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

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

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

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

Sometimes a dead tree is just a dead tree.

* * * * *

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

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

But sometimes, it happens. And it just did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I would have regretted paying import prices, naturally.

* * * * *

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

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

See you in line Tuesday morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and Disintegration is the best album ever.

* * * * *

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

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

See you in line Tuesday morning.

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

Next week, the Cure, I think.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This one’s for the comic book fans. Just to warn you.

And, needless to say, many spoilers lay ahead.

* * * * *

For the longest time, March 2004 has been the furthest outpost on my cultural calendar, the one firm, definitive date amidst an otherwise nebulous future. Who and where I would be in March 2004 was anyone’s guess, of course, but even in 1992 I knew two things: first, in 3/04, I would be three months away from my thirtieth birthday, slowly rounding the curve towards what I perceived at that time to be really, really old age.

And second, I knew that in March 2004, Dave Sim would release Cerebus #300.

Oh, sure, there was always a healthy amount of doubt and speculation about the feasibility of Sim’s promise. Back in issue #26 or so, just as Sim was embarking upon his first major years-long storyline, he announced his audacious plan: he would self-publish 300 issues of Cerebus, and together they would tell the story of one character’s life, the way he always thought it should be done in comics. And issue #300 would ship in March 2004. People laughed, of course, and even coming late to the party as I did (I started reading when Sim was about halfway through), I marveled at his chutzpah. But I always believed he could and would do it.

Issue #300 came out today, right on schedule. And you can almost hear Sim chuckling. “Who’s laughing now, boys and girls?”

The issue’s arrival, sadly, has been greeted with a muted mixture of half-hearted congratulations and sighs of relief, and in order to find out why we’re going to have to delve a bit into who Sim is and what his work has been about. But first I want to say this. In my mind, there is no arguing this point: Cerebus is one of the finest examples of what can be done with the comics medium when freed of editorial interference and genre restrictions. It is a huge, towering achievement that masterfully weaves theme and symbol into a gleaming whole, a superb example of comics as literature, and a master’s class on fully utilizing the long-form narrative.

It is also impeccably crafted. By the novel’s conclusion, Sim had written and drawn 6,000 pages, and his collaborator, Gerhard, had fleshed out roughly 4800 of them with some of the most intricate background linework you’re likely to find anywhere. By the 3,000-page mark, Sim and Gerhard had become masters of the form, and quickly turned into bold innovators, playing with panel arrangement and layout for dramatic effect. The later pages of Cerebus are among the most beautiful black-and-white comics art ever created. And it also quickly became apparent that Sim is the best letterer in the business. His words pulse and breathe with life – you can hear every word of his dialogue, exactly the way he intended it, and that’s a level of communication to which most comics rarely aspire.

If you think I’m making too much of what is, in the end, just a little comic book, then you haven’t read Cerebus. But that’s okay – it puts you in good company. By the end, Sim and Gerhard were selling only about 6,000 copies of each issue, and you’d be amazed to discover how many scathing, negative reviews of the work as a whole have appeared online, most beginning with the reviewer admitting he/she hasn’t read Cerebus in years. “I haven’t read an issue of Cerebus since #200 or so, but I’ve flipped through a few lately and they look like they suck. And Dave Sim is evil.” You know, stuff like that.

Cerebus used to be the talk of the industry. It started off in 1977 as a “funny animal in the world of humans” book, like Howard the Duck. (Which, by the way, was a great comic, before George Lucas got his hands on the property…) Cerebus is an aardvark, three feet tall and gray, with a pronounced snout and a penchant for referring to himself in the third person. In the early adventures, he carries a sword and undertakes quests for gold in an archetypal fantasy land. It was a skillful parody of Conan, right down to the Red Sonja doppelganger, Red Sophia. (Quick aside – Sim managed the neat trick of making Cerebus’ aardvark nature both a) central and pivotal to the story, and b) irrelevant. No one talks to him like he’s an aardvark. Very few characters even seem to notice that he’s an aardvark.)

