Oscar thoughts first:

I was saddened by the number of comments I received regarding the winners for Best Actor and Best Actress. I talked to a number of people who honestly believe that Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won simply because of their skin color. I guess if they hadn’t won, it would have been racism, but since they did, it’s tokenism. Never mind the fact that both turned in fantastic performances in their respective films. Washington, who should have four Oscars by now anyway, elevated a sharply written genre flick into a tour de force, and Berry was breathtaking, giving one of the year’s best turns in a role that required this former model to be physically and emotionally haggard throughout. And that’s what it ought to be about – rewarding the best actor and the best actress of the year. Nothing else. (Not even equally deserving nominee Russell Crowe’s temper tantrums, which undoubtedly played a part in his loss.)

In her acceptance speech, Berry made mention of a door having been opened. I think she’s partially right. That door will only be fully opened (and hopefully closed behind us) when we don’t even notice an actor’s (or a musician’s, or a novelist’s, or a person’s) skin color and just talk about the performance. It shouldn’t have taken 74 years just to get halfway there.

End of rant.

As usual, Oscar neglected, snubbed and otherwise ignored the best films of the year in favor of safe (if admittedly well-made) fare like A Beautiful Mind. The Academy got a bit closer this year, though, nominating my two favorite films of 2001 (Moulin Rouge and Memento) for multiple awards. Memento won nothing, and Moulin got a couple of the smaller awards, but still, baby steps in the right direction. And what a bizarre thrill to see California-phobic Woody Allen make his first Oscar appearance, to a standing ovation. He’s the perfect example of my earlier point about rewarding the artist for the art and none of the other distractions.

* * * * *

Last week’s column on the Alarm 2000 box set was posted on www.thealarm.com a few days after it was posted here, and I got a ton of e-mails from Alarm fans from across the globe. My sincere thanks to everyone who wrote me, and to Jules from the Mike Peters Organization for posting the review. Made my whole week…

* * * * *

When I wrote this column for Face Magazine, I got free music all the time. Virtually every day, I’d leave the office with two or three CDs, some I had heard of and many I hadn’t. The catch at Face was that if you took a disc, you were then obligated to review it, good or bad. While I always felt bad for trashing a CD I’d received for free, my own sense of journalistic integrity wouldn’t allow me to do anything else if the disc warranted such a review. Still, at Face I could hide behind both my editor and the fact that nearly a dozen other writers were doing the same thing.

So it was with great trepidation that I opened the package containing guitarist Peter Calo’s three discs, which he sent to me in hopes of scoring a review. Calo is the first musician to request such a thing from me since I started the online version of Tuesday Morning. One way or another, I knew I’d have to review these albums, since he’d gone to so much trouble to send them to me. I decided, hard as it would be to do, that I would be completely honest with Peter, no matter what I thought. If he couldn’t take it, well, fuck him.

I steeled myself and pressed play on Calo’s 1995 debut, Cape Ann. Within two tracks, I was basically in love. The album is a completely instrumental acoustic guitar excursion, of the type that Harvey Reid does so well. Calo’s pedigree (he’s played with Carly Simon for years, and has also worked with James Taylor, Hall & Oates, Linda Eder, Jimmy Webb and a host of others, not to mention appearing on Joe Pesci’s musical experiment, Vincent LaGuardia Gambini SIngs Just for You) didn’t quite prepare me for how well this guy can play a six-string. Cape Ann evokes seaside images and woodsy landscapes in turn, and from first note to last, the album is a pleasant and terrific listen. When he brings in Bob Patton on soprano sax on “Pashka,” the results are sublime.

Okay, so he can play guitar, but I noticed with growing dread that his second album, 1998’s Wired to the Moon, contained a full complement of lyrics. Vocals often trip up even the best guitarists, and I worried that Wired would be the point where I’d have to start trashing the poor guy.

Silly me. If anything, Wired is a better album than Cape Ann, largely due to Calo’s confident and tuneful voice. In contrast to his debut, which jumps styles in a finger-straining web of acoustics, Wired to the Moon is a streamlined folk-pop album that cements Calo as a better-than-average songwriter while maintaining that “Jeez, he can really play that thing” feeling the debut evoked. The songs on Wired will appeal to both musicians, who will marvel at Calo’s precise guitar work, and plain old music fans, who will end up singing along with his sweet tunes. The closing track especially, “Don’t Know If It’s Love,” epitomizes what’s cool about this album, with its simple lyrics and strummed acoustic backing. It’s musically superb without getting head-scratchingly complex, and perfectly pop without getting boring. Basically, it’s all good.

Ah, but I was sure Calo would lose me with his third effort, the recently released Cowboy Song. It’s subtitled Contemporary Arrangements of Songs From the American West, and it doubles as a history lesson in 19th century ridin’ and ropin’ music. He does “Home On the Range,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “The Old Chisolm Trail,” for crying out loud. There’s no way, I thought, that I would enjoy this album.

But Calo surprised me for a third time: Cowboy Song is pretty terrific. It’s largely instrumental, and his arrangements are, as the title suggests, contemporary, yet respectful and oddly timeless. He performs “Red River Valley” with a string trio, for example, and he plays the sad, simple melody on acoustic guitar with reverence and grace. “The Old Chisolm Trail” rides on a modern backbeat with judicious slides on his resonator guitar, and he even sells the yodeled chorus. (“Come-a-ti-yi-yip-ee-yip-ee-yea.” Really.) In his hands, it sounds like a blues-rock lament.

