It’s a best-laid-plans kind of week.

I intended to write about two sweet pop records that are, as of now, only available in other countries – one from Canada and one from the U.K. However – and I really should have seen this coming – neither one made it to the United States in time for me to fully review them. As far as I know, both are still in transit, perhaps on an airplane somewhere, and perhaps that airplane is full of snakes, which would explain the delay. In any case, plans fell through, so I have to come up with something else.

Also, my computer has decided to die on me. The problem, apparently, is the graphics card – I spent hours on the phone with Dell tech support, in the mistaken belief that it was the graphics card driver. I’ve been through three support technicians now, because I can only work on this issue an hour at a time, due to my insane schedule.

So I’m writing this at work, and hoping nobody notices. But I’m glad that writing is my job, and not a suspect activity here in the office…

I do have something to review this week, but before we get to that, a quick note about something you can find in your record stores right now. I have previously gushed about Mute Math’s self-titled debut, which took its spot in the top two of my 2006 list pretty early on, and has yet to relinquish it. As I’ve mentioned, the band self-released Mute Math on their own Teleprompt label, selling it online and at shows, following a dust-up with Warner and Word.

Well, the bridges have been mended, the band is back on Warner, and Mute Math is finally on CD racks everywhere, as of this week. This would be unqualified good news, except for one thing – they messed with it, and the Mute Math you can find at your local Sam Goody is vastly inferior to the original version.

What’s different? Well, first, they took off one of the best songs, the amazing “Without It.” (They also omitted its drum-break coda, “Polite.”) Why, I don’t know. Then they added three songs from last year’s Reset EP – the three best, no doubt, but none of them are worth losing “Without It.” Finally, they shortened some of the longer songs, all but killing the atmosphere. The worst offense: the glorious “You Are Mine,” which spread its enveloping texture over 6:17 on the original release, is now a radio-ready 4:43. “Break The Same” also has had more than a minute trimmed from its whirlwind outro.

I know this seems picky, but with the three new songs and the edits, Mute Math is an entirely different record. It now has a weak song, “Plan B,” in place of a masterpiece, and the second half feels like a bunch of singles instead of a coherent whole. “Control,” the excellent opener from Reset, now sits between the truncated “You Are Mine” and the dazzling “Picture,” two songs which flowed perfectly on the original release.

The only longer song that remained untouched is “Stall Out,” the original closer, but the band have found a way to screw that up too, appending the instrumental “Reset” to the end of the disc. The album’s conclusion, once graceful, is now abrupt and uncomfortable. The sad part is, with this release, you can’t get the original Mute Math anymore – the band isn’t even selling it. The new bonus live EP, while nifty, does little to make that situation better.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy Mute Math, or that it’s not still an amazing album. It is. But in its original form, it was perfect, one of the finest debuts I’ve ever heard, and in this new incarnation, it’s just… not. It’s still fantastic, it’s just not perfect, and there’s no good reason why they messed with it. If you don’t have Mute Math, by all means, buy this version. But if you want the real deal, track down the original.

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Of course, I’m about to praise and recommend something that is basically a rearrangement and re-editing of, in some cases, perfect albums, so you might not want to listen to me. But then, most of my rules and pet peeves go out the window when I’m talking about Tori Amos.

Tori was quite possibly the first artist to completely rewrite my idea of music. At the time, I’d never heard anything quite like Little Earthquakes, her incredible first album. There were songs on it that resembled others I’d heard, but I’d never encountered pop songs delivered with such depth and emotion, such personal nakedness. And then there were others, ones that featured just Amos and her chilling, moving voice, and these were like nothing I’d ever imagined music could be.

My friend Chris was even more into Amos than I was – he scoured CD shops looking for every single he could find, tracking down all of her elusive b-sides. For good reason, too, because her non-album songs were often the equal of, and sometimes superior to, the ones that made the cut. And she released a lot of them – two or three brand-new tunes per single, as well as some breathtaking reinventions of songs like “Angie” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

But I had neither the money nor the resources to buy every Tori single, so I didn’t, and I watched as Chris’ collection grew. But ah, patience is rewarded, because out this week is A Piano, the five-disc box set that finally (finally!) collects almost all those b-sides and alternate tracks, as well as some new things and a liberal collection of Amos’ best tunes. And it comes in a box shaped like a piano, with real-looking white and black keys.

So I bought A Piano for the b-sides, but listening through it, I’m finding that I’m reliving the last 15 years in my mind. It’s astounding to me how much of my personal soundtrack can belong to just one artist. I’m remembering where I was when I first heard each of these songs, and how I felt listening to them for the first time. It’s been a heady experience.

A Piano also illustrates Amos’ bizarre and rapid decline in miniature – the first two discs are great, the third not as much, and the fourth is mostly bland, featuring songs from her three worst records (1998’s from the choirgirl hotel, 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk, and last year’s execrable The Beekeeper). It’s unspeakably sad to relive the artistic demise of one of my all-time favorite musicians, but after A Piano, there can really be no argument – she is not as good now as she was then.

So let’s start with then. The first disc here is called Little Earthquakes Extended, and is a thorough examination and restatement of her landmark 1992 debut. As Amos explains in the lavishly designed liner notes, Earthquakes went through several permutations, and was submitted to Atlantic Records three or four times. Hence, the b-sides from these sessions were really a-sides that were nixed by the label, which explains why songs like “Flying Dutchman” and “Upside Down” are just as beautiful and revelatory as anything on the record proper.

This new Earthquakes starts with “Leather” instead of “Crucify,” which means the first line on the album is now “Here I’m standing naked before you.” Somehow, this is more fitting, because this album is one of the most naked and deeply felt things I own, still. Here is “Silent All These Years,” the first Tori song I heard, its piano and strings and powerful lyrics standing out from all the soulless rubbish on MTV in ’92. Here is “Precious Things,” still one of the most searing and pure outbursts in my music collection. Here is “Winter,” which I played over and over again my freshman year of college, trying to find comfort.

