What’s especially maddening about Up is that Gabriel has, just recently, given us not one, but two compelling arguments that he hasn’t lost his touch. Ovo, a soundtrack to a show at London’s Millennium Dome that was released across the pond in 2000, is several degrees better than Up, and makes a more convincing case for one world music than anything else he’s done since Passion. Long Walk Home, likewise, is an invigorating and intelligent score to Philip Noyce’s The Rabbit-Proof Fence, and is oddly more melodic than this mainstream release.

So yeah, Up is disappointing, and yet I can’t quite bring myself to dismiss it. I have the nagging feeling that I’m going to end up coming to terms with this album in the next few months, and may have to post a second review. For now, though, I can’t quite understand why Up took 10 years to put together. While better than a lot of his more recent material, it’s not nearly the masterpiece we deserved after a decade of secretive work. It’s tempting to say that Gabriel is better than this, and if not for Ovo, I’d be wondering if, in fact, he is anymore.

One good thing – if ever I’m feeling low about my own lack of accomplishment in the last 10 years, I know I can listen to this and feel a lot better…

The longer columns are still in the works – finding the time has been difficult lately, but trust me, thousands and thousands of words are coming your way soon. Before I go, I need to get in an early word of recommendation for the new Beck, Sea Change, which I’ll review in depth next time. For once, a Beck album lives up to the hype.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I am so mad at Peter Gabriel right now.

Next week, he unleashes Up, his first new album in 10 years. He’s been working on this thing for at least seven of those 10, so you can understand my frustration upon seeing the track listing, which he unveiled last month. Up contains a mere 10 songs, and two of them have been previously released – “Sky Blue (Ngankarrparni)” on the Long Walk Home soundtrack last month, and “I Grieve” on the City of Angels soundtrack from 1997.

Plus, the single, “The Barry Williams Show,” is a pile of shit. You can trace the decline of his pseudo-soul sound from “Sledgehammer” to “Steam” to this half-baked effort. It might not bother me so much if the entire theme of the song were not something so obvious as the inanity of TV talk shows. So that’s two halfway decent songs we’ve already got and one lousy one he never should have released, and they make up one-third of this album he’s been laboring over for the better part of a decade.

Is it so wrong to think that we, as fans, deserve a bit better? I know I haven’t heard the rest of Up, and it might be a masterpiece when all is said and done, but whatever happened to ambition? Ten songs in 10 years is not a great average, and cobbling bits and pieces from soundtracks is not the best way to create a cohesive statement. Not to single out Gabriel sound unheard, but why are so many artists content to make the minimum effort, and why are so many listeners content to let them slide?

The recent critical circle jerk over bands like the Vines is a good case in point. The Vines, the Hives, the Strokes and almost every other “neo-garage” act I’ve run across reminds me of my junior high school band – a bunch of kids who have just learned how to play their instruments, and haven’t quite figured out how to write songs. Play loud, scream atonally, get it on tape without any flair or finesse at all, and call it art.

For some people, that’s good enough. That’s fair, but I just don’t understand those people. If I’m going to fork out 15 bucks for a CD, I have some very basic expectations. First, I would hope that the folks playing the instruments at least possess some proficiency in that area. I expect, at the very least, that if there is a guitar player, he or she should be better at the guitar than I am.

Second, I expect an album to reflect a certain amount of effort. That means, above almost everything else, writing some fucking songs. If you can’t be bothered to do that, then I don’t see why I should bother listening to you. Songwriting is not something everyone can just do. It takes practice and work and more practice. Songwriting is not just a vomiting of the soul, or a collection of studio techniques. Believe it or not, it’s a skill.

Beyond that, I’m looking for some sense that an artist believes in his or her own journey. Speaking as a music fan, I want to follow along. I want an artist to lead me through twists and turns, up peaks and down valleys, but in order for that to happen, I need to know that said artist is committed to growing and adapting creatively. And that’s called ambition.

Most critics treat ambition like a dirty word. It’s as if they don’t like being surprised. I’ve found that the majority of critics deem any display of unbridled ambition pretentious and overbearing, and it’s usually a reflection of their own unwillingness to follow along. For a music fan, though, there’s almost nothing more exciting than watching a genius craft a body of work, one ambitious album at a time.

And nobody does that quite like the Brits. Ever since the Beatles introduced artistic ambition to the pop world with Revolver in 1966, many British acts have followed suit and taken their musical output seriously. The new wave of British guitar-pop acts, led by the once-mighty Radiohead, are a self-important bunch, to be sure, but often they have the songs and the sonic sense to back it up.

Take Coldplay, for example. Dismissed by many when they first appeared as timid Travis knockoffs, the boys in Coldplay have delivered a second album that solidifies their promise with a dose of real artistry. In fact, the only thing wrong with it is the title, A Rush of Blood to the Head. Besides being unwieldy, it also bears an unfortunate resemblance in theme to the name of Radiohead’s second, The Bends.

But like Radiohead, if Coldplay experienced any pressure to craft their sophomore release, it doesn’t show. First single “In My Place” is a good indicator of what awaits on most of this disc: majestic, atmospheric pop that soars on simple, yet sublime melodies. Guitars chime, pianos ring, and lead throat Chris Martin’s voice swoops and dives, mixing elements of Dave Matthews and Thom Yorke.

Though it is similar in tone, Rush takes several bold leaps ahead of Parachutes, their debut. “God Put a Smile Upon Your Face,” for example, is about as heavy as Coldplay gets, and they milk it for all it’s worth, cascading guitars atop one another in service of a killer chorus. “Green Eyes” incorporates country influences, but not in that twangy, just-married-my-sister kind of way. And “Clocks,” the most effective track, builds upon a repeating piano tumble a la Moby, but with more presence and atmosphere.

A Rush of Blood to the Head holds together better than Parachutes, as well. It’s one of those albums that one finds difficult to break up or listen to out of order. Some will find that pretentious, certainly – in the age of the downloadable single, who wants to wade through an hour’s worth of music to get the full effect? Rush is slow, enveloping and patient, and it takes time to absorb.

Even with all the giant steps forward, you can’t help but note that Rush is only Coldplay’s second effort. The Brits have a nasty habit of killing their own careers by burrowing up their own asses – see Radiohead’s Kid A, Blur’s 13 and Mansun’s Six. If Coldplay can keep advancing their artistry without letting the sounds overtake the songs, they’ll be one of the best bands around before too long. But even if they don’t manage that trick, the ride should at least be a fascinating one.

* * * * *

If we’re going to talk ambition and pretension, we can’t do so properly without bringing up the oddly flowering genre of progressive rock. No other style sends critics into hysterics, tossing off adjectives like “pretentious” and “arrogant” and “overblown,” like prog. And no outgrowth of prog trips the critic’s switch more than the concept album.

I could never figure that out. Even bad concept records, like Roger Waters’ Radio K.A.O.S., are exciting to me. The idea of an artist weaving a story through song, opening the thematic floodgates and creating a single, unbreakable work seems like the apex of creativity to me. The concept album just doesn’t get its due, but once every few years, some band somewhere tries its hand at this maligned art form, and most of them are, artistically speaking, wildly successful.

Recent examples include Ben Folds Five’s wonderful The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner and Dream Theater’s complex Scenes From a Memory. Most recently, neo-prog outfit Spock’s Beard has emerged from a year-long writing and recording session with a two-disc concept album simply called Snow. It’s the brainchild of singer-guitarist Neal Morse, who over SB’s previous five albums acquitted himself well as a songwriter to watch. Like many of the concept albums it draws from, Snow is about a gifted prodigy and the different ways he is used and broken by the world. Snow is an albino who can touch people and heal their pain, or something like that. He moves to the big city and a religion forms up around him, a revolution of sorts whose primary goal is a golden future for all. Naturally, it all goes wrong when he falls for a girl who won’t love him back, and then dies and is reborn, or something like that.

The first disc, in which Snow discovers his gift, moves to New York and begins sharing it, establishes itself well. The “Overture” announces key themes, which surface throughout the disc. The songs are accessible yet complex, fueled by acoustic guitars and pianos more often than not. There are two bona fide epics – “Open Wide the Flood Gates” and “Solitary Soul” – that compensate well for missteps like “Devil’s Got My Throat,” which sounds too much like Damn Yankees to be taken seriously.