Sim’s ambitions quickly became clear with issue #26, the start of High Society. Cerebus journeyed to the city-state of Iest, and became wrapped up in the whirlwind of politics for 25 dizzying issues. Issue #51 began Church and State, the longest single story of the run, which found Cerebus at the center of a religious and political power struggle. Taken together, High Society and Church and State form a cohesive, engrossing, hilarious 86-issue skewering of that famous maxim about absolute power corrupting absolutely. Its ending even hinted at the larger cosmic issues Sim was driving the story towards.

Sim deftly explored family life and gender issues with Jaka’s Story, the next chapter. In fact, Jaka’s Story remains, along with Going Home, one of the most precisely observed portraits of human behavior in Sim’s catalog. And it has an ending that will make you recoil. In retrospect, many of the seeds of Sim’s later points were planted here. The first half of Cerebus was capped off with Melmoth, a well-researched peek into the last days of Oscar Wilde.

It was with Mothers and Daughters, the 50-issue arc that came next, that the true shape and scope of Cerebus came into focus. In carefully unfolding layers, Sim laid bare his cosmology and his belief structure. What appears at first as interruptions in the ongoing story, tangents and side streets, becomes the basis for a series of reality upheavals. Mothers and Daughters is a fascinating, clever and brilliant examination of creator and created, of artist and art, and of the dangers that face those searching for their destinies, even on levels beyond our comprehension. It utilizes text and meta-text in ways not even Grant Morrison has managed to outdo.

And it also contains issue #186, the culmination of years of planning, in which Sim’s alter ego, Cerebus reads writer Viktor Davis (it’s difficult to explain, but it all makes sense in the book), contemplates the “male light” and the “female void.” He concludes that the greatest danger to any artist full of “male light” is the sucking away of that light by women. It’s an involved and intricate piece, a window into Sim’s odious yet oddly well-reasoned worldview. It was also the beginning of the end for his audience.

From this point forward, Cerebus became an exercise for me in separating the artist from the art. Save for the final story arc, I have always read Cerebus in collected volumes, which has spared me the extended text pieces and essays that have filled the non-story pages of the monthly book for years. Still, Sim’s points are fairly easy to grasp from the story itself (and from “Tangents,” his multi-part “last word on gender issues” from a few years back). Sim has drawn a deep division between reason and emotion, the former of which he labels male and the latter female. Women, he says, are emotion-based creatures, incapable of reason, and since reason can never win in a battle with emotion, men have no choice but to ignore them completely or capitulate to their worldview. Which, in his mind, is incredibly dangerous, and has pretty much already happened.

Since #186, the comics press has ignored Sim, the way they would ignore the Unabomber if he had a monthly comic book based on his manifesto. No praise of Sim seems to trickle out without a generous helping of withering contempt for his views assaulting it from all sides. Sim would call this an emotional response, not a rational one. Just to show what I mean by the exercise that Cerebus has become for me, allow me a few seconds of Davespeak:

Cerebus, as a whole, makes me feel uneasy. I feel disgusted by many of his back-of-the-book views and I’ve tended to feel more and more uncomfortable as those views have crept into and slowly redefined the comic book. However, I think that Cerebus is a masterpiece of the comics form, and I think that Sim has utilized comics to its fullest extent in approaching and elucidating his points. I think that the completed novel should be treasured and highly regarded for as long as comics are made and read. It’s just that occasionally, I feel like throwing all my Cerebus volumes away.

Nothing has symbolized Sim’s idea of the war between the male light and the female void to me like my own reactions to the later issues of Cerebus. Sim himself appears in the book at the end of Mothers and Daughters, wrapping up the story so far and sending the comic in completely unexpected directions. He re-examines and redefines much of what has come before, especially with regards to Cerebus’ One True Love, Jaka, and her husband, Rick. I read with slight revulsion and horror as Sim turned his nuanced portrayal of Jaka in Jaka’s Story into the harping, irritating Jaka that travels with Cerebus through all 34 issues of Going Home. And I watched with some awe, I must say, as Sim rewrote Rick from the ground up, turning him into a saint and a prophet, albeit with some mental issues.