Another highlight is, of course, Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” played without a trace of twang. In fact, the twang factor is kept at a perfect balance throughout Cowboy Song, which manages the neat trick of updating songs revered by Americana historians in such a way that the rest of the population and the history buffs can enjoy them for the same reasons. Calo brings many styles, including blues and gospel (especially on a sweet “Home On the Range”), to bear on these old chestnuts, and like the enduring songs they are, they rise to the challenge well.

So that’s three for three. Last month I had never heard of Peter Calo, and this month I confess that I’ve become a bit of a fan. With three albums in three distinctly different styles, all very well made, Calo has gotten me interested in what he does next. What more could you ask from any musician?

You can buy all three of Calo’s albums at his website, www.petercalo.com.

Next week, who the hell knows?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

As we barrel towards Oscar night, I feel the need to share this true story:

The newspaper I work for holds an Oscar contest every year, offering some form of fabulous prize for the readers who predict the winners in the Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress category. We run a multiple-choice ballot in the paper that lists the nominees in each category, so readers can fill it in and mail it back to us.

Well, we goofed a bit last week and ran last year’s ballot. That means the choices printed were up for Oscars last year – Best Picture listed Gladiator, Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Chocolat, for example. It didn’t take long for people to start sending these ballots in with their “predictions,” and we all wondered how we would handle the situation. Would we credit last year’s ballot, considering it was our mistake? If so, how would we separate those who actually predicted the winners from those who (if they didn’t already know) looked them up on the internet?

Turns out, we needn’t have worried. We’ve received several ballots from several readers to date, and all of them failed to predict last year’s winners. One guy guessed Gladiator, then crossed it out in favor of Traffic. One woman selected Juliette Binoche for Best Actress. We’ve contacted each of these people and sent them new ballots, and I wish them all the luck in the world, because apparently, they’ll need it.

* * * * *

I don’t care what anyone says, the Alarm was a great band.

The Welsh quartet was around for 10 years (1981-1991), and in that time, they never got the respect they were due, but by all accounts, they never achieved the height of their capabilities, either. They were always unfairly and unfavorably compared to U2, whom they shared a stage with on numerous tours. The sonic similarities are there to support such an argument – it’s possible that both bands discovered punk, reverbed pop and American traditional blues-rock at roughly the same time in their respective careers, but it’s unlikely. The way the bands explored those influences, however, was vastly different.

The real difference lies in the way both bands approached their own passion. While U2 has long been about giving the people a voice to look up to, the Alarm was always about being amongst the people, and singing with their voice. While their five albums are all wildly different from one another, that philosophy remained constant.

Lead singer Mike Peters has carried that torch through his solo career. He’s a successful artist in his native Wales, although he could walk down any street in America anonymously. The passionate fury of his voice is, along with Dave Sharp’s blistering guitar work, the defining characteristic of the Alarm, and the man’s commitment to his fans is legendary. There’s no other way to explain the existence of the Alarm 2000 box set, a phenomenally comprehensive document of a band few have ever heard. The Alarm’s sales never warranted such a retrospective from their label (or any label, for that matter), so Peters took it upon himself.

What he’s done with this set should be the blueprint for boxed compendiums. I have never spent so much money on any one piece of music – in United States dollars, the Alarm 2000 set is $180. That, my friends, is an absolute bargain. It’s almost as if someone handed Peters a handbook on creating the perfect box set. Here’s what he did:

First, he included every song from every album. Box sets are notorious for mixing and matching, providing random samplings of an artist’s career. This is crap. If an artist’s work is worth releasing in a deluxe set, then most likely the albums are meant to be heard as a whole. Expensive box sets shouldn’t be marketing tools, they should be lasting monuments. You shouldn’t have to seek out the albums afterwards to get the complete picture.

Hence, all 67 tracks from the Alarm’s career are present, in digitally remastered form. Each album appears on its own CD as well – none of that non-chronological scattershot technique you find with most sets of this nature. That alone would have been enough to get me excited about this project, but that’s just the first step.

Next, Peters filled out each CD with unreleased tracks, live versions, acoustic renditions, b-sides and more. Every album here benefits from this insight into the process and overall sound of the band during the period in which it was recorded. Most notably, the self-titled EP that launched their career in 1981 has been expanded to 22 tracks and more than 77 minutes, offering a full measure of the Alarm in their early stages. Even the six-track EP Electric Folklore Live has been transformed into a true live album, with 14 tracks over 78 minutes. All told, you get 128 tracks, nearly double the running orders of the original albums.

After all that, you’d never expect that there would be an additional eighth CD of rarities, but there it is. Rare Tracks includes 18 previously unreleased goodies, and offers another 78 minutes of music. All together, the Alarm 2000 collection serves up 146 songs, many of which appear in extended, previously unreleased versions. But of course, that’s not all.

What would a set like this be without detailed liner notes? These are more detailed than most, offering a complete history of the band from the first rehearsal to the final show, most often in the words of the four band members. (Besides Peters and Sharp, the Alarm included bassist Eddie MacDonald and drummer Nigel Twist.) Each album comes with its own extensive booklet, including the original cover art to each and lyrics to every song. Plus, since Peters dispensed with the original running orders on these discs (sequencing them in the order they should have appeared in the first place), each booklet offers information to program your CD player to duplicate the original sequences. All of this comes packaged in a deceptively small travel case, with sleeves for each disc and booklet.

But just you wait, because I haven’t mentioned the coolest thing of all. When you order the Alarm 2000 set (only available at www.thealarm.com), you can select your favorite song, write a dedication, and Peters will perform that song and dedicate it to you on a ninth CD. This is the ultimate extension of the Alarm’s commitment to their fans. Peters swears that he performs each of these requests individually, no matter how many people ask for the same song.

