God, what a year it’s been.

It moved simultaneously faster than light and slower than dirt. It was, simultaneously, the worst year in recent memory as far as my personal life goes, but somehow ended up one of the best years I can recall for music. I’ve taken up too many column inches this year with my own heartbreak and despair, and at this point, I’ve already said good riddance to 2003 in my mind, so why repeat that here? It’s better to focus the last column of the year on the positive aspects of the past 12 months, artistically speaking, and I can think of no better way to accomplish this than with my annual Year-End Top 10 List.

Honestly, it wasn’t until I was compiling this list that I realized what a banner year we’ve had as far as good new music goes. Most of the 10 albums on my list have, with one notable exception, slipped beneath the radar of the mainstream music media, but having to dig and discover treasure doesn’t make it any less valuable. At one point, my honorable mentions numbered more than double those albums in my list – I’ve rectified that, of course, but it demonstrates just how much good stuff found its way out this year.

Of course, there is a downside, and as usual, it’s my increasingly irritating rules. I know, they’re self-imposed and can easily be self-repealed, but I still think they’re valuable, even considering the growing number of great records they force me to exclude every year. I’ve pared the rules down to the following: Only new, original studio albums released between the first of January and the 31st of December are eligible. That sounds easy enough, but it leads to some conundrums, as you shall see.

Most distressingly, once again my favorite album of the year has been disqualified. Last year it was Ben Folds Live, and the same rule (no live albums) keeps Jeff Buckley’s mesmerizing, captivating, altogether superhuman Live at Sin-E from topping the list. But take it from me – music in 2003 got no better than this album. If you’ve heard that perhaps this Buckley guy was pretty good, but you’ve never understood why, even after hearing “Last Goodbye,” people talk about him like some mythic being, then you have to hear this. Two hours, one guy, one guitar, and one indescribable, spirit-touching voice.

Why isn’t it atop the list if it’s the best of the year? Well, it was recorded in 1993, and four tracks from it actually preceded Buckley’s 1994 debut, Grace, as the original Live at Sin-E EP. Put simply, it’s not new, even though we’re just now hearing most of it. It’s also live, and it’s additionally made up mainly of covers. The songs are interpreted and reinvented by Buckley, it’s true, but the original compositions were not, by and large, his. These rules are important – they keep the likes of Frank Sinatra off this list every year.

They’re also going to keep Johnny Cash off this list this year, unfortunately, but he should be used to it by now. His Unearthed box set, compiled before his death but released posthumously, is far and away one of the best sets of studio recordings I heard this year. Like all things Cash, it’s mostly filled with interpretations of others’ songs, which doesn’t disqualify it as art, but it does prevent it from living up to the criteria of new, original studio albums.

The word “albums” caused me some consternation this year as well. Almost as a rule, I don’t include EPs or mini-albums in this list, no matter how amazing they are. What I didn’t count on is the unfortunate tendency this year to cleave albums in two, calling the result EPs. For instance, Ryan Adams would likely have garnered an honorable mention for his Love Is Hell, had it been released whole. Instead, his record company released it in two halves, neither one of which could stand on its own.

Ben Folds also shot himself in the foot this year, as far as this list goes. His planned trilogy of EPs was truncated to a duology, but had he combined Speed Graphic and Sunny 16 into one 10-song document, he’d have had a decent shot at the top 10. But that’s all right – we’ll probably see Folds in this space next year, when he delivers his full-length album.

I know that in the era of downloadable singles and I-Pods, such concerns about format must seem quaint, but I, for one, will mourn the impending death of the album. Already we’re seeing bands take to the internet to release single after single, and if they do make a hard-copy album at all, the result sounds like what it is – a collection of songs that were never meant to sit together. I’m a believer in the complete album statement, and the above rule strongly reflects that. A solid disc, from beginning to end, should be the goal of any musical artist, and I like to reward those who can carry that off for extended running times. Soon the album-length statement as we know it will be gone, but here at my corner of the web, we’re going to celebrate it while it’s here.

Which brings me to the honorable mentions. I think there are more Number 11s this year than any in recent memory, and most are excluded from the list for the tiniest of reasons. Everything I’m about to list from here on out is worth a listen, if not a purchase. As I said, it was an extraordinary year, and here are several extraordinary works that back me up:

Near the top of the list must be Blur’s Think Tank, the first of our #11s. While there are certainly some bum tracks here (“Crazy Beat,” “We’ve Got a File On You”), the majority of Think Tank is given over to some of the warmest electro-pop you’re likely to hear. It’s odd that atop mechanical backdrops, Damon Albarn delivers one of his warmest vocal performances to date. It’s a winning synthesis of the metallic and the organic, and perhaps the sweetest and saddest album Blur has made.

Radiohead finally delivered on their own promise again with Hail to the Thief, their first collection of actual songs since 1997. Among them is “Scatterbrain,” one of the most haunting works of the year, but the remainder of the album is uncharacteristically excellent as well. At times they even sound like a band again, one that perhaps remembers how great Radiohead used to be. Thief doesn’t scale the heights the band once did with apparent ease, but at least it finds them looking at the right mountain and judging the distance again.

Mark Eitzel should be on this list, but I can’t allow it. His The Ugly American is fantastic, a collection of older Eitzel songs performed with Greek musicians who add surprising depth and emotion. And Eitzel found reserves of emotion within his voice as well – he sounds better here than he has in years. Sadly, it’s still a collection of older songs, not new ones, and hence is ineligible. But it’s overwhelmingly wonderful just the same.

