The new Keane album is called Under the Iron Sea, and it comes out here on June 20.

I’m racking my brain to come up with any first album I have ever enjoyed more than Hopes and Fears, Keane’s 2004 debut. It made number two on my top 10 list that year, ahead of Marillion’s Marbles, a feat in itself, and just behind Brian Wilson’s amazing SMiLE. I can only think of a couple opening shots I’ve liked more – Jellyfish’s Bellybutton, for example, or Ben Folds Five.

So I’m in that familiar state of anticipation and dread for the follow-up, especially after hearing that the trio a) almost broke up while recording it, and b) decided to shake up their sound and produce something darker. I love their sound, and I don’t want them to shake it up. I admire bands who can keep growing and evolving, and I certainly don’t want a Strokes situation for Keane – they’re way too good to produce the same album over and over. But change is scary.

My hopes are renewed and my fears allayed, however, by the first single, “Is It Any Wonder.” Wow. This is one of my favorite songs of the year so far, and seemingly a shove back at everyone who ever called Keane boring. It doesn’t take much to get me excited – a killer melody, sung and played well, will do it – and this song has a hook that never stops. Plus, I have been assured by several sources that there are no guitars on this tune, a claim I find hard to believe, but there you go.

This song is great, and if Under the Iron Sea weren’t already atop my list of records I can’t wait to hear this year, it is now. I won’t post any links to the tune or its video, but both are floating around the web in a number of unofficial places, and I’m sure a simple Google search will yield results.

* * * * *

Apologies for last week’s absence. My workload has increased exponentially since becoming the new City of Aurora reporter, and last week (and this one), controversial news just kept exploding in front of my face. By the time I sat down to write last Saturday, the words just weren’t there. I hope this doesn’t happen again – I did plan to have two columns for this week, but I didn’t find the time, which is another bad sign. I’m not sure what I can do to improve this situation, but I will do everything I can. I love this column, and I don’t want to give it up, nor do I want to produce crappy, cranked-out junk just to meet the deadline.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

* * * * *

The Fiery Furnaces have four albums now, and each one seems to have started its own religion.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a band that divides its fans as consistently as the Furnaces do. The Friedberger siblings (Matthew and Eleanor) began their career with 2003’s Gallowsbird’s Bark, a simple little blues workout that didn’t impress me much, but gained them legions of devotees. They’ve not yet made another album like it.

Instead, they returned 10 months later with Blueberry Boat, a nearly 80-minute masterpiece of garage-prog, with 10-minute songs and suites and an obviously restless imagination. Blueberry Boat sounds to me like Spoon trying to make Tales from Topographic Oceans with $50 and an eight-track. It’s extraordinary, but it seems timid when compared to Rehearsing My Choir, last year’s collaboration with the Friedbergers’ grandmother, Olga Sarantos. Choir is a seamless radio play narrated by Sarantos, full of textures and sound effects and one plunking, nostalgic piano. It’s incredible, but it plays like a dare – so you stayed with us from our boogie-blues record to our crazy-ass synth-prog album, but can you handle this?

I could. I love to be challenged by music, and I especially love following artists that aren’t afraid to express an individual vision. The Furnaces’ vision is perhaps the most individual one on the Pitchfork-approved indie scene right now, and their records have only two things in common – Matthew’s absurd genius for melody and arrangement, and Eleanor’s clear, gorgeous voice.

The trend continues with Bitter Tea, the duo’s fourth album in two and a half years (not counting their EP, called – what else – EP, which collected singles and b-sides). Sonically, it shares that plunking piano with Choir – it was intended as a companion piece – and a crazy sense of ground-falling-away songcraft with Blueberry, but that’s about it. Everything else is new territory, and as usual, it’s brilliant, maddening, difficult and amazing. And as usual, the fans are divided.