The final book, Latter Days, found Cerebus as the head of a new church, and concerned itself almost entirely with theology according to Sim. It’s perhaps the most fascinating of the books, if only for its real-life mirrors. Sim has embraced God, yet has done so by developing his own religion, a mixture of Judaism, Christianity and Islam anchored by his unique interpretation of the Bible. He goes into extreme detail on this last point, dedicating eight issues of Cerebus to commentaries on the Torah, rendered in nearly microscopic type. (He calls it the “Cerebexegesis.”)

Not surprisingly, his religious ideas seem to stem from his gender issues, and it all comes to a massive climax with #289/290 (a double issue), in which he lays out his complex cosmology. It’s yet another bold reinvention of the conclusion of Church and State, and probably the apex of Sim and Gerhard’s formal comic storytelling innovations. As far as the Cerebus storyline is concerned, #289/290 can be summed up with the admonition, “Don’t go into the light.” Ten issues later, that warning comes full circle for Cerebus, now 300 years old.

The final issue feels like a surprise, but in retrospect it’s the only way this series could end, honestly. We get the big “something fell” that has been foreshadowed since Church and State, and we get Cerebus’ final chance to avoid going into the light. Sim doesn’t give the little gray guy a break, even at the end, and it’s his big weakness, his love for Jaka, that does him in. It’s a final hammering home of the point, a final bit of the uncompromising heartlessness that has characterized this book. (His last word? “Heeelllppp…”) It’s perfect, and it leaves me with those same senses of awe and revulsion at war.

Now that the shape of the work is evident, several observations present themselves. First, Sim may try to characterize Cerebus as a two-act work (and he has, calling the first half “male” and the second “female”), but it’s really in three acts, each roughly 100 issues. (The first one’s a bit longer, the second a bit shorter.) Each concludes with an examination of light and void, and with Cerebus getting what he wants without being happy. The fantasy-oriented first third concludes with the (ironically named) final ascension – after much struggle, Cerebus is chosen, and he talks with a higher being. Of course, he’s told that he’ll never conquer the world, that he’ll die alone and unloved, and that people will one day find a way to blow up the sun and kill everyone. (Don’t go into the light.)

Cerebus sits out both Jaka’s Story and Melmoth – and if anything characterizes the monthly comic book, it’s long stretches of inactivity – but sparks a second ascension in Mothers and Daughters. He meets his creator, gets all his questions answered, but then his world is turned upside down. He spends the next 30 issues or so hanging out in a bar, but the third act hits its stride with the Cerebites’ vanquishing of the Cirinists in Latter Days, and it ends with Cerebus’ final contact with higher forces. Three rising waves of action, and three climaxes, all with the same point. It’s a brilliant structure.

Perhaps more interesting, though, is the ways in which this book has really been about Dave Sim and his journey. At the start, Cerebus is a brave barbarian out for money, a state which mirrors that of the self-publisher seeking his fortune. (Sim even states in Minds that he created Cerebus hoping to make himself rich and famous.) As Sim’s interests turned to larger things, so did the book, taking on politics and religion in its first third. Authors that Sim studied for inspiration (and for allegory) made appearances in the book – Oscar Wilde as Oscar Melmoth, F. Scott Fitzgerald as F. Stop Kennedy, and most importantly, Ernest Hemingway as Ham Ernestway.

Cerebus’ storyline is all about Sim’s search for truth. You can feel him developing his ideas and his basic philosophies within the story. When he first puts forth his gender-based cosmology in Church and State, it feels unfinished, but it is slowly refined in Reads and comes to full flower in Latter Days. Of course, any search for truth will eventually end up with an examination of God, which is where Cerebus concludes – with the Bible, God, Rick and the One True Cerebus. Interestingly, Sim’s ideas start small and become huge, whereas the story seems to do the reverse – it begins with a vast, untapped fantasy world and ends with 10 issues that all take place in one room.

The temptation has always been great to consider Cerebus an avatar for Sim himself, and assume that Cerebus’ opinions mirror Sim’s own. If Sim’s own appearances in the book (in Minds and Rick’s Story) talking to Cerebus weren’t enough to dispel that notion, then certainly the ignoble end Sim gives to his aardvark creation must be. Rather, it’s more likely that Cerebus represents the parts of Sim he wishes to see eliminated – his greed, his lack of faith, his ultimately tragic attachment to one woman. With #300 coloring the previous issues, Cerebus emerges, in a way, as a cautionary tale written to its author.