OutKast struck a blow for ambition and artistry with the world of hip-hop with their double-disc extravaganza Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. I heard fewer rap albums this year than usual, mostly because what I heard all sounded the same, but Big Boi’s half of this record easily outdoes everything I encountered. And Andre 3000… well, what can I say about a guy who wants to be Prince, George Clinton and Al Green all at once? His half is a mind-boggling mess that solidifies OutKast’s position as the most creative rap outfit currently performing.

I missed Ester Drang’s wonderful Goldenwest two years ago, and while they didn’t quite top it with this year’s shorter, more direct Infinite Keys, they made an album of dreamy pop that rises above most of their contemporaries. I say most because one of them landed at number 10, after much consideration and flip-flopping. Suffice it to say that my final decision is a lot less final in my mind than here in print, and should anyone like Infinite Keys better than my number 10 choice, I wouldn’t blame you a bit. It’s a terrific, powerful little record.

Which brings us to Warren Zevon. We said goodbye to Zevon this year, but not before he crafted his final aloha, a rollicking yet tender little album called The Wind. Much like George Harrison’s Brainwashed last year, I find myself unable to adequately judge The Wind as an album, so wrapped up in the emotions of its finality is every song. “Keep Me In Your Heart” makes me cry almost every time, though, and that alone is worthy of an honorable mention. As an album, I don’t know where it fits, but as the final farewell from cynical, hard-bitten Warren Zevon, it’s pretty well perfect.

Okay, enough of my babble. Let’s see the list:

#10. Grandaddy, Sumday.

Why the Flaming Lips get all the ink, I’ll never know. Grandaddy treads the same terrain – atmospheric pop full of quirky beauty, and concerning mechanical failure as a metaphor for human decay. The thing is, Jason Lytle and his band do this sort of thing so much better than Wayne Coyne and his. Sumday was almost released on two discs, six tracks apiece, and while the opening six blend together in a strummed blur, the final tracks explode the sound into brilliant colors. There’s almost no better closing trilogy this year than the three wonderamas that conclude this album. Sumday makes Yoshimi look like the work of clever amateurs, so infused with real feeling and melodic grace is Grandaddy’s sound. This is a work of wonder.

#9. Cerberus Shoal, Chaiming the Knoblessone.

I’m dreading having to try to explain the appeal of this thing again, so unsuccessful was I last time. The Shoal has recently reinvented itself, parting ways with three members and taking on three more, but they couldn’t have made the transition sound any more natural and complete than they have here. Knoblessone is the first full-length from the new lineup, and it’s a fully formed flower of a sound. This is where the Beatles meet the beat poets meet the prog-rockers meet the avant-garde. There’s no explaining a programmatic beast like “Story #12 From the Invisible Mountain Archive” or a sweet melodic meander like “Sole of Foot of Man.” What can I say? This is a slow-burning genius, an album so bizarre that it sounds exactly right on first listen and only deepens from there.

#8. BT, Emotional Technology.

Brian Transeau finally made his masterpiece. This is the album that combines his fascination with the technological and the organic, the whirring of machines and the soul of the human. It’s not a techno album, it’s not a pop album, it’s a perfect synthesis of the two without sacrificing either one. This is what all those Delirium albums should have sounded like. Here are explosive beats and basslines, sweet vocals, strummed guitars and string quartets, and everything is processed, folded, spindled and mutilated into something new. Here is one of the finest examples of genre-destroying in quite some time, and one hell of a fine listen to boot.

#7. The Alarm, In the Poppy Fields.

I will admit two things. First is my heavy bias towards the Alarm – I grew up with them, and have always thought of them as one of the best bands on Earth. Second is my love for sprawling, ambitious works, and you can’t get much more sprawling and ambitious than Poppy Fields – 54 new tracks spread out over five CDs. It’s the first Alarm album since 1991, and even if three-fourths of the band is different, the voice and vision still belong to Mike Peters, and he brings his trademark passion to all three and a half hours of this thing. Poppy Fields is an achievement U2 wishes they could still make, a sterling statement of purpose from a guy who’s never wavered in his commitment to soaring, beautiful, anthemic rock and roll. Here’s a whole bunch of it, and it’s all worth hearing and treasuring.

#6. Supergrass, Life on Other Planets.

Beck dreams of being this good at this sort of thing. Supergrass is a walking cultural blender, a mixture of influences so deep and wide that the only recourse is to make use of all of them, all at once. But Planets goes deeper than that – the individual influences sound vintage here. If the bass and vocal lines are supposed to recall Lou Reed, then they do, even if the synth part is ELO and the drum beat is pure punk. That they fuse these disparate sounds in the service of some great, fun songs elevates the album from sonic experiment to work of pop magic.

#5. Travis, 12 Memories.

Let’s face it, Travis is pretty much universally written off as a lightweight band. Up ’til now, they could most accurately be described as “pleasant.” So what a stunning surprise to find an album this muscular, this punchy, from these wishy-washy Brits. 12 Memories practically explodes with newfound force, and at times it feels like showing off – “Look what we just found out we can do!” If Britpop is dead, then someone forgot to tell these guys, because they’ve just made an album of superb loud pop songs, played with all the fire of a brand new band.

#4. Over the Rhine, Ohio.

If I have a sentimental favorite here, it’s probably this one. With often minimal instrumentation, Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist strike right through the artifice and pretension of the world and touch the soul. Ohio is more than 90 minutes long, weighs in at 21 tracks, and feels all too brief. The songs are deceptively simple, yet they never stand in the way of the emotional connection Bergquist is searching for, both vocally and lyrically. There isn’t a moment on Ohio that isn’t pure, heartfelt, open and perfect. Hearing Bergquist sing “Changes Come” while Detweiler accompanies her on mournful, longing piano is the closest anything on this list came to a spiritual experience this year. And the rest of this album is similarly extraordinary.