Bitter Tea was touted as a return to guitar-rock, but don’t you believe that. There are guitars, but they’re woven in with oceans of keyboards, pianos and sound effects, Matthew Friedberger firing up his trademark ADD arrangement sense. Bitter Tea, like the albums before it, reminds me of New England weather: if you don’t like what’s happening, wait two minutes, and it’ll change. The album kicks off with a count-in, promising a live feel, and then dashes that with “In My Little Thatched Hut,” a multi-textured studio wonder that changes direction half a dozen times.

So goes the whole record – just as soon as the band settles into a groove on something, Matthew loses interest, and he’s on to the next idea. Some of his ideas are more brilliant than others, and I found myself wishing more than once that he would follow something to its logical conclusion instead of leapfrogging ahead, but that’s his style. “Black Hearted Boy” establishes a sweet piano theme, dissects it, inverts it, coughs it up and then restates it, just in time for the title track to explode all over it. It’s great stuff, but it does take several listens to fully grasp.

The Furnaces do take things in some new directions here – Bitter Tea is their darkest record, lyrically and musically, and they lay down some of their most compelling atmospheres. The album repeatedly returns to backwards recording, almost as a motif – “Teach Me Sweetheart” is almost entirely made up of backwards piano, drums and keys, and many songs contain backwards verses or bridges. The technique is used so effectively that it’s part of the song – I don’t care what Eleanor is singing in the reversed sections. They sound right just the way they are.

The album gets a bit more traditional by its conclusion, but not much – “Nevers” sounds like it will be a loping snooze-fest until the vocals come in, all cut-and-pasted like the next generation of “1999.” (Dig the second verse, recorded backwards but retaining the melody of verse one. That must have taken days to put together.) Still, the ideas don’t come as fast and furious in the final few tracks, perhaps indicative of Matthew’s well running dry. But give the guy a break – he wrote and recorded more than four hours of material in 30 months, and he even found time to do two solo records, coming later this year. If he slips a bit – and “Benton Harbor Blues” is definitely slipping a bit – I can’t fault him for it.

Bitter Tea is manic, ridiculous, fascinating, daunting and idiosyncratic – essentially, everything you could want in a Fiery Furnaces album. The Furnaces are one of the few current bands I know that can’t be described or encapsulated. They simply must be heard. I can’t relate what they do to any other band I know, and I’ll be amazed if they can keep up this level of imagination and enthusiasm for their whole career. It would be tempting to list off all of the styles they play brilliantly, and call them the best garage-prog-rock-blues-ambient-folk-sea shanty-techno-pop band there is, but it’s easier just to say this:

They are the Fiery Furnaces. There is no one like them. Period.

Next week is the best new-CD week of the year, with new ones from Pearl Jam, Tool, Glen Phillips, Ministry and the Elms. So I’ll review one or two of those, most likely.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A quick one this week – I’m writing this at my friend Ray’s house, in Massachusetts. I’m here visiting for Easter, and I have a few hours of downtime. I almost called in sick this week, but I like the record I’m reviewing enough to spend some of my precious vacation telling you about it. And if that’s not a decent recommendation all on its own, I don’t know what would be.

I also wanted to talk a little about South Park, and about the issue of censorship, but I don’t think I can get into it as much as I want to right now. Short version – Matt Stone and Trey Parker aired the second half of their “Cartoon Wars” epic this week. The plot: Cartman travels out west to get Fox to pull an episode of Family Guy in which the prophet Mohammed apparently will appear.

Cartman says he’s doing this out of respect for Islam and to keep people from getting hurt, but we learn that (of course) he has his own motivation – he hates Family Guy’s humor, and wants it off the air, and he knows the best way to accomplish this is to get the network to cave in one time, on one episode. This will, he says, set a precedent – if the network will pull one episode because one group is upset, it has to keep pulling them under pressure from other groups, until the show is no more.

Part two seemed to be leading up to an actual image of Mohammed as part of the Family Guy episode, which Kyle finally convinces Fox to run. But instead of the prophet, we viewers all saw a black slide with a message from Matt and Trey, informing us that Comedy Central has refused to show an image of Mohammed, and has censored the show. This was followed almost immediately by the Islamic “retaliation,” a similar cartoon depicting Jesus shitting on George Bush and the American flag. Which ran uncensored.

