Buying Tori Amos albums has begun to make me feel like an X-Men fan.

By any appreciable standard, very few of the dozen or so X-Men comics that come out each month are any good. In fact, despite pockets of overrated coherence (see Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men), the dozens of X-Men comics haven’t been any good since 1988 or so. How do I know this? Because I read comic book message boards, where people who have been buying every X-Men comic since the glory days of Claremont and Byrne congregate to bitch about how bad every X-Men comic is.

Here’s what’s always mystified me about X-Men fans. They know the books suck. They readily admit that the adventures of these seemingly hundreds of mutants in matching costumes haven’t been worth reading in almost 20 years. And yet, every week, they line up and spend tons of money – the average comic costs three dollars, and there are literally more than a dozen each month. In the latest Previews catalog, there are 16 X-Men books listed for April. That’s almost $50, for one month, to keep current on a story that hasn’t been good since the ‘80s.

I’m an insane collector of a number of things, and even I don’t get that.

But here I am, spending my 20 bucks this week to keep current with Tori Amos’ story, when I know that it hasn’t been a rewarding trip since 1996. Amos’ first three albums changed my life. They sparked emotions in me that I didn’t know music could spark. I used to look forward to new Tori albums, counting the days and grabbing any scrap of information I could about them before they were released. The night before Under the Pink came out, I couldn’t sleep. Seriously.

And now I dread them, knowing that I will go to the record store and plunk down my cash for dull disappointment. Twice now I have bought that dull disappointment in limited edition packaging, complete with bonus DVDs and maps and stickers and other crap. Why? Because I am a Tori Amos fan. Much like the poor X-Men fan who drags himself to the shop each week to buy something he knows will make his head hurt and deflate his little heart, I buy Tori albums because she was great once, and I believe she can be great again, and if I just weather this current storm of mediocrity, my faith will be rewarded.

Hey, it worked for U2 fans.

It’s just that the mediocrity keeps getting more mediocre, if that’s even possible. The downward slide started in 1998 with From the Choirgirl Hotel, a lame stab at commercialism that still contained about half an album’s worth of gems. To Venus and Back was better, but still not very good, and the covers record Strange Little Girls was better in concept than in execution. And then, two years ago, Scarlet’s Walk punched the bottom out of the airship. It was the worst thing she’d ever done.

I pulled out Scarlet’s Walk recently to give it another spin, and I’m afraid my original opinion stands. It’s a slog. 18 songs over 74 minutes, and if she had cut it in half, it would still have been her worst album. I ended up only liking three songs (“Carbon,” “I Can’t See New York” and “Gold Dust”), and of those, I still don’t really like any of them, not to the level that I have liked Tori songs in the past. The album is long stretches of absolute, crushing boredom punctuated by brief signs of life that flicker out before they can catch fire.

And now here’s The Beekeeper, Amos’ eighth album, and she’s taken the odd step of preemptively extinguishing those signs of life before pressing the record button. Beekeeper is 19 songs sprawling over 79 minutes, and it’s all oatmeal. I can’t even tell you how much I don’t want to write this next sentence, but I have to. This record is horrible, the new champion Worst Tori Amos Album Ever. Ten years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to convince me that there would one day be competition for that prize, but here we are.

There isn’t a single song on The Beekeeper that makes me glad I bought it. There are some pleasant moments, some songs (like the opener, “Parasol”) that hold up well when compared with most top 40 radio, but the Tori Amos of her first few records is completely absent. The album is slicked up in an inoffensive sheen, and dotted with really awful lite-funk (“Sweet the Sting,” “Witness,” “Hoochie Woman”), the kind that Phish tried to do for 10 years. Beyond the styles and the production, though, the songs are just plain boring, and Amos doesn’t even seem all that interested in them.

There are bits I like – the swirling piano in “Barons of Suburbia” is a lesser version of that in “Carbon” (which makes sense since “Barons” is a much lesser song), but is still somewhat enjoyable. The brief “Original Sinsuality” is a musical highlight, and it’s too bad that the lyrics are so self-satisfied and obvious. The title track has some neat textures, and “Marys of the Sea” is the best song on the album. Too bad it’s at track 18. After 70 minutes of snooze-inducing blandness, “Marys” comes charging in like a classic, but taken on its own, it’s merely okay.

The rest? Terrible, typical, sub-Sarah McLachlan mundanity. And it hurts me.

I tried to follow my own advice and divorce this album from Amos’ past, just assess it as the work of a new artist, and I can’t. Without the deeply resonant work Amos delivered on Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink and Boys for Pele, there would have been no reason at all for me to have bought this. As the work of a new artist, it is pleasant and forgettable, and I wish I could think of it in those terms and just forget it, but I’m a Tori Amos fan. I feel betrayed when she disregards her own immense talent and phones an album in, like she has here.