#3. Fountains of Wayne, Welcome Interstate Managers.

The Grammy people get around their ignorance of new music by awarding a Best New Artist nomination to a band that, during a certain year, established their “public identity.” Fountains of Wayne got that nod this year, despite nearly a decade in the biz, because of “Stacy’s Mom,” a first-rate novelty tune, but if the Rachel Hunter video is their public identity, then the public is dead wrong about them. Anyone buying Welcome Interstate Managers and expecting an LP full of “Stacy’s Mom” will likely be surprised by the warmth and depth of the record, as well as its impeccable craft. Fountains go after emotions and explore characters that other artists disregard – the small-town guy longing for his famous classmate in “Hackensack,” the quarterback who suddenly discovers he has “All Kinds of Time” – and they do it with a cleverness that transcends novelty. With “Valley Winter Song” they wrote one of the year’s loveliest tunes, and with “Hey Julie” one of its catchiest. And they also delivered the most fun you’ll have in three minutes this year with “Bright Future in Sales.” If not for the subpar final four songs, this nearly perfect pop album might have been even higher on this list, something no mere novelty band could ever accomplish. Welcome Interstate Managers is a brilliant delight.

#2. Bruce Cockburn, You’ve Never Seen Everything.

For months on end, Cockburn had the lock on the top spot with this devastating, fantastic record, and even now I’m not sure I’m making the right choice. This is easily one of the most complete artistic statements of Cockburn’s 30-plus-year career, from the mission statement “Tried and Tested” to the jazz-tinged venom of “Trickle Down” to the absolute bleak horror of the mostly spoken title track. At its heart, it’s about finding hope in a terrifying world, and it never shies away from depicting that world in all its chilling detail. Cockburn has been everywhere, and he has a global worldview we sorely need in Bush’s America, but more than that, he has a master’s touch with words and melody that brings that worldview into impressive focus. This album is a grand summation from Bruce Cockburn, and one of the most important and unjustly ignored albums of the year. Moreover, it’s one of the most musically captivating, wrapping you up in its carefully controlled power. It’s a masterwork from a guy with nothing more to prove, and that makes it all the more stunning.

Which brings us to the top, and the source of most of my consternation. I swear, it was almost a tie, and the top two positions switched places often enough that I can almost consider it an even draw. It came down to which one pushed my personal buttons more, and even though Cockburn’s record outdoes the winner for social conscience and lyrical power, I’m always going to go where the melody is, and no one delivered better melodies than this guy:

#1. Rufus Wainwright, Want One.

I’ve been watching Wainwright since his debut, certain that he would one day make a magnificent album. I honestly didn’t expect one this good so soon, however. Want One sparkles with confidence and majesty. It’s a pop album in the purest sense of the term – Wainwright remembers when pop referred to the likes of Gershwin and Berlin. This set of 14 songs packs more surprises and delights for a melody addict like myself than anything I’ve heard in years, all recorded with a sense of grandeur and drama missing from just about all pop music these days. It’s all topped with Wainwright’s voice, an even-toned powerhouse that he’s honed into a graceful instrument. Wainwright makes writing great songs sound incredibly easy, as if most other songwriters are just being lazy. As I said in the original review, any discussion of the year’s best songs would be dominated by this album, and “I Don’t Know What It Is” leads the list as the best single song I heard this year.

In the end, it came down to one tiny moment, though. There’s a bit near the end of “Beautiful Child” when, after three minutes of crescendo, all the other instruments (including guitars, drums and horns) drop out, leaving nothing but Wainwright’s lead vocal and an ocean of his multi-tracked backing chorale. It’s like that moment when you go over the first hill on a roller coaster, a genuinely spine-tingling instant of giddy drama. That’s the sort of thing that makes all this searching for good music worthwhile, and Wainwright was the only one to provide me one of those moments this year. That edged him over Cockburn, but the rest of this dazzling album put him in position to be edged in the first place. Whatever he does from here out is irrelevant – he’s carved out a permanent place in the pantheon with this record. Regardless, I can’t wait to see where he goes from here.

I’m writing this on the last day of this stupid year. I’m hoping that 2004 is kinder to the people I love. Good riddance, 2003. Get the fuck out of here.

Next week, I begin rectifying some glaring omissions from the past 12 months. Year four, here we go. Thanks for hanging in there this year, and for joining me for the next one. I’m grateful for you all.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A friend of mine e-mailed me this week to tell me her father died. A couple of days after that, another friend called me to tell me she just got back from her grandmother’s funeral. There’s something unnatural about the sheer amount of death we’ve seen this year. I’ve written far too much about it in the past few months, and I’m tired of having to. Only two weeks until we can bid this awful year goodbye.

But it’s fitting, somehow, that this, my final new review of 2003, is about Johnny Cash. Cash was another victim of 2003, passing away in September at age 71. I’m finding as I arrange my thoughts for this piece that, just as I have no authoritative voice on death, I have no similar voice on Johnny Cash. His loss seems impossible – it’s almost like his legend and his presence transcend the idea of a frail human form to house them.

There just aren’t enough superlatives for Cash, but here are a few anyway. Some may call him a singer, and in fact he referred to himself as such, but what he brought to the songs he graced with his voice was so much more. Cash inhabited songs, like few others could do – he brought depth, power and layers of meaning and feeling to virtually any lyric, simply by being Johnny Cash. The great Cash songs always centered around the same conflict evident in his persona – the troubled, often violent man crawling his way along the road to redemption. Cash lived this so completely that one can feel the eternal struggle in every word he sang.