And here is “Me and a Gun,” an a cappella confession that still makes time stop, and remains among the most intimate and brave things to come out of any artist I’m aware of.

I remember playing Earthquakes to death, wearing out my cassette copy – it still doesn’t quite play right, but that’s okay, because with my CD copy and A Piano I’ve effectively bought the album twice more since then. I also remember being unable to sleep on the eve of her 1994 follow-up, Under the Pink. I was a sophomore in college then, and I’d cultivated a small group of Tori fans who were equally (well, almost) excited to hear what she’d do next.

We weren’t disappointed. Pink, represented nearly in its entirety on this box set’s second disc, is a very different album from Earthquakes – more joyful, more sexual – but its equal in nearly every way. I devoured this album in ’94, and I found listening again that I know every detail of its contours. I am glad Amos included all nine minutes of “Yes, Anastasia,” still one of her most ambitious and successful pieces. I’m also glad that “Honey” is included here, instead of with the other b-sides – it belonged on Pink, as its author says in the liner notes.

I could not have predicted Boys for Pele, her 1996 excursion – it’s a difficult and painful listen, but ultimately a rewarding one. Here Amos tried new things – harpsichords, programmed beats, brass sections, more complex structures, and an unrestrained vocal timbre that grated on first listen. Pele was the first album I reviewed for Face Magazine, way back in the day, and I remember still struggling with it at the time.

And those feelings came rushing back as I dove through the back half of disc two here, and the first part of disc three. Here are nine of Pele’s 18 songs, many in intriguing alternate versions, but in any order, these recordings practically bristle with rage and pain. Pele is a daring, uneasy album, the kind that very few artists are courageous enough to make, even though in disconnected pieces, as it is here, the full effect doesn’t quite come through.

“Professional Widow,” perhaps the album’s most explosive song, is here twice, and neither one is the album version – here Amos is bellowing it live over just an organ, and watching herself get spindled and mutilated in Armand van Helden’s remix. Here as well is a Pele outtake, “Walk to Dublin,” and sadly, it was rightly cut from the album. But here are my favorites from the record, “Marianne” and “Doughnut Song” – oddly, the more traditional numbers. “Marianne” in particular is the only piano-and-strings song on Pele, the only real connecting thread with Earthquakes and Pink.

But after figuring Pele out, and learning to love it, I figured Amos would never stun me like that again. I was wrong – choirgirl hit in 1998, and it was easily the weakest and most banal thing she had done. Gone were the progressive structures, but also gone was any sense of deep feeling in the tracks. Amos has defended the album, which she recorded in the wake of her miscarriage, but the five songs on disc four here tell the story. They’re not bad, just not very good.

It was the start of a downslide from which she has still not recovered. Disc three contains seven songs from To Venus and Back, her half-studio, half-live endeavor from 1999, and they’re interesting, and certainly better than the stuff on choirgirl, but still not up to the bar she set early on. Both “Concertina” and “1000 Oceans” are winners, though. There’s nothing here from 2001’s covers record, Strange Little Girls, which is probably for the best.

Then came Scarlet’s Walk in ’02, and The Beekeeper in ’05, and the less said about either of them, the better. Sprawling records full of boring songs drained of all passion, these two misfires are represented on disc four with a mere six songs between them, as if Amos knows they are not up to par. Here as well are some newly uncovered songs from those sessions, including “Not David Bowie” and “Zero Point” and something called “Ode to My Clothes,” and none rise above the muck to make much of a mark.

But the fifth disc is the real prize – a 22-track journey through her b-sides and lost tracks. Here is “The Pool,” a haunting mélange of overdubbed vocals that works magic. Here is “Daisy Dead Petals,” and “Black Swan,” and “Bachelorette.” Here is “Sugar,” in its burbling and oddly moving synthesizer rendition. Here is “Cooling,” one of Amos’ best songs, which for some reason never found a proper home. And here is “Here In My Head,” a song for which I would probably have paid the full box set price.

Granted, here as well are her takes on “This Old Man” and “Home on the Range,” as well as trifles like “Toodles Mr. Jim,” but you take the good with the bad when the good is this extraordinary.

At this point, who can tell if Tori Amos will ever make another record as important, as devastating and as obviously personal as her first three. A Piano certainly makes the case that her talent has failed her – few artists have recovered from a decline like the one detailed on this box set. But if anyone could do it, Amos could. Listening to A Piano in order, I fell in love with Amos’ work all over again, as if I’d forgotten just how compelling and powerful her work once was. And of course, I will buy everything she does until one of us dies, in the hope that she can recapture what she’s lost.

For Tori virgins, A Piano might be all you need. It’s certainly all you need of her last few discs, although I would recommend getting the first three anyway – you must hear Little Earthquakes in its original order. But if you want to know what all the fuss is about, and at the same time hear all her important non-album tracks (and trust me, they are important), then you could do worse than dropping $75 on this thing. With a few exceptions (“Space Dog,” “Not the Red Baron,” “Black-Dove,” etc.), it’s every reason I love her, all in one box.

Next week, I swear, sweet pop from other countries. Really.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s a pretty big one this week, folks – I scored one of my rare days off this week, so I had some extra time. Hope that’s okay with everyone. This is where I play catch-up on a flood of recent releases, some good and some not so good. The flood continues next week , and the week after, and basically all through October, so any chance to gain some ground on the ever-growing tower of CDs on my desk…

First, though, an installment of Things I Didn’t Think I’d Like:

On a recommendation, I picked up the new Black Keys album, Magic Potion. The Keys are a guitar-drums duo, and just that combination is enough to put me off, but I’m very glad I bought this beast. It’s pretty great – dirty blues recorded live, with 1970s equipment. A lot of this sounds just like Grand Funk Railroad’s first few records, minus Mel Schacher’s bass playing, and it’s all raw and soulful. It’s the kind of blues that one of this week’s main contestants could learn a thing or two from…

I also bought Blood Mountain, the new Mastodon, thanks to some prodding by Andrew at my local record store. And man, this thing is awesome. I missed out on Leviathan, the band’s previous effort, even though many consider it a classic. And now I’m going to have to go back and get that one, too, because Blood Mountain is extraordinary – progressive metal that never lets up, and never sacrifices melody, and brings in a dozen different musical styles as window dressing.