I don’t get this way with most artists. If Ani Difranco wants to take four years and four C-minus albums to do something noteworthy, I don’t feel like she’s stabbed me four times. I have a personal connection with Amos’ early work that I can’t explain. But even in the most dispassionate, critical terms, she is an incredible songwriter, pianist and singer, and she could have (and in some sense, should have) been making astounding records for the last decade. But she hasn’t been, and with each new crap-fest, it becomes harder for me to convince myself that she ever will again.

So why do I keep buying Tori Amos albums? Because she still has it. She’s buried it, but it pokes its head out every once in a while. Last year’s Welcome to Sunny Florida EP contained six songs, each of them better than all of Scarlet’s Walk and The Beekeeper. Had I done the sensible thing and given up on Tori after Scarlet’s, I’d have missed out on some great work.

It’s getting harder to sift through the shit to find the corn, though. Case in point – the limited edition DVD that came with Beekeeper. The album made me sad, but the DVD made me kind of hate Amos. The interview segment is full of forced profundity, Tori obviously working hard to assign these second-rate songs a concept worthy of her. She’s always been a little loopy, of course, but she’s always been effortless about it. This interview makes her circular logic and oh-so-arty philosophies of life sound like work, like she’s selling her ideas to herself.

Really, it’s like this: “This garden is full of shapes, but not physical shapes, shapes of sound. And your shape may not be like my shape, yours might not be based hexagonically. But mine is based on a hexagon, because the cells of a honeycomb are hexagons, and of course you go to the beekeeper, right?” And I’m watching this, thinking two things: “Oh, my aching ass,” and, “What the hell is she talking about?”

But then, there’s an audio track on the DVD, called “Garlands.” And lo and behold, it’s a better song than anything on the album – it’s rich, full, expressive and bursting with the emotion Amos used to put into everything. It’s simply beautiful. And it raises a number of questions – foremost, if Amos can still reach into that place and create lovely statements like “Garlands,” then why doesn’t she? Why didn’t this song make the album? Why must one buy the limited edition package of a truly awful album to get to the one worthy song? Why didn’t she take “Garlands” as a challenge, say “Now we’re getting somewhere,” write 10 more like it and make a good record?

If Amos had completely lost the ability to make captivating work with an undercurrent of deep feeling, then I might not feel like kicking her, but she hasn’t, clearly. That she can write songs like “Garlands” and chooses to write songs like “The Power of Orange Knickers” is betrayal, plain and simple. Not just betrayal of her fans, even though it is that, but betrayal of her own prodigious gifts. She should be the most important female artist in the world, and she should be making music that forces people to pay attention, music that moves and reshapes and explores with passion. Music that will not be ignored. Instead, she’s making background noise for pre-formatted radio.

And it hurts.

But I will keep buying Tori Amos albums, like those sad X-Men fans, because I believe she can grab hold of her own power again. At this point, I don’t care what she chooses to sing about – she could make a 70-minute concept album about how great her kids are and how happy motherhood has made her, and I’d be in, as long as she meant it. Amos hasn’t sounded emotionally invested in anything she’s done for a long time, and The Beekeeper is the most remote, distant, uninvolving record she has made. It’s a record that all but dares me to give up on her, but I’m not doing it. I know she has great things left to say, great songs left to write.

Prove me right, Tori. Please. Prove me right.

* * * * *

We lost Hunter S. Thompson this week. This has been a really bad year for famous people I admire, and it’s only February.

Like a lot of would-be writers, I had two revelations about Hunter Thompson’s work. The first came after I encountered it for the first time, reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and that was that writing could be this alive, this dangerous, this all-involving. The second came years later, after numerous stabs at adapting Thompson into my own style, and that was that it can’t be done. There was only ever one Hunter Thompson.

My favorite Hunter-related memory has little to do with the man himself, since I never met him. But when I shared an apartment with Liz Balin, we had what we referred to as a “bathroom journal” – a little notebook that we would write in while on the toilet. I know, more info than you needed, but stick with me here. That journal rested in a bucket in the corner, and also in that bucket Liz had placed a thick volume called Daily Affirmations. And it was just as Stuart Smalley as it sounded.

So, of course, to counteract those vibes, I contributed my copy of Fear and Loathing to the bucket. I wasn’t hoping for much beyond spreading the disease that is Thompson’s writing to an unwitting recipient. I know that Liz read at least some of it, because one day I picked up the bathroom journal and found this written there, in a shaky hand: “What is this book?”