Big laughs, of course, at the expense of Comedy Central – until the news broke that it wasn’t, in fact, a joke. The network did tell Parker and Stone to snip their image of Mohammed from the show, and were apparently okay with Jesus taking a crap on the president. The problem I have with this isn’t the defecating Christ scene, well-timed for Holy Week – it’s the selective censorship, which is what the show’s creators railed against throughout the two-parter.

As Kyle said on Wednesday’s show, when you decide to censor something, you’re making a judgment about what is permitted as satire, and what isn’t. Either everything is okay to make fun of, or nothing is. “Cartoon Wars” was the logical extension of the message Parker and Stone have been shouting out since day one, 10 years ago, and was their most impassioned statement in defense of free speech. They constructed it in such a way that Comedy Central’s weakness and cowardice became the punchline.

I have long held the theory that most people in America don’t know what freedom of speech means, and if they did, they wouldn’t want it. Parker and Stone have been at the forefront of the free speech issue for a decade – what seems to some a juvenile, potty-mouthed cartoon is actually one of the most incisive social commentaries in any medium right now, and has been for the whole of its run. And they are dead on when it comes to what I believe is our most important right – either all speech is free, or none of it is.

More on this next week, when I can really delve into it.

* * * * *

I first heard Built to Spill thanks to my time at Face Magazine – Warner Bros. sent me Perfect From Now On, the band’s third album and major-label debut. I have been hooked ever since.

BTS is from Boise, Idaho, and their leader is Doug Martsch, a high-voiced guitarist with an obviously deep Neil Young fetish. The best Built to Spill material sounds like Crazy Horse with a pop edge – long, sprawling, and in love with the sound of the guitar, yet melodic and hummable, too. Perfect was an excellent blend of those influences, with songs stretching up to 10 minutes and full of loud, distorted fretwork, but also of sweet vocals and melody lines.

The band has been good since then, but they’ve never captured the striking sound of Perfect since. Both Keep It Like a Secret and Ancient Melodies of the Future trimmed things down and scaled back the ambitions, but I didn’t mind, since Martsch came up with some winning songs in place of the six-string wonderment. The live album made the division clear – short pop songs took up half the time, and winding epics (including a 20-minute cover of “Cortez the Killer”) filled the other half. Martsch seemed to have forgotten that his band is at its best when he’s bringing those elements together.

Ah, but here’s You in Reverse, the first Built to Spill album in five years, and the band’s best since Perfect, in 1997. And you know what? They’ve found their sound again.

The record opens with “Goin’ Against Your Mind,” a nine-minute excursion that revolves around two chords and has no real chorus. And it rocks. It’s the most energetic, guitar-loving piece of work the band has done in ages – the lead lines snake in and out of the simple yet satisfying backdrop, while the drums flail wildly and Martsch sings his little heart out. It sounds like it was recorded live, and the spacey breakdown in the middle bit probably goes on for another 10 minutes when they’re on stage.

“Goin’ Against Your Mind” is a hell of an opener, and while in some ways it throws down a gauntlet that the rest of the record can’t pick up, it does set the tone. You in Reverse is a guitar record, through and through, and its simple little songs serve as mission control for some of the band’s greatest orbital journeys. Just listen to “Gone,” which shifts guitar tone several times in its not-quite-six minutes, finally crashing down in a colossal collapse.

Or check out “Traces,” an acoustic-based piece that, on the heels of “Goin’ Against Your Mind,” feels slight at first. But listen to the melody, and the web of solos in the second half – this is one of Martsch’s most accomplished songs. “Mess With Time” accomplishes the same trick, in a way, as it morphs its simple, sledgehammer riffage into a stratospheric, reggae-inflected guitar workout. The album falls apart from there, its last two tracks not quite measuring up, but the first eight provide more than enough big-wide-grin moments.