I asked for “No Frontiers,” a soaring anthem off the Change album from 1989, which has always been my favorite Alarm song. I requested no dedication, because I’m uncomfortable with the concept of music being tied to an individual, or of imposing that much of myself on Peters’ art. But I thought of one, and I mentally say it to myself whenever I play the disc. Peters performs “No Frontiers” like a world-weary songwriter looking back and trying to capture the youthful innocence of a forgotten time. His solo acoustic version trades the original’s ambition for an earthly realism, and somehow it suits the way I hear the song now, more than 10 years since I first fell in love with it. Plus, he kind of screws it up at the end, which is nifty.

Despite all my concerns about branding Peters’ version of “No Frontiers” with my own words, I confess a certain reverent thrill upon pressing play for the first time, and knowing that I was only the second person alive to hear that particular rendition. While that’s faded over time, I still get tingles when I hear it, and that feeling alone justifies the price for me. It’s the perfect icing on such a huge cake.

The Alarm 2000 set is exhausting to plow through, but ultimately more exciting than anything I’ve bought since the Choir’s similar comprehensive box, Never Say Never. It starts with both sides of the band’s first self-financed single from 1981, the ragged acoustic “Unsafe Building” and even more ragged electric “Up For Murder.” Amazingly, the passion is there from the start, with Peters’ often erratic voice riding on pure emotion and Sharp’s wrist-breaking acoustics setting the tone. The first disc jumps through five early demos before plunging into the meat of the eponymous EP and a seven-song mini-concert. (It’s a startling feature of this set that you often get multiple versions of songs you’ve never heard before, like “Reason 41,” which appears in demo, live and studio renditions, but never made an album.)

The Alarm is an angry, rough recording of anthems and rebel songs, especially the charmingly naive “Marching On.” The Alarm was a band that knew the value of a good “whoa-oh” in the chorus, something they likely nicked from the Clash, and that fist-pumping stridency reached its apex with one of the band’s best-known songs, “Sixty-Eight Guns,” which appears in demo and single versions on this first disc. Despite its thunderous chorus (“Sixty-eight guns will never die, sixty-eight guns our battle cry”), the group’s later maturity is hinted at even here in the plaintive middle section: “Through all the raging glory of the years, we never once thought of the fears for what we’d do, when the battle cry was over…”

“Sixty-Eight Guns” made its full appearance on the Alarm’s first album, Declaration, in 1984. Produced by Alan Shacklock, this record smoothed out the ragged edges while leaving the rough intensity of the EP. Performed almost entirely on furiously played acoustic guitars, Declaration is a slice of folk-punk that feels like a flower coming into bloom. (The Alarm’s trademark symbol, which appeared on every album cover and on the cover of this box, was an exploding blood-red poppy.) It manages to be diverse and unified at once, another trait they learned from the Clash, and it delves deeper into the spiritual side of the band’s rebellious nature.

Declaration jumps from the finger-pointing rage of “Where Were You Hiding When the Storm Broke” to the menacing throb of sniper tale “Third Light” to the crunchy electric blues of “Howling Wind,” but if any one song defines this period of the Alarm’s history, it’s the epic “Blaze of Glory.” It’s a twisty number that incorporates military drums, trumpets and banjos seamlessly, fades off into a mournful fanfare midway through, and comes charging back for Dave Sharp’s rousing finale. With lyrics about picking yourself up and learning how to fight back, it may be the ultimate rebel song.

This disc also includes seven unreleased contenders for the album, including the bluesy “Reason 41” and the surprisingly pop “The Chant Has Just Begun.” You also get covers of traditional folk tune “Bells of Rhymney” and Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory,” as well as the single version of the song the band released with visions of stardom, “Absolute Reality.” It’s a precursor to (and appears on) one of the most consistent Alarm albums, 1985’s Strength.

The band went electric for their second full-length, and they wrote some of their best songs. The title track is a standout, as is the epic “Spirit of ’76,” the pure punk “Deeside,” the sweet “Walk Forever By My Side” and the masterful, heartbreaking “The Day the Ravens Left the Tower.” You get a couple of unreleased cuts (“Majority” being the best), a roughshod electric version of later standout “One Step Closer to Home,” and a quartet of live tracks, but mostly, the highlights are the 10 fantastic, invigorating songs that made up Strength. Some maintain they never got better than this.

While I can’t join in that opinion, I will concede that they sort of lost their way on 1987’s Eye of the Hurricane, but since it s the first Alarm album I heard, I have a sentimental attachment to it. Eye is the most altered of the discs, since it turns out that the band was only partly to blame for the way the original release sounded. This album found the band caught between trying to make a hit record and an Alarm record, and the results were predictably strained. Synthesizers and drum machines took over, especially on pseudo-hit “Rain in the Summertime,” and the band sounded unconvinced that this was the right way to go.

Well, surprise surprise, the version of Eye I’d been listening to all these years is a poorly edited mix the label foisted on the group, with the guitars mostly removed or subdued. The Alarm 2000 set corrects this blight by offering the mix the band gave the label, intact. And it’s a bit of a revelation – “Newtown Jericho” now sounds like the anti-anthem it was always meant to, “Summertime” is more of a full band groove than a computerized one, and “Shelter” cranks up the electric guitars over sections that were once just acoustic. Sure, the songs are still poppier than they’d been, especially the ballad “Presence of Love,” but the sound is less tentative. Finally, Eye sounds like an Alarm album, like the band is as invested in it as they are the rest of their catalog.