It’s simply excellent, if your ears can handle it, and it contains a contribution from The Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala that’s a hundred times better than anything on his band’s new album. It also has amazing, detailed cover art, apparently a Mastodon tradition. Just an all-around fantastic metal record.

All right, no more metal for this week. Bring on the pop-rock!

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I will never hate the Barenaked Ladies.

This is official. I discovered it this week, as I listened to their latest attempt to turn me into an ex-fan. It’s called Barenaked Ladies Are Me, and it’s the weakest thing they’ve done, not counting that awful Christmas album from a few years back.

Let’s back up. I’ve been a BNL fan since Gordon, which hit back when I was in college. Maybe it was just the right time for me to hear a fun little ditty like “If I Had a Million Dollars,” but I was hooked pretty much immediately by the band’s sense of fun. Their live shows have a carnival atmosphere to them – they’re loaded with improv, jokes, fake songs, and impromptu vaudeville routines. Some bands play concerts, but BNL puts on a show.

I’ve seen them live probably six times now. Back when I worked for Face Magazine, the band played an acoustic show at a club called Asylum. It was the kind of show you had to win a radio contest to get into, unless you were one of the bigwigs at the city’s only music mag. My old friend Meg and I went, and as I recall, the tickets they gave us to get in read something like this: “Official I-Don’t-Need-To-Win-No-Contest-Because-I-Am-Special Ticket.” I still have it somewhere.

The point is, I love this band, and I think I always will, no matter how lame they get. And Barenaked Ladies Are Me is pretty damn lame. The first problem with it is that it travels even further down the mature adult-pop pathway blazed by 2003’s Everything to Everyone. I dug that album, but even I noticed that it was more reserved than prior records. BNL is often written off as a novelty band, and they’ve always been deeper than that, but they’ve also always been a lot of fun – even when they’re about autoerotic asphyxiation, their tunes are a blast.

Barenaked Ladies Are Me is the first BNL record that isn’t any fun at all. Leave it to Ed Robertson to deliver the wittiest thing here: “Bank Job” is about a failed caper, used as a metaphor for a failed relationship. And he’s right – how do you plan for a bank full of nuns? “Bank Job” has fun lyrics, but the banal music drags it down, and the rest of the album has a kind of low-key wispiness. The sound is great – the guitars punch, the accordions and horns are nice touches, but overall, there’s very little here that’s memorable.

If you’ve heard the first single, “Easy,” then you know what to expect – simple acoustic songs with bland melodies and only the faintest hint of the sharpness Robertson and Steven Page usually exhibit. Oddly, the two best songs on the album come from keyboardist Kevin Hearn. “Sound of Your Voice” is a rousing singalong, and “Vanishing” is decidedly creepy, one of the band’s finest examinations of jealousy and loss. Unfortunately, Hearn himself sings that one, and his thin voice doesn’t quite do the song justice. Bassist Jim Creeggan sings his own “Peterborough and the Kawarthas,” and he fares better, although with a title like that, you’d expect a quirkier song.

But no, Barenaked Ladies Are Me is almost entirely devoid of quirk, and is the band’s most “normal” album to date. It’s all pleasant, like a Gin Blossoms album, but there isn’t much here to satisfy long-time fans. And yet, here I am, listening to it again, and I swear – I will never hate this band. Just the mixture of Robertson’s playing and Page’s singing takes me back to age 20, and it hardly matters how lame the songs are. I’m even singing along with a song called “Rule the World With Love,” which may be a sign of mental illness. Barenaked Ladies remain a band I love, even as they’re boring me to tears.

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BNL may have let me down, but the prize for Most Crushing Disappointment of the Year goes to John Mayer.

Here’s the thing – Mayer is really, really good. He’s a good songwriter, and an amazing guitar player, and I’m tired of having to defend him against his own work. “Daughters” drove me insane. It’s easily the most banal song on Mayer’s second album, Heavier Things, and so of course it became the smash hit, and the one that everyone’s heard. I mention that I like John Mayer, and nine out of 10 people will sing “Daughters” back to me, laughing at my questionable taste.

I honestly thought those days were over, though. Last year, Mayer released Try, a live album with his kickass trio, which included him on guitars and vocals, Steve Jordan on drums and Pino Palladino on bass. Those two guys have been around forever, and they’re great players, but Mayer matched them lick for lick on Try, a rough and tumble blues excursion that finally – finally! – showed off just how good the guy is. At the same time, he announced that Jordan and Palladino would be featured on his third album, Continuum, which he promised would be a quantum leap from his older records.

But now Continuum is here, and I feel like I need to defend Mayer again. Honestly, he’s much better than this, trust me.

The biggest problem I have is that Continuum never, ever rocks. Not once. Mayer is able to kick over the chairs and rip bluesy solos with the best of them, but you’d never know it from this merely pleasant effort. Leadoff track “Waiting on the World to Change” is perhaps the most upbeat thing here, and it’s an old-time soul ballad, like something Marvin Gaye might have done. It’s enjoyable – hell, this whole album is enjoyable, in a sense – but it’s not the full-on journeyman rock album Mayer led us to expect.

No, this is an adult contemporary album through and through. Much of it sounds like Sting, and a lot of it sounds like the lamest of Eric Clapton’s smoothed-out solo work. “Belief” sounds so much like the former Gordon Sumner that I had to check and see if he had a co-writing credit (he doesn’t), and “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” could easily be a Slowhand track. All the rough edges are sanded off, and spit-shined. Mayer’s lead guitar is all over the album, thankfully, but only in clean, miniature bursts that don’t call attention to themselves. He only gets to show off on the Jimi Hendrix cover “Bold as Love.”