Cash was always surprising people. This was the guy, after all, who found some of his most receptive audiences behind the walls of prisons. One can lazily type him as a country singer, given that he was a member of the Grand Old Opry, but he lived far beyond the limits of genre restrictions. He was folk, rock, pop, blues, and any other idiom he chose, but everything he did came out sounding like Johnny Cash, labels be damned.

And leave it to senior-citizen Cash to save his biggest surprise for the end. Certainly no one expected the kind of creative and popular career revival Cash has seen in the past decade. It’s largely thanks to a remarkable partnership with American Records honcho Rick Rubin, best known for his work with the likes of Slayer and the Beastie Boys. Rubin has a knack for producing artists so that the result sounds definitive, as if he can isolate and replicate the way those musicians always wished they could sound. His plan for Cash was astoundingly simple – get Johnny, an acoustic guitar, a microphone and a bunch of songs together in his living room, record a stark live document, and then promote it with all the respect Cash’s legend deserves.

Thus began the American Recordings series, an amazing set of four albums that cast Cash as an interpreter of just about anything. In addition to old blues and gospel standards, Cash covered such unlikely sources as Soundgarden, Danzig, U2 and Sting on these records, with mostly incredible results. His version of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” gave him his first bona fide hit in ages, scored him several award nominations (fueled by a raw and beautiful video by Mark Romanek), and made him stunningly relevant to a modern audience. In Cash’s hands, the song was transformed from merely heartfelt to positively shattering, a collapse of worlds in three minutes.

Cash’s death came mid-project. He and Rubin had been working on the fifth American record, and Cash had finished demos of roughly 50 songs. Additionally, Rubin had assembled a box set of outtakes and new recordings to celebrate 10 years of their partnership, and he had just sent the CDs to Cash for review when he succumbed. That box set is called Unearthed, and while it was never intended as a memorial, it serves as a fitting capstone, not just to the last 10 years of Cash’s creative revitalization, but to his grand career as a whole.

Unearthed is divided into five CDs and housed in a gorgeous cloth-bound book design in an embossed slipcase. Even in shape and design, it looks like a monument, and the music inside is no less monolithic. Here we have three discs of unreleased outtakes from the American sessions, a new album of spirituals and an admittedly unnecessary but still worthy compilation of the best tracks from the four American albums. All together, it’s 79 songs, and not one is not worth hearing. Everything that was ever great about Johnny Cash is represented in this box, and it’s no wonder it takes five CDs to hold it all.

Starting from the beginning: Who’s Gonna Cry is the first volume of outtakes, taken from the live acoustic sessions for American Recordings. If you liked that one, this disc is blessedly more of the same, with more of a focus on classic songs like “Long Black Veil” and “Waiting For a Train.” Cash excelled in this setting, just the man and his guitar, and it’s here that one can best hear the power of his voice. When Cash sings, it’s like hearing the voice of music itself. But the best moments are the faltering, human ones. When he gets to the title phrase, in his own “The Caretaker,” it’s chilling: “Who’s gonna cry when old John dies,” he sings, and one can’t help but think on Cash’s own mortality.

Cash’s second American album, Unchained, hooked him up with an ideal backing band – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Though several other musicians, including the Red Devils, make contributions, it’s the Heartbreakers who bring the best stuff to Trouble In Mind, the second disc here. The emphasis is on blues rock, and Lord, are these performances amazing. Just a few highlights: Carl Perkins guests on Chuck Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and his own “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” Cash stomps his way through an unadorned reading of Steve Earle’s “Devil’s Right Hand,” he reinvents Neil Young’s signature “Heart of Gold,” and he makes Jimmie Rodgers’ “T For Texas” his own.

The most affecting of these recordings, however, has to be his duet with his late wife, June Carter Cash, on his own “As Long As the Grass Shall Grow.” It’s a lovely song of eternal devotion, recorded not long before June’s death, and their two voices playing off of each other is heartbreaking. That alone is worth the price of Unearthed.

But wait, there’s more. The third volume, Redemption Songs, is the only one that feels like a selection of outtakes, so diverse is the track listing. Cash duets with the late Joe Strummer of the Clash on Bob Marley’s title tune, and if you can imagine that, you’ll have no problem with the rest of this. Cash soars on Jimmy Webb’s great “Wichita Lineman,” rocks through traditional tune “Salty Dog,” puts his stamp on Stephen Foster’s immortal “Hard Times Come Again No More,” and invites Glen Campbell to the mic for a read of “Gentle On My Mind.” Most surprising here is a stark version of “You Are My Sunshine,” which emphasizes the incredible darkness at the song’s center. That all of these tunes can exist on one CD serves as proof that typing Cash as a country artist is simple laziness.

As grand as everything that precedes it is, the capper here is disc four, My Mother’s Hymn Book. The last real album Cash completed, this is a collection of 15 hymns taken quite literally from a book owned by his mother. The versions are naked and passionate, featuring only Cash and his guitar, and it only takes one or two songs to realize that he’s singing from his very soul here, perhaps more so than on any of his previous works. Cash’s music has long been about striving for redemption, and it’s fitting that his final recordings center on that redemption, wholly and completely. This is deceptively simple, yet quite powerful stuff.

And if disc five, The Best of Cash on American, is superfluous, it also serves as a fine reminder of just how lucky we’ve been to witness this resurgence from one of America’s icons. Opening with “Delia’s Gone,” a great Cash original, the disc brings us through some of the riskier choices Cash has made recently, all of which paid off beautifully. His take on Soundgarden’s “Rusty Cage” is a revelation, as are versions of U2’s “One” and Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man.” “I Hung My Head” was Sting’s attempt at writing a Johnny Cash song, so his reclaiming it here is only natural, and the result is superb. And though “The Man Comes Around” was one of the last songs Cash wrote, it’s a quintessential Johnny Cash piece, full of frightening redemption. It’s all capped with “Hurt,” which Cash turns into a meditation on mortality.