The Alarm were a bit of a rarity in the ’80s: a great live band that also made great records. The stage, however, is where they shone, and Electric Folklore, expanded to a full document of the Alarm’s stint with U2 on the Joshua Tree tour, is the proof. I’d almost recommend new listeners checking this out first, because this is one hell of a live album. I’d always been bothered by the sequencing of the original release, and apparently Peters has been too, because he corrects every one of my concerns. Rightful opener “Strength” now kicks off the set, “Blaze of Glory” nests comfortably in the middle, and the one-two punch of extended renditions of “Rescue Me” and “Spirit of ’76” now appear in the showstopper positions they always should have. In many ways, this is the height of the collection.

Fresh from the biggest tour of their lives and determined not to make the same mistakes they made with Eye, the band huddled down with producer Tony Visconti and in 1989 released their finest work, the lengthy Change. Here they explored American blues and English pop, traditional folk and Welsh choral arrangements. It’s a stylistic departure, and yet the semi-hit “Sold Me Down the River” sounds like a direct descendant of “Howling Wind,” off of Declaration. Change lives up to its title, but it progresses nicely from what came before. Most impressive, though, is Peters himself, who finally learned to harness that powerful voice of his to suit the various styles.

Peters has called this album “the double album that could have been,” and here he gets the chance to rectify that a bit. Many songs on Change were edited down to fit on one piece of vinyl, but the original versions appear here, including Dave Sharp’s wonderful jam outro to “No Frontiers.” Three unreleased tracks join the 14 originals, and if you’ve never heard the album, you’d be hard-pressed to pick them out. They’re just as good as the album tracks. Change concludes with one of the band’s finest moments, the fully orchestrated “A New South Wales,” performed with a Welsh male voice choir.

In essence, Change was the band’s swan song. Their final album, Raw, released in 1991, is not so much an album as it is a slipshod collection of the final studio tracks the Alarm recorded. Dave Sharp took over vocals on several tracks, heralding his upcoming solo career. The recording is, in fact, quite raw, considering most of it was done live and self-produced. The original album consisted of three new Peters tracks, three new Sharp songs, three old numbers the band had been playing for years, and a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

But as released here, Raw takes its place as the band’s sad farewell. Peters bumps the running order up to 15 tracks, including two that were recorded for the best-of collection Standards. With the full picture, the lyrics to “Moments in Time” take on resonance as a wave goodbye. As a capper on their career, the band recorded updated versions of both sides of their first single (“Unsafe Building” and “Up For Murder”), and covered John Lennon’s wistful “Happy X-Mas (War is Over).” The final track, and most heartbreaking, is a newly discovered recording on “the last few inches of tape on the last reel of the last recording session,” an acoustic duet between Sharp and Peters on “Walk Forever By My Side.” Rarely has a band made their final album so final.

And the Rare Tracks disc? All intriguing stuff, especially for the longtime fan. My favorites are an impromptu acoustic version of “Absolute Reality,” a demo for an unreleased song called “Firing Line,” a live version of “Rivers to Cross” with a jamming violin player, and a hushed and caustic acoustic reading of Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.” Rare Tracks ends with an acoustic version of “No Frontiers,” which, when paired with Peters’ version on my dedication disc, adds a nice symmetry to the whole set.

It’s rare that a band will offer up such a complete version of itself, with none of the edges smoothed out. The Alarm 2000 set is the ultimate example of a band having nothing to hide. If you think, as I do, of musical entities as living, breathing organisms that change and grow over time, then a set like this is a dream come true, the total evolution of a musical entity in a single box. Most importantly in my mind, a set like this, so lovingly and painstakingly crafted, signals that the music of the Alarm is as important to Mike Peters as it is to me and thousands of others, and thanks to his efforts and commitment, Alarm fans new and old will always be able to enjoy it. So thanks, Mike.

“There are no frontiers
That we can’t cross tonight
There are no borderlines
To keep us apart…”

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Before I get rolling on this monstrosity, let me satisfy my inner geek, who’s growling at me to mention this…

Did everyone see the Star Wars trailer on TV? Doesn’t it look exactly like Phantom Menace? What in hell took so long to make this movie? It appears as though they just cut and spliced CGI shots from Episode One and tacked new dialogue on top of it. And the dialogue’s not even that new, really – still a bunch of bureaucratic back-and-forth about not wanting to go to war. Okay, it’s not all that bad, but I’m really in this one for the nostalgia, and the cool-looking action scenes. And I will admit, the six-year-old in me gasped in shock and dread at that first sweeping shot of the army of stormtroopers. I knew the story, I knew it was coming, and still I gasped. That’s got to be a good thing, and will hopefully offset those clones, which have always sounded like a weak plot device to me. The seeds of the Empire are evident even from the trailer, and if the film sticks with that sense of foreboding, this one and the next could be really good.

Plus, no fucking Jar Jar. Bonus points for that.

Still, Lucas, you’re on probation, especially since your ratio of good movies to bad is all tied up right now. (For the record, A New Hope and Empire are the good ones.) You need to knock this one out of the park, if you’re capable. You need to make the origins and history of the Empire believable and frightening. Having spent the last 20 years building your very own empire, you should have plenty of insight to draw from, right? Right. The Fanboy Nation stands in judgment in less than two months.

Speaking of judgments, here’s a bunch of ’em:

* * * * *

I knew this was going to happen.

If you’re a fan of the Indigo Girls, you probably shared in my moment of prognostication. I was sure it would happen a lot sooner than it did, though, which surprised me. Back in 1996, when the Girls released Swamp Ophelia, an album so much bigger, louder and ballsier than anything this unassuming folk duo had done before, I figured it for an experiment, and predicted that they would be back to making sweet acoustic folk music by their next album.

They fooled me. It turned out that Ophelia was the first step in a progression, which continued with building force on 1998’s mammoth Shaming of the Sun and 2000’s overblown and somewhat forgettable Come On Now Social. The guitars got more ferocious, the lyrics more biting, and the tempos more relentless. In places on Social, in fact, the twosome experimented with dissonance that would have made Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore smile like a proud papa.

