I’m going to try to keep it short this week. I’m sniffling and sneezing every few seconds, and my head is pounding, and I really just want to drift into unconsciousness. Let’s see how long I can stay awake.

I’ve gone on and on about what a great year for music 2007 has been, but looking back on it, there have been just as many high-profile disappointments as left-field successes. I lambasted Wilco two weeks ago, and even though the record is growing on me a bit, Sky Blue Sky still sounds like a joke that fell flat to me. Marillion’s Somewhere Else takes the crown for most crushing disappointment so far this year – I live and breathe that band, and even after 30 or so listens, this album still isn’t bringing the magic.

Opening salvos from two upcoming albums haven’t exactly whetted my appetite, either. Take the first single from the reborn Crowded House’s new album, Time on Earth. It’s called “Don’t Stop Now,” and you can hear it here. It is, perhaps, the lamest song I have ever heard from the pen of Neil Finn – boring, uninspired, thin, completely forgettable. Considering how incredible the first four Crowded House albums are, the thought of this new one sullying the band’s good name just makes me sad.

Ryan Adams re-emerges on June 26 with Easy Tiger, an album that’s generating some of the best pre-release buzz of the man’s career. But listening to the single, “Two,” you have to wonder where the accolades are coming from. (Here, check it out.) He welcomed Sheryl Crow up to the mic for backing vocals, and turned out a safe, lazy piece of pop nothing. Adams put out three albums in 2005, and none of them contained a single song as boring as “Two.”

And then there’s Bjork.

I’ve been a fan of the bizarre Icelandic pixie for a long time, although we didn’t exactly meet on good terms. My junior year of high school, my best friend Mike bought for me a random selection of cassette tapes from the local store. He’d never heard any of the artists he selected – he went solely on the cleverness of the band’s name, and the coolness of their cover art. I barely remember most of them, but I do recall that one of them was Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, the second album by the Sugarcubes.

And I hated it. So I avoided Bjork’s solo career for years, convinced that nothing good could come from the Sugarcubes. (For the record, I still don’t like Here Today – it’s too silly, too reggae-inflected, and too formless.) So I missed her dazzling Debut, and her even-better follow-up, Post. Thankfully, I jumped aboard with 1997’s Homogenic – I was intrigued by a pre-release description that included the coined phrase “technorchestral” – and discovered I’d been turning a deaf ear to one of the most engaging and innovative artists of our time.

I’ll brook no dissent on that one. I can understand not warming up to Bjork’s full-throated, heavily-accented voice, and I get that her work isn’t for everyone, but to my mind, very few artists have struck out in as many new directions and crafted as many new sounds as Bjork has. The argument starts with the “technorchestral” overtones of Homogenic – organic strings meeting brittle, crunching electronic beats, with melodies galore – and it ends with 2004’s Medulla, a captivating record made up largely of human voices, and little else.

A new Bjork album is an event, especially since she’s one of the very few artists that can still surprise me. I have no idea what she’s going to try next, and that kind of unpredictability is thrilling. Of course, an experimental streak like that is bound to lead to the occasional misfire, and that’s what she’s delivered, sadly, with Volta, her new album.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Volta pissed me off before I even pressed play. This CD comes in one of the most irritating packages I’ve seen in a while. The red digipak opens in the center, instead of at one end, and the two halves of the front cover are held together by a sticker depicting Bjork dressed up like some kind of Technicolor onion with enormous feet. You have to pry one end of the sticker up to get at the CD, and it’s not easy to do without tearing it.

Once you’re in, good luck getting the booklet out of the awkwardly positioned middle panel. Seriously, good luck. When you give up on that, you can flip the panel and pull the CD out, but then if you want to close the package up again, you have to press the end of that sticker down to keep it from popping open. Pry that up and then re-seal it enough times, and the sticker will lose its stickiness, leaving you with an annoying pop-up book of a package. It’s just poorly designed, and it seems like the intent is to keep you from listening too often.

Which is okay, because Volta is not an album you’re going to want to revisit that often. It is easily the most confused, directionless, meandering thing Bjork has ever released. Her vocals are still gripping, but she’s given herself no melodies to chew on, and precious few fascinating soundscapes to sing over. Most of the album sounds like it was performed by a drunken brass band, recorded in a canyon, and while the moods are sometimes interesting, the songs hardly ever are.

The proceedings actually begin well. “Earth Intruders,” a collaboration with Timbaland, is one of Bjork’s sprightliest singles, all beats and synth bass and the catchiest “ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!” you’re likely to hear. “Wanderlust” is pretty good, too – the brass band makes its entrance, but there’s a thudding beat and an actual chorus to carry the day.