Alas, as events unravel for Snow, so too does the album. In fact, I can pinpoint the exact moment Snow starts going off the rails: the end of “Reflection,” when Snow meets his dream girl. “He might have been fine, he might have got through it okay,” Morse sings in his raspy tenor. “If not for the girl, when he saw her I guess everything changed.”

Did it ever. The remaining 42 minutes of Snow is full of sappy love songs, cheesy metal and rehashes of songs from the first disc. “Carie” is only slightly less cloying than the Europe song that shares its name, “Looking For Answers” is forgettable and bland, and the five minutes of solos posing as songs don’t help matters. Disc two even concludes with the exact same song as disc one, played exactly the same way.

Until it crashes, however, there’s a lot in this album’s favor. For one thing, it’s one of the most unabashedly spiritual works from the mainstream in some time, dealing with reincarnation and God in plain-spoken language. Many of the songs, like “Love Beyond Words” and “Wind At My Back,” are gorgeous, colored by three-part harmony that would make Crosby, Stills and Nash green with envy.

At worst, Snow is just a bit too ambitious for the band’s grasp. It’s hard for me to fault it for that, however, because it’s not very often that a band even tries something this far-reaching. Snow is derivative, lengthy, and inconsistent, but it’s also bold and uncompromising, and bodes well for whatever second shot Spock’s Beard comes up with.

One final word about Snow – this album comes in one of the most beautiful packages I’ve bought this year. It’s a digibook, which means it looks like a small square hardbound book, with sleeves for the two CDs. The lyrics are copiously illustrated, and the effect is like reading a short novel. It’s beautiful.

* * * * *

Ambition is not reserved for the established. In fact, often it’s a band’s willingness to craft its own sound and destiny when first starting out that sets it apart. In a musical climate saturated with big beats and sonic flash, it’s a strange thing to note that writing good songs is extraordinary in itself.

Torben Floor writes good songs. They’re a four-piece from Chicago that I discovered by accident – they opened for Phantom Planet at a recent show, and simply owned the stage from the moment they plugged in. Their first studio album is called Matinee, and it leaves no doubt that if you still haven’t heard of this band in five years’ time, it won’t be their fault.

Perhaps the band’s greatest asset is singer-guitarist Carey Ott, who also writes the lion’s share of the songs. His voice is reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s, and his songs are superb. From the first line he sings on “Ahead of Your Time,” the 6/8 opener, he has you in the palm of his hand, and 38 minutes later, he gently lets you go, and you’re aware that he and the band have taken you on a journey. When Matinee is done, you feel as though you’ve been somewhere, and you can’t wait to go back.

Torben Floor maintains a strong sense of melody and atmosphere here, from the classic pop of “Midwest Distress” to the foreboding menace of “Claustro Crowded,” stopping off in acoustic troubadour land for “What Do I Know.” The final four songs are glorious and melancholy, beginning with their most popular tune, the dreamy “Sunbathing.” That song sounds like an early number, written on the cusp of greatness, and the follow-up, “Sleep Too Much,” fulfills its promise grandly.

Yes, it’s short, but Matinee may be 38 of the best minutes you’ll spend lost in your headphones this year. It’s proof that where artistic ambition is concerned, size doesn’t matter. In a musical landscape littered with also-rans, just writing 11 great songs is almost a revolution in itself. No spectacle, just the thrill of four talented musicians launching what promises to be an amazing career.

Get in on the ground floor and check out Matinee at www.beautyrockrecords.com.

* * * * *

Next time, Gabriel, as well as Beck, Ryan Adams and a whole passel of others, if you’re lucky.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s been a year.

I’m not going to do a September 11 memorial piece here. As a contributing member of the 9/11 Media Onslaught of 2002, I’m just sick of thinking about it. I wrote my two stories on it already, and I’m heartsick and tired. Life as we know it is depressingly similar to the way it was on Sept. 10, with the added bonus of fewer freedoms, and the people that I know that were personally affected by the attacks want nothing more than to mourn in peace. They certainly don’t need my help, or the help of a media-led “period of national grief.”

So the answer is no. No soul-baring reflections or observations on the last 12 months, no agonizing examination of the state of our nation, none of that. Not from me. If you want a well-written and heartfelt piece on life post-9/11, e-mail Jeff Maxwell at volumeat11@netscape.net for a copy of this week’s edition of Twitch, his ongoing e-column.

But this column is about music, just like usual, and one reason I didn’t have any intention of sharing Sept. 11 thoughts this time is because I thought I wouldn’t have to. Surely, I prognosticated, the artistic community will come through, and within a year, our nation’s poets and artists will deliver strong, sublime statements that encapsulate the experience of living in a post-9/11 world. I predicted (in last year’s Top 10 List column, if you recall) that 2002 would be the year the art community would turn outward and craft responses to the worst act of terrorism America has ever seen.

And maybe these things take time, and 2003 will be the year 2002 should have been, but so far, the response has been lackluster at best. The most astonishing piece of post-9/11 work has so far been Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album that creates unbearable chaos in order to sift through its own wreckage for beauty. Considering that YHF was written and recorded long before 9/11, several references in its lyrics bear an eerie resemblance at times to the events of that day. Both lyrically and structurally, YHF captures the essence of the last 12 months.

Otherwise, there’s been little. The most prominent commentator has been Bruce Springsteen, who filled his new album The Rising with ground-level stories of a coping America. As the de facto spokesman for the working joe, it makes sense that Springsteen was first out of the gate, and that his lyrics have the gritty sense of the average American dealing heroically with tragedy beyond scope. Musically, The Rising is no great shakes, but lyrically, it’s a grimy and gritty portrait of the bloody but unbowed.

But it’s just so damn simple. Springsteen doesn’t really struggle to understand the attack, nor does he take any other viewpoint than the one he’s always taken – the working-class American. As such, The Rising is only one or two steps removed from Toby Kieth’s repulsive “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue,” or Lee Greenwood’s simplistic anthem “God Bless the U.S.A.”

I’m glad The Rising exists, of course, because Springsteen has long captured Joe America in song better than just about anyone else, but I can get Joe America by walking down the street and talking to people. I want more from my artists. I want a point of view that startles me, that rouses me from my own thoughts, shakes me awake and says, “Hey, look at this.” In this case, I want something that forces me to see this tragedy in a different light, not something that rehashes the evening news and the Concert for America.

The closest I’ve seen to an honest and powerful examination of post-9/11 life has come from perhaps an obvious source. I mean, we should have expected that Ani DiFranco would come up with something as poisonous and eloquent as “Self Evident,” the poem-song that is the centerpiece of her new double-disc live album So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter. Delivered in a volley of rhymes that carries you along in its momentum, “Self Evident” is a personal, political and emotional bullet train of anger and self-righteousness that, at the very least, deserves respect for sheer scope.

DiFranco has always mixed the personal and the political, and in that regard, “Self Evident” may be her masterpiece. She doesn’t shy away from the horror of the event, concluding that the “exodus uptown by foot and motorcar looked more like war than anything I’ve seen so far,” but remains staunchly opposed to the violent payback Toby Kieth seems to want so much. “You can keep the Pentagon,” she says, “keep the propaganda, keep each and every TV that’s been trying to convince me to participate in some prep school punk’s plan to perpetuate retribution…”

She doesn’t stop there. DiFranco is one of the modern dissidents who, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs and Utah Philips before her, knows that it’s okay to love your country and hate the actions of its government. And in a clear voice, she dispels the notion that America stands united:

“‘Cause take away our Playstations
And we are a third world nation
Under the thumb of some blue blood royal son
Who stole the Oval Office in that phony election…”

And later, in the verse which gives the song its name:

“And we hold these truths to be self-evident:
#1. George W. Bush is not president
#2. America is not a true democracy
#3. The media is not fooling me…”

Whether or not you agree with DiFranco’s statements, the joyous reaction of the crowd at this point in the song speaks for itself. Behind the mask of national mourning, there is anger, and it’s festering, and it’s not aimed at “the evil ones from over there,” but at our own government, our own policies and policy makers. Some have said that now is not the time for political dissent. By defiantly releasing “Self Evident” on September 10, DiFranco is saying that there is no better time than now.