Much as I love the poppier places BTS has been since I first heard them, You in Reverse is the kind of album I always secretly wished they would make. It is the perfect juxtaposition of their talents, the ultimate indie-pop jam record, if you will. If you ever wished that J. Mascis would learn to write better songs, then this is for you. It’s a terrific return to form for Built to Spill – the band sounds energized here, and ready to take on the world. And hell, if this record makes garage-rock kids want to actually learn to play their instruments this well, then I say more power to them.

Next week, the Fiery Furnaces return. Wait, did they ever even go away? Wasn’t their last album released, like, three weeks ago…?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The year is 1988.

I’m 14 years old, thin, with hair past my shoulders. It’s my second year at a new school, and I’m just starting to think about things like art, and free speech, and politics. The Reagan years are coming to a close, and King Bush I is just about to take his throne. We are still a couple of years away from Gulf War I, the most critical world event of my young life, and still four years away from the first election in which I can vote.

And I do vote, in 1992, for an Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton, and the rush when he sails to victory is my rush, too. 14 years later, I think about politics and world government and social injustice perhaps too much, but in 1988, I’m an apolitical kid, experiencing my first glimmers of the structure we’ve erected around us. And those first glimmers came through music – R.E.M.’s “World Leader Pretend,” Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes” and “…And Justice for All,” the still-striking video for Genesis’ “Land of Confusion.” Music is my first love, and I listen to what it has to teach me.

Of course, 1988 is the height of my metalhead phase – it continues for another four years or so, and for half of that time, I am convinced that Megadeth’s Rust in Peace is the best album ever made. A list of my favorite bands in 1988 would include Metallica, Anthrax, Guns ‘n’ Roses, and others of that ilk. I’ve never even heard of Seattle, Washington, which in almost no time flat will unleash a full-blooded assault on the headbanging music I hold dear, wiping it from the face of the earth.

Except I had heard of Seattle, in that abstract sense – I still, at this age, don’t have a firm grasp on the concept that the bands I love are made up of people, and that these people actually live in real places. But if you ask me, I will tell you that the smartest band in the world comes from Seattle, and their name is Queensryche.

You know how people studied records like Tommy and The Wall when they came out, endlessly playing them to search for conceptual clues and piece their operatic stories together? That’s me with Operation: Mindcrime, Queensryche’s magnum opus. I play that thing to death, going over the lyric sheet (printed, in my cassette, as one long sentence that was incredibly difficult to follow) and leaping for joy as new insights present themselves. This is new territory for me – there are characters, there’s a plotline, this record has Something to Say.

It’s 1988, and Operation: Mindcrime is the best album I’ve ever heard.

* * * * *

I have often made the distinction in this column between albums that are genuinely groundbreaking and important to music as a whole, and ones that are personally important to me, no matter how much they objectively suck. Mindcrime is one of those – it was the smartest album my 14-year-old self had heard, a politically-charged headrush that also rocked really hard. Looking back, it’s the absolute apex of Queensryche’s career – they only approached it once more, with Promised Land in 1994 – and even if the band itself is a blip on the radar of pop culture, that one album changed my life.

I don’t think it’s possible to undersell the place Mindcrime has in my personal musical life – it’s an album I can still sing from memory, and one that I go back to even now. Does it still hold up? I’m the wrong guy to ask. I can’t separate Mindcrime’s admittedly over-the-top operatic metal sound from what it means to me. I still think that Geoff Tate is one of the best singers in popular music – the only difference between Tate and someone like Matthew Bellamy of Muse is the cheese factor inherent in what Queensryche does. And the relative intelligence Queensryche brought to my then-favorite style of music was like a gateway drug.

Here’s the story of Mindcrime, and if you haven’t heard it and don’t want to know, stop reading now. The album follows a street thug named Nikki who, disgusted with the political situation in Reagan’s America, joins a revolutionary movement named (you guessed it) Operation: Mindcrime. Under hypnosis, Nikki goes about assassinating political leaders, following the directives of a shadowy figure named Dr. X. He gets the call, X says the word “mindcrime,” and off Nikki goes, gun in hand.