Alas, things go downhill quickly. “The Dull Flame of Desire,” one of two duets with Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), is an endless bore, a repetitive intertwining of voices that goes nowhere for seven minutes. “Innocence,” another Timbaland creation, is just not up to par with “Earth Intruders,” and once it’s done, all sense of fun just drains out of the rest of the record. Just about everything else here is a droning meander, whether accompanied by plunking stringed instruments or muted brass.

Are there moments of joy along the way? Sure. Bjork has never made a lousy album, and even this slipshod effort doesn’t fully obscure her genius. “Pneumonia” is one of those brassy excursions, but it contains probably her best vocal in many years – she’s just breathtaking on this song. “Hope,” the final Timbaland monster, mixes in some interesting sounds, even if the song goes nowhere. And “Declare Independence” is an embarrassing, noisy disaster, shrill and distorted beyond all reason, but it does keep you listening, like the aural equivalent of a five-car pileup.

But overall, Volta just isn’t up to par. Bjork has always been good at developing a theme for her albums, leading you sonically from one end to the other, but this one doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, or what mood it wants to set. It’s saddled with brass interludes that resemble foghorns in the night, and it never takes flight – it’s missing that one amazing song that could make up for an album of failed experiments.

One thing you do have to say for it, though – like all of her albums, Volta sounds like no one but Bjork. Most of these tracks are unfortunate missteps, but at least they’re courageous missteps. There’s nothing formulaic or shopworn about Volta, and it’s unmistakably Bjork, even though she’s never sounded like this before, and hopefully never will again. You have to admire her willingness to chart new courses, even if they sometimes end up with her boat dashed on the rocks.

That said, I don’t see myself reaching for this album too often. It’s already on the ever-growing pile of disappointments from 2007, along with Fountains of Wayne, Ted Leo, and a host of others. Thankfully, the good stuff this year has been amazingly good, and though I wish Volta had been better, it doesn’t bring the batting average down too much. And you can’t keep a restless artist like Bjork down – she’ll bounce back next time, with a record that undoubtedly will sound nothing like Volta, and nothing like anything else on the shelves.

Next week, we get new ones from Paul McCartney, Dream Theater, Shellac, Pelican, Chris Cornell and Marilyn Manson. We also get something called Ziltoid the Omniscient, from the mind of Devin Townsend. Has he lost it completely? We’ll know in a few days.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Dear Dave Mustaine,

Hey, man. It’s been a while since my last letter. Hope everything’s going well for you. I don’t know if you remember me (and if you do, you’ve probably torn this letter to shreds by now), but I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time now.

Hell, that’s not even close to saying it right. I know I’m going to get shit from the “serious music fans” who read this site, the ones who agreed with me about Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom (and I hope right now you’re saying, “Who the hell are they?”), but your music changed my life. When I was 15 years old, I thought you were the best musician in the world. Seriously.

I look back on it now, and I know it’s kind of silly. Even you must see the humor in a band name like Megadeth. I know, I know – “Megadeath” is a real term, coined by Herman Kahn in 1953, and it means one million deaths. It’s the kind of word only a civilization with the frightening ability to destroy itself in a matter of minutes would come up with, and I like to think that’s why you chose it, but I don’t get why you misspelled it. That’s the kind of thing that 15-year-old me thought was cool, but it makes 32-year-old me grimace.

But you know, as you said once, it’s not the size of your pencil, it’s how you sign your name. The first four Megadeth albums are – and forgive me, serious music fans – awesome. Still, today, they hold up. They are fast, aggressive, explosive, complex, sneering and hilarious. You were young, you’d just been kicked out of Metallica for being a bigger badass than they were, and you were determined to make the best metal albums you could.

Rust in Peace came out when I was 16, and it knocked me on the floor. You should take this as a massive compliment – I was at the height of my teenage metalhead phase, and I’d heard it all, and I thought, honestly and sincerely, that Rust in Peace was the best album ever made. I know the last thing you wanted at the time was to make hummable music, but I would walk around humming the amazing opening guitar lick to “Holy Wars… The Punishment Due.” (And I would get a lot of strange looks for doing so.)

And then… well, I’ve written about this a number of times, and it’s never less depressing. Your music fell into a downward spiral that just has to be heard to be believed. Countdown to Extinction was pretty good, easily the best of this new melodic direction you’d gone in, but by the time Cryptic Writings came out in 1997, you were going through the motions, it seems to me.

I was fresh out of college, living in Maine, and the release of that album sparked the first of these Dear Dave Mustaine letters. It opened with me telling you I’d just heard the album, and asking you, “What the hell was that?” Because Cryptic Writings sucks. You know, I went back and listened to it again recently, in preparation for writing this letter, and while it’s a little better than I remembered, it’s still a half-assed Megadeth album. I mean, “Mastermind”? “She-Wolf”? Really?

But little did I know how good I had it in 1997. By 1999, when Megadeth hit its nadir with Risk, I had my own column (the print version of this puppy right here, published by Face Magazine), and I felt it was time for another letter. This one started a little differently, if you recall: “Dear Dave Mustaine, fuck you.”