And I thought to myself, “Mission accomplished.”

I don’t have much to say about Hunter’s death, or the manner in which he chose to go, but if you’re looking for a good essay about it from someone who actually met the man, go here. It’s the blog of Dr. Tony Shore, and it’s worth reading beyond just the Thompson piece.

Next week, The Mars Volta.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s 1:30 in the morning, and I’ve just returned from seeing a great gig.

I don’t get out to see live music as much as I want to anymore, but this was Keane, playing the Riviera here in Chicago, and I wasn’t about to miss it. Keane flips my particular switch more than any new band I have heard since the Ben Folds Five – they were the musical discovery of the year for me in 2004, and their album Hopes and Fears is pretty damn close to absolutely perfect.

And you know what? They’re better live.

Keane has a non-traditional lineup – singer Tom Chaplin, drummer Richard Hughes and keyboardist Tim Rice-Oxley, and that’s it. Rice-Oxley has the Jack White role here, meaning that every melodic contribution that’s not lead vocals is down to him. Live he writhes about like an epileptic, keeping time with his whole body and banging the hell out of his electric piano. In contrast, Chaplin mostly just stands there, but his voice is so powerful and clear that your focus is drawn to him anyway. Chaplin’s voice was even stronger live than on record, filling the theater all by its lonesome.

The band played most of Hopes and Fears, including its b-sides, but they also premiered two new tunes. What can I say except this: inevitably, there will come a day when Keane writes a bad song, a song that doesn’t effortlessly soar above nearly everything that currently passes as pop music. That day has not yet come, though. At this point Keane is testing my well-honed cynicism – they are so good that I’m already dreading the eventual decline, the middle third of their Behind the Music special, before the rehab and the reunion tour. May it never come to that.

And can I just add that if you haven’t bought Hopes and Fears yet, you really should.

* * * * *

The first thing most everyone says about Julian Cope is that he’s insane.

You’ll see it in the first paragraph of reviews, articles and interviews – Cope is fried, nuts, out of touch, on another planet, loopy, a hazelnut cream and a praline delight short of a full box of chocolates. He has weird ideas, weird beliefs, and most of all, he makes weird music. I got more than 5,000 results on a Google search for “Julian Cope” and “insane.”

And I’m not going to say that Cope isn’t a little bit crazy, but I think he’s insane in the same way that Dave Sim is insane. Both have looked at the world, processed all the horror and pain through their own individual filters, and come to some internally consistent conclusions. That these conclusions don’t jive with the thoughts of most of the rest of the world means little – both Cope and Sim are a very particular, very reasonable form of crazy, and spend any time with the works of either one, and you start to see the sense in what they’re saying.

It helps that Cope is an immensely talented songwriter. He started off as the lead visionary in a band called The Teardrop Explodes. After a couple of psychedelic records with them, he spun off on his own with a series of fractured pop records, including the near-classic Saint Julian. Still, the constraints of radio-pop seemed to be chafing him on the overly synth-poppy My Nation Underground. So, in 1991, he left his pop career behind and never looked back.

Perhaps Cope’s best regarded work is his what’s-wrong-with-the-world trilogy, released between 1991 and 1994. He explored man’s responsibility to the planet on Peggy Suicide, took aim at organized religion on Jehovahkill, and imagined a world gone to hell thanks to cars, gas and oil on Autogeddon. Along the way, he dropped Kraut-rock jams, Beatlesque carnival music, a couple of phenomenal space-rock guitar solos, and some world-class pop songs. These are three terrifically varied, well-constructed gems full of melody and madness.

And then? Well, he put out the scattered, swirly 20 Mothers in 1995 and the more focused, rollicking Interpreter in 1996, and then seemed to disappear. The general public hasn’t heard from Julian Cope in almost 10 years, but in truth, he’s been more active in those years than ever before. A visit to his website will show that, like many other bands and artists, Cope has latched onto the internet as a way to get his work out there with a minimum of external influence, and he’s been using it to build (ahem) his nation underground.

So let’s see. Cope has written several books on spiritual sites throughout Europe. He’s formed three bands, ranging from the moron-rock of Brain Donor to the ambient drones of Queen Elizabeth, and produced a number of very strange solo albums. The Rite series sounds like Prince’s News album, all beats and wah-wah, while works like Odin take drones and ambience to their 70-minute breaking point. He’s written some pop songs, too, but they’ve never been more odd-sounding. All in all, Cope has taken every opportunity to be as uncompromising as possible, sales be damned, and he sounds artistically happier than he’s ever been.