She concludes with this:

“3000 some poems disguised as people
On an almost too-perfect day
Should be more than pawns
In some asshole’s passion play
So now it’s your job and it’s my job
To make it that way
To make sure they didn’t die in vain…”

“Self Evident” isn’t exactly the kind of artistic response I’ve been looking for – it’s too politically motivated, for one, and less a response than a continuation of DiFranco’s own polemic discourse that she’s been carrying out for years. Still, it’s the best we’ve produced so far, and it feels honest and real. Rather than sweeping these feelings under the rug so as not to disturb the scheduled television event that is 9/11/02, we should be examining them, because people are responding to them. People are identifying with them.

As for the rest of So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter, well, it’s pretty obvious that this collection, released only five years after her last double live album, exists mainly to get “Self Evident” out there. The album shows off DiFranco’s sophisticated jazz leanings of the past few years, especially on material from her latest, Revelling/Reckoning, from which eight songs are included. The arrangements are tight and yet open, letting air in. She all but redefines older favorites like “32 Flavors” and “My IQ,” and does a nifty version of the rarely-played “Gratitude.” If you like Ani’s most recent output, you’ll like this.

But for me, the whole thing is about the nine minutes of “Self Evident,” which, incidentally, might not have been released intact on any other label but her own. “Yes, the lessons are all around us,” she sings, “and a change is waiting there, so it’s time to pick through the rubble, clean the streets and clear the air.” Here’s hoping artists of similar stature and artistry pick up that gauntlet, and respond not just to DiFranco, but to the entirety of post-9/11 life.<'p>

* * * * *

Next week is a big one, with reviews of Coldplay, Lifehouse, Doug Martsch and Spock’s Beard, at the very least. And then comes the deluge of September 24. Batten the hatches, it’s gonna be a storm…

One final note, and it’s more of a correction. I got a gracious e-mail from Michael Pritzl, guiding light behind The Violet Burning, who somehow stumbled upon my website and my review of his new project, The Gravity Show. I attributed the swirling guitar sound on Gravity’s album Fabulous Like You to longtime Violet Burning member Andy Prickett, but Pritzl says that just isn’t so. He writes:

“The Gravity Show has really nothing to do with Andy whatsoever. His involvement was basically saying, ‘Michael, you should play everything on this recording as it seems that many people tend to credit me where credit is due to you…you should just kick everyone’s asses from your apartment, on your own…'”

Which he did. My apologies to both Michael and Andy, and at the very least, this screw-up allows me another opportunity to plug the fine work both gentlemen have been doing for more than a decade. Besides collaborating on The Violet Burning, Pritzl and Prickett have both worked with Cush, a semi-anonymous supergroup. Prickett used to be in The Prayer Chain as well, one of the best bands of their time. And of course, there’s Pritzl’s terrific Gravity Show, which he did all by himself with no help from Prickett or anything. (Grin.)

You can get most of the above at www.northernrecords.com. Hit www.thevioletburning.com for more.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m not sure there’s much point in reviewing Fan Club, the four-CD box set from Jellyfish that just arrived in my mailbox last week.

Strangely, the most compelling argument both for and against reviewing this set is its own existence. Jellyfish was a California band that only lasted four years (1990-1993) and made a mere two albums. Their total recorded output doesn’t even amount to an hour and a half, and though they experienced brief flickers of interest from both radio and MTV, they never really broke out beyond their small core audience.

It’s a testament to that audience that Fan Club, which collects four and a half hours of demos, unreleased tracks and live cuts, exists at all. It was manufactured to demand by tiny Not Lame Records from Colorado, the product of a one-time pressing that was almost entirely sold out before the first sets shipped. As stated over and over again in the beautifully designed booklet, Fan Club is really the result of eight and a half years of fan demand, proof that if you clamor hard enough for something, someone somewhere will listen.

And that alone is a good reason to give the band and Not Lame some press here, but the set itself sort of defeats that purpose. As the title suggests, the only people who will likely be willing to fork out 60 bucks for 80 tracks of curiosities and concert documents are the fans. If you’ve never heard of Jellyfish, you’re not going to start with Fan Club, nor should you. Reviewing this box doesn’t make any sense, in a way, because practically everyone that wants one already has one.

I’m going to anyway, because I think it’s a crime that more people didn’t flock to Jellyfish when they were around. Both 1990’s Bellybutton and 1993’s Spilt Milk are perfect pop albums. Not just good, not even just fantastic, but perfect. They’re ornate without being overstuffed, intelligent without being fussy, joyful and melodic without being silly, and defiantly musical without losing accessibility. These are records in which everyone, from the least discriminating teeny-bopper to the snootiest alt-rock snob, can find something to love.

Bellybutton is perhaps the more accessible of the two, a collection of 10 short songs that take the listener on a deceptively tricky journey. The amazing a cappella breakdown in “The King is Half-Undressed,” for example, is so flawlessly executed that it feels effortless, and the melodic shifts in “She Still Loves Him” flow so naturally that you almost miss how well-constructed they are. The songs on Bellybutton serve as a 40-foot-high neon sign announcing the simultaneous arrival of Andy Sturmer and Roger Manning, the Lennon and McCartney of the early ’90s.

The follow-up, Spilt Milk, took two years and cost untold thousands to make. The most expensive album ever released by mini-label Charisma Records, Spilt Milk nearly bankrupted everyone involved, but one listen through and you know they all think it was worth it. The album is a complex compendium of joyous bitterness, a stunning ride that envelops a dozen forms of popular music just on side one. Spilt Milk is 45 minutes of unrelenting bliss disguising a sour heart beneath. And to top all that off, it’s produced so well, so full-color, that you’ll think the rest of your CD collection is in black and white.

It’s worth dwelling for a moment on just how good these albums sound. A lot of bands these days think that by playing softly, then playing loudly, they’re evoking drama. Jellyfish were masters of the art of making your senses sit up in surprise. Just check out “All Is Forgiven” on Spilt Milk – it’s drowned in a sea of noisy, swirling guitars that at one point drop out in a heartbeat, leaving you with only a twinkling music box. Jason Falkner’s dazzling guitar solos on Bellybutton stand out not just because he’s a great player, but because the entire production is so well-mixed that every element is distinct and crystal-clear.

The same production values cannot be found on the two discs of demos that make up half of Fan Club, and that’s to be expected. For fans of these songs, though, it’s fascinating to hear them in their embryonic states. Bellybutton is less of a sonic wonderland in general, so the demos from that period more closely match their official counterparts. It’s fun to note that the chiming bells in “Now She Knows She’s Wrong” were there from the beginning, or that “Bye Bye Bye” was originally slated for the first album. (It ended up on Spilt Milk.) The unreleased tracks are a blast as well, including a foray into sappy pop (“Let This Dream Never End”) and a super-swell tune called “Queen of the U.S.A.” that would have fit well on the album.

Still, if you’re not a fan already, these demos probably won’t have the same effect for you, and you’d be better off with the full album versions anyway. The same goes for the Spilt Milk demos, which are by and large more skeletal than those on Disc One. You can hear the first drafts of the orchestral pieces that bookend the album, marvel at the difference in arrangement on the a cappella “Hush,” and experience a master’s class in audio production by comparing the Fan Club and album versions of “Russian Hill.” That song, more than any other, proves my point – on Spilt Milk, “Russian Hill” is in 3-D, with reverb so thick you can swim through it, and three pedal steel guitar tracks that somehow coalesce into one amazing whole. The demo is flat in comparison, and the descriptions of the album version in the booklet only whet your appetite.

The second half of the Spilt Milk demos is worth it, though, as it includes eight tunes not readily available anywhere else. Of all of them, the epic mini-opera “Ignorance is Bliss,” recorded for Nintendo’s White Knuckle Scorin’ compilation (really), stands out as brilliant. It swoops, ducks, turns and soars while retaining its cartoony feel, and is overall reminiscent of Frank Zappa. The five demos the band recorded for Ringo Starr’s Time Takes Time album are all excellent, with Manning imitating Starr’s vocal style perfectly on two tracks. The disc ends with a fan club recording that contains a piano and vocal version of “The Ghost at Number One,” proving once again that a great song is a great song no matter how it’s played.

The demos are fun, but the other half of Fan Club takes the prize. Jellyfish made fantastic records, and unlike most ornate power-popsters, they pulled their elaborate arrangements off live. I have firsthand knowledge here, as I saw the band in a dingy Providence dive called Club Babyhead in ’93, and they were unreal. It still stands as the best show I have ever seen, bar none. Four guys, crammed into a corner, playing these dense and yet lightweight pop masterpieces that were chaotic and perfectly controlled, and topped off with stunning, flawless four-part harmonies. They rocked, plain and simple.