I am such a fan that when EMI remastered the Megadeth catalog, I ran out and bought them all again, including Risk. (You’re welcome.) And I read your liner notes for that record with a smirk – you all but disowned it, detailing what you called the hijacking of your band from under your nose. I hated the same things about it, especially the WWF-inspired disco-metal of “Crush ‘Em,” although we disagree on “I’ll Be There” – I think it’s one of the worst pieces of crap you’ve ever written. The Megadeth I loved at 16 would never have written a song called “I’ll Be There.” Never.

Honestly, it was almost a relief for me when you injured your hand in 2002 and called it quits.

It should be obvious at this point what I want from you, Dave, and I hope you get other letters that ask for the same thing. I want aggressive, powerful, tricky, challenging metal, music that sounds like shrapnel exploding, music that makes my ears ring and my nose bleed. You must have noticed by now that other, younger bands are kicking your ass – Mastodon, Lamb of God, In Flames, and a dozen other acts are regularly producing heavy-as-shit metal that makes your mid-period music sound like Hall and Oates.

I admit, I was skeptical when you re-formed Megadeth, apparently having healed from your debilitating injury. I didn’t expect much, and yet, like the dutiful fan I am, I bought the album – number 10, in fact, called The System Has Failed. The cover is great, depicting longtime mascot Vic Rattlehead giving out pardons for cash to a long line of familiar faces, including Bush, the Clintons, Condi Rice and Ted Kennedy. Still, I wasn’t optimistic, and I braced for the worst as I pressed play.

And 48 minutes later, I breathed a sigh of relief. Holy shit, Dave, this album is great. You weren’t lying, you weren’t kidding. It’s the heaviest and best Megadeth album in more than 10 years. And maybe I’m just getting old, but the slower, more melodic ones really did it for me this time, too, especially “Truth Be Told.” I was sad to see Dave Ellefson go – he’s been with Megadeth since the beginning, providing great bass work – but it seems like you’ve really taken control of the band now, and you’re inspired, for the first time in ages.

I’m happy to report that I also like the follow-up – it lives up to its very Megadeth title, United Abominations. The front cover even reminds me of the classic image that adorned Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying, all those years ago, and while the music inside is a far cry from the speed-metal genius of that album, it ain’t bad at all. This record’s of a piece with The System Has Failed, and in fact sounds like the second part of a trilogy. Am I right?

The other thing that makes me think we’re dealing with a new trilogy is the lyrical content. This is the second album in a row that focuses on the state of the world, politically speaking, and it takes aim at some worthy targets. I disagree that the U.N. should have supported our illegal and immoral war in Iraq, as the title track says, but tunes like “Washington is Next” show that the guy who served as MTV’s political correspondent for the 1992 elections hasn’t lost that social conscience.

It’s not all good news, Dave. This album is a bit of a step down from the out-of-the-box excellence of System, and there are a few clunkers. Oddly enough, you seem to have sequenced them all in a row, dragging down the middle of the album with slower, less exciting numbers. There are a few too many places here where you just let the power chords and endless solos ring out over mid-tempo, repetitive backdrops, which is all the more depressing when you contrast these bits with the best stuff, like “Sleepwaker” and “Washington is Next.”

You also, for some reason, have included a new version of one of your finest songs, “A Tout le Monde,” off of the otherwise lousy Youthanasia. Can I tell you that you’ve done this song no favors with this new version? Sure, you share vocal duties with Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil, and she has a nice voice, but in all other ways, this is a lesser effort than the original, which had the textured work of guitar god Marty Friedman. Nothing against you or new guitarist Glen Drover, but there’s no magic here, just a straight rendition of the tune, like a local cover band might do.

But hell, this song deserves to be heard, and United Abominations is a better record than Youthanasia, all told. You pull it out at the end, too, with three superb, angry songs with wonderfully metal names. (“Amerikhastan” is my favorite, but the directness of “You’re Dead” shouldn’t be understated, either.) Overall, it’s a lesser effort when compared to the first part of this new trilogy, but it’s pretty damn good, especially for a guy I’d all but written off.

Yeah, that’s you, Dave. I’d almost given up on you, more than once over the last decade. I’m still not sure why I didn’t, or why your work remains so important to me. You’re still the only musician I’ve chosen to address directly like this, and I’m not certain why that is. I definitely have more to say to someone like Brian Wilson, or Ben Folds. But I’m not as invested in their careers as I am in yours. I want you to succeed, I want you to produce the best, heaviest, most ass-kicking stuff you can, and keep challenging yourself.

Don’t ask me why, but it’s important to me that Megadeth survives, and remains awesome.