X has other ways of keeping Nikki under his control, including drugs, administered by a former prostitute named Sister Mary. We learn that Mary joined the church after a priest picked her up off the street, and now that priest rapes her once a week. Nikki and Mary fall in love, and, sensing the danger, X orders Nikki to kill the unsuspecting nun. (“And get the priest, too,” he says, in a spooky interlude.) What happens next is up to conjecture, but Nikki finds Mary dead two songs later. The record ends where it began, with Nikki in a hospital room, under arrest for crimes he doesn’t remember committing, and mourning Mary. He’s been used by the revolution just as much as he’d been by the system it sought to overthrow.

Cheery, huh?

Incredibly, this dark, complex album was the band’s commercial breakthrough, thanks to a hit single “Eyes of a Stranger” and a video that summarized the whole story. I must have watched that video 200 times, looking for more clues – what happened to Mary? Who killed her? Did Dr. X get away? What happens next? And as difficult as it was for 14-year-old me to grasp, I had to learn that in this case, as with most stories, nothing happens next.

Except, it turns out, something does happen.

* * * * *

Time has not been particularly kind to Queensryche – they’ve gone through as many changes as I have in the intervening 18 years. After Mindcrime, they hit the big time with Empire, a concept-free collection of love songs that included “Silent Lucidity,” an orchestrated ballad about dream control that is still the song for which they are best known. Empire was good, Promised Land was better, and then it all fell apart.

Many point to the departure of guitarist Chris DeGarmo as the death knell, but his last album with them (Hear in the Now Frontier) is still their worst, so that doesn’t quite hold water. DeGarmo’s replacements have failed to fill the void, and despite showing off a renewed vigor on 2003’s Tribe, they’re demonstrably not the same band they were. Even Tate’s powerhouse voice has seen better days, as he strains to hit high notes and can’t hold them for as long as he used to.

It’s this band, this not-quite-Queensryche, that has decided to risk ridicule by making Operation: Mindcrime II in 2006. What the hell were they thinking? It’s bad enough that records like Q2K and Tribe get unfavorably compared to Mindcrime, why would the band intentionally invite that scrutiny? And more importantly, who, beyond the small set of folks like me who hold the original in perhaps-undeserving esteem, will care about this? Offering someone like me an official sequel to one of the more important records of my life is like asking me to hate it.

Because of course I’m going to buy it. Of course. No matter how much it sucks, or how much it taints the albums I loved as a teen. Naturally, I had to hear this thing.

And really, all I was praying for here was for Mindcrime II to rise above the level of unlistenable crap. It does that handily. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, is just how much it would connect me, emotionally speaking, with the original record. The story picks up in real-time, and Nikki apparently had a really good lawyer, because 18 years later, he’s out of jail, and hungry for revenge. He’s also insane, and he hears Sister Mary’s voice in his head constantly.

So Nikki tracks down Dr. X, and kills him, but in the process, he learns (I think) that he himself was Mary’s killer, under that apparently powerful hypnosis. The final third of the album is basically a long conversation between Nikki and the voice of Mary in his mind, urging him to kill himself. If it’s possible, Mindcrime II ends on an even more depressing note than the original – there are no plot twists waiting in the wings, just a collision and a sad aftermath.

And that’s one problem I have with it – the story is pretty much unnecessary, and doesn’t tell us anything new. It also misses the opportunity, unlike the first one, to comment on the state of the world, which I was looking forward to – the original Mindcrime is a tight burst of anger at the world and at how it chews people up, whereas the new one is more of a vengeance flick with little context. It’s not an essential new chapter, and even though it clears up one lingering question (kind of), all it accomplishes is a further exploration of just how used and damaged Nikki is.

But I really have to give Tate and company credit – this is the punchiest, most vibrant Queensryche album since before DeGarmo left, and much of that can be chalked up to the band’s decision to time travel back to the ‘80s. Most of this album is crunchy, heavy metal, the kind that the ‘Ryche hasn’t turned out in almost two decades. Some of this album represents their heaviest material since The Warning, believe it or not, and it’s full of flailing guitar solos and high, wailing vocals.