I really don’t know what else to say. Here are 79 songs that argue fairly convincingly that Johnny Cash was one of a kind, a genius interpreter with a soul 20 miles high. While it’s true that they don’t make them like they used to, they honestly never made them like Johnny Cash, and never will again. If you don’t understand how important his loss is, Unearthed is a consistently engrossing way to inform yourself. If after listening, you still don’t get it, there’s no hope. Cash leaves behind a sadder, shoddier, more artificial world than the one he knew, and even though we all still have to live in it, we have his work to remind us of a time when things mattered, people were real, and genuine redemption was difficult, eternally rewarding work.

Rest in peace, Johnny. We’ll miss you.

* * * * *

Next week is Christmas, of course, so enjoy yourselves. The Year-End Top 10 List will hit on New Year’s Eve. After that, year four.

See you in line Tuesday morning… and to all a good night.

Where to start with Ryan Adams?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Ryan Adams wants to be an iconic rock god. He’s not satisfied with the Boy Genius tag he’s been given since his days in Whiskeytown, either. Since launching his solo career in 2000, he’s been astoundingly prolific, announcing project after project, and then shelving most of them after completion. But he spends at least as much time on his carefully crafted image. Even though few outside of his circle of fans know his name or his music, and most people still confuse him with Canadian popster Bryan Adams, he’s positioned himself as the new Savior of Rock, and he does all he can do to live up to that.

And it’s been showing through in his music. Where Whiskeytown was down-to-earth and confessional, Adams’ solo projects have been more and more artificial, more concerned with putting on a good show than with using music as a conduit between souls. That’s always been fine with me – I enjoy artists like Beck and David Bowie, who change personas as often as they change underwear. But Adams’ legion of fans, those same folks who were lauding his singular talent when Strangers Almanac came out, have been put off lately by his antics and a solo career that at times feels like it’s careening out of control.

Adams is undoubtedly going for icon status – he wants to be the Sensitive Rocker, the Cool Hipster, the Dangerous Rebel With the Heart of Gold. He imagines himself as the Unpredictable, Self-Destructive Rock Star, and it’s an archetype he’s wearing like a suit. And his recent albums have sounded like products of the same archetype, cut from the same motivational cloth. Everything he does now is another building block in his self-aggrandizing myth.

But hell, it’s starting to be a fun ride, especially lately. Adams has been systematically demolishing his prior sound, established during the Whiskeytown days and perfected on his stunning solo debut, Heartbreaker. In 2001, he released Gold, an old-fashioned double album that jumped from style to style, as if Adams had just discovered a musical world outside of alt-country. (Most of Gold fits on one disc, but he cheekily titled the five-song bonus platter Side Four, a tip of the hat to the days of vinyl.) He then launched into four simultaneous projects with four different bands, a sampler of which was released last year under the title Demolition.

Through it all, Adams has been veering away from the twangy country-rock with which he made his name, so much so that sections of Demolition sound like the aural equivalent of a raised middle finger aimed at his former fans. Nothing wrong with that, either – Adams is evolving, and if some of his audience refuse to follow him, then so be it. Trouble is, his label, the No Depression haven Lost Highway, is starting to feel the strain.

So when Adams delivered Love Is Hell, the proper follow-up to Gold, early this year, Lost Highway told him he’d gone too far. It seems Adams has been in a melancholy ’80s mood lately, so he found himself a producer known for that sort of thing – John Porter, who made a number of Smiths albums, among others. Together they crafted a mellow reverie, layered and sad, that (of course) bore no resemblance to the alt-country for which Adams was signed. So now Adams can add a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-style story of label rejection to his myth – Lost Highway sent the album back and told Adams to do better.

And all things considered, they probably shit a brick when they heard Adams’ idea of “doing better.” The album Lost Highway accepted (probably out of exasperation) is called Rock N Roll, and it’s as simple, loud and direct as its title. Adams has apparently decided to stay in the ’80s, only this time, he really wants to be Paul Westerberg. It’s the noisiest thing he’s made yet, full of ringing guitars and screamed vocals, and propelled by pounding drum beats that’ll make the Uncle Tupelo fans go into cardiac arrest. It’s exactly the sort of impetuous, dumb, legend-making record that gets one noticed, especially if it’s recorded under duress.

Thankfully, Adams writes good Paul Westerberg songs, so Rock N Roll isn’t a total waste. Still, it feels like a quick, dumb detour, one recorded in a weekend. Adams crashes through the first four songs so quickly that they barely register – they’re all flurries of guitar and shouted choruses. “So Alive” is an ’80s anthem, all soaring melody and thudding beat. With “Note to Self: Don’t Die,” Adams has somehow come up with one of the year’s best song titles and married it to one of its lamest songs, a plodding grunge dirge that couldn’t have taken him more than an hour to write.

Ironically, the title track is the one moment of reflective pause here, and it stands out. It’s a brief piano number over which Adams laments, “Everybody’s cool playing rock and roll, I don’t feel cool at all.” That number heralds the superior final act, beginning with “Anybody Wanna Take Me Home,” a perfect Replacements mimicry. But by the time “The Drugs Not Working” completes its extended coda and fade, you’ve realized that Adams has gone a whole record without delivering anything heart-stoppingly great. It’s all a big show, fun for a bit but wearying upon repeated listens.