That experience came rushing back when listening to Fan Club‘s two great live discs. First up is the Bellybutton Tour (called the Innie Through the Outtie Tour) in ’90 and ’91, which found the band deconstructing their own tunes and grafting them to other popular favorites. Included here for the first time is what some fans call the “holy trilogy” of unreleased Jellyfish songs – “Mr. Late,” “Hello” and “Will You Marry Me.” All three of these monsters should have been given the full studio treatment, but they’re all killers live, especially “Mr. Late,” with its largely improvised lyric.

The Spilt Milk tour, documented on Disc Four, included a whole bunch of acoustic dates for radio and TV, and they’re the highlight of the set. I would have paid my $60 just to hear the acoustic version of “That Is Why,” recorded for Philadelphia’s World Cafe radio program. The acoustic tracks serve to fully humanize Jellyfish, whose records often sound unearthly, as if they couldn’t have been made by humans. Live and acoustic, pop anthems like “Joining a Fan Club” enter our atmosphere, burning up everything but their amazing melodies in reentry. These tracks are revelations.

The set concludes with a seven-song set from the Universal Amphitheatre, including a phenomenal reworking of “The Man I Used to Be,” and the final Jellyfish studio track – a version of Harry Nilsson’s “Think About Your Troubles.” All in all, Fan Club provides a unique glimpse behind the curtain at the magician practicing his tricks. As much as I love it, however, I can’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t heard Bellybutton and Spilt Milk first, because you need to see the trick performed before you find out how it’s done.

That’s okay, though, because Jellyfish’s albums are two of the best you’ll ever buy, masterworks that grow and reveal new dimensions with each listen. Unfortunately, by the time you’re ready to join the Fan Club, it may no longer be waiting for you, considering its limited pressing. This is, from first to last, a project for the fans, for those few who embraced Jellyfish when they first appeared and have been demanding a set like this ever since. So if you’re one of those, and you somehow missed this set, get on over to www.notlame.com and get one quick.

And if you’re not yet a fan, what are you waiting for? A couple of trips through either Bellybutton or Spilt Milk (or both) and you’ll be one. Track them down, buy them, love them.

As for me, I’m grateful to Not Lame, the band and the fans for making this thing possible. It’s all the sweeter knowing that, under the rules of the music business, it should never have happened. Here’s a permanent, loving testament to a brilliant band that too few heard, one that burned brightly and exploded too quickly. Just the fact that Fan Club came together at all is a validation for the fans of this unjustly ignored band, and a rare instance of the well-deserving getting their due despite all the laws of the universe. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A programming note first: I am beyond happy to report that the long-rumored and long-delayed Jellyfish four-CD box set Fan Club not only exists, but is out and available. I’m looking at my copy now, and I hope to slam this column out in a couple of hours so that I can stay up late and absorb the whole thing. I plan to review this next week, but as someone who would pay good money to hear Andy Sturmer and Roger Manning play tunes from McDonald’s commercials (which they do on Fan Club), I can’t promise the most objective review.

After that, I hope to play catch-up with a massive column encapsulating the new ones by Coldplay, the Black Crowes, Spoon, Ani DiFranco and Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch. That’s all to make room for the deluge on September 24, including albums by Beck, the Levellers, Mortal, Tonic, Poor Old Lu, Peter Gabriel, Low and Ryan Adams. Sheesh. October, of course, is no less expansive (and expensive), with releases from Mark Knopfler, Tom Petty, Ben Folds, Tori Amos, Tracy Chapman, the Elms, Foo Fighters, Badly Drawn Boy, the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson and Sixpence None the Richer. If I don’t answer your e-mails until November, that’s why.

I know I said I’d do Coldplay this week, but I’m still absorbing it. Luckily, there were a bunch of releases this week, and two of them struck me as complementary and worth discussing together. They’re both, in many ways, about escaping where you’ve come from.

* * * * *

I’d bet that Duncan Sheik cringes each time he listens to his self-titled debut.

A strange and mostly unsuccessful attempt to merge Nick Drake-style atmospherics with radio-ready pop, Duncan Sheik contained a couple of swell tunes and a whole bunch of boring ones. It was overproduced, with waves of intrusive strings blocking out everything except Sheik’s unpracticed, straining voice, which sends shivers of the wrong kind. Still, there was promise there, buried under oceans of studio dronery, and my instincts told me he would be worth watching.

If every major label artist improved at the rate Sheik has, the industry would be in much better shape. His second album, Humming, was worlds better, even in its improved balance between the pastoral and the poppy. His third, Phantom Moon, made a brave and fantastic leap into acoustic artistry, leaving his first two efforts in its gentle, chilling dust. I enjoyed it so much that even in the face of unenviable competition, I awarded it the top spot on last year’s Top 10 List.

Sheik has long maintained that he will be attempting a split between his more artistic endeavors, like Phantom Moon, and his pop star records. Most greeted this news with a mixture of anticipation and dismay – depending on which side of Sheik you like, every other album could potentially feel like a trade-off at best and a sellout at worst. Being a huge fan of Phantom Moon, I greeted his just-released Daylight, described by Sheik himself as a more modern radio album, with trepidation.

I needn’t have worried. As the titles suggest, Phantom Moon and Daylight are merely two sides of the same coin, each album the yin to the other’s yang. Daylight is light-years removed from the fragility of Moon, but even further from first-album tripe like “Out of Order” and “Days Go By.” This is an accomplished pop album, populated by elegant songs honed to a fine sheen. These are the kinds of songs you want radio to embrace, because by their very presence on the dial they would up the relative intelligence of the airwaves.

Daylight was produced by Patrick Leonard, who has worked with Peter Cetera and Michael W. Smith, among other lightweight popsters, so the atmosphere and muscle present here is a bit of a surprise. The requisite string accompaniment on two of the album’s best tracks, “Half-Life” and “Shine Inside,” stays south of overpowering (except at the climax of the latter song, where overpowering everything else is the point), and the layers of guitar and keyboards are subtle and in service to the songs.

The real surprise here, though, is Sheik himself. He’s carried the Phantom Moon experience with him into this project, and exhibits a casual confidence throughout that truly marks his arrival. The Duncan Sheik of the first two albums tried way too hard to convince himself he could write and sing his songs. The Duncan Sheik of Daylight already knows he can, and you can hear the difference in his voice, which has grown into a remarkable instrument. His even tenor is unlike any other voice out there right now, and he can bring it soaring into a weightless falsetto with surprising grace, especially when compared with earlier attempts.

The songs have come a long way as well, and while Daylight is indeed a bunch of pop tunes, these are artfully constructed pop tunes with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of memorable hooks. While both of Sheik’s prior pop records contained stretches of uninspired boredom, there isn’t a moment wasted on this one. Opener “Genius” is as bad as it gets, with its simple chords leading into a rousing “la-la-la-la” chorus that brings it home.

I confess ignorance here, but if the buoyant “On a High” isn’t the first single, it ought to be. “Magazines” recasts the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” as a disturbing morality play, “Good Morning” finds the narrator taking sales pitches from the devil, “Start Again” makes the most of its circular melody, and “For You” is a near-perfect acoustic break. And closer “Shine Inside” is the kind of epic few songwriters these days even reach for.

In short, while it’s a shame that someone capable of Phantom Moon chooses to make pop albums like Daylight, these 11 songs establish Duncan Sheik as a force to be reckoned with. This is as artful as modern pop gets, and the album serves as the second half of Sheik’s mission statement. Hopefully there will be an audience for these songs. Sheik is an unabashed classicist, a throwback to the days when “pop” wasn’t synonymous with “crap,” and it would be a shame to lose him. Especially since he’s reportedly working on another Phantom Moon as we speak.

Aimee Mann, as well, came from humble beginnings, and I’d bet she hasn’t listened to those old ‘Til Tuesday albums in more than a decade. Who would have guessed in 1984 that the punkish “Voices Carry” girl, who used to front a noisy anti-pop combo called Young Snakes, would be capable of the luminous pop she’s been making for more than 10 years as a solo artist? Even the final ‘Til Tuesday album, the accomplished Everything’s Different Now, couldn’t have prepared anyone for Whatever, Mann’s delightful solo debut.