You sound like you’re on the right track, Dave. You’ve curbed that pop-metal urge, and you sound invested in the music you’re making again, which is a very good thing. You’re 45 now, as hard as that is to believe, but I’m glad to hear you’re not giving up and turning into Elton John. I guess what I’m trying to say is this – five years ago, I danced on Megadeth’s grave, rejoicing at the news that you were throwing in the towel after a decade of increasingly horrid records.

I was wrong. And I’m glad you’re back. And my inner 15-year-old is even more glad.

Keep it up, Dave. I’ll talk to you when the trilogy’s complete. (I am right, aren’t I?)

Sincerely, your fan (still), Andre.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I get a surprising amount of grief for the positive bent of this column.

I honestly get letters all the time asking for more negative reviews, from people who apparently believe that all the music coming out these days is crap and deserves to be slated. I got one the other week that started like this: “Is there anything you don’t like?”

The answer is, of course there is. But here’s the thing, the guiding philosophy behind it all: I love music. I don’t want to hate anything I buy, because I’m not buying it as a critic, but as a music fan. I want to enjoy every single CD I plunk down my cash for. Given how many records I buy on a weekly basis, I know that’s an impossible expectation. But I never greet the inevitable moments of crushing disappointment with glee. I don’t want any music to suck, and I’d rather praise something to the skies than tear it down, honestly.

I’ve learned over the years not to expect too much from artists, especially ones with only one or two albums under their belts. I loved the first Click Five album, for the very same sugary-sweet qualities that turned a lot of people off, but I won’t be too sad if the second one (Modern Minds and Pastimes, out June 26) isn’t very good. New singer Kyle Patrick isn’t as charismatic as Eric Dill, and the single, “Jenny,” isn’t a patch on the power pop gems on that first album. But I want it to be great, and I’ll buy it hoping that it is.

It’s the established artists that inevitably end up making my heart sink. There’s nothing quite like following a promising artist as he or she delivers on that promise, and then follows up with a limp effort that just lies there. I’m left wondering just what happened, and who’s to blame for sullying what up until that point had been a sterling catalog. The more good albums an artist makes, the more disappointing a bad one is.

This is all buildup to my thoughts on the new Rufus Wainwright album, Release the Stars, but I don’t want to give the impression that our boy has made a bad record here. It’s actually pretty good, but that’s the thing about being outstanding – you can’t go back to pretty good.

I’ve said this before, but Rufus Wainwright may very well be the best pop songwriter in North America. Some may have difficulty classifying Wainwright’s opulent, dramatic music as pop, but to me it unquestionably is, just like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim are pop. His first two records set the pace, the simple piano and strings of his self-titled debut making way for the brilliant off-Broadway chamber-pop of Poses. At the time, I’d rarely seen an artist improve so much between first record and second, but Wainwright was just getting warmed up.

Released in chapters over two years, Want, Wainwright’s third and fourth albums, painted his flamboyant, fantastic style over a candy-colored sky. It was the most massive, most elaborate, and most artistically successful work of his career thus far, a bright burst of sustained creativity that firmly cemented Wainwright’s place among the greats of his time. It was everything he does well, but bigger and better than it had ever been – he spared no expense, left no stop unpulled, and ended up with a nearly two-hour masterpiece.

So if Want was Wainwright’s Grand Statement, then Release the Stars is just the next day of the rest of his life. Which isn’t bad, but it is a significant comedown.

But it’s very difficult to dislike Wainwright, even when he’s on autopilot. Stars crashes open with “Do I Disappoint You,” a strikingly orchestrated curtain-raiser that carries on in the Want tradition. From there, things take a step back with first single “Going to a Town,” a caustic piece about America that hides its claws beneath lovely rolling piano and subtle strings. It took a while for this song to grow on me, but it has, and I think it’s one of this album’s best.

But elsewhere, Wainwright stumbles, his gift for melody giving way to a meandering style that resists hooks and refuses to stick. “Not Ready to Love” may be the worst, a slow, sometimes (gasp) boring number that lopes along unconvincingly until it dies with a whimper. I like the arrangement of “Slideshow,” but the ascending hook of the chorus is all it has – it’s not a great song. And snoozy groovers like “Tiergarten” and “Rules and Regulations” are nice, but they don’t leave much of an impression.

Ah, but when Rufus is on, he’s spectacular as always. “Nobody’s Off the Hook” is a sweet piano-and-strings piece that makes full use of the dramatic pause. “Leaving for Paris No. 2” is his best ballad this time out, a captivating mourner that, surprisingly, is also the sparsest thing here – just piano, bass and eerie cellos. And “Between My Legs” lives up to the campy naughtiness of the title, with a dazzling overload of guitars and strings bursting at its edges.