There are certainly good things here, and interestingly, some of the slower ones are the best – “The Heart of Life” deserves to be a hit, so engaging is its acoustic lope, and “Stop This Train” takes some delightful melodic detours. The final track, “I’m Gonna Find Another You,” is a swell, soulful coda to the enjoyable “In Repair.” But the whole thing smells like safety, like Mayer was told to make an album that wouldn’t upset the radio programmers who have to slot his new stuff alongside Phil Collins and whoever it is that just won American Idol.

That’s my real problem with this otherwise competent and well-crafted album. Listen to the trio album – Mayer basically had Cream in the studio with him, and he decided to skip that phase of Clapton’s career and make Pilgrim instead. The best thing you can say about Continuum is that it’s a nice album, and it is – it’s got some sweet ballads on it, and some smooth blues like “I Don’t Trust Myself With Loving You,” one of the highlights. But it should have been so much more, and it should have rocked.

And so here I go again, defending him against his own work. Continuum isn’t bad, but John Mayer is capable of so much better. Let’s hope he figures that out someday soon.

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Jason Martin hopefully needs no such convincing of his own skills. For more than 10 years, he’s led his band Starflyer 59 through half a dozen genres, writing one great little song after another, and toiling in obscurity all the while. But for those of us who have discovered Martin (and his brother Ronnie, of Joy Electric), his yearly missives are things to look forward to.

This year’s is called My Island, and it follows up Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice, one of the best records Martin’s ever made. Talking Voice was an immaculately produced gloom-pop powerhouse, with an incredibly full sound and some of the catchiest melodies of Martin’s career. Rather than try to top that by moving even further down the studio wizard path, though, he’s decided to pull back and make a guitar-heavy rock album.

And it’s pretty great. Like most Starflyer albums, the worst thing you can say about My Island is that it’s too short – it’s 10 songs, running a meager 32 minutes. The sound is slightly stripped back – guitars, bass and drums, for the most part, with some great keyboard textures – and the songs have taken on an energetic, angular new-wave quality. Standout “Nice Guy” starts off with a cheesy piano intro, and then jumps right into a Clash-style bass-heavy groove that, quite simply, rules. Martin’s baritone sounds menacing here, and the whole thing works.

“I Win” is a keeper, one of several rockers with memorable melodies here, and the keyboard figure after the chorus will make its home in your head without much effort. “Division” could almost be a Talking Voice outtake – it’s perhaps the darkest thing here, and loaded with texture. And the title song is right out of prime 1980s Daniel Amos, with Martin paying homage to Terry Taylor, one of his admitted heroes.

Still, there are missteps here, whereas on Talking Voice there were none. “Mic the Mic” is too repetitive, as is “It’s Alright Blondie,” though the keyboard motif on the latter track is enjoyable. Despite these minor hiccups, My Island is another in a long line of very good records from Starflyer 59. Jason Martin’s catalog is too extensive and too excellent to go as unnoticed as it has. On the final track on My Island, Martin sings, “My ideas outweigh all the talent I have.” He’s never been more wrong.

Check the band out here, and buy their stuff here. And watch for The Brothers Martin, coming soon – it’s a collaboration between Jason and Ronnie, and it dives further into new wave waters. Hear some of it here.

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If you’re in a band, and you have an album coming out, and you’re trying to come up with the year’s best title for it, don’t waste your time. That honor’s already been won by Yo La Tengo – their 10th album is called I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.

Game, set, match.

As you’d expect, the album cannot possibly be as good as its title, but anyone who wrote off Yo La Tengo after their last two records, the lazy And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out and the shimmering Summer Sun, may want to reconsider. I Will Beat Your Ass is another sprawling piece of work – 15 songs spanning 77 minutes – but it returns to the band to its greatest strength: its wild diversity. None of these songs sound anything like their neighbors, and yet they all sound like Yo La Tengo.

The album opens with “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” an 11-minute guitar freakout over a repetitive backdrop, and it represents the first time frontman Ira Kaplan has really kicked out the jams in six years. It ends with another one, “The Story of Yo La Tango (sic),” as if to bookend the songs in between. And those 13 shorter tunes are some of the most elegant of the band’s career, from the bouncy pop of “Beanbag Chair” to the falsetto soul of “Mr. Tough” to the orchestrated balladry of “Black Flowers.”

Of course, vocals have always been Yo La Tengo’s Achilles heel, and they’re as weak here as they’ve always been. Kaplan has a thin, wavery voice, and all the pitch control of Wayne Coyne, though he is complemented well by his wife, drummer Georgia Hubley. The pair spin little webs of fragile harmonies that decorate the sweeter tunes, but they fall short on the harsher ones, like the percussion-fueled organ jam “The Room Got Heavy.”

But it’s the eclecticism that will keep you coming back. The gem of the album is the nine-minute instrumental “Daphnia” – sandwiched in between two folk-pop ditties, its slow walk through a frost-covered landscape truly stands out, and the piano work, dripping like melting icicles over Kaplan’s understated guitar, is exceptionally beautiful. It’s the only song like it here, and it plays like intermission music, with the second act heralded by the rambunctious “I Should Have Known Better.”

Other standouts include the trashy rock of “Watch Out For Me Ronnie” and the beautiful gallop of “The Weakest Part” (which includes the best Kaplan-Hubley harmonies on the record), but truly, it’s all pretty good stuff. I have never been on the Yo La Tengo train as much as some of my fellow critics, but I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass is a winner, and if you’ve never heard the band, it’s a particularly good place to start. Plus, as an added bonus, you get to buy and own an album called I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.

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Saving the best for last once again, we come to Roger Joseph Manning Jr.

Hell, I knew him when he was just Roger Manning, keyboard player and genius songwriter for Jellyfish, perhaps the greatest band of the ‘90s. No, I’m not kidding – Jellyfish’s two albums are perfect pop platters, and I don’t mean that they’re almost perfect, or that they contain moments of perfection, but that every minute of both albums is absolutely perfect. Don’t take my word for it, buy them for yourself, especially if you like pop music of any stripe.