The major difficulty I have with Cerebus as a work of art stems from the very principles that guide it, however. One can see much of Sim’s worldview as motivational – for a writer/artist dedicated to making it through 6,000 pages in just over 26 years, imagining a world where forces beyond your control have aligned to make sure you don’t follow through on your grand artistic design in order to prove them all wrong makes a bit of sense. Unfortunately for the work itself, it feels like Sim has applied his reason vs. emotion argument to his characters.

That’s the rub – I don’t get the sense in the latter half of this book that Sim sees his characters as any more than allegorical devices to advance his points. They’re brilliantly crafted allegorical devices, but I don’t believe that Sim feels for them, or cares about what happens to them. That’s different from a common complaint I have with writers who seem to hate their characters, and wish bad things upon them. Sim just doesn’t allow his work to emotionally resonate, and that, I believe, is a change – Jaka’s Story is as resonant a character study as one could hope to find.

In the end, Cerebus reflects its creator’s own worldview – it’ll make you think, but it won’t make you feel. Your enjoyment of it will depend on whether you see this as a drawback.

There are countless other issues raised by Cerebus, and countless other observations to be made about it, but many of them require a complete re-reading, which I have planned for after the final collected volume ships this summer. It’s an uneasy work, as I’ve said, but it’s hard to overstate the impressiveness of Sim and Gerhard’s achievement. They developed a model for long-running, independent, self-published works in a field that, economically, is designed to prevent those from existing. They created a cohesive, complex work of literary merit in a medium dominated by pandering and spoon-feeding. And they did it all while patiently explaining that anyone – anyone – could do it, given the drive and willpower. “If you really want to self-publish,” Sim once famously said, “no one can stop you. If you don’t really want to self-publish, no one can help you.”

Who knows what Sim and Gerhard will go on to do next, if anything. Sim has taken to referring to himself as a retiree. Even if they produce nothing else, however, the Cerebus team has created a milestone achievement – a staggering, poisonous, praiseworthy work of art, the likes of which comics may never see again. Its passing is an event, and hopefully the philosophies at its center will not weigh the completed work down into obscurity. It’s too good, and too important, to meet a fate similar to that of its main character – dying alone, unmourned and unloved.

Thank you, Dave and Gerhard, for all 6,000 pages. Even the ones I disagree with.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So, did you all know that Dweezil Zappa and Lisa Loeb have a cooking show on the Food Network? Seriously. This makes me sadder than I can properly articulate.

I am typing this on my brand new Dell Dimension 8300 computer, my first column on the new beast. It is, in the words of the old show, better, faster, stronger than my aging Compaq, which I have mercifully put to bed. I get all my morning internet work done in eight minutes now, and I’m often finding myself sitting at the screen at 8:30 a.m. thinking, “Now what? How can I fill the rest of my day?” My monitor is like a tiny flat-screen TV, and my keyboard is somehow more receptive to pressure than my last one, making fast typing an easy and comfortable task. I’m halving my time on emails and other writings, just because I enjoy it more on the new board.

So here’s to a long and happy relationship. Let the honeymoon begin. I’m already enjoying my new Dell Jukebox, which, on shuffle, has just given me “I’m Bugged” by XTC, “Wintergreen Eyes” by Donnie Vie, and a selection from Peter Gabriel’s score to The Rabbit-Proof Fence, all in a row, like the best radio station on the planet.

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I haven’t said much about the Oscars this year, mainly because they seemed preordained. It was Lord of the Rings’ year, and anyone who has seen the films knows what a towering achievement in filmmaking they are, even if they’re not very good movies in the final analysis. Peter Jackson, at the very least, deserved his Best Director award, even if the voters, by necessity, considered the trilogy as a whole instead of just the third installment.