At the very least, this whole fiasco has shown that record label stupidity extends to even the most artist-friendly minors. Yes, Lost Highway finally released Love Is Hell, inexplicably broken up into two EPs, and yes, it’s considerably better than Rock N Roll. In fact, I can’t figure out why they didn’t just run with it in the first place – if after Demolition they still think Adams is going to go back to the twang, they’re deluded. And he obviously poured his heart into this one, in a way he just didn’t on Rock N Roll.

Love Is Hell is a hushed, mostly acoustic affair full of poetry and atmosphere. It’s absolutely an attempt at bringing out the Sensitive Side of the Dangerous Rocker, and it’s all for show – he mentions the Chelsea Hotel not once, but twice, for pity’s sake – but this show is a good one. Only two songs (the title track and “This House is Not For Sale”) shift the tempos above the patient, languorous pace of the opener, “Political Scientist.” Often Adams is only accompanied by acoustic guitar or piano. It’s meant to sound like the Window Into the Tortured Soul, and it succeeds.

Whatever the motivations behind it, though, Love Is Hell is a deeply enjoyable work, from the Jeff Buckley imitation on “Afraid Not Scared” to the lovely chorus melody of “Avalanche” to the dramatic Cure-inspired sound of “City Rain, City Streets.” It takes Adams into new places, which is exactly Lost Highway’s complaint, of course. He covers Oasis’ “Wonderwall” here, turning it from pop-crap to something approaching affecting, and he apes Bruce Springsteen on closer “Hotel Chelsea Nights.” There’s no defining, statement-making sound, but there is an advanced sense of songcraft, something sorely missing from Rock N Roll.

The album also doesn’t benefit from the two-EPs approach – it forces each half to stand on its own, and like Tarantino’s Kill Bill (similarly cleaved in two), it’s meant to be experienced whole. “Avalanche” is a perfect middle-of-the-record song, and “My Blue Manhattan” follows it nicely. Unfortunately, the former closes part one, and the latter opens part two. Who knows if this is even the originally intended sequence of Love Is Hell, but in this form, splitting it into halves doesn’t make any sense. Plus, didn’t the label have to press two CDs, print two booklets and distribute two records this way? Each part costs about seven bucks, so they’re not making much more than they would had they released one CD for 13, and it seems to me that the expenses are much higher. Especially for an album the label purports to dislike.

Music aside, these two releases (three if you count the two EPs separately) add immeasurably to the myth of Ryan Adams. Here we have both his Great Lost Record and his Petulant Comeback to His Label. The stories behind the albums are, one imagines, at least as important to him as the albums themselves. The shame here is that neither album is as good as Gold, which wasn’t quite as good as Heartbreaker. The Ryan Adams Pose is already leading him down a self-destructive career path, one that hardly ever ends well. Part of me hopes he’ll snap out of it and make a killer album soon, but the other part secretly hopes for a fun ride to a musical crash and burn, just because it will make a good story. Either way, it remains to be seen whether the artist will trump the myth or be drowned by it.

Next week, Johnny Cash.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The Academy did it again.

For the benefit of those who despise award shows and my constant obsessive complaining about them, I have shortened the annual Bitch About the Grammys column to only a couple of paragraphs this time. That’s mostly because there’s just nothing left to say about the stupidity and laziness of the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, and their seeming inability to keep track of the best music released in a given year. That’s also because, as the Grammys go, this year’s selections aren’t too bad. OutKast made out big for their excellent Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, and Warren Zevon will hopefully receive a posthumous award for at least one of his five nominations. Nothing for most of the year’s best releases, of course, but that’s all subjective and to be expected.

I do, however, have one major gripe, and it’s a familiar one. Fountains of Wayne are nominated for Best New Artist, despite having been around for about seven years and having released their third album in 2003. I’m tired of the Academy calling something new just because they haven’t heard of it before. If they’re going to rely on hit singles to select the nominees in this category, they should probably change the name to Best Breakthrough Artist. Calling Fountains a new artist is just plain ignorant, and lazy to boot.

But there is an upside. Thanks to a Best Rock Song nod, I now live in a universe where it’s accurate to call “Stacy’s Mom” a Grammy nominee. That’s too bizarre.

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One thing that bothers me about the Academy is its pained reliance on restrictive genre labels. They’ve subdivided the nominations into “fields,” including pop, rap, country, R&B, bluegrass, alternative and rock. Thing is, music just doesn’t neatly fold itself into boxes like that too often, unless the producers and artists are specifically designing it to. To pick a few nominees, would you label OutKast rap or R&B? Or pop, even? They do all three on their nominated album. Kid Rock – is he rock, rap or country? Or all of the above?

If there’s one label that means nothing anymore, though, it has to be alternative. That word used to describe the indie bands that offered, yes, an alternative to mainstream radio. Now it’s been co-opted as a mainstream radio format. The word has lost all significance – it’s just another way to describe a style, instead of an attitude. Do you think Jane’s Addiction (the modern version) imagines their music as an alternative to anything?

Here’s another one: progressive. What does that even mean? When it entered the lexicon, it was meant as a sign that a particular band was pushing the boundaries of accepted musical forms. Bands like Yes, Genesis and Jethro Tull wore their prog badges proudly, and created technical, complex music that certainly seemed to progress toward something.

Now the progressive tag is applied to anything that smells like Tales From Topographic Oceans. If it’s needlessly hard to play, say the critics, it’s prog. Never mind that the term now describes its opposite – if anything, the we-wish-it-was-1973 attitude of most prog is regressive. And then there’s progressive metal, a subgenre with an oxymoron all its own. Metal hasn’t significantly progressed anywhere since 1984 or so, and progressive metal is nothing more than ’70s prog played louder. Labels like “prog-metal” are commonplace because they give writers an easy out – you don’t need to discuss anything on its own merits if you can play the sounds-like game.