For years, though, he’s been talking about this album called Citizen Cain’d that he’s been working on. (And can I take a moment to marvel at that title? It’s a work of art all by itself.) After 36 months of work, Cain’d was finally released last month in a really cool package – two discs in a solid black jewel case, housed in a black slipcase. And the album is picking up some strong reviews and support, leading some to expect that it will be his commercial comeback, despite its release on his own homemade Head Heritage label.

Lest the reviews mislead those early-90s Cope fans into thinking that he’s created another Peggy Suicide here, though, I have to say that if you haven’t been following along, Cain’d will leave you scratching your head. The darkness of the packaging promises a dark record, and man, has Cope delivered on that score, but he’s also made one that follows closely on the heels of his work with Brain Donor and his more esoteric solo material. Cain’d has 12 songs, and not one of them is a hit. Even on alternative college radio. Trust me.

Cope says that Citizen Cain’d is split up into two CDs, despite running just a bit more than 70 minutes in total, because the songs are too “psychologically exhausting” to play all in a row. While I think that’s crap, I do applaud the decision, because the two discs are very different. The first is basically a Brain Donor album, loud and bashing and raw. Opener “Hell Is Wicked” crashes in on a pair of riffs that would make Zeppelin fans drop jaw, and then “I Can’t Hardly Stand It” explodes, heralded by Cope’s mad exultations.

There’s no getting around the sound of the first half of the disc – it’s mixed very strangely. The lead guitar that spills all over “I Can’t Hardly Stand It” is so loud and blatted that it may damage your speakers, and I think Cope knew he had written a catchy little number with “I’m Living In the Room They Found Saddam In,” so he damaged the vocal track. (Speaking of great titles, how about that one, huh?) Since the odd mixing decisions are confined to a few tracks, though, I have to think that Citizen Cain’d sounds exactly the way Cope wants it to. Similarly, he mispronounces Saddam Hussein’s first name, but I think he did it so that the lyric could be misheard as “I’m living in the room they found so damning.” That fits with the lyrics and theme as well.

The first disc concludes with a 13-minute waltz called “I Will Be Absorbed,” and any fears that this album will be nothing but Iggy Pop ditties should be allayed. “Absorbed” is a wonder, with some great melodies and a powerful chorus. It goes on a little long, but it leads into the more melodic second disc well. Disc two is slower, but no less dark – witness the opener, an 11-minute web of guitars called “Feels Like a Crying Shame,” in which he uses the title phrase to describe his own reincarnation.

“World War Pigs” is the album’ most indelible number, sizing up religious conflict with some pointed observations: “The word is out on Allah, he’s been hijacked…” “The Living Dead,” similarly, equates westerners with shambling zombies, and finds Cope walking through Armenia and decrying his own country: “I will not represent the living dead.” The song is delivered with little but Cope’s voice and guitar, and while it’s an odd choice for the intimate treatment, it works well.

And then the closer, “Edge of Death,” gives us Cope at his most abstract and howling. Over nine minutes of driving guitars (with no drums), Cope details a nightmare world, and examines himself in its shackles. This one is not for the faint of heart, as Cope’s vocals are, shall we say, unrestrained. But it’s a powerful piece, including actual helicopter sounds to add force, and it could only have been the last song.

As a complete trip, Citizen Cain’d doesn’t quite hold together, and those looking for a return to form will probably be disappointed – the album is another progression along Cope’s singular musical path, and it leaves little doubt that he’s going to follow this path for the rest of his life. (He’s already announced the title of his next project: Dark Orgasm. Yikes…) Listening to Cain’d is like peering into the mind of the sanest crazy person you’re likely to meet, and while it’s not a masterpiece, it’s up to the high standard Cope has set for more than 20 years. And, of course, it’s only available direct from him.

* * * * *

Cope’s website includes a section called “Unsung,” where Cope picks an album every month or so and gives it his full support. Reading this section led me to purchase one of the strangest and most oddly compelling albums I’ve ever added to my collection. See, there was this doom-rock band called Sleep, and they played slow, pounding metal as if the first three Black Sabbath albums were the only records ever released. And after two moderately successful stoner-rock platters (Volume One and Sleep’s Holy Mountain) they were signed to London Records.

And as legend has it, London paid a sizeable advance for the band to record their third album. And lo, the band did smoke the whole advance, buying huge quantities of pot and other substances, and when the time came for them to turn in that third album, they gave London something called Dopesmoker. And verily, I tell thee, Dopesmoker consists of a single 63-minute song, also called “Dopesmoker,” that chronicles the travels of the Weedian people to the Riff-Filled Land.