Since J-Fish broke up in 1994, Manning has kept the busiest. His cohort Andy Sturmer has done some production work, but little else, while Manning has launched two bands – the funky Imperial Drag and the hilarious Moog Cookbook – and played on a couple dozen albums by other artists. So it’s hardly any surprise that he won the race to get a full-length solo record out. The only surprise, unfortunately, is that it took more than a decade.

But it’s here, and it’s called The Land of Pure Imagination. And it’s completely wonderful.

True, this is really just a restatement of his not-widely-available Solid State Warrior LP from last year, but one gets the sense that this is the real deal, the way it was meant to be heard. Manning played every note and sung every line on this album (except for one little trumpet solo), and if the two J-Fish albums weren’t enough to establish him as a pure pop genius, this would absolutely do it. This album is practically swimming in amazing melodies, dreamy harmonies, and quirky-beautiful arrangements. It’s an astounding listen.

This isn’t for everyone. Manning’s voice is high, childlike and eerily precise – great for the oceans of backing vocals that graced Jellyfish albums, but not as effective as a lead instrument. His songs are similarly childlike, as obviously influenced by Brian Wilson as much as by Andy Partridge. This entire album exudes innocence and joy, about as much as you’d expect from a record unironically titled The Land of Pure Imagination, and some will be put off or embarrassed by it.

But not me. I’m on board from the delirious chorus of the title track, an epic that includes some judicious use of toy piano. “Too Late For Us Now” may be the catchiest pop song of the year, and in my world, it’s a hit. “Wish It Would Rain” starts as a lazy waltz, but blossoms into a pop classic, with some gorgeous vocal melodies. “Sandman” could be a great lost XTC track, as could “Dragonfly,” and “Creeple People,” the album’s one stab at rocking out, is a messy, noisy romp. Land concludes with “Appleby,” a left-field carnival of sound and melody, and one of the strangest and coolest things here.

This isn’t Jellyfish, and as such, it’s not perfect. The sound is sumptuous and lush, but occasionally you’re reminded that these are basically home recordings, and some songs (“Pray for the Many,” “In the Name of Romance”) fall just under par. But for the first solo album from one of my heroes, it’s pretty damn terrific, and there isn’t a moment here that doesn’t sparkle with inventiveness and sheer delight. I love this little record, one of my favorites of the year so far, and I’m thrilled to have new Roger Manning music on my shelf and in my life. It’s not a Jellyfish reunion, but it’ll do.

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That’s it for this week. Next week, some ‘70s-inspired pop from other countries.

A quick recommendation before I go – Aaron Sorkin coasted back to TV this week with the pilot for his new show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and it was quite good. Not an outside-the-park home run like the West Wing pilot, of course, but full of Sorkin’s trademark banter and wit. And he found a dignified, pivotal role for Judd Hirsch, whom I’ve always liked. We’ll see if this show sticks around – it seems very expensive to produce, and NBC has dumped it on Monday nights. But if you liked Sorkin’s work on Sports Night and The West Wing, this is the goods.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This is the second of two columns on the oh-so-scintillating topic of simplicity vs. complexity. Last week, I took a look at three of the simplest albums of the year, musically speaking, from Peter Mulvey, Bill Mallonee and Bob Dylan. Only one of them, the Mallonee, really does it for me, and I think it’s because the other two rely way too often on pretty standard chords and progressions – what some would call traditional structure.

And I hope you’re not scared away by words like structure and chord, because this week I’m taking a look at the flipside – three of the most theory-heavy, epic and complicated records that 2006 has given us so far. I have to admit right up front that my musical mind gets all excited about these kinds of albums, and the longer and more complex the better. I’m a huge fan of bands like Yes and Spock’s Beard, bands that compose extended suites that stretch out for half an hour or more.

I know, I know. Half an hour? Or more? Is any song worth half an hour or more?

In short, yes, I think so. The trick is to earn all 30, 45 or however many minutes you’re taking up. If you’ve written 10 minutes of song and you’ve decided to just jam or solo for the remaining 20, then you’re eating disc space with not much of substance, because that’s what complex music is about – what have you composed here?

Which leads me to my main issue with this kind of music. It’s no secret that musical complexity edges out emotional connection – the more difficult the song is, the less likely it is that the conduit between listener and artist will be established. You have to turn your head off to respond with your heart, and the more complicated and mind-engaging the music, the less likely it is that you will do that. And the most technical bands don’t even care – they want to engage your brain above all else.

At least, that’s what I think. It is entirely possible that the members of Rush were truly and deeply moved by “2112,” or “Cygnus X-1,” but I doubt it. In the same way that I criticize the most moving of singer-songwriters for not stepping outside the standard three or four chords and 4/4 time, I take the proggers to task for turning out music without soul, music that is concerned only with how difficult it is to play.

Perhaps the standard-bearer for modern complexity is Dream Theater, a band that just celebrated 20 years of jackhammer riffing, stop-time arrangements, 20-minute song-suites and lightning-fast solos. If metal is masculine music, then this is steroid-fueled, muscle-bound bully music – Dream Theater may as well have adopted “Our music can beat up your music” as its official slogan. There are moments of tenderness, but they are all but drowned out by the bombast, and the insanely complex playing and songwriting.

A good summation of their modus operandi to this point is Score, their just-released three-CD live album documenting their 20th anniversary show at Radio City Music Hall in New York. It’s called Score because DT finally succumbs here to the old prog trope of playing with an orchestra, a carry-over from their latest studio album, Octavarium. The 30-piece ensemble joins the band on the second set of this nearly three-hour affair, meant to summarize and cap off DT’s first two decades.

It’s a testament to their skill as players that I scanned the track listing of the first set, which takes up the first disc, and dismissed it as pretty standard stuff. That I can look at a setlist that contains metal monsters like “The Root of All Evil,” prog masterpieces like “Under a Glass Moon” and lengthy workouts like the never-officially-released “Raise the Knife” and think, “Ah, nothing too demanding, then,” just illustrates what amazing musicians these guys are. Just trying to learn the songs in this one set would make most bands faint with fear.