Since then, it’s been one commercial disappointment after another, with label after label either folding or rejecting her work. Her second solo disc, I’m With Stupid, was delayed for more than a year while Mann fought with Geffen over its release. (This after Imago, her first label, went belly-up.) Her third, Bachelor No. 2, met a similar fate, and Mann finally bought her album back from the label and released it her damn self, riding a wave of attention she earned with her soundtrack to Magnolia.

Hence, Lost in Space, her fourth album, is her first since Whatever to come out on the label and the release date originally announced. Not hard, really, since the album is on Mann’s own SuperEgo Records, which exists specifically to release her work. With no label interference and unlimited creative freedom, Mann has finally made an album that sounds purely her, a collection of sad tales set to superb, graceful atmospheres.

If I could put an album atop my Top 10 List based solely on packaging, Lost in Space would be a shoo-in. A beautifully designed digipak, the album features the sublime work of New York cartoonist Seth, who has told a few sad tales himself. His graphic novel, It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, could be an Aimee Mann song. It’s the tale of a cartoonist’s obsession with the past, and failing attempts to fit in with the present. His art conveys all that lonely, sepia-toned emotion with gorgeous clean lines and a classic style.

Seth is a perfect choice for this album, as Mann’s lyrics are equally past-obsessed. In just about all of these 11 songs, things are not as good now as they were in some hazily-remembered past. Mann’s characters drift though these songs, tethered to their memories, and often lacking the will to rearrange their circumstances. (To her credit, only one song, “Pavlov’s Bell,” could be interpreted as an attack on a record company executive…)

As is her trademark, Mann sets these stories to some of the sweetest melodies you’ve ever heard. There’s rarely any light at all in her words, so she relies on the music to provide that, which it does admirably. The result is a kind of melancholy lightness, a nostalgia-tinged reverie that remains oddly hopeful. Even though the main character of “Today’s the Day,” for instance, never gets up the courage to actually leave before the song’s conclusion, one gets the sense through the music that she will one day.

If I have one complaint about Lost in Space, it’s this: Mann seems to have found a style she’s sticking with, and even though this album is a step up from Bachelor No. 2, it provides the same effect. Mann writes terrific songs, but she’s starting to write the same kind of terrific song over and over, and it would be to her benefit to stretch out a bit more on her next record.

A minor quibble, however. Listening to Lost in Space from beginning to end provides an experience unlike any offered by any other singer-songwriter currently recording, and it will stay with you long after the final strains of “It’s Not” have faded. Lost in Space is an emotional experience, an album you feel and experience rather than analyze. It finally cements Aimee Mann as an artist who has grown beyond her humble beginnings to become a master of her craft, and of her own destiny.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

For a while now, I’ve been contemplating changing the admittedly strict rules for inclusion in my Year-End Top 10 List. The one that’s garnering the most scrutiny right now is the only-domestically-released-and-in-record-stores regulation, which, given my newly global audience, seems to have outlived its purpose. (Plus, nixing that would let me consider the new Levellers album, out September 24, provided it’s as good as I expect it will be.)

A couple of rules will stay the same, however, most notably the ones that prohibit live records or cover albums into the list. Simple reasoning, really: I like to reward albums that match composition with performance. The song is half the magic, and how it’s played and recorded is the other half. It’s a shame, then, when someone as gifted and list-worthy as Peter Mulvey takes himself out of the running by breaking both of the above rules at once.

Mulvey cut his teeth in the Boston subway system, playing virtually every day. Unlike most of the buskers, however, Mulvey was using his subway time as partially subsidized practice, and emerged several years later with the crucial ability to hook a listener quickly and hold his or her attention. He also became one hell of a guitar player and singer, and the difference is noticeable between his first album, Brother Rabbit Speaks (pre-subway), and his third, Rapture (after two years down there).

On stage, Mulvey is simply mesmerizing, and he soon proved that the studio was no threat to him either, producing two great follow-ups to the manic, impressive Rapture. Deep Blue showed a more sinister and atmospheric side of Mulvey, and The Trouble With Poets should have been a breakthrough, so completely did it capture his sound and songcraft.

Poets sounded like a destination point, a final arrival, and so it’s no surprise, really, that Mulvey’s gone back to his roots with his new one, Ten Thousand Mornings, just released on Signature Sound Records. It turns out he’s never forgotten the subway, or the thrill of playing and singing for complete strangers who haven’t paid to come listen to you. Mornings is a live album, recorded entirely at the Davis Square T-stop in Somerville, Mass., outside Boston, and in its atmosphere you can hear the bustle of the city and feel the chill of the air.

Mornings is also a covers album, as Mulvey takes a trip through 35 years of his favorite songs. (Actually, given the traditional nature of “Rain and Snow,” the range of years is likely much larger than that.) And like any passionate music fan, Mulvey has chosen songs off the beaten path, even from some of the more famous contributors here.

For example, the album opens with “Stranded in a Limousine,” which Paul Simon recorded for his Greatest Hits Etc. album in 1977. Mulvey performs it raw, with famous folkie Chris Smither providing the accompanying beat with a pair of shoes. (Really.) While many of the songs come from the folk tradition, and thus translate well to Mulvey’s spare acoustic renditions, many more hail from unlikely sources. For every Bob Dylan (“Mama, You Been On My Mind”) and Gillian Welch (“Caleb Meyer,” a definite highlight), there’s a Leo Kottke (“Running Up the Stairs”) or an Elvis Costello (“Oliver’s Army,” which seriously never sounded better).

There really isn’t any such thing as an obscure Beatles number, but Mulvey picks one (“For No One”) that isn’t among the first twenty or so to come to mind, and performs it as a duet with Schwang’s Anita Suhanin. He also lays bare the power of Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” another unlikely choice, and really fleshes out Randy Newman’s overlooked “In Germany Before the War.” While Mulvey recommends the Be Good Tanyas version of “Rain and Snow,” I’m most familiar with the song thanks to the aforementioned Levellers, who recorded it on their 1997 album Mouth to Mouth. Mulvey adds new dimension to the tale.

Surprisingly, though, the most effective song here is by Dar Williams, whom I’ve often had trouble liking in the past. Mulvey finds the heart of “The Ocean,” singing and playing with the passion that makes him one of the best six-string storytellers working today. And then, at the emotional climax of the song, something happens that could only come about on a project like this one: a train rolls by. Mulvey somehow uses the din of the subway as an instrument, rising with it to finish off one of the best things he’s ever committed to tape.

Still and all, Ten Thousand Mornings is a bit of a place-keeper. It’s enjoyable, touching and often quite beautiful, but it’s still made up of other people’s songs, and half the reason I buy Peter Mulvey albums is to savor his words and music. In fact, for a limited time, Signature Sounds is making available the “other half” of Mornings, an eight-track EP called Five-Thirty A.M., and in listening to that, I discovered what’s missing from Mornings: more of Mulvey’s own songs.

It’s somewhat surprising that the EP, as a whole, works better than the album, but that’s likely because Mulvey sings his own songs better than anyone else’s. Included here are spare readings of songs from each of his last three albums, beginning with the lovely “Wings of the Ragman,” off of Poets. The title track to Rapture is well done, if not much different from the album version, but “Grace,” off of Deep Blue, is a wondrous thing. The album version was all beats and atmosphere, but here it’s just Mulvey’s guitar and voice, and the final effect is striking. It’s easily my favorite thing here.

Coming in second is Mulvey’s version of Radiohead’s “Airbag,” the most unlikely cover on either disc, and he does it straight, just guitar and voice. It’s further proof that a great song is a great song, and it doesn’t need studio trickery to hold its head high. The EP also features songs by two of Mulvey’s guest collaborators, the sweet-voiced Suhanin (who contributes “Sugar”) and bluegrass boy Sean Staples of the Resophonics (who wrote “Muddy Ground”). Cap it all off with an instrumental, Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” with cellist Kris Delmhorst, and you have a much more diverse and delightful offering.

But really, any chance to spend time with Mulvey is worth taking, and where else are you going to find a live record on which an amazing musician occasionally breaks stride to thank people for tossing quarters into his guitar case? Ten Thousand Mornings and Five-Thirty A.M. are unique and diverting discs that offer a glimpse at Mulvey’s breadth of talent.