I’m going to repeat the pertinent parts of that, because I find them so amazing: A 63-minute song. The Weedian people. The Riff-Filled Land. It’s called Dopesmoker.

Naturally, of course, I had to have this thing.

And thankfully, the full version of Dopesmoker is available now after a protracted battle with London Records that caused the group to break up. London did release a 50-minute version of the song, retitled Jerusalem, but the 63-minute one is the real deal. It sounds very much like someone playing Black Sabbath and Paranoid very, very slowly, after pulling Ozzy’s tongue from his mouth and giving him food poisoning. It’s an endurance test. Time slows to a crawl while this is playing. I’ve made it through four times now, but I’m not sure my eardrums have.

And I’ve only made it through because I’m obsessive about music, and about finding patterns and compositions where others hear noise. I would bet that none of my friends could make it to the 20-minute mark, and I’m willing to put money on that. Cope’s current album of the month is by Om, a band that has risen from the ashes of Sleep, and it consists of three long songs that probably sound just like Dopesmoker. And I may have to get that one, too.

It’s a sickness.

Anyway, next week, Tori.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

People don’t like to think.

Okay, before you fire up those email accounts, this is one of those times where I’m going to start with a generalization and then walk back from it. Believe it or not, I use this technique most often to either change my own mind or figure out how I really feel on any given topic. I’ve been saying for years that when it comes to art – music, movies, books, what have you – people don’t like to think. So let’s dance around that for a bit and see if I think it’s true.

I already think that perhaps it may be more true to say that people don’t like to be made to think. Remember the books you had to read in high school? How many of you really enjoyed that experience? I don’t think the unpleasantness came from the books, but from the enforced, mandatory nature of the reading. There are books I have plowed through in an evening, and books I have sloughed through over more than a year’s time, but I’ve set my own pace. Since graduation, no one has rapped my knuckles if I haven’t read three chapters by Monday’s quiz.

I think that many people consider challenging movies and music the same way – as if the artist is forcing them to think. And I believe a large part of that comes from the societal expectation we’ve stapled to music and films, which is the promise of escape. When most Americans go to the movies, they want to relax for two hours, shut down their brains and enjoy themselves. It’s a mentality that certainly explains the impending Die Hard 4, and in fact the majority of American cinema – brainless, funny, disposable, and gone from your mind once the credits stop rolling.

And when a movie like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes along, which casts rubber-faced funnyman Jim Carrey in a mind-bending exercise about truth, memory and the futility of love, I think quite a lot of moviegoers feel like they’ve been tricked. They signed on for a funny romance, and they got a desperately sad maze of ideas. It’s almost like someone pre-empted NASCAR for a physics lecture, only moviegoers have paid their nine bucks and can’t change the channel.

The same goes for music. Most folks relegate music to the background of their lives, scoring their own experiences and matching their own moods. So when an artist decides to create something trickier, something that demands attention and concentration, I think people find themselves annoyed with it, especially if it’s by an artist that has delivered easily digestible material before. That’s one of the many reasons you’ll never see a rock opera by Usher, for example. It’s also why most pop albums follow the same two or three styles all the way through – 17 disposable tracks adhering to a formula makes for successfully pleasing background noise.

And it’s not that pop music fans don’t think, or don’t have ideas, it’s just that they don’t want or expect them from their entertainment. I think that’s because the industry has taken the focus off of artistry and onto lifestyle, marketing everything as stylish and fun. The sales machine is oddly more honed in the music world – it’s very easy to distinguish, just from the cover art most times, the “serious” art from the formulaic static, which makes either one pretty easy to avoid, depending on your preference.

Here’s the thing: genuinely thoughtful, thought-provoking music is out there, but I’ve come to the conclusion that people need to discover it on their own. The problem is that even if you’re looking for it, it’s hard to find, because the marketing machine keeps it on the sidelines, out of the public consciousness. Big labels don’t want you to find something ambitious and powerful that you might like, they want you to down a steady diet of what they’re selling.

So if even those seeking out this type of music will have a hard time finding it, and most of the American population couldn’t give a damn, then why do artists make challenging works to begin with? The simple answer is the most difficult to explain to most people – it’s because they have to. They’re wired to take on the big concepts, and too skilled to allow audience indifference to dictate their direction. Hard as it may be to grasp, for some artists, asking “who’s going to like this?” isn’t even a concern.

Granted, that mentality flowers more in places like Europe, where the American marketing virus has not fully spread – just look at the difference between American and European films. Or look at the catch-all genre that is progressive rock, which has a much larger measure of support in Europe than here. Progressive has become a term for anything that exhibits conceptual development and complex musical composition – anything that requires multiple listens and some concentrated study to fully grasp. And lately, the best of that seems to come from across the Atlantic.