Release the Stars may not live up to the bar set by the Want records, but it seems to signify a new beginning for Wainwright. It’s the first album he’s produced himself, and the first one to feature his own string arrangements, which are uniformly wonderful. I get the feeling that this is the first step on a new journey, and in a couple of albums, he’ll be ready to grace us with another adventurous, ambitious work of classic pop wonderment.

I would never steer you away from buying a perfectly acceptable effort like Release the Stars, especially if you’re a fan of Wainwright’s other works. But trust me on this one – if you’ve ever liked Wilco, and you want to keep on liking them as much as you do, then I’d stay as far away from their new album, Sky Blue Sky, as you can.

I like Wilco. I’ve liked Jeff Tweedy since his days in Uncle Tupelo, one of the greatest alt-country bands to ever walk the earth. Right out of the gate, Tweedy’s post-Tupelo project knocked his former bandmate Jay Farrar’s work with Son Volt flat on its ass. With Being There, Wilco made an extraordinary rock record, one that all but closed the book on the indie country thing for me. With Summerteeth, they stretched out and made a classic pop record. And with the amazing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, they somehow crafted one of the best albums of the decade so far.

And then, well, wow. Tweedy’s partner in crime, Jay Bennett, left the band, and he seemingly took all of their melodic sense with him, as 2004’s A Ghost is Born trafficked in somnambulant boredom, when it wasn’t being actively annoying. Following that train wreck, Tweedy unveiled the new Wilco, including guitarist extraordinaire Nels Cline, and utility man Pat Sansone. And surprise surprise, the subsequent live album Kicking Television was pretty great. With this lineup, Wilco seemed poised to deliver something superb next time they hit the studio.

Alas, here is Sky Blue Sky, and it is music to grow old and die to. Tweedy has thankfully curbed the experimental streak that led him to include 12 minutes of white noise on Ghost, but he’s also reined in the whole “rock band” thing, leaving his dream lineup sounding like every lame soft-rock band on AM radio in the 1970s. Many of the songs on Sky Blue Sky are ones the Eagles would have rejected as too wussy, especially in the saggy middle third, and the whole thing sounds like background music for the shuffleboard court.

Some of it’s not bad – “Impossible Germany” ends with a striking guitar duel between Tweedy and Cline, one of the few moments of pulsing life here, and closer “On and On and On” is Tweedy’s best work on this record. The bar’s not all that high, of course, but this song actually has a melody you can recall 10 minutes after you hear it, so it gets the prize.

The tragedy of this mellow California sunshine record is that the band Tweedy’s assembled to play it is obviously much more talented than the material. These songs are beneath them, and you can hear it every time Cline peals off a jazzy, complex solo, or Sansone whips out a piano flourish. They’re straining against the boundaries of these half-assed songs, trying to make them interesting and failing. I don’t mind low-key breather albums, but why would you make one of those when you have these musicians at your disposal, obviously aching to make great music?

Here is what I think: Jeff Tweedy is punking us. Except for a couple of places (like the near-metal solo on “Side With the Seeds”), this album is so mellow that even my dentist would be bored with it. It reminds me of nothing more than those latter-period Phish albums that I listened to once or twice, and then shelved without much comment. Only you never heard critics calling The Story of the Ghost a work of genius, and yet here’s every pundit in the country falling all over themselves to justify an album this lackadaisical from one of their anointed heroes.

I think Tweedy is trying to see what he can get away with and still get rock reviewers to kiss his feet. It’s the same thing Radiohead’s been doing for years. It’s an elaborate joke fueled by laziness and lack of inspiration. It’s just a theory, of course, but the other alternative is that Tweedy really likes this album, and believes it holds up next to the likes of Being There and Foxtrot. And if that’s the case, it really is a tragedy.

That’s the other side to the expectation game – if Sky Blue Sky had been an album by a new band, I’d probably be willing to give it more of a chance. It would still bore me, but maybe the lazy, hazy vibe would connect more if I didn’t have more than a decade of history to compare it to. As an album, Sky Blue Sky is probably a C minus. But as a Wilco album, it’s a dreadful failure. That’s the curse of excellence. Most bands will never make a record as good as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Wilco likely never will again. It’s an albatross around their necks, and its shadow makes a trifle like Sky Blue Sky seem like an unpardonable sin.

But all you can do as a fan is get used to disappointment. I’m already dreading the next albums by Sufjan Stevens, Mute Math, Keane, Joanna Newsom, Aimee Mann, the Choir, and a dozen others that are on a roll with their recorded output. But even if they fall flat on their faces, as Wilco has, I will faithfully line up and buy the next one, and the next one after that, because being a music fan is all about hope and faith. Every once in a while, the impossible happens – U2 makes an amazing record after a decade of fumbling about, or Brian Wilson finds his voice and finishes one of the best albums ever made. You never know with music, and that’s the magic of it all. It makes even the worst of it worth every second.