The Girls have always had a dichotomy going on, with Emily Saliers’ more melodic folk leanings brushing up against Amy Ray’s more explosive rock tendencies. It was little surprise, then, that the buildup finally reached its head on Ray’s propulsive solo album, Stag. This was Ray in pure punkus outus mode, screaming over stunningly noisy rhythms and feedback-drenched electric guitars. If you were to play this album and Nomads, Indians, Saints back to back, you’d never guess it was the same Amy Ray.

After that, of course, there was nowhere to go but back down, and the Girls have done so gracefully on their eighth studio album, Become You. This is an album I expected in 1998, but it sounds even more nostalgically wondrous in 2002, after the last few outings. It’s completely acoustic-based, the emphasis is on harmonies, and it’s the sweetest album they’ve made since Rites of Passage, which it brings to mind constantly. There’s no bitterness, no bile, just a lovely, simple album of love songs. And I didn’t realize how much I’d missed this sound from these two.

Honestly, I’d love to hate Become You for the backslide it represents, for the fact that it blithely ignores the last eight years of the Indigos’ musical development, but I can’t. It’s such a winsome creation, made with such obvious joy, that attacking it would seem petty and small. Unlike some of their recent works, Become You wants nothing more than to provide 40 minutes of sweet, enjoyable folk-pop, and its very unimportance in the Girls’ catalog is sort of its prime feature. If you’ve ever liked the Indigo Girls, you’ll like this album. A lot.

One major thing in this album’s favor is that it features the return of the gorgeous harmonies that buoyed the Girls’ first five albums. Can anyone name two other modern singers whose voices sound like they belong together, like they were sculpted from the ether specifically to complement each other? I can’t. When the pair winds their way through Saliers’ beautiful piano ballad “Deconstruction,” it’s like welcoming an old friend home. It’s soaring and intimate at the same time, and listening to it and its 11 counterparts on Become You, you remember why these two coffeehouse folkies became stars in the first place.

Like many artists who are personally as well as musically involved, Indigo Girls albums have always had an emotionally charged edge. It’s fairly apparent when they’re writing songs about each other, and lately they’ve been moving away from that, chasing individual concerns. In many ways, Become You is a breakup and makeup album, an often painful examination of a creative and personal relationship that still yields rewards, more than 15 years after its start. The title track, reminiscent of “Power of Two” from Swamp Ophelia, sums it all up: “It took a long time to become the thing I am to you, and you won’t tear it apart without a fight, without a heart, it took a long time to become you…”

Even more revealing is Saliers’ “You’ve Got to Show,” about connections and compromise: “Why don’t we both agree we’re both afraid and too afraid to say, if I say count to three and move toward me would you meet me half the way, there are a thousand things about me I want only you to know, but I can’t go there alone, you’ve got to show.” The prevailing mood is one of learning to work with and love someone all over again, and is filled with the sense that any relationship, be it personal, musical or whatever, takes work and time and compromise.

Become You is the first “classic” Indigo Girls album in a long time, and it easily rekindles the abiding love these two have engendered from the start. While the previous few releases may have taken time to settle and sink in, this one is immediate. Had they followed my prediction and released an album like this in 1996, it would have seemed safe and cowardly. They’ve more than earned this return to their roots, and the album is all the sweeter when you consider how far they journeyed from home.

* * * * *

Beck gets an awful lot of credit for what amounts to standing outside the music industry, at a safe ironic distance, and commenting on it. He’s got an amazing sonic sense, I’ll grant, and his patchwork albums are marvels of cut-and-splice wizardry. The thing is, though, he’s never, not even in his quieter acoustic moments, emotionally invested in his music.

All of which is a long way of opining that the Eels, often lumped in with Beck as ironic collage studio nerds, have the edge because the emotion is always there. Beck albums are sonically satisfying, but Eels albums go the full nine by engaging your heart, mind and ears all at once. It’s no real surprise that they’re on Dreamworks Records, because no other major label would allow them to make the records they make.

I keep saying “they,” and I guess Eels is technically a band, but in truth it’s a shield of relative anonymity for the mastermind, a guy named Mark Everett who usually just goes by E. Every Eels album is as personal a project for E as any strumming folkie’s work, a fact that’s often lost behind his bizarre studio sensibility. An Eels song just doesn’t sound right unless it sounds somehow wrong, and the best part about E is that he’s completely unselfconscious about the off-kilter nature of his music. It probably all just sounds right to him.

I often liken Eels music to a satisfying independent comic book. The indie comix ethos strives for work that is honest at the cost of just about everything else, and the development of style out of limitations. Hence, many indie books are acquired tastes, because the work seems sketchy, almost unfinished, but once you’re finished with the book, you realize that the style is inseparable from the effect of the story. Essentially, if you strip everything else away, honesty animates even the sketchiest of outlines, and dishonesty is doubly easy to spot.

Similarly, Eels songs sound somewhat unfinished upon first exposure to E’s singular style. This isn’t quirky for quirky’s sake, however – it’s E expressing himself in the only way he knows how. When I mention to people that the last two Eels albums, Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies of the Galaxy, deal exclusively with the suicide of E’s sister and the wasting death from cancer of his mother, they’re often left with the understandable expectation that both CDs are really depressing. Astonishingly, they may be the most realistically uplifting albums about death ever recorded.