All of this is just a lengthy preamble to discussing an album that nearly slipped past me last year, but one that has taken over my stereo and my head-space quite effectively since then. I’ve bought quite a bit of music already this year, but I keep coming back to this one, and I keep mulling it over and humming it. And I mention the preceding theories here because this album is one that evidences years of thought and planning, one that wears its big brain proudly.

It’s the new one by Swedish band Pain of Salvation, and it’s simply called Be.

Now, right off, this record establishes itself as the musical equivalent of a thesis paper, so if you don’t like that sort of thing, at least you can’t accuse PoS of tricking you. The song titles are all in faux-Latin (or faux-Italian, or some variation thereof), they have subtitles, and the album is broken up into five suites, each with pseudo-Latin titles and subtitles of their own. Just track four, for example, is called “Pluvius Aestivus,” subtitled “Of Summer Rain (Homines Fabula Initium),” and is part three of a suite called “Animae Partus,” subtitled “All in the Image Of.” And that one’s an instrumental, to boot.

As much as you might ponder Be, rest assured that PoS mastermind Daniel Gildenlow has pondered it more. The central thesis of Be is that God created the universe to teach him about himself, making man small shards of a very large mirror. The album also details the story of mankind’s search for God, building a probe that, in the end, becomes God. (Or something like that.) It’s a cyclical examination of origins and rebirthings that poses more questions than it answers, but Gildenlow has provided an exhaustive list of reference materials on the band’s site should you want to explore the concept further.

Really, how many albums come with a list of reference material? Be has been written off by many as pretentious twaddle, probably without cracking open the CD case, because it tackles big ideas with an even bigger sense of its own importance. The album doesn’t hold your hand – it presents massive concepts with an all-inclusive musical explosion that shifts and morphs for its whole running time. No two songs sound the same here (discounting reprises), because, as Gildenlow would say, the concept transcends time and place – it happens everywhere, and circles and winds around itself repeatedly.

But beyond the concept, how is Be as 70 minutes of music? Well… breathtaking, really. It’s full of sound effects and color, and even the simplest of its songs contain hidden depths. It opens with a rush, the sound of God birthing into existence, a heartbeat, and a male/female monologue about what it means to be. This is followed by three minutes of blistering heaviness beneath a newscast-style monologue detailing the population explosion on earth, as a way of conveying the fractal nature of God. In rapid succession, then, come a flute-and-acoustics jig concerning seasons and rebirth, a lovely piano instrumental and a more modern-sounding rock-with-strings piece about the impermanence of death.

And that’s just the first 20 minutes. If that’s not enough to make you run screaming from this record, then it may just be for you. The mish-mash of styles never lets up – I have heard criticism that track five, “Lilium Cruentus,” is the album’s first real song, and if by “real song” one means “guitar-based rock with verses and a chorus,” then one would be right. But typical structure is not the point here. Immediately following “Lilium” is “Nauticus,” a lovely five-minute gospel moan, and “Dea Pecuniae,” a 10-minute epic (subdivided into three parts, naturally) that sounds like David Lee Roth’s favorite waltz. Nothing here is what you’d expect, even if you’re familiar with Pain of Salvation. (I wasn’t – I only picked up earlier albums after hearing Be.)

The first few times through, Be can feel like a scattered mess. Songs are internally consistent, but the threads between them need a few listens to discern. (And the liner notes help.) Still, even on first encounter, there are a couple of tracks that stand out as particularly powerful. Most notable is “Vocari Dei,” a gorgeous collection of answering machine messages. Let me explain that: while making Be, the band asked its fans to call a certain number and pretend they were leaving messages on God’s machine. Gildenlow then strung those together and composed a lilting instrumental for the background. The result is stunning – the messages are heartfelt and aching, coming from all corners of the globe. At the end, when a shaky British voice apologizes for “really screwing things up this time,” the effect is nearly immobilizing.

The climax of the album is “Iter Impius,” a piano-led stunner that adds a layer of unquenchable sadness to the idea of being God. Melodically, this is the closest Be comes to earlier PoS albums, and is the best thing this album has going for it. Gildenlow’s voice is deep and strong, and he tears into this piece. In the end, the album cycles back upon itself for “Martius/Nauticus II” (which contains bits of “Nauticus” and “Imago”) and “Animae Partus II,” ending where it began – breath, heartbeat, “I am.” It’s quite the journey.