Next week, probably the next installment of Dear Dave Mustaine.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This is one of two columns I did this week. The other, a look a posthumous albums by Warren Zevon and Elliott Smith, is in the archive, if you’re interested. It didn’t turn out quite as well as I’d hoped, but it’s there.

I’m using this one, though, for all the other random bits and pieces I’ve wanted to discuss over the past few installments, but haven’t. The week’s theme of finality and loss is touched on here and there, but mostly this is just scattered thoughts, arranged in no particular order. And as usual for columns of this sort, I thought I’d start with a brief look ahead at some of the new music scheduled to hit stores in the coming months.

Next week’s a good one, with the new Rufus Wainwright, the (reportedly horrible) new Wilco, and the (apparently terrific) new Megadeth. After that, you have to wait until June 5 for anything truly significant. We’ll get Paul McCartney, Chris Cornell and Dream Theater on that date, and two weeks later, we’ll see the White Stripes, the Polyphonic Spree and the Chemical Brothers.

Batten down the hatches for June 26, because it’s a flood of new releases, including Ryan Adams, the Beastie Boys, the Click Five (with their new singer), Steve Vai (with an orchestra), and a massive live box set from Pearl Jam. Then in July, we have new ones from Spoon, They Might Be Giants, Interpol, Suzanne Vega, and Velvet Revolver.

Also, July is reunion month, and it’ll bring us the first new Crowded House album since 1993, and the first new Smashing Pumpkins disc since 2000. We know who’s in the House – it’s mastermind and resident genius Neil Finn, Nick Seymour, Mark Hart and new drummer Matt Sherrod. As for the Pumpkins, we know it’s Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain, and… um…

The rest of the summer is clouded in mystery right now, but given how fantabulous this year has been, expect that it won’t remain so for long. The farthest out I can see right now is August 21, which should bring us new discs by the New Pornographers and Minus the Bear. But I should have updates soon enough.

* * * * *

Anyone watching Lost? Let me say for the record that if the show goes off the rails in the coming seasons, I will point to this week’s episode, specifically the revelation of Jacob, as the moment when it all went wrong. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but wow… I don’t know what to make of it.

Regardless, the real news on the Lost front hit on Monday, when ABC announced that it would allow producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to set an end date for the show. Lost will run three more 16-episode seasons, for a grand total of 48 more episodes after this season, and will wrap up in 2010. This is an extraordinary move for a major network, and the first time I can think of that any of the big four have taken this step. Lost will end the way the producers want it to, without slowly crumbling over several extraneous seasons that only exist to bring in the advertising bucks.

I credit HBO with making it safe for networks to do this. Thanks to shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, viewers are used to smaller, uninterrupted seasons, complex narrative storytelling, and a novelistic structure with an end point. Six Feet Under ended when Alan Ball wanted it to. The Sopranos will shortly wrap up its run with creator David Chase firmly at the wheel.

I remember when DC Comics took a similar plunge. Of course, comics cost less and bring in considerably less revenue than TV shows do, but I recall what a huge deal it was in the early ‘90s when Neil Gaiman announced the end of Sandman. No new writer would take over. When the original creator’s story was over, he would put his pen down and pack up shop, regardless of the fact that DC Comics owned (and still owns) Sandman completely.

I think this is an immensely positive development for lovers of serial narrative, like me. Here’s what happened in the comic book realm: DC took a lesson from smaller publishers and began accepting creator-owned properties with designated end points. Their Vertigo line is famous for it now. Y: The Last Man, one of the finest books currently being published, is set to end its run at 60 issues. 100 Bullets will run 100 issues.

I predict that this will start happening with television shows as well. We’ve already seen it with J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5, pitched as a five-season novel. I think the major networks will start to catch on to this idea, taking pitches from producers who want their shows to run four or five seasons, and then end on a high note, with the conclusion of the story. This is a serious commitment for the network and the producer, of course, and the success or failure of the first couple of these novelistic shows could determine the fate of the paradigm.

And of course, some (if not most) shows will still be based on renewable premises, and will bounce from good idea to bad until the money runs out, just like DC still publishes Superman and Green Lantern and a hundred other ongoing books. But from a creative standpoint, there’s nothing like having a beginning, a middle, and an end to your story, and being able to present it the way you created it. And if Lost does well in its final three seasons, I think we’ll see much more of these finite long-form televisual novels in the future.

* * * * *

Speaking of end points, the great comic book Strangers in Paradise ends its run this month, and I wanted to give creator Terry Moore a special shout-out to celebrate. He’s finishing the series on his own terms, with his own pen strokes, after 14 years.

Strangers in Paradise is the story of three people in constant orbit around each other, and the satellites they bring with them. It is a violent series, full of intrigue and pain and death, but it is also incredibly touching, a book that gets those small, human moments exactly right. SIP is credited with expanding the ranks of female comic book readers, and it’s easy to see why, with its two strong female leads, but honestly, I believe it brought people of both genders to comics because it’s just a damn good book.