There comes a point, however, in a musician’s journey where going back and playing the subways is just downright unfair to the other buskers. The light of day, the packed houses and the critical acclaim he deserves are awaiting him, and he’s too good to go unrecognized any longer. Mulvey has, literally and metaphorically, been underground too long.

You can help. Go to www.petermulvey.com and buy his stuff. It’s all worth your money.

Next week, Coldplay and Aimee Mann, and after that, I feel another big column coming on…

See you in line Tuesday morning.

In order to fully explain the flurry of emotions surrounding my high school reunion this past weekend, I have to tell you a bit about Bronwyn Moylan.

I doubt highly that she’s reading this, but when I was 17, Bronwyn was the most singularly creative and luminous individual I had ever met. We collaborated on the musical score to a play she had written, and she helped hone my raw ideas (dozens of them, in fact) down to a manageable and relatively effective core. I was thrilled to be asked to work on this, because it allowed me the chance to watch Bron at work. She was incredible, subtly manipulating all the elements necessary to bring her painfully personal story to life.

Bron won the female half of the “most talented” award our senior year (and in fact the designer of this very page, Michael Ferrier, won the male half), and it might as well have been written in flaming letters thirty feet high that this girl, this whirlygig of ideas and artistry, was Destined for Great Things. Amazingly, she thought the same of yours truly – that I was going to set the world aflame within 10 years. Bron and I used to joke after rehearsals about being too big and famous to attend our 10-year: “Send my re-gaaaahhds to the reunion.”

I don’t have any idea where Bron is right now, but she wasn’t at the reunion. I was, however, mostly because none of my maids or manservants would attend in my place, and my agent had the weekend off. When my personal assistant placed the event on my schedule, in between lunch with Ron Howard (“It’s about time you won an Oscar, Ronny, and why the Academy didn’t recognize your genius before, when you were making Backdraft and EdTV, is beyond me…”) and a Sunday getaway with Nicole Kidman (turns out she used to call Tom “shorty,” and not because of his height), I was aghast. But I finally reconciled myself to hobnobbing with the riff-raff, at least for a few minutes, before calling for my private helicopter to whisk me away.

The truth is, a lot of my fellow high school graduates shared Bron’s opinion of me, and expected that I would prove them right. Instead, I spent the 10 years since high school basically meandering around, waiting for my magnetic needle to find north. (I also spent it gaining 50 pounds, which didn’t help.) I ran a failing music magazine for far too long, I published a bad comic book, I took several journalism jobs, and I did everything possible to forestall starting my Real Life. So it was no surprise to come back to Rhode Island and find that many of my classmates had grabbed hold of their Real Lives as soon as we graduated.

I’ll be the first to admit that the wife-and-kids thing isn’t for me. I was still surprised at how many of my classmates had tried it on, and found that it fit well. Even the most unlikely folks from the Class of 1992 had become amazingly respectable and settled.

And here I have to tell you about Doug Borden.

In high school, Doug was an insane, alcoholic clown. He saw no class lines, talking to everyone and spreading his phenomenal gift for making people laugh. My favorite Doug story involves his bizarre habit of snorting Tic-Tacs – he would place one on his desk, lean over and inhale it so that it would bounce off the back of his throat and down. A funny trick, albeit a disgusting one, which he abruptly stopped after getting a cinnamon flavored one stuck in his sinus passages. Judging from his reaction (screaming, jumping, smacking the back of his neck) I’d wager it hurt a lot, but it made everyone laugh, and that’s what Doug was all about.

Come to find out that Doug is married to a lovely girl named Erin, has two kids and one on the way (all boys, or as Doug would say, “every one of ’em packing a turtle”), and has become an East Providence cop. Officer Doug Borden. I tried all night to wrap my mind around that one and couldn’t do it.

His story was not unique, however. Everywhere I turned, there was someone else with a well-respected job and multiple children. My closest friends from high school, with whom I have kept in regular contact, have for the most part avoided those jobs, and although some have significant others, none have children. And there we were, all huddled together, as if making a defensive line against the Real World and everything that goes with it, a handful of Peter Pans hoping never to grow up, despite evidence that we already have.

And yeah, there was still that schism that we felt all through high school, with the cool kids on one end and the losers on the other. I shudder to think how many people from my class saw a combination of talents and thought they knew me. To illustrate the point, one of the Cool Girls came over to where I was sitting two hours into the event, and proceeded to tell me how much she’s thought about me in the previous 10 years, and how she wishes she hadn’t been as mean as she was, and that she’s grown up tenfold, and on and on. I didn’t want to tell her that it took me a minute to remember her name.

But then, she asked me, “Are you still doing art? Because you could draw really well.”

Before I could respond that I can’t even doodle really well, it hit me that she wasn’t thinking of me at all, but of either Mike Ferrier or Jason LeClair, the two most gifted artists in our class. I casually pointed out Mike, seated a few feet away, and in doing so realized that this girl and I didn’t know each other at all, and that neither one of us had made the effort in high school to get beyond our little class cliques. Those barriers don’t exist in the real world (though at my most cynical I’m tempted to think that they’re merely replaced with more insurmountable ones), but the worst part of the reunion experience was that I found myself slipping back into the person I was 10 years ago more than once.

I don’t like that person, and have done a lot to try and kill him, but he’s still there, still carrying high school around with him. He’s the one that tried to make up lies about my 10 years, convinced that the real story wasn’t cool enough. He’s the one that really wanted to look some of the popular kids in the eye and say, “I can’t remember why I cared so much what you thought of me,” not realizing that the very act of saying that sentence belies it.

It’s amazing that 10 years can disappear before you realize that you haven’t really done anything with them. You don’t really understand that those years aren’t coming back until you see someone you haven’t seen in a decade, and try to match up this person with your memories. The ’90s aren’t coming back, though, and as much as I occasionally want a do-over, I’m okay with that. The person I am is a million miles from the person I was, and hopefully, the person I become in 2012 will be another million.

In the end, I’m glad I went, even though only about 40 out of around 150 of us showed up. The strangest thing happened on the way out, though: one of the more popular kids from my class, who had impressed everyone all night with tales of his exciting adult life, admitted to me that he’d lied his way through the whole thing. It broke my heart, but it cemented the impression that 10 years on, we’re all the same, and we all carry high school around with us like a weight. I wanted to tell this kid that I’d figured it all out – we can put the weight down any time we like – but for some reason, I didn’t.

There are some things, I later figured, that we just need to learn for ourselves.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A while back, I received my first unsolicited request for review in the form of three CDs by Boston area guitarist and singer Peter Calo. They were good discs, so I gave them good reviews. Calo impressed me with his instrumental prowess (Cape Ann), vocal and lyrical ability (Wired to the Moon) and interpretive capability (Cowboy Song, a collection of old west tunes). He thanked me for the review, and I figured that would probably be it.

Turns out, though, Calo has taken on the role of part-time hype machine for my column, to the point of asking a couple of his musical compatriots to send free CDs my way. Besides being nifty cool in that I get to check out free music, this is a swell thing for Calo to have done, especially since I’m such a small and insignificant source of publicity for him, so here’s his public thank you.

I then went and dropped the ball by not finding some way to work reviews of these discs into my schedule. Thankfully, the musical downpour has kind of dried up for a couple of weeks, and I’m finally ready to talk about both Pamela Ruby Russell’s Highway of Dreams and Chris Brown’s Go West. Besides being friends with these musicians, Calo added his signature swell guitar and arrangement skills to both of these discs, and co-produced them as well, so they both already have points in their favor.

Ladies first.

Russell sent me her disc a few months ago – her salutation at the end of her letter read “happy summer” – and I’ve been meaning to e-mail her and thank her ever since. She’s a Bostonian who used to head up local band Beauty and the Beast, and Highway of Dreams is her debut solo disc. It was inspired by a couple of trips to Mexico to overcome family tragedy, and it features a wide variety of styles, all in service to Russell’s high, powerful voice.

In fact, it’s a voice that I sometimes have trouble with, since it often sounds a bit too studied. She hits the notes high and clear, but occasionally I wished for a bit more emotional resonance, especially since the songs seem to cry out for it. The main criticism I have for Highway of Dreams is that Russell doesn’t vary her vocal tone as much as the music behind her shifts and changes. She sings a haunting number like “Avenue of Tears” in the same tone she uses for a bluesy number like “Is There Any Love.” She does allow a great deal of character to seep in on the Spanish romp “Tengo Razon,” and I wished for more performances like that one.