And DT slams through this stuff well, if not a bit by rote. Octavarium was something of a disappointment to me, since it stays pretty much within the standard limits of this band’s sound. “Root” is an eight-minute metal powerhouse, but it sounds like every other eight-minute metal powerhouse the band has written. “I Walk Beside You” is a pleasant bombastic pop song, but it doesn’t break any new ground for them. And the title song, which we’ll get to in a minute, strikes me as a thin idea stretched out to 25 minutes.

So after this pretty standard first disc comes the main event, with strings attached. The second disc starts with “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence,” still the band’s best extended piece. The entire second half of their 2002 double album of the same name, “Six Degrees” is a 42-minute symphony about mental illness, and the orchestra, though not always prominent, really adds to the epic scope of the thing.

Brief interlude “Vacant” is all strings and vocalist James Labrie, who really knocks it out of the park on this whole record. But then we’re onto the songs from Octavarium, and they’re just not up to par. “Sacrificed Sons” is standard epic metal, and the new album’s title track drags on and on, opening with seven minutes of synth-and-six-string atmosphere ripped right out of Pink Floyd. “Octavarium” doesn’t push and pull like “Six Degrees,” it slowly builds and relies on solos, finally climaxing in a full-throttle shout section reminiscent of Tool. Simply put, it ain’t worth 26 minutes.

And that’s really it with this kind of music. If it doesn’t engage my theoretical knowledge, and give me something to figure out every minute or two, then it just doesn’t rank too highly with me, no matter how well it’s played. The technical virtuosity is all a band like this has, and if they’re not using it to its fullest, then there’s little reason to actually listen to it.

However, if you want to hear dramatic progressive metal done properly, there’s pretty much no better band than Iron Maiden. They essentially started the theatrical metal genre (Dream Theater cites them as a major influence), writing long songs about novels and historical figures when their contemporaries were singing about screwing groupies. They’re just as ridiculous as Dream Theater, if not more so, but they’re in on their own joke, as Spinal Tap as they can be. They’re also fantastic players, even though they don’t show off nearly as much as the DT boys do.

About six years ago, Maiden solidified their lineup, reuniting with original singer Bruce “Scream for me, Long Beach!” Dickinson, and launched an extraordinary rebirth. It continues with their recently released 14th album, A Matter of Life and Death, perhaps their most musically intricate and powerful album yet. It’s certainly the best since their heyday, and the secret here is a commitment to a sound that they have honed over two and a half decades.

That sound is reach-for-the-rafters drama, powered by three (count ‘em, three) guitars and Dickinson’s operatic voice. It’s pretty far over the top, but if you’re looking for sincerity and beauty, you’re listening to the wrong band. Life and Death was recorded mostly live, and is powerful and (believe it or not) somewhat restrained. Difficult to believe for an album on which more than half the songs break seven minutes, but this is a mature Iron Maiden effort, bare-bones and tough.

Why do I like this more than Dream Theater’s work? Because I honestly believe that none of these songs are too long, and none of them waste my time. These are progressive compositions that earn their extended running times, with a sense of dynamics and power. The strongest songs, in fact, are the longest – “For the Greater Good of God” runs 9:24, but it flies by, so tight is the writing and playing. The same goes for “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns,” at a quick 8:44.

Don’t get me wrong – I really like this record, and I’ve always liked this band, but I have little emotional connection to this music. It doesn’t touch me to my soul, but it does make the teenage metal fan that lives in my head very happy. Very few bands are able to maintain a 25-year career doing this kind of music, and not become a parody of themselves, but Maiden has blazed a trail here – they are a blueprint for how to do dramatic metal right. And A Matter of Life and Death is pretty close to the perfect Iron Maiden album – fist-pumping head music with a brain.

But both of these bands have long histories with complex music. Let’s take a look at a band like the Mars Volta, one of the front-runners in the new prog movement. They are considered one of the most virtuosic and creative groups to come up in recent years, and they’ve just released their third album, Amputechture. It’s the follow-up to Frances the Mute, last year’s conceptual odd-o-rama, which stretched their funk-rock-salsa sound to its breaking point.

And Amputechture certainly sounds broken. It’s 78 minutes long, even longer than Frances, and it exemplifies everything that’s wrong with complexity for its own sake. In many ways, this is TMV’s least pretentious album, despite titles like “Vicarious Atonement” and “Viscera Eyes,” because it’s all music – the noisy interludes that marred Frances are all but gone. But the music is endless and lifeless and pointless, just a bunch of empty jamming and showing off.

I don’t want it to sound like the Mars Volta guys don’t play well on this record – in fact, judged solely on instrumental skill, Amputechture is amazing. Cedric Bixler-Zavala has never sounded more like Robert Plant in his prime, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is on fire with his explosive guitar playing, and Red Hot Chili Peppers wizard John Frusciante slathers the whole thing in searing leads. The problem is that instrumental skill is all this album has going for it.

Take “Tetragrammaton,” the second track. It drags on for 16 minutes, at pretty much the same tempo, and it goes absolutely nowhere. It’s nearly impossible to sit through, because all the frenetic flailing about can’t replace good songwriting and memorable melody. The whole album sounds the same, and meshes into one big mush, except for “Asilos Magdalena,” a quiet Spanish-language interlude that stands as the album’s best moment.

The rest just crawls on and on, Bixler-Zavala wailing away while Frusciante’s eight-minute solos are presented in their entirety. Nothing stands out, nothing gels, and nothing here earns its extended running time. The ending is actually a perfect metaphor for the whole thing – “El Ciervo Vulnerado” is a pointless dirge that creaks forward for an eternal nine minutes, before it ends abruptly, as if the mixing engineer just decided he’d had enough.