Outside of the Rings sweep, there weren’t any surprises, either. Much as I was pulling for Bill Murray, Sean Penn had this in the bag, and it was his turn. Sofia Coppola for screenwriter? Certainly. Charlize Theron winning for what I hear is an incredible performance in Monster? Sure. Why not? It was all so… blah this year, really. Maybe I’m just outgrowing silly awards shows, but the only part of the night I can truly say I enjoyed was Jack Black and Will Ferrell singing a song about lengthy acceptance speeches. Even the venerable Errol Morris came off like a bit of a schmuck.

I will give props to Sean Penn for mentioning the performance that I thought should have been honored above most others this year: Paul Giamatti’s in American Splendor. Once again, my favorite film of the year wasn’t even nominated, but I can’t complain that heavily this year because I just didn’t see a whole lot of films. Very little looked captivating enough to brave hordes of rude, inconsiderate people in order to pay nine dollars to see.

I have, however, already seen a film that I believe will be represented next year: The Passion of the Christ. And where to start talking about this?

Let’s begin here: Passion is, without question, the single most violent and brutal film I have ever seen, and I have no desire to see it again. There is a 25-minute scourging sequence, in which Jesus is whipped with multi-tailed contraptions tipped with metal blades that tear chunks from his flesh and leave him covered (literally, covered) in red gashes. I never have to see that again. Also, the nailing scenes, in which Jesus is attached to the cross in the most graphic manner imaginable? Never, ever want to watch that again. There were young children in the audience at my showing, and they were quite rightly disturbed.

Does all this gore have a point? That depends. Mel Gibson’s point is, most assuredly, that Christians have forgotten how unbelievably brutal the death of Jesus was, and bloodless passion plays in community churches have dulled people to the graphic nature of this sacrifice. I have spoken with Christians who came out of this movie deeply moved, because they see these lashings and think, every time, “That was for me. He’s going through this for me.” This is undoubtedly the context in which Gibson wishes you to view his film.

Trouble is, the movie itself doesn’t provide this context. Very little time is spent on telling the audience who Jesus was, and what he said, and why he said it. You’re expected to bring this context with you. But what if you don’t? There’s no doubting the power of the images in this film, but they remain unfocused to anyone who doesn’t already know what they mean. The movie doesn’t wield its power; it doesn’t argue its case. Hence, it allows you to filter it through whatever context you bring with you.

And that’s part of the reason, I believe, that Jewish groups are railing against the perceived anti-Semitism here. I believe there isn’t any – Caiaphas is cast in a negative light, certainly, but there are numerous other Jewish people who are portrayed much more sympathetically than, for example, the Roman centurions. The Pharisees represent a power struggle, a religious and political organization gone bad, and are not meant to characterize a nation. Or at least, that’s what I think, but see? The movie doesn’t support or refute my point effectively.

This is, absolutely, a film made for a particular audience, but millions outside that audience are going to see it. Some will wonder about this Jesus guy, and why he did what he did. Others will see it through the eyes of their own beliefs, and nothing in the movie will challenge their notions. And still others, perhaps the largest segment, will go see The Passion of the Christ out of curiosity, and get a two-hour film about a guy being whipped, beaten, nailed to a cross and brutally killed, in spectacularly gory detail. The fact that the film doesn’t effectively present itself as more than that is, to my mind, troubling.

And yet, I remain shaken by Passion, and I am in awe of Jim Caviezel, who plays the obviously inaccurate white-guy-with-perfect-teeth Jesus with incredible power. His eyes alone deserve their own Oscar. As a piece of cinema, this movie is stunning, powerful and unsettling. It tells an important part of a larger story very well – sometimes too well – and whether or not you believe in Jesus, the sheer filmmaking deserves respect. It is what it is, though – a part of a larger story, and I just wish that the movie didn’t invite you to write the rest on your own.

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Who knows what Jonatha Brooke might think about sharing a column with Jesus…

Jonatha Brooke is another of those literate, melodic singer/songwriters that I love and of whom the rest of the world has never heard. Check out my columns from early 2002, when I was trying to find a copy of her Steady Pull album in any music store I could find in Tennessee. I finally had to special-order it from Maine. Similarly, when I tried to find her new one, Back in the Circus, at my otherwise excellent CD store here in Maryland, I had to dig through the jazz section. ‘Cause it’s distributed by Verve, I guess, even though it plainly says “file under pop” on the back cover.