For my money, Dream Theater sounds like no one else on the market right now. They’re a stunningly virtuosic quintet, able to play rings around even the most talented of their peers. They have a symphonic compositional sense that’s unmatched, and an inhuman endurance level. Their concerts have been known to run three hours, chock full of the most difficult and taxing music you’re likely to hear outside of a Zappa revue.

They also seem quite at home with every stupid metal cliche in the book. Guitarist John Petrucci lets fly with some of the wankiest solos since the days of Yngwie Malmsteen, drummer Mike Portnoy just loves his double bass pedals, and singer James LaBrie comes from a time when long-haired men screamed from the throat and were thought of as cool, not cheesy. There is a wild card – keyboardist Jordan Rudess, who adds most of the symphonic touches, would have been run out of Megadeth on a rail. But otherwise, the stupidity of genre labels aside, calling Dream Theater a metal band wouldn’t be inaccurate.

Except that lately, they’ve been upping the symphonic elements and downplaying the metallic ones. Last year’s double-disc opus Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence featured a 40-minute song, a sure sign that someone’s been listening to Relayer or the like. Though pieces of the album were slash-and-burn, very little of it stood up to older DT records like Awake for sheer heaviness.

Well, here’s hoping you didn’t like that direction, because the new Dream Theater album, Train of Thought, takes a sharp veer back to the punishing riffs of old. In fact, you’re only a few minutes in before Petrucci starts bitch-slapping you with his lightning-fast soloing, something which made very few appearances on Turbulence. Train of Thought is seven songs long, and the average length is right around 10 minutes each. There are few breaks from the metallic onslaught – “Vacant” is a two-minute interlude, “Endless Sacrifice” begins and ends with clean guitar sections, and that’s about it. The rest is loud, fast and angry.

In fact, this record sounds very much like DT’s attempt to make a classic Metallica album. Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets certainly incorporated elements of ’70s prog, and added the impressive feat of creating symphonies with just guitars, bass and drums. As much of a presence as Rudess has been since he joined four years ago, the rest of the band seemed to have trouble fitting him in here – he’s consigned to a few solos and some ill-matched (yet brief) interludes when not providing background atmosphere. The focus is undeniably on the guitars this time around.

Train of Thought is a complex album, of course, and the instrumental sections that make up the bulk of each song are impeccably arranged and played. Still, what sticks are the metal cliches throughout. All the lyrics are angry, but that anger is directed at well-worn targets – religious fanatics, bad parents, the insanity of life, etc. The songs have titles like “This Dying Soul” and “In the Name of God,” and LaBrie sings them with the traditional operatic seriousness of the best metal singers throughout the ages.

But hell, who listens to this stuff for the lyrics? You listen to Dream Theater to hear five guys lock into some crazy complex polyrhythms, the sort of thing that sounds impressive even if you don’t know what a polyrhythm is. You listen to hear Petrucci, one of the best masturbatory axe-slingers around, go apeshit all over his fretboard. You listen to hear Portnoy somehow not pull a rotator cuff while slamming out superhuman drum fills. You listen to hear a level of musicianship you just don’t get to hear anymore, and Train of Thought largely delivers on that. If you liked Awake best and have been hoping the band will return to that sound, you’ll like this. Even if you hoped they’d continue traveling the symphonic road they’d been on, though, this is impressive stuff, and it shouldn’t let you down too much.

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Comparatively speaking, few would likely consider Queensryche a progressive band. But consider the following evidence: 1) They’ve made a concept album – 1988’s brilliant Operation: Mindcrime, which included spoken sections, an overture, and an imaginative plotline. 2) They’ve worked with orchestras, several times (“Silent Lucidity,” “Real World,” etc.), and used them to accentuate the inherent symphonic qualities already present in their music. 3) They have a classically trained, operatic singer in Geoff Tate, a guy who can hold a note well past the lung capacities of many of his peers. And 4), Dream Theater asked them to open their recent tour, a slot that has traditionally been held by neo-proggers like Fates Warning.

It’s also true that they’re known as a metal band – they even have an accursed umlaut in their name, over the “y.” But in truth, they haven’t played what any self-respecting longhair would call real metal since the early ’80s. Queensryche only has one metal album to its credit (1984’s The Warning), and since then, they’ve been exploring the progressive and pop sides of their sound.

One doesn’t expect much of Queensryche these days, unfortunately. They have the pallor of a band that’s past its prime, and their last two projects suffered in comparison to their early work. Hear in the Now Frontier was a compressed pop album, a collection of singles looking for a platinum record that never came, directed almost entirely by guitarist Chris DeGarmo. He then promptly left the band, to be replaced by Kelly Gray, who did a competent yet unremarkable job on Q2K, a limp effort heavy on groove and light on inspiration. Even the most ardent fans had to admit that the days of great Queensryche records were probably over.

Which is why Tribe, their just-released ninth album, is such a pleasant surprise. Inspired by the events of September 11, Tate rallied the band, pulled back DeGarmo for five songs, and turned in the best Ryche record since Promised Land. It’s no coincidence that DeGarmo’s return heralds an album crying for unity and understanding, even if he’s since bid the band farewell again. His guitar sound and distinctive flair for melody instantly pop from the speakers, giving all the evidence one needs to conclude that Q2K should never have happened.