Amputechture is a sterling example of the extreme end of the complexity spectrum. There is nothing here to emotionally latch on to – even the lyrics are gibberish, unless a line like “Because the flies my mouth spill bare the children at play” speaks to you in some way. I doubt it even means anything to Bixler-Zavala, although he whispers it as if it were the secret to the universe. This is music disconnected from the heart entirely, as much as the simplest folk music is disconnected from the theoretical brain.

And maybe that’s the answer, and perhaps I knew that from the start – my favorite music combines the head and heart reactions. If I am not surprised or engaged by the musical choices, the structure, the melody, I will be bored. But likewise, if the music has no soul, and does not move me or make me feel, then I will be equally bored. It’s not about simplicity vs. complexity, but about a melding of both, without stepping too far in one direction or the other.

Of the six we discussed, I can only unreservedly recommend two – Bill Mallonee’s excellent Permafrost, and Iron Maiden’s forceful A Matter of Life and Death. As for the rest, well, I continue to struggle with these issues, and I strive to find what is good about these records and just enjoy that. Maybe someday I’ll be able to.

Next week, a huge (and hopefully more timely) one, with lots of new ones – Starflyer 59, John Mayer, the Black Keys, the Indigo Girls, Roger Manning, Yo La Tengo, and perhaps more. And Sloan’s new one is on the way to me right now, too. Life is good.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This is the first of two columns in which I am going to try to explore my feelings on complexity in music. I know, I know, that sounds like the driest topic you can imagine spending two weeks on, but I wrestle with these thoughts – they prevent me from trying certain artists, and enjoying certain others, because I reduce music to mathematics in my mind without even thinking about it.

Anyway, for this week, I’ve chosen three of the most traditional, easy records I’ve bought this year (including one that got five stars from Rolling Stone and other arbiters of taste), and for next week, three of the most complex and difficult. The idea is that by exploring the extremes of simplicity and intricacy (within reason), I can figure out what it is I like and dislike about both. And along the way, you’ll get reviews of six new records, which, you know, bonus.

So, to start off, some background. I have an uneasy relationship with simplicity in music, which probably stems from my life as a teenage metalhead. Metal is Manly Music, fast and aggressive and complicated for the sake of being complicated. The harder something is to play, the cooler the musicians who can play it, or at least I thought so when I was 15. Dave Mustaine can outplay Kirk Hammett, who can outplay Scott Ian, and on and on.

I defined “outplaying” as the ability to produce material the other guys couldn’t, perhaps not realizing that not everyone was going for a full display of technical acuity each time out. The assumption was that if Gregg Allman could play like Steve Vai, he would, and he only doesn’t because he can’t. Strange, I know. That’s still a large, lingering part of the reason I can’t stand Kurt Cobain and Nirvana – they couldn’t play nearly as well as the bands they unceremoniously ushered off the popular stage.

I spent so much time as a young man figuring out music, working out how the notes correlated and how time signatures worked and how quickly one had to move one’s fingers to play the blistering solos that made one a real man, that when my first brush with simple, emotional music came along, it bowled me over. And I quickly discovered what I was missing when I tried to play these new songs.

I can play Metallica’s “Creeping Death” – that’s just a matter of knowing the right notes in the right order. One band’s take on it sounds like any other’s, really, and it’s difficult, but practice will get you there.

Likewise, I can play Tori Amos’ “Winter,” meaning I know all the notes in the right order. It’s an easy song. But I can’t play “Winter,” if you know what I mean. And it’s no surprise to me that no one covers Tori.

I think a lot of artists strive for that, and when they strip their music down to its bare essentials, what they’re doing is trying to find the core of what they do. And sometimes it works for me, but just as often, my mind drifts – I’m predicting chords, and groaning inwardly at progressions I’ve heard a thousand times. I know, deep down, that folk music (for one) is not about what’s being played, but about who is playing it, and what personal stamp he or she is leaving on it.

But I’m always happier when folk musicians step up and do something different. Take Peter Mulvey, for example. I first heard him when Eastern Front Records sent me a copy of his 1995 album Rapture, a crazy mish-mash of styles played with a percussive inventiveness and a wide-open spirit. It’s a great record, and for a while there, I was a Mulvey evangelist – he was the best-kept secret in Boston, until he moved back to Wisconsin. I was even there for the premiere performance of “The Trouble With Poets,” still his finest song, at Raoul’s in Portland, Maine.

Lately, though, Mulvey seems to be doing that stripped-back thing, turning out old-timey folk and shuffle tunes that reach deep through the American songbook for inspiration. 2004’s Kitchen Radio is a good folk album, but little more – the sense of adventure is missing, replaced with a deep respect for traditional songwriting. And his new one, The Knuckleball Suite, continues along that path. It is his loosest, breeziest record ever, and yet, in its own way, it’s just as diverse as Rapture.

So why don’t I like it as much? I’m not sure. Mulvey is still an enjoyable performer – his low voice remains commanding, his lyrics just as witty and poetic as ever. The songs, though, seem like tributes rather than originals – “Abilene” is a classic waltz, “Brady Street Stroll” is a light shuffle, “You and Me and the Ten Thousand Things” is pretty typical jazz-folk. Most of The Knuckleball Suite sounds like Peter Mulvey trying to do other artists, instead of trying to do Peter Mulvey. Even the punchiest of these songs, “Girl in the Hi-Tops,” owes a debt to Paul Westerberg.

There are high points. Opener “Old Simon Stinson” is a hoot, with lines like “I was dreaming you were what I was dreaming of.” The record’s sole cover is a complete back-to-basics reinvention of U2’s “The Fly,” which emerges as a dynamite little song when scrubbed clean. And the final few numbers find Mulvey sounding like Mulvey again – the title track is a slowly-building winner, and “The Fix is On” is the album’s best song, a fret-slapping rant about the state of things: “It pays to pay the politician, it pays to pay the politician twice, it pays to be the politician, it pays to be the politician’s wife…”

And of course, Mulvey’s playing is excellent, even on the simplest tracks like “Horses.” Longtime producer and musical partner David Goodrich works his magic all over this album as well, though he’s more reined in than usual – a natural consequence of the material. The two of them really only get to let loose during the extended jam that concludes “The Fix is On,” muted by the coda “Ballymore” that finishes out the disc.