Suffice it to say that Brooke does not play jazz. She writes and sings glorious pop songs, in the vein of Neil Finn and Aimee Mann, and Circus is her sixth album, counting the two she made with the Story. She’s another in that long list of musicians who ought to be far better known than they are – you know, that list of names I’m always going on about. What’s infuriating about Brooke’s continued obscurity is the same thing that gets me riled up about others like her, such as Finn, Beki Hemingway, Michael Roe, etc: Brooke’s music is accessible, likeable, and would strike a chord with people, if only they could hear it. But with our current radio and distribution system, that’s never going to happen.

Brooke has been on an upswing since divesting herself of major labels in 2000. She watched her best album to that point, 10 Cent Wings, die a forgotten death on MCA Records, and quickly grew disillusioned with the major label scene. Like Aimee Mann, she formed her own label, Bad Dog Records, and has been using it to release her work ever since. And the work has reflected her newfound freedom – her newest songs usually turn out to be the best she’s ever done.

The eight Brooke compositions on Back in the Circus keep the tradition going. These are the best, most varied songs she’s ever put out, and although I will probably always love “Because I Told You So” (from Wings) best of all, there’s no doubting the increase in craft and emotion this album represents. The title track opens the record with a graceful waltz, “Better After All” may be her best shot at a hit single yet, “Everything I Wanted” is a great juxtaposition of desperate music and contented lyric, and “It Matters Now” is a delightful song, perhaps her most mature work to date.

Elsewhere, Brooke dips into electronic colorings, and finds them to her taste. “Sleeping With the Light On” is more eerie than anything she’s yet done, and “Less Than Love is Nothing” soars on a clubby beat and a lovely chorus. Brooke’s gorgeous voice, here and elsewhere, is a wonder all to itself. The album is remarkably diverse, almost to the point of disconnection – we jump from the trippy ambience of “Love” to the progressive pop of “Sally” and into the naked, beautiful sparseness of “No Net Below” without a break. She even caps it with a breathtaking rendition of an unlikely song: “Eye in the Sky,” originally by the Alan Parsons Project and brought to new life here. It’s the best example of finding the hidden potential in a song since Tori Amos covered “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and a great way to conclude the record.

If only she’d quelled her cover-version urge there. Alas, Brooke brought her album nearly to the brink of ruin with the inclusion of two more re-imaginings, as the Dirty Dancing people call them. As much as you might think an electro-pop version of “Fire and Rain” might be cool, trust me, it isn’t, and doing the same injustice to Brian Wilson’s revered “God Only Knows” is even worse. The latter song is one of the very best ever written – and it’s not just me talking here – and its original recording is still considered one of the finest ever undertaken, so why mess with it?

What we need on a Jonatha Brooke album is not another “God Only Knows,” but more Jonatha Brooke songs. These covers don’t fit in, and they break up the album’s flow immeasurably. Brooke would have been better served by writing a couple more tunes, or even leaving her James Taylor and Beach Boys homages off entirely. The result would have been short (nine songs), but it would have been her best album.

I’m becoming more and more enamored with my CD player’s skip button, though, and this is one of those cases for which it was made. Circus is also a good argument for paid song-by-song downloads. Getting this record off of iTunes, minus the bad covers, will only cost you nine bucks, and while you won’t get the packaging, you will get a better album than I got for $13. Back in the Circus is a wonderful record with two glaring flaws that nearly kill it completely, and that’s a shame. But with my luck, her trip-hop “Fire and Rain” will become the hit single she’s been chasing for 10 years now, create sales for this album in the millions, and go on to define her as an artist. So really, what do I know?

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I’m planning a retrospective column about Cerebus, one of the towering achievements of comic book storytelling, for after I’ve read the final issue. Since subscribers got their copies of #300 last week, I’m expecting to buy mine next Wednesday. Watch out for that, is all I’m saying, plus a look at the Cure’s box set, and reviews of Peter Mulvey, BT and Joe Jackson. Plus, on the horizon, a progressive rock detour with the new one from Fish, Field of Crows, and the two-disc Marbles from Marillion. Only a month to go before that one drops…

See you in line Tuesday morning.