Tribe is a shorter, more song-oriented disc than Queensryche has made lately – 10 standard-length tracks, each with memorable choruses and fewer art-rock touches than before. At only 41 minutes, it’s pretty much in and out, but it’s enough time to leave a swell impression. “Open” opens the record with a monstrous riff and a lyric about tolerance, “Desert Dance” incorporates some rapcore shouting (but done well) over a killer guitar line, “Falling Behind” has a classic DeGarmo acoustic feel, “Rhythm of Hope” reaches skyward beautifully, “Tribe” crashes in with heavy distortion and Tate’s menacing spoken verses, and “The Art of Life” pulls it all together in four impressive minutes.

There’s just no way also-rans like P.O.D. should be outselling this album. This is a thoroughly modern Queensryche, thoughtful and restrained, yet muscular and confident. When stacked against their recent work, this thing is almost a revolution. Tate’s in fine voice throughout, a marked improvement from the previous couple of albums, and while there’s nothing fun or enjoyable about most of the lyrics, one imagines Tate is at home again, excoriating violent governments and crying out for peace. It turns out, all he and the band needed was something to sing about.

And the epilogue, “Doin’ Fine,” might be the most genuinely uplifting piece of music yet inspired by 9/11. “Next time we could try a little harder,” Tate sings, before proclaiming, “Look around, everything’s better now.” Tate never succumbs to Springsteen-itis, the unfortunate tendency of American songwriters to believe it’s all about America, and to provide a rallying point for the country. We’re all, as he notes, the same tribe. The theme of the album is summed up in “Great Divide”: “Take the flag we wave, the freedoms that we sing, without respect for one other, it doesn’t mean a thing.”

This is the passionate response to September 11 that I was hoping to get last year from our more literate songwriters. That it comes from a reinvigorated Queensryche is one of the happiest surprises of my year. If you gave up on the Ryche before the turn of the century, then give this a try, because Tribe will most likely happily surprise you, too.

* * * * *

Which brings us to the grandaddy of all progressive metal bands, Iron Maiden.

Maiden is another band that people are surprised to learn I know quite a bit about. They invented the symphonic metal prototype, and if you’re brought up liking bands like Queensryche and Savatage, eventually you’re going to work your way to Iron Maiden. They’re everything that’s good and bad (usually in equal measure) about this sort of thing – pretentious, goofy, ambitious, textured, ass-kicking, and defiantly their own band. Maiden has never tried to be anything except what they are, and despite legions of imitators, no one does it quite like they do.

What’s always been fascinating about Iron Maiden is their insistence on doing nothing halfway. They’re unflinchingly accepting of both the impressive and silly parts of their sound and image. They write lengthy historical dramas, set books to music, and revel in any new way they can find to bring their sound further over the top. Remember in Spinal Tap when the band unveiled their Stonehenge rock opera and stage set? The movie was making fun of Iron Maiden, and to their credit, there’s no doubt they got the joke.

Much of the melodrama is contained in the forceful alto of Bruce Dickinson, who always sings like he’s leading the Roman army to conquest. Dickinson has a great set of pipes, and his style fits Maiden perfectly, as amply displayed whenever they try to make an album without him. Most recently, the singer’s spot was filled by Blaze Bayley, who led the band through the two worst albums to bear their name (The X-Factor and Virtual XI). One could easily imagine the band giving up the ghost, never again attaining the heights of Powerslave.

But we’ve all watched Behind the Music, and we all know the reunion tour is a staple of long-running rock acts. When Dickinson rejoined Maiden in 2000, you could almost hear the sigh of relief. Bayley was so impossibly bad, so much worse than anyone feared, that even watching the Dickinson band shuffle through a tour of their hits would have been preferable.

Here’s the thing, though – Dickinson’s return re-energized the band in ways even the most hopeful fans couldn’t have expected. 2000 saw the release of Brave New World, an album that brought them back to their Seventh Son sound with a vengeance. And now here’s Dance of Death, the thirteenth Iron Maiden album, and it’s even better. It’s rare to witness such an impressive creative rebirth from a band many had written off.

Given that this band likes to set atmosphere right up front, the fact that Dance of Death opens with a live-sounding count-off (“One, two, three, four!”) is startling. That the first two tracks are, dare I say it, fun is also quite a surprise. “Wildest Dreams” is a revved-up rocker, and “Rainmaker” is barely done kicking your ass before its 3:48 is up. The pieces get longer as the album progresses, but the vibe remains – this is probably the most fun I’ve ever had listening to Iron Maiden.

The album includes epics galore, like the marching song “Paschendale” and the atmospheric closer “Journeyman,” which incorporates strings for the first time on a Maiden album. But none are more epic or mind-expanding than the title track, quite simply one of the best songs in the band’s catalog. It’s more than eight minutes long, and it leaps from complex section to complex section nimbly, wrapping it all up in one chorus-less whole. It’s the second coming of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and the absolute highlight of the album.

There’s not much more I can say – if you ever liked Iron Maiden, even a little bit, you’ll like Dance of Death. It’s unquestionably one of the best things they’ve yet done, and considering they’re on album 13 and year 24, that’s borderline amazing. Those lamenting the loss of heavy music on a truly epic scale can take heart that at least one band is still doing it right.

This one’s for Shane Kinney, who’s been after me to review Dance of Death for months. There you go, Shaner, now what are you going to do for me?

* * * * *

A quick note about last week’s column before I go. I got a nice email from Keavin Wiggins, who runs Donnie Vie’s website, and he sent me the artwork and liner notes for Just Enough. Suffice it to say that my guess about Vie playing all the instruments was incorrect – there’s a host of people on there, and I fear I’ve slighted them all. In particular my apologies go to Andrew Rollins, who appears to have been Vie’s musical partner on this project. Everything else I said still stands – good album, check it out at www.donnievie.com.

Next week, Ryan Adams.

See you in line Tuesday morning.