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.