Electro-Shock Blues in particular presents its ruminations on suicide and loss amidst a carnival of unlikely sounds and trippy beats. Daisies is more subdued and acoustic, but no less winsome, as if it’s working overtime to cheer its author up. Electro-Shock is about denial and Daisies is about acceptance, and they fit together like two halves of a great comic book novel. They’re mirror images of each other: Electro-Shock is a bunch of sad songs about learning to be happy, while Daisies is a bunch of happy songs about learning to be sad.

With this tiny magnum opus behind him, E has thankfully simply gone back to work. Eels’ fourth album, the just-released Souljacker, is just that: another Eels album. It’s 12 great unconnected songs about funny, strange, sad people, made with E’s trademark quirky genius. Think of it as an anthology of short comic book stories.

And most of them are stories in their own right. Consider “Jungle Telegraph,” about (and I’m quoting the hilarious liner notes here) “a man who was born during a terrible storm, grows up to be a teenage prostitute, kills a man in self-defense and flees to the jungles of Africa to live out the rest of his life in a tree.” Really. “Bus Stop Boxer” is an examination of the psyche of a guy who beats people up at bus stops. “Dog Faced Boy” is actually about a boy with a dog’s face, and it revolves around the line, “Mommy won’t shave me, Jesus can’t save me.” I can’t make this shit up.

The truth is that E loves and identifies with each of his characters, and he intersperses their stories with his own. “Fresh Feeling” might be the most unironic love song in the band’s short history, buoyed by a terrific string arrangement, and it’s particularly surprising on the heels of “That’s Not Really Funny,” a studio wonderama about emasculation. Closing rave-up “What Is This Note” is absolutely heartwarming lyrically, and surprise surprise, “World of Shit” is actually a sweet love song: “Baby I confess, I am quite a mess, so let’s get married and make some people more than equal in this world of shit.” Well, sort of sweet.

While not as personal as past albums, Souljacker is perhaps E’s most enjoyable effort to date. And, if you’re lucky and run to the record store quickly, you can get the version that comes packaged with a four-song EP called Rotten World Blues. It’s caustic, it’s hilarious, and it begins with a semi-parody called “I Write the B-Sides.”

E’s off-kilter songcraft is not for everyone, of course. It’s also not going to set the world on fire, nor will it even make my Top 10 List, most likely. But as long as he’s allowed to make these little missives from his unique corner of the world, then the rest of the world is all the more improved for it. And if the general public somehow comes around to his way of hearing things, so much the better. Souljacker is another little window into this strange little universe that exists in E’s head that we get to experience for 40 minutes or so a year, in which E tries to explain to us what it’s like to live there full time.

* * * * *

Why is it that so many bands that start off with a cool, original sound end up wanting to sound like everyone else?

The most grating example I can think of is The Moon Seven Times, who traded the blissful dream-pop of their first two wondrous albums for the compacted and radio-friendly rock of their third (and final). Admittedly, they might not be the best example, as it’s easy to imagine such a decision being made for sales concerns. But what about the bands and musicians that start out selling like gangbusters with a unique sound? Michael Penn comes to mind – while I like his subsequent albums, none match the nifty acoustics-and-computers vibe of his debut, March, which outsold the others combined.

And then there’s Jars of Clay. Their self-titled debut was described to me by my friend Chris L’Etoile as “Toad the Wet Sprocket moves down south, finds Jesus and a drum machine,” and I can’t come up with a better summation of the sound. The debut sported soaring acoustic pop augmented by dance club loops, combined in a way that few acts had done before. It also brought Jars their only real hit, a frenzy of six-string fury called “Flood.”

Now you’d think that the band would consider the sound of the record an integral part of the success of the record, but no. Subsequent albums have become gradually more normal and average, and on the band’s fourth full-lengther, The Eleventh Hour, the descent bottoms out. You couldn’t tell Jars apart from 90 percent of the crap on the radio now, and that’s a shame.

What’s doubly interesting about the band’s collapse this time out is that they produced Hour themselves. One can almost understand a product this bland and uninspiring coming from a label-sanctioned production team, or a songwriting committee, but no. The band sequestered themselves away from distraction, poured their creative energy into what they’re calling their finest work, and this is what they came up with. They have no one to blame for its facelessness but themselves. There are one or two hooks on the album that catch the ear, but not many. The chorus of “Something Beautiful” is interesting, and… and, well, that’s about it.

Jars also abandon Jesus for the most part on this album, which some will see as an improvement and some will call a sell-out. I just think it points to the overall sanitized blandness of the whole production. There is one exception – the genuine expression of doubt that is “Silence,” in which singer Dan Haseltine whimpers, “All I pray is wrong, and all I claim is gone, I got a question, where are you?” However, a couple of tracks later, he’s back praising God (or a girl – it’s just vague enough that we can’t tell) with a joyous, “Your love can make these things better.” It’s such an empty set of lyrics that the religious and the heartbroken can fill in their own blanks and come away with completely different messages, which, from a marketing standpoint, is probably the goal.

I find it hard to believe that a band that was once as creative and energetic as Jars of Clay can’t, when given ample opportunity, come up with anything better than this. My hope is that eventually they’ll realize that no one ever made great music by trying to please everyone who hears it. In time, their sales figures will fade, their fame will disappear, and they’ll be left with nothing but the music, a permanent record of commercial concerns winning out over artistic ones.

* * * * *

The Corrs are a study in strange irony. The four siblings have been described as “obscenely attractive,” and they’re superstars in Europe for their trademark blend of sugary pop and traditional Celtic folk. In fact, the Corrs are famous pretty much everywhere else but America, and they’ve been trying for years to crack our defenses. Each album has included an increasing amount of MTV-style dance-pop, de-emphasizing the Celtic elements in the process. There were two versions of their second, Talk on Corners: a worldwide version that balanced the sounds and a “special edition” for America that cranked up the beats. And there was nary a fiddle to be found on their third, In Blue.