Terry Moore is also reportedly one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet. I got the chance to talk with him a few times during my days as a comics writer, and I found him charming and modest about his prodigious talent.

Anyway, Strangers in Paradise #90 comes out later this month – it’s actually the 106th issue of the book, counting the two prior volumes. And that’ll be it. I’ve been reading SIP since college, and I’m proud to say I’ve bought every single issue from the same comic book store: Casablanca Comics in Portland, Maine. Like Cerebus wrapping up three years ago, the end of SIP means another remnant of my younger life is gone for good. But it was a great run, a great book, and here’s hoping for a great final issue.

Thanks, Terry.

* * * * *

You may scoff at this, but I don’t honestly consider myself a collector of music.

I’m an obsessive fan of music, it’s true, and I do buy somewhere in the neighborhood of three to five CDs a week, on average. But you won’t see me scouring vinyl bins, looking for out-of-print Australian singles from my favorite bands. You won’t see me seeking out original pressings of anything – in fact, I’ve been known to wait for the remaster more often than not. I own exactly one copy of just about everything I have, and have no use for multiple printings with different sleeve art or different bar code numbers. (Seriously. People pay for an album they already have because the numbers on the bar code are different!)

Still, I do have several collections in progress, and I’m always thrilled when I finish one off to my satisfaction. I did so just last week with one I’ve been tracking down for years, and I’m over the moon about finally having everything I’d hoped to own by this group.

The band is the Prayer Chain, a little-known quartet from California that, in the space of five short years, went through one of the most dramatic artistic evolutions I’ve encountered, and in the process kicked against the very idea of mainstream-label Christian music and what it can be. The members of the Prayer Chain (Tim Taber, Andy Prickett, Eric Campuzano and Wayne Everett) have gone on to either start or contribute to some incredible bands, but none have had the impact on me that the Prayer Chain did.

They started off as a U2-inspired alt-rock band with up-front spiritual lyrics. Their first record, The Neverland Sessions, was released independently in 1991. (And it was the one I needed to finish the collection off – I found a copy online. Hooray for the Internet!) Shortly thereafter, they were signed to Reunion Records, home of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, among other lightweight gospel-poppers. It’s no understatement to say that they didn’t quite fit on Reunion, and would actually be accurate to call them the heaviest and most artistically driven band on the roster.

The Whirlpool EP was something of a restatement of Neverland, but the band’s second full-length, Shawl, blew the doors off. Produced by Steve Hindalong, drummer of the Choir, Shawl is a tough, massive slab of melodic rock with deep themes – “Fifty-Eight” is about the distance between fathers and sons, and “Never Enough” is one of the most chilling songs about needing grace that I’ve ever heard. Still, Shawl was a rock record, and given that as a starting point, no one could have predicted where they went next.

1995’s Mercury still stands as one of my very favorite records. I don’t own very many like it, honestly. The band teamed up with Hindalong again, but the result this time is a strange, minor miracle of an album that winds around Cure-like guitars, space-age drones, armies of percussion, and slowly unfolding flowers of melody. It’s beautiful and ugly and scary, and it ends with “Sun Stoned,” the greatest end-of-the-world song I know of.

Apparently, the record label messed with Mercury, demanding changes and new songs and an overall less frightening vibe, and I would kill to hear the original version of that album before the suits got their hands on it. The remaining tracks that would have been on Mercury were all released later, on the rarities collection Antarctica and the career-spanning So Close, Yet So Far, but we still don’t know the running order, or how they would have sounded mixed and mastered as a record.

But the evolution and dissolution of the band is fun to trace. Mercury’s engineer, Chris Colbert, once said that you could hear the band break up on that album, and it’s true – they lasted only a few more months before going their separate ways. Still, I’m eternally grateful that I got to hear Mercury, and that now, I have all the stops on the journey that led there.

* * * * *

Next week, my heart will be in it, I swear. New ones from Rufus Wainwright and Wilco, and maybe another installment of Dear Dave Mustaine.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Final albums are difficult to review. Posthumous albums are impossible.

The thing is, artists rarely know when they’re making their last statements. Time and tragedy can’t be predicted. Jeff Buckley had started work on his second album when he drowned, leaving only Grace as his legacy. George Harrison likely didn’t know while making Brainwashed that he was working on his swan song. The sense of finality is just not as prevalent in the work.

But posthumous albums, especially those cobbled together by family members and friends, are a different story. They are often, to me, like sifting through a dead man’s garbage, looking for change. I can’t help thinking while listening to these collections that the only reason I’m hearing these songs at all is that the author isn’t alive to stop me. It’s hard to know what someone like Frank Zappa would have wanted for his thousands of unreleased recordings. Would he have foisted rehearsal tapes like Joe’s Domage onto the public? Would John Lennon have okayed the surviving Beatles using his demos to construct “Real Love” and “Free as a Bird”? Who knows?