Be is not about individual songs, though – it’s about conveying the vastness of its own concept, playing on a grand scale. It avoids the trap of most concept albums by not spelling out its plot in hackneyed “then-this-happened” scene structures, but rather giving us the experience of time the way God might see it, all at once. It speaks to grand themes and huge questions, and is still a swell piece of enjoyable music. It sidesteps its own pretension, in a way, by drafting such a massive scope. The album itself cannot help but be less pretentious than its inspiration.

But you know, I’ve had this problem with the word “pretentious” for some time now, and I think this ties in neatly with my earlier point about the industry’s marketing. To me, having something to say and saying it over 70 (or 120, or 240) deliriously complex minutes isn’t pretentious, because it doesn’t waste my time. Three Doors Down, now, they’re pretentious for assuming that I’d want to spend even 40 minutes listening to them rehash bland rock formulas. They’re wasting my time. Be is a stunningly original and superbly crafted work that rewards my repeated listens with new colors and new insights. It’s not pretentious to me if you actually do have a point of view and a way to express it.

But then, I like to be challenged by my art, and Pain of Salvation have definitely come through for me on that score. There are some dismal-selling records that I wish more people would hear, because they would appeal to most everyone. Be is not one of those. It requires knowledge and appreciation of at least a dozen musical forms, a willingness to follow threads of a concept through non-adjacent songs, and the patience to listen to a 70-minute album at least five or six times before it starts making sense.

If you can do all that, then Be is a masterpiece waiting for you to discover it. I can’t imagine that most people will be bothered to try it, and while I certainly do think it’s their loss, I can’t blame them. This record will make you think. I have no idea who the band had in mind when they created this work, but I’m glad I found it. If you like music that stimulates your brain and your imagination, and doesn’t just fill the space around you with pleasant nothingness, you should find it, too.

Next week, Julian Cope returns with the wonderfully titled Citizen Cain’d.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I know, I know, I’m late again. I have no excuses – I finished my script on Wednesday, basked in some good early reviews from friends and collaborators, and spent the next two days just recharging my batteries. It’s off to other projects next week – a screenplay, a book of my uncle’s writings – but I am determined to keep my weekly column schedule. No vacations!

* * * * *

Conor Oberst is only 24 years old.

I wasn’t going to bring that up, but then I got a letter from the Saddle Creek Records legal team. Apparently, it’s the law – reviewers are obligated to mention Oberst’s young age within the first paragraph or two of any article about his Bright Eyes project. I’m trying to avoid jail time – last time I was there, well, let’s just say it wasn’t Camp Cupcake and leave it at that. So: Conor Oberst is only 24 years old.

I assume I’m supposed to include this factoid because it’s apparently astounding that he’s such an accomplished songwriter, performer and recording artist at 24. It’s not a new observation – only the number has changed in the last 10 years or so. Oberst was in and out of his first recording band, Commander Venus, by age 15, and releasing albums as Bright Eyes by 17. He formed Saddle Creek Records with his Venus bandmates, who went on to start projects like Cursive and The Faint, and he’s resisted all attempts by major labels to woo him away.

And I think he probably got tagged with the “boy genius” thing by age 18, when the homemade wonder Letting Off the Happiness hit stores. Oberst set himself up as a literary lo-fi poet, garnering a flood of “indie Bob Dylan” comparisons, and with every subsequent release, he’s worked hard to simultaneously live up to and topple that image. He has remained a lyricist first and a melodicist second, like Dylan, and his shaky voice is still the dealbreaker for a lot of newbies, but other than that, Bright Eyes has evolved considerably.

One thing that gets glossed over in all the Dylan references is that Oberst makes weird records. The experience of listening to Bright Eyes’ cobbled-together debut with the cobbled-together title (A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997) has little to do with the songs themselves. It’s about how the impassioned basement recordings wrap you up in their wobbly spell. The missed beats and sub-demo quality become an integral part of the sound and style, in a strange way. Oberst uses the sound of his records to tell part of the story – 2000’s Fevers and Mirrors crashed to earth with snarling guitars and gloomy lyrics, while 2002’s Lifted built huge studio constructs with choirs and orchestras.

So when critics commented on the incongruous physical sound of the two new Bright Eyes albums, I was a bit baffled. No two Oberst projects have sounded quite the same, but the songs have remained identifiably Bright Eyes, and there’s no mistaking that yelping, barely-restrained voice. After Lifted’s 70-plus-minute monolithic statements, in fact, I figured Oberst would have to do one of two things – keep on going, and produce a huge mess of a record drowned in production, or strip back and make a simple little collection of ditties.