Oddly enough, it just isn’t working. The more “American” they sound, the less popular they are in America, and the end result has been a couple of depressing albums from a group that can do much better. How do I know? There are at least two pieces of recorded evidence that the Corrs can be a great band if the want to be. The first is their Unplugged CD, pretty much unavailable in the U.S. The second has just been released courtesy of VH-1, and it’s called Live in Dublin. You know, Dublin, Ireland? Where they’re famous?

This album is what the Corrs always should have sounded like. The balance between their pop and traditional leanings is in full effect, especially on their pipes-laden cover of Jimi Hendrix’ “Little Wing.” Their originals, mostly from the last two beat-happy albums, thrive in this organic setting. The hit “Breathless,” especially, has never been better, sugary harmonies and all.

A lot of live albums are just rehashes of album tracks, but the Corrs know better, and they’ve given over roughly half of Live in Dublin to swell covers of unexpected tunes. The previously mentioned “Little Wing” stands next to Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” featuring that band’s bassist Ron Wood. The Celtic instruments get a workout as well on the traditionals “Joy of Life” and “Trout in the Bath,” appended into an energetic medley.

The most fascinating cover here, though, is of Ryan Adams’ glorious “When the Stars Go Blue.” This song is buried halfway through Adams’ 75-minute Gold, but it’s given a chance to really shine here. The band brings the ubiquitous Bono on stage to sing, and I would think that for Adams, that would be one hell of a compliment. If the singer of one of the biggest bands in the world was in Dublin crooning my song, well, I’d have been on a plane to see the show, and in line at the record store the second the disc became available. As expected, the band does a great job, but it would be hard to mess up such a great song.

Hopefully this release is a taste of things to come, a sign that the Corrs understand that they may never crack a fickle America, and that they’re too good to pander to the teeny-bopper set, and they should just sound like themselves. We shall see…

* * * * *

The Corrs would have the title of Best Star-Studded, Covers-Laden Live Album From Across the Ocean all wrapped up this month, if not for one Neil Finn.

Finn has had such bad luck in his career that he’s due for a run of the good stuff, I’d think. He fronted two semi-successful bands, Split Enz in the ’80s and Crowded House in the ’90s, neither of which managed more than one or two hits in the U.S., despite the fact that between them they released maybe three bad songs out of nearly 100. His solo debut, Try Whistling This, died on arrival here in America, although its minor hit status in Finn’s native New Zealand secured him a second solo disc, One Nil, in 2000. Of course, we have yet to see this disc stateside.

Thank God Nettwerk Records has picked up the ball and run with it. They plan to release One Nil (inexplicably retitled One All for the U.S.) on May 21, and they just put out the warmup, a new live album called 7 Worlds Collide. This 17-track stunner belongs in a textbook with instructions on how to create the perfect live album.

First, it’s important to make the concert you’re recording an event. Finn invited six other worlds to New Zealand to come collide with his own – Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway of Radiohead, Lisa Germano, Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, Finn’s brother Tim, and his son Liam. Then he selected a wide variety of tunes from both his career and those of his guests. In short, if you’re looking for a comprehensive Neil Finn overview, this’ll do ya. Songs range from his earliest work with Split Enz to three tracks from the upcoming album (which of course everyone in the audience had heard already…grrr…).

Those three tracks, if they’re indicative of One Nil/All‘s overall sound, point towards a collection of classic Neil Finn. He’s one of the world’s greatest living pop songwriters, no question. Just listen to the gentle melodic uplift of “Turn and Run,” or the meandering beauty of “Anytime,” perhaps the second-sweetest song about dying in a car crash ever penned. These songs stand alongside old favorites like “Weather With You” and “She Will Have Her Way” with confidence and grace.

Finn isn’t the only one on display here, though. Vedder takes an early vocal turn on Split Enz’ “Take a Walk,” and Tim Finn’s piano ballad “Stuff and Nonsense.” Germano steps forward for her own “Paper Doll,” and Johnny Marr sings his own “Down On the Corner” before stepping aside to let Finn display his Morrissey impression on the sweetest song about dying in a car crash ever penned, the Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” Neil and Tim duet on a couple of tracks from the forgotten Finn Brothers album, most notably “Angels Heap,” and they perform “Edible Flowers,” a gorgeous track that for some reason didn’t make the record.

Top all of this off with a lovely acoustic version of “Don’t Dream It’s Over” and you’ve got a well-spent 74 minutes. Finn (as I’ve said many times before about many other artists) doesn’t get the recognition his talents deserve. Hopefully this stateside push will be just the boost his career needs, mainly because I don’t want to have to pay import prices to hear his new stuff from now on. Come on, America, help a brother out. Check out 7 Worlds Collide.

* * * * *

I’m just about at 4000 words, and thanks for wading through all this, but there’s one thing I need to mention before I go. I had the chance to see Mike Roe play guitar this week in Livonia, Michigan. Seriously, if this guy is anywhere near you (and I drove 3.5 hours for this show), go and see him. Even if you don’t know any of the songs, it’s worth it just to hear what he can do with an acoustic guitar. He ended the show I saw by finger-picking one of his most heart-wrenching songs, “Ache Beautiful,” and segueing into a drop-dead gorgeous rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Kathy’s Song.” The show landed somewhere in my top five I’ve ever seen, and remember, I used to review live music for a living. Seriously. Go. Check www.michaelroe.com for tour dates and CDs.

Next week, I dive into the Alarm 2000 box set (a mere two years late). The week after that, you and I both get acquainted with guitarist Peter Calo.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

There is no greater sound in the world than that of a group of talented musicians doing whatever the hell they want.