The band is on fire here, especially new guitarist Mike Stone, who almost makes me not miss DeGarmo. First single and leadoff track “I’m American” is a jaw-dropper, the kind of riff-heavy monster I thought Queensryche would never write again. While the album doesn’t erupt quite like that again, some other tracks come damn close – “Signs Say Go,” “Murderer?,” “Re-Arrange You.” This is without a doubt the band’s attempt to bring back fans that wandered during the ‘90s. The sound is punchy, thanks to Snake River Conspiracy’s Jason Slater in the producer’s chair.

But I was also surprised at just how dark and moody this thing is. The original Mindcrime didn’t take a lot of time to wallow – it had a plot to advance, and it did so with razor-sharp, uptempo rockers. But Mindcrime II explores emotions, sometimes in cringe-worthy ways, and the music is appropriately minor-key and overcast. The final third is a tumble down into suicidal thoughts, and tunes like “If I Could Change it All,” with a reprise of the choir from the original record, are as atmospheric as one could hope.

* * * * *

So it’s not terrible – in fact, it’s the best thing the band has done in ages.

Except…

Well, there’s the cheese factor again. And I don’t know at this point if it’s me or the band, whether I’ve outgrown this kind of thing or if they’ve really ratcheted up the Velveeta here. Take “The Chase,” the song in which Nikki confronts Dr. X. The band has invited Ronnie James Dio to play the part of the evil doctor, and he does so with gusto, chewing up whatever scenery Tate has left untouched. The two vocalists make a radio play out of their predatory circling, but the end result is… well, really cheesy.

“Believe it or not… you owe me!”

“I owe you nothing!”

“I gave your life a purpose!”

“I owe you nothing but your death!”

Yeah… it’s like that.

But that’s nothing when compared to the closing song, “All the Promises,” which finds Tate singing a duet with Pamela Moore, as Sister Mary. (She provided the voice of Mary on the original record, a nice nod to continuity.) This song is so laughably awful it nearly ruins the whole project for me. It’s the most groan-inducing love song (“When you said you loved me, it made me feel like I could fly…”) sung with all deliberate vocal force, American Idol-style. The song is meant to be the emotional climax, the sad withering of Nikki’s will to live, but it falls painfully flat.

And I’m listening back to the first Mindcrime, and to the records that surround it in Queensryche’s early catalog, and I think it’s the band, not me. I think they regrettably chose cheese in several key places here, and turned their love-slash-revenge story somewhat silly. These moments keep Operation: Mindcrime II from rising to the status of its predecessor in my mind, and unfortunately, prevent me from embracing it the way I do the original.

Maybe Mindcrime was just the right album at the right time for me – had this sequel been released in 1990, it’s possible I’d think of it as equal to the original. But I don’t. It’s certainly better than I expected, but it doesn’t make me feel 14 again, like I’d hoped. Although, I admit, that was a far-fetched hope to begin with, and too outrageous an expectation to place on what is, after all, just a rock record.

In 1988, Queensryche was just like me – they could have gone anywhere and done anything. 18 years later, this is where they’ve ended up, and I would no more fault them for where life has tossed them than I would stay angry at myself for not living up to my perceived potential. For the first time in a long while, this sounds like Queensryche making the best album they could, and even though they landed a triple while aiming for a home run, at least they tried to knock it over the wall, which is more than I can say for most bands I listened to when I was 14.

Operation: Mindcrime II is not essential, really, nor is it important, in the grand scheme. But it is a sign of new life, of renewed purpose, from a band I have always liked, and sometimes loved. This is not one of those times, but given how much I dreaded this album’s release, I am relieved that it’s at least solid and imaginative. I don’t love it, not like I love the first one, but I’m not disappointed in it. Is that enough?

Sometimes, yeah, it is.

See you in line Tuesday morning.