So while this album is not on par with past triumphs like The Trouble With Poets, it seems that Mulvey is on a journey to really explore his sound, and see what he can glean from past masters. I miss the fire, though, the sense of pushing forward instead of reaching backward that infused his earlier work. He probably looks on songs like “On the Way Up” and “Midwife” as naïve now, but to me, they still ring true. That probably says more about me and my maturity than Mulvey and his, of course, and most likely, this is the right path for him to take. I just miss the old spark. The Knuckleball Suite is a sweet record, and an enjoyable one, but it offers nothing you’ve never heard before.

There is some precedent for taking one sound, exploring it over the course of a career, and still turning out excellent work. But I think that’s part and parcel of owning that sound, of claiming it early and indelibly marking it as What You Do. Bill Mallonee, for example, writes great songs, but there’s no doubt he’s been writing the same kind of great songs forever – literate, honest American folk-rock with an occasional twang. He’s just so good at it that I never seem to mind how simple it all is.

His new one, Permafrost, is another nine Bill Mallonee songs, and the only real difference is the trappings. Like last year’s wonderful Friendly Fire, this record is a full-band effort – he’s even named the band this time, calling it Victory Garden. The only thing cheap about it is the packaging. The recording itself is full and beautiful, and these are nine of his most fully realized songs since his obvious high water mark, 1999’s Audible Sigh. It’s obvious that Mallonee blew all his money on the recording – the cover art is one-color and garish, and he has no distribution deal for this one.

But don’t let that stop you. The record opens with “Pour, Kid,” and the full sound, complete with pedal steel guitars and great backing vocals, is like a sigh of relief. The seven-minute “Threadbare” has some Neil Young overtones, but it’s mostly Mallonee, stretching out with some sweet lead work. “Stay With Me” is one of his punchiest songs, and the lovely “Pristine” even makes a feedback-drenched backwards guitar solo work in context. “Flowers,” resurrected from last year’s Hit and Run album, sounds terrific in its full version, the pedal steel and harmonica complementing each other nicely.

Mallonee is a good example of a guy who has been on a quest for fulfillment through simplicity for his whole career, and there are times (like this album) when he finds it. Like much of his recent work, Permafrost is mostly bleak, with moments of hope, but not many. But the music is perfectly realized, and carries the emotion of the lyrics as if there were no barriers between his heart and yours. This is a superb new Mallonee record, a case in which simplicity works wonders, and it captures a sadly ignored and unknown artist in fine form, clear voice, and delightfully dark heart.

You can get the album here.

But if we want to talk about searching for clarity through simplicity, we need to discuss Bob Dylan. His more than 40-year career plays like an Americana songbook, full of folk, blues, country and swing, and while his lyrics are often cryptic, his musical presentation has always been straightforward. It’s for that very reason that I have never really enjoyed his work, and I used to think of it as too simple, but now I consider it so simple that it’s actually beyond me.

Let me explain – I always talk about needing to work my way up to certain musical idioms, like complex jazz and orchestral work. I don’t feel like I’m there yet, and I have a lot of theory left to learn before I can really understand what someone like Duke Ellington was truly up to. But on the other end of the spectrum is someone like Dylan, who has been plying the same chords and the same instrumentation (more or less) for his entire career, and I’m honestly starting to feel like I need to work up to understanding what he’s up to as well. There is something special here, and I’m not always hearing it.

Take his new one, Modern Times. By my count, it’s his 30th studio album, though I’m probably wrong about that, and it’s being billed as the final installment in a trilogy that began with 1997’s Time Out of Mind, and continued with 2001’s Love and Theft. There’s no doubt that these are three of the most fully realized Dylan albums of the past 25 years, and the loose sound of the sessions only adds to the thrill of them.

But the songs are all incredibly simple bits of blues and ballads, sung in Dylan’s new register – low and rumbling and sometimes overly throaty. His band is great, but there’s nothing tricky about making something like “Someday Baby” or “Thunder on the Mountain” work. So with a mountain of five-star reviews of this thing piling up, I can only surmise that I’m missing whatever others are responding to. I like this material, especially the more shuffle-based ones like “Spirit on the Water” and “Beyond the Horizon,” but to consider this genius work is just odd to me.

Some of it is probably the Cult of Bob, claiming everything the man touches as solid gold, but some of it is probably just hearing a guy with so much history and influence cracking open 10 new songs and having fun with them. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” is certainly fun, and “When the Deal Goes Down” is very pretty, for what it is, but you can draw a straight line from this to Peter Mulvey’s album, and in some ways Mulvey does it better, and you don’t see him racking up the five-star accolades.

But Dylan is still capable of spinning a mesmerizing web, and the final track on Modern Times illustrates that perfectly. “Ain’t Talkin’” is a minor-key acoustic blues that runs for nearly nine minutes, and it’s pure magic. This is the kind of song that Dylan’s ravaged voice is perfect for – he adds a sense of menace and darkness to the song, and his very Bob Dylan-ness lends it weight. The other nine songs on Modern Times are frivolous things next to this piece, the one song here fully deserving of the reverence bestowed on it.

As for the rest… well, I still don’t get it, but I’m working on it. As I said, I have an uneasy relationship with simplicity, and I’m slowly trying to work it out. Why does someone like Bill Mallonee flip my switches, but not someone like Bob Dylan, whom Mallonee obviously draws from? Why can’t I see the recent, more informed and mature work of someone like Peter Mulvey as anything but a backslide? Is it really all about the complexity of the music? Do I have to see art as something monumental and ambitious and inventive to like it? Can’t I just relax and enjoy something like Modern Times for what it is?

And if not, why not?

These are questions I’m sure I will struggle with for the rest of my music-loving life. Next week, I’ll look at the mirror images of these quandaries, as I spin three of the most epic, complex records of 2006. To be continued…

See you in line Tuesday morning.