But anyone that can write an album that bounces between those styles, and several more, is worth listening to. Highway suffers slightly from its sequencing, which places two of the weaker songs, “Boxcar” and “Live Baby,” up front. There’s nothing wrong with these songs, they’re just not as well-written as others like “Almost Gave My Heart Away” or the title tune. The aforementioned “Avenue of Tears” is this album’s finest moment, with rich harmonies accenting the melancholy chords. Russell actually sang this song on top of a Mayan temple at midnight five years ago, and unsurprisingly, it’s the best vocal delivery on the album.

All the songs here are Russell’s, but it’s impossible not to notice Peter Calo’s influence on this work. His rich guitar playing elevates even a simple number like “Boxcar,” and it’s quite surprising how few notes Calo needs in that song to make his mark. “Tengo Razon” shows a side of Calo’s playing that didn’t surface on his solo discs, and of course, he pulls it off fabulously. Highway of Dreams is not an album that I will pull out and listen to repeatedly, but it is a nice effort, and shows a fine collaboration between singer and instrumentalist.

New Yorker Chris Brown also has one of those voices that takes some time to become familiar with, but he gets by a bit more on cleverness. His album Go West is by turns smirking and sad, full of the stuff that makes the coffeehouse singer/songwriter circuit such a delight most of the time. His voice is low, deep and quirky, and he often sounds like the bastard child of Elvis and Leonard Cohen, especially on sing/speak numbers like “Dominoes.”

Go West is Brown’s third effort, after 1987’s The Edge of Life and 1991’s Surrealin’ In the Years, and that experience in the studio is felt all over this record. Brown, most likely with Calo’s able assistance, plays with dynamics on Go West to decent effect, mixing in accordion, organ and piano at the perfect times. The album is a fun and sometimes moving listen.

It’s Brown’s lyrics that really stand out, however. Sly opener “Nice Shoes” counts down a list of everything the singer’s significant other despises about him, but makes sure to point out that she can’t disrespect his shoes. The wry tune ends with the following couplet: “Nice shoes, nice shine, in lieu of another rhyme, I’m simply going to let the music play as I walk away.” Cleverness also abounds on the rollicking “Every Time We Kiss,” which includes the lines “Sometimes all this spinning has me feeling like an old 45, all pops with a hiss, scratch and skips, stuck on my b-side.” He saves one final zinger for the last verse: “It’s survival of the fittest and I feel fit.”

Brown strips the sound down for the sad recovery tune “My Better Half,” which stands as my favorite here. That comes directly after another highlight, Brown’s straight folk-rock reading of Tom Waits’ lovely “Hold On,” sung with all of Waits’ passion and none of his roar. And yes, Calo is all over this album as well, lending his graceful playing and arrangement skill to Brown’s well-crafted songs, but Brown exhibits enough confidence on his own to emerge as the focal point. Go West is a quick, clever piece of work that grows deeper with subsequent listens.

You can get Pamela Ruby Russell’s album at www.rubytunes.com. Chris Brown’s work is available at www.cbonline.net. And of course, I highly recommend (again) that you check out www.petercalo.com. Thanks to Pamela and Chris for sending me their work, and thanks again to Peter Calo for recommending me.

Next week, tales from the dreaded high school reunion, probably.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s 95 degrees and I have a date with a hammock and a glass of lemonade, so let’s get this over with.

This year’s Top 10 List is already strong enough to be respectable. Wilco is pretty firmly entrenched in the top spot right now, but new contenders seem to spring up every week, including great new ones by Tom Waits, Neil Finn, Eminem, Bruce Hornsby, Michael Roe and Counting Crows. Plus, I’ve just heard that September 24 is the “official” (meaning infinitely mutable and changeable) release date for Peter Gabriel’s long-awaited Up album.

You’ll notice, however, that it feels like a boys’ club up there in the creme de la creme, with not a single female artist making an appearance so far. Honestly, the women have been holding back until the second half of the year, I think, and I expect great things from Aimee Mann this month, Sixpence None the Richer next month, and Tori Amos the month after that. And to kick off the (hopeful) avalanche of excellent releases by women is the inimitable Beth Orton.

I’ve heard some people refer to Orton as boring, and that strikes me as a minor form of blasphemy. Still, I’m trying to be more understanding and accepting in my old age, and I took my first spin through her third album, Daybreaker, with that thought in mind. And no, I’m sorry, I just don’t hear it.

For one thing, Orton has a great voice. This is not the same sense of that phrase you might use to describe your friend who’s better than the rest of the bar on karaoke night. Orton has a voice that will stop you in your tracks, the kind of voice the sirens may have used to lure unsuspecting seamen to smash themselves upon the rocks. You hear it for the first time, and all at once you want to keep hearing it, studying it, turning it over and over in your mind. All by itself, her voice is captivating enough to justify buying everything she does.

And like most great singers, Orton is most effective when she allows her voice to be the main attraction. The second half of her wonderful second album, Central Reservation, is largely just her voice and guitar, and the sound they produce together is so affecting that you can’t help but have diminishing returns when you place other instruments on top. Oddly, though, it’s those very models of sparse emotion that have been labeled the most boring of her works.

The truth of the matter seems to be that people need lots of stuff going on to keep their attention, which is why moody, drawn-out movies like In the Bedroom don’t do as well as busy, effects-laden ones like The Mummy Returns (and, yes, like Star Wars). That’s why radio concentrates on the three-minute single, and producers fill those three minutes with as much ear-catching gloss as they can. The days when Tim Buckley could hold an audience in the palm of his hand for three hours with just an acoustic guitar are long over.

Even Orton seems to realize that, which is probably why Daybreaker is her fullest, most produced album to date. There’s certainly nothing wrong with production, if done right, but nowhere on Daybreaker does Orton just let herself carry the song with her voice, and as such, it’s a less immediately seductive album than Reservation or her debut, Trailer Park. This one provokes fewer “ahhhhs” than it does “hmmmms.”

For all that, though, it’s a pretty magnificent piece of work. Daybreaker is a restless album, flitting from one style and sound to another over its 10 songs, but each one shines in its own way. Opener “Paris Street” is one of the best, with buoyant string lines complementing Orton’s soaring vocal nicely. The single “Concrete Sky” follows, and it marks the first pairing of Orton and Ryan Adams, the wunderkind from Whiskeytown. Their voices merge beautifully, and the song, though written by Orton and Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, sounds like vintage Adams.

In fact, the only song not written by Orton also sounds like vintage Adams, because it is. “This One’s Gonna Bruise” finds Orton crooning Adams’ song while he accompanies on guitar, and while the tune is remarkable, I can’t help imagining Adams singing it. It’s the one spot on Daybreaker in which Orton’s glorious voice is maddeningly ineffective, and surprisingly, it’s also the one unadorned number on the album, just voice and guitar. The mismatch is puzzling.

Less puzzling, however, is the sheer impact of grand experiments like “Mount Washington,” with its ascending chorus and sweeping atmospherics, or the title song, with its fluttering electronic drums and wistful strings. “Carmella” is a tale of hope amidst a bad relationship, and I wouldn’t be all that surprised to find out that its inspiration is Carmella Soprano, from HBO’s hit series. “God Song” pairs Orton up with Emmylou Harris, and is the most classic-sounding down-home American piece the British chanteuse has ever written. Harris, Orton and Adams all merge their voices in an extended coda that sends chills.

And then there’s the closer, “Thinking About Tomorrow,” which flies higher than anything else here. In a dazzling six minutes, Orton brings the orchestra back and sends us off with a classic pop song in which everything clicks. Daybreaker contains little of the misery and confusion that marked previous efforts, and especially here in its final song, it spreads a certain kind of joy wherever it goes. It’s the sweetest album she’s ever made, capped off with the sweetest song she’s ever written.

One may accuse Orton of a lack of focus, what with 10 different styles sitting next to each other here. The truth may have more to do with the real goal of experimentation: to find something that works. Orton is neither a jazz crooner, a folk poet nor a pop songstress, but she tries all of them here, looking for a way to make her heavenly voice fit earthly styles. She possesses a love of classic songcraft, and one can hear the works of Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones and Emmylou Harris in her songs. That she’s a better singer than any of them may mean that she’ll have to leave her influences behind and create something wholly new before she finds that perfect fit.