That’s the guiding philosophy behind Tuesday Morning, and in fact my life as a music fan. When circumstances, passion and talent align, the result is more often than not sublime. A really great piece of music, written and recorded by great musicians with no concerns other than the artistic, can bring you closer to whatever God or guiding force that holds the universe together. It can speak of better worlds just out of the reach of this one, and provide windows through which you may glimpse them and believe.

Unfortunately, 90 percent of all recorded works don’t even attempt to draw back the blinds and reach for whatever waits beyond. 90 percent of all musicians are blinded, clouded or otherwise held back by financial or personal constraints that prevent them from even trying to act as the conduit to something greater. Of the remaining 10 percent that try, most of them fail in one way or another. The sheer number of coincidences that can derail even the finest and purest artistic plans point towards the making of a truly great creative work as a statistical near impossibility.

If this is getting a little too metaphysical for you, well, let me bring it back to earth. I’ve recently been taken to task (not unkindly, mind) twice by two separate readers for the rules I use to formulate my Top 10 Lists. Most pointedly, these readers both agree that my decision to only include those albums released stateside during a given year is bogus and ill-conceived. More than likely, I’ll be changing the rules at some point to accommodate my newfound worldwide audience (which I still can scarcely believe, so if you’re reading this someplace outside of the continental United States, thank you), but I’d like to point out that I’ve broken them before. One band has forced my hand on at least one occasion to include their discs on the list, even though you can’t find them in record stores, because the music was so original and fantastic that not including them would be criminal.

That band is Maine’s own Cerberus Shoal.

Without my time at Face Magazine, I might never have stumbled across this band, and I’d never know what I’d been missing. I got the opportunity to meet them as well, and to discover just how artistically driven they are. At the time of our interview, the band had just restructured itself into its boldest and best six-man lineup, and was just about to embark on a musical trip with no clear destination. I caught them at the cusp, and they knew just how great they could be then. Four years later, they’d burned brightly and dissolved, but they left behind a three-hour testament to art for art’s sake.

The sextet lineup, which included the three members of local soundscapers Tarpigh, made three albums. Designed as a trilogy, the discs came out slowly. The fascinating, layered Homb descended in 1999, followed by the stranger, denser Crash My Moon Yacht in 2000. Both featured webs of exotic percussion wrapping around intricate guitar and trumpet melodies, augmented by dozens of instruments from around the world. The resulting sound is nearly impossible to describe. Dreamy, atmospheric, cascading, heavy, unfettered and almost entirely wordless, Cerberus had practically created a new art form all their own.

The final part of the trilogy languished, delayed and incomplete, for more than a year. During that time, the band split amicably, with the Tarpigh trio striking out on their own again and Cerberus taking on two new members (and an entirely new sound) and moving forward. Their final album together, rumored to be a double disc that would set the other two records on their ears, looked as though it would join the annals of the great lost recordings.

But lo and behold, Mr. Boy Dog is here. The rumors were right – it’s a double disc set, even though the 68 minutes of music it contains would fit nicely on one CD, and it sets the other two records on their ears.

The unfortunate thing about pure art, from a reviewer’s standpoint, is that it defies efforts to reduce it to words. Mr. Boy Dog has confounded my attempts to review it for a few days now. I can’t pin it down with proper comparisons or contexts, so I’m reduced to fluffy adjectives that tell you pretty much nothing. I can only compare it to other Cerberus Shoal albums, because I know of no other band moving in the direction they moved to arrive at this work. I can only tell you that it is a destination point, a grand finale, a huge and daunting final sprint across the finish line.

Whereas both Homb and Moon Yacht were exercises in drawing out moods, the nine longer tracks on Mr. Boy Dog are relatively concise. The songs are infinitely more complex and dizzying this time out, drawing influences from acid jazz, progressive rock and tribal rhythmic circles, usually all at once. Melodies spring out of nowhere, building on the steadiest foundation this band has ever laid down. The album feels tense and dramatic, even when the melodies are not, as on “Vuka” and “Nod.” This tension makes the 11-minute release of the final track, “An Egypt that Does Not Exist,” seem monumental. In fact, the whole album feels massive, even monolithic.

As towering an achievement as Mr. Boy Dog is on its own, it gains new dimensions when heard as the final act of a trilogy. The occasional aimlessness of previous albums now feels like winding paths toward a well-earned goal. Considering how much the band grew between albums, it’s amazing how much Mr. Boy Dog makes it sound like they knew where they were going all along.

Perhaps the finality of the record wouldn’t sound so…well, final if the band hadn’t split before its release. We (and, I suspect, they) will never really know where they could have gone next. Neither of the musicians’ new incarnations show the promise of Mr. Boy Dog, either: Tarpigh’s new album, Monsieur Monsoon, feels small and scattered in comparison, and Cerberus Shoal, with the addition of two singers, has gone in an off-kilter and vocal-driven direction with their single, Garden Fly Drip Eye. Since both projects’ release preceded Boy Dog, they’re both unfortunately reminiscent of the Beatles’ solo work that came out before Let It Be, reminding everyone that the band was much more than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps sadder than the funereal aspect of Mr. Boy Dog is that relatively few people will ever hear it. It’s been released on tiny Baltimore label Temporary Residence, and is only available through one of two websites: www.cerberusshoal.com or www.temporaryresidence.com. If you agree with the first sentence of this column, and you can think of no sweeter sound than that of a group of talented musicians doing whatever the hell they want, then you won’t find sweeter sounds than those contained on Mr. Boy Dog.

Next week, a big huge column with at least five reviews. You’ll just have to wait and see what they are.

See you in line Tuesday morning.