And it probably shouldn’t have surprised me that he’s done both. Simultaneous album releases are not a new thing – just ask Axl Rose, if you can find him – but rarely has that tactic made as much sense as it does here. Oberst has picked a direction by going in both directions at once, and his two new albums are so different from each other, tonally speaking, that calling them both Bright Eyes discs can only be a conscious decision to expand his own definition. Perhaps stranger still is the fact that neither one sounds an awful lot like previous Bright Eyes records. This is an expression of artistic restlessness that can’t help but make me happy, if only for its own sake.

But how are the discs themselves? Start with I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, if only because it shares the most connection with Bright Eyes past. This little record – 10 songs in 45 minutes – follows from the sparser and more country-folk moments of Lifted. The orchestrations are still here, but this time they are more muted and shiny. The horn section on “We Are Nowhere and It’s Now” never even threatens to overpower the sweet acoustic waltz, and Oberst takes away everything but voices and guitar for a couple of tracks, most prominently the single, “Lua.”

These are easily the most traditional-sounding songs Oberst has written. I had to check to make sure “Another Travelin’ Song” isn’t a cover, so old-time country is its sound, and in “Old Soul Song (For the New World Order),” Oberst has come up with a classic, beautifully set to horn lines and piano. This is such a traditional American country-folk record that Emmylou Harris guest-stars on a few songs, and her wavering alto fits right in. After the 10-minute epics on Lifted, I’m Wide Awake sounds positively unambitious, but it revels in its simplicity, and the crashing sound of old does get one workout, on closing Beethoven homage “Road to Joy.”

But by and large, Oberst has reserved his sonic experimentation for the other album, Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. It’s billed as a full-on embrace of electronic studio wizardry, and yet the cover drawing is of a man vomiting numbers into a toilet. With the title and packaging, Oberst seems almost embarrassed by this excursion, providing plausible deniability for his indie cred. Should Digital Ash need to be written off as an ill-advised sidestep in the coming years, Oberst has made it easy by building that sense into the packaging.

Happily, it does not appear in the record itself. Digital Ash is, in fact, a full-on embrace of electronic studio wizardry, especially in its first half. Ambient synths pulse, programmed drums collide, and Oberst’s voice is processed and alien. Sonically, it’s like hearing an old friend in an entirely new setting. Luckily, Oberst didn’t abandon his responsibility as a songwriter – just about all of these songs could be played with his band instead of programmed, and serve as perfectly acceptable Bright Eyes tunes. Had he written for the studio, I doubt this project would be as successful as it is.

Of the two new records, Digital Ash is the more interesting, and not just because of the production. Songs like “Down In a Rabbit Hole” would be fascinating even without the compressed electronic drums and screechy synth tones, and “Light Pollution” is almost rock-band organic as it is. “Ship in a Bottle” may be the best song on either disc, and the screaming baby sound near the two-minute mark ought to startle you a bit. That said, the studio has not freed Oberst as much as it might have, only supported him in new ways. Given a few listens to make sense of the keyboard webs, this is most definitely a Bright Eyes album, and while the songs are good, they are not to the level of the best stuff on Lifted.

My primary criticism of this two-album endeavor is that since Oberst has made some obviously deliberate style choices, his work is of necessity limited on each disc. Whereas Lifted (and, to a smaller degree, Fevers and Mirrors) glimmered with unpredictability, by the fourth song on each of these new ones, you know what you’re in for. A mixture of the two sessions would have resulted in a schizophrenic work, to be sure, but one with a more adventurous nature. In a way, Oberst knew what he was going to get when he started these projects, so the end results are less of a ride than he has delivered before.

These are definitely the two most smoothed-out and accessible Bright Eyes records available, too. Oberst’s voice is reined in, for the most part – he brings the passion at the end of “Road to Joy,” but otherwise his trademark high, fragile caterwaul is largely absent. If this is evidence of the end of his musical adolescence, then there’s nothing to be done – even child prodigies have to grow up sometime.

Oberst has certainly delivered here, and his music is still touching and odd. The trick will be to keep maturing without losing the gut-rumbling edge he has always had. That edge is in somewhat short supply on Wide Awake and Digital Ash, and while it’s great that Oberst is evolving sonically and continuing to branch out, his music doesn’t ache like it used to. But hell, he has time, and a hopefully long and prolific career ahead of him. (Did I mention that he’s only 24?) If he can learn to mix impact with imagination, he’ll be incredible someday.

* * * * *

First Will Eisner, then Johnny Carson, and now Ossie Davis. Damn, this year sucks. Even if I didn’t appreciate Davis as an actor (which I do), I would respect him for this little fact: he was married to the great Ruby Dee for twice as long as I have been alive. That’s just amazing.

Next week, a musical treatise I missed last year, and then Julian Cope and Tori Amos.

See you in line Tuesday morning.