For now, though, Daybreaker is a fine album, and a swell companion piece to her other two. It’s also, to my ears, miles and miles away from boring.

This means nothing, but check it out: look at the covers of Daybreaker and Trey Anastasio’s solo album side by side. The similarities are striking, aren’t they? (If you don’t own both and don’t want to go to the record store to see what I’m talking about, click on the link below to Amazon.com and call up the pages for both albums. It’s pretty eerie.)

Next week, a couple of surprises.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This week’s column is about maturity, so I thought I might start it off with an immature rant against the entire auto mechanics industry. And I’m not even going to ask permission, so nyah.

Okay, granted, my eight year old car is a piece of shit. And granted, I don’t exactly treat it with the loving care that I probably ought. But still, this pissed me off. My car has been making this loud, belching, rattling sound lately, and while I don’t have the highest level of mechanical acumen, even I could figure out that it probably shouldn’t be making such a racket. Funny thing is, it hadn’t been doing any of that before I brought it in to the local Midas to get the burnt-out alternator replaced (for $350). Thinking there may be a connection, I trundled back to the same Midas and asked just what the hell was wrong with the crapbucket now.

And the Midas people told me I needed to replace something called a solenoid, I think. (Spellcheck isn’t red-flagging the word, so I guess it’s a real one, and that I spelled it correctly.) For $150, they told me, my problems would be solved. So I agreed, knowing shit about cars, and had the sole-whatsit replaced. Did it make a damn bit of difference? Of course not.

When I pointed this out to the Midas man, he shook his head, opened my hood, poked around for a second and then sprayed a cleaning fluid into my air intake system. Presto – the noise was reduced by about 60 percent. “It’s just dirty,” he said. “All you need to do is get the injection system cleaned.”

“Oh,” I said. “And how much is that?”

“About $40.”

“So, um, why did I pay $150 for this other thing?”

“Oh, you’d have had to have that replaced eventually anyway,” the man shrugged. And that’s when I kicked him in the balls.

Oh, wait, no, I didn’t. I paid him and left, grumbling about the Mechanics Mafia. $190, all told, for a $40 procedure, just because I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to cars. Personally, I’ll be quite pleased when they finally invent those Star Trek style teleporters, and we don’t need these rolling hunks of money-sucking machinery to get around anymore. Let’s get right on that, NASA, okay?

In the meantime, wanna buy a Saturn? Cheap.

* * * * *

One of the sweetest delights music holds for me is the chance to see artists grow before my eyes. (Or rather, hear them grow before my ears, but you knew what I meant.) Strangely enough, though, most people don’t seem to want their artists to grow up, and will gravitate to youthful energy over mature artistry any day of the week.

Some acts have made whole careers out of remaining immature, grasping hold of their original audience and playing strictly to them, and always giving them what they want. Observe the incredible longevity of a one-note band like AC/DC, who proudly revel in the fact that they’ve made the same album more than a dozen times. Or how about the irrepressible hair-metal tour that Poison headlines every year, that somehow manages to sell hundreds of thousands of tickets? People want their “Nothin’ But a Good Time,” and heaven forbid the band try to feed them anything else. Luckily for Poison and AC/DC, that suits them just fine – they have all the artistic ambition of Milli Vanilli.

But what about the risk-takers? It’s not very often that a band can sustain a lengthy, successful career while developing and morphing their sound. The rare exceptions are usually hailed as genius: the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and R.E.M., for example. By and large, though, people don’t want their rock stars to grow up.

It’s especially difficult to attain some level of artistry if you first become known for your immaturity. I can’t imagine Andrew W.K. sustaining his career beyond one more disc, especially if that disc isn’t as chock full of moronic party tunes as his debut. One of the few acts that’s managed the jump from novelty to respectability is the Beastie Boys, and even they don’t understand their own success. Still, the Beasties moved from “Fight For Your Right to Party” frat boys to social activists and artistic commentators with remarkable ease.

It hasn’t been that easy for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but with the just-released By the Way, the band has completed their transformation from silly funk outfit to genuinely affecting songwriters, all without sacrificing their core sound. They’re still the Chili Peppers, but lately they’ve been exploring their grown-up side. And I have to say, for a band that used to parade around naked with socks on their peckers, the Peppers wear maturity well.

By the Way follows the same path the Peppers began forging on 1999’s Californication, minus the ill-fitting sex-pun title. The whole disc is mellow and well-crafted, so much so that it’s hard to reconcile this work with the minimalist rap-funk of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, from only a decade ago. Here Anthony Keidis, often the worst thing about the band, summons reserves of melody we’ve never heard from him, crooning slow numbers like “I Could Die For You” without a hint of irony. And John Frusciante, whose return to the fold could have signaled a return to the rump-shaking days of yore, proves himself yet again as a textured and emotional guitar player. He takes on the whole thing with clean tones, never once amping up and distorting out.

There is, of course, a thin line between maturing and selling out, but where that line is remains subjective at best. Even though By the Way only jumps beyond mid-tempo-land once (“Throw Away Your Television”), there’s a palpable sense of honesty to this recording, an investment of emotion and belief that can’t be faked. The album will likely be met with casual disdain from the folks who climbed aboard in ’92, as it contains no “Give it Away,” no “Sir Psycho,” nor even any soft-loud-soft stuff like “Under the Bridge.” For those who have been with the band a bit longer, it’s the culmination point of a trip they’ve been on for years. Rather than a ploy for radio hits, By the Way feels like an argument for longevity, and quite a convincing one at that.

Oasis find themselves in a similar situation. They started off all brash and swagger, all cigarettes and alcohol, led by the brothers Gallagher, the self-styled Mick and Keith of the next generation. Oasis wrote balls-out rock songs peppered with the sense that the Gallaghers really thought they were running the best band in the world. By the time they imploded on the self-obsessed and ridiculously overdone Be Here Now, Oasis were living the mouthy rock star thing to the hilt.

The band’s problem always seemed to be the vast disassociation between their music and their opinion of their music. Oasis has always been a pretty good band, and if the Gallaghers (singer Liam and guitarist Noel) hadn’t strutted about proclaiming themselves better than the Beatles, they probably could have gotten by on that. Instead, they aimed for the brass ring, and fell several miles short.

The fallout landed all over their last album, the nearly pitable Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, and it appeared that Oasis needed to pull back and reexamine just about everything, or else break up. Happily, they’ve gone with choice A, and even though their fifth album, Heathen Chemistry, is not nearly their best, it points confidently in a number of right (and, dare I say, mature) directions.

For one thing, Noel Gallagher has lifted some of his often tyrannical control on this disc. Previous albums found him writing every song, singing several of them, and producing (and often over-producing to death) every note. Heathen Chemistry feels like a democracy, with songwriting contributions from all five members. Rather than The Gallagher Brothers and Some Other Guys, this album sounds like the work of a band, and that’s a remarkable step.

The album itself ain’t too bad, either. It represents a search for simplicity, with the appealingly straight-ahead single “The Hindu Times” setting the pace. You can draw a straight line, in fact, from the band’s no-bullshit rock and roll debut, Definitely Maybe, to this one. Even the slower songs, like sure hit “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” and “She Is Love,” aim for subtlety more than the bombast of previous ballads. The chorus of “Stop Crying” is augmented by a string section, but one that barely calls attention to itself. Even Liam’s signature rasp is reined in here, to nice effect. Speaking of Liam, he acquits himself well as a songwriter on Chemistry‘s closing tracks, the melancholy “Born on a Different Cloud” and the rollicking “Better Man.”

What’s sort of remarkable about Heathen Chemistry is the number of times the band could have gone for the jugular, sonically speaking, and decided not to. Because of that, it doesn’t quite have the punch of What’s the Story Morning Glory, but it deftly avoids the self-indulgent overkill the band had almost become known for. Chemistry is just a little rock and roll record, but it may be the most important one this band has made. It’s the kind of album whose very creation bespeaks a kind of self-discovery that a band like Oasis desperately needed if they were to continue. It sounds for all the world that they’ve stopped trying to convince everyone that they’re the best band in the world, and started going about the business of actually becoming that band.

Next week, the great Beth Orton returns with Daybreaker. Can’t wait…

See you in line Tuesday morning.