It’s hard to take these things as they are, and not surround them with emotion and suspicion. They are reminders of what we’ve lost, certainly, but they are also often collections of recordings deemed unfit for public consumption when the artist in question was alive. I can’t stop myself from thinking, should I be listening to this? Should I have this? Am I going against a dead man’s wishes by hearing this?

These are questions that can never be answered. To his credit, though, Jordan Zevon raises them in his eloquent liner notes to Preludes, the just-released collection of demos and unreleased recordings by his dad, Warren. He wonders whether he will receive a hug or an ass-kicking for this album when he sees his father in the afterlife, and concludes that he’ll probably get both. But at least he considered the question, and that makes me feel infinitely better about listening to this great collection.

Few artists faced death with as much grace and acceptance as Warren Zevon. Truth be told, mortality was always a central theme of Zevon’s work, and he treated it with a hard-edged cynicism obviously earned through years of tempting fate. When it finally caught up with him – Zevon was diagnosed with inoperable, asbestos-related lung cancer in 2002 – he didn’t collapse in a heap, but rather set about making one final record, one last chance at setting things in order.

That record was called The Wind, and it hit stores in August of 2003. Just over one week later, Zevon died, but not before he saw the birth of his twin grandsons, and got to experience having a top 20 album for the first time since 1980. It was a terrific, fitting finish to a career that had flown largely under the radar, and I’d have been perfectly happy to have The Wind as the last album in my Zevon stack.

That’s not to begrudge Preludes at all, though, because as posthumous collections go, this one’s fantastic. It was lovingly assembled by Jordan Zevon, and contains 10 early recordings of songs that later appeared on his albums, and six unreleased tunes, all of which are worth having.

More than half of the demos here are from his underrated self-titled album from 1976, and they include a rip-snorting take on “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and a gorgeous closing piano run-through of “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” The Zevon trademark of simple yet memorable melodies coupled with lyrics dosed in darkness is in place even this early on, a far cry from “Tule’s Blues,” a semi-sweet version of a ditty from Zevon’s forgotten 1969 debut, Wanted Dead or Alive.

Other highlights include a reggae-inflected, organ-fueled version of “Werewolves of London,” which manages the neat trick of getting me to listen to “Werewolves of London” again. I think it’s nearly criminal that Zevon is best known for this song, when his catalog is deeper and warmer than this knockoff novelty tune would suggest. Just listen to “Hasten Down the Wind,” here performed with little more than Zevon’s voice and piano, or the trio recording of “Accidentally Like a Martyr,” one of the darkest love songs ever written.

But it’s the unreleased songs that really shine. Preludes opens with “Empty Hearted Town,” a piano-based lament that ranks among Zevon’s best work. I’m not sure when this was recorded, or why it never grew into a fully produced album track, but it’s the kind of song that puts lie to the notion that Zevon’s work never had a heart. His catalog is full of songs like this, sad little stories finely drawn, and there are a couple more on Preludes, too, most notably “Stop Rainin’ Lord” and “The Rosarita Beach Café.”

Most revealing is “Studebaker,” a song that Jordan performed on the tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich. Here is Warren Zevon’s only released run-through, and it’s obvious it’s an aborted take, a sketch intended to get an idea down on tape before it evaporates. Zevon plunks the song out, missing beats and obviously working through chord changes, and he abandons it halfway through. He would never finish this song, and the question it raises is this: was he wrong to toss it aside? Should we, as his audience, be granted glimpses at works in progress like this without his permission, and should we be given the choice to, in effect, tell Zevon he made a mistake? Is that our place as the listener?

Philosophical questions aside, Preludes is a fascinating glimpse at the work of an undervalued songwriter. It’s hard to be too sad about it – I miss Zevon and his music, but his work has such a hard, bitter edge to it that it effectively shuts you down before you can let it into your heart. The most touching and emotional thing here is on the second disc, basically an extended interview mixed with songs from Life’ll Kill Ya, including a solo acoustic performance of “Don’t Let Us Get Sick.” That song was written four years before Zevon knew he had cancer, and it’s a cutting and difficult listen now. It’s also lovely.

Should I care about whether Warren Zevon would have wanted me to hear these recordings? I don’t know. I jumped at the chance to hear them, one way or the other, just like I rushed out to buy New Moon, the new two-CD collection of unreleased songs by Elliott Smith. I suppose I consider the morality of these actions too late – whether Zevon and Smith would have given their permission or not, I’ve heard these records now, so all I can do is talk about how they’ve made me feel.

As you may expect, the Elliott Smith has hit me a lot harder. I consider him one of the finest songwriters of my generation, but that’s too simple a description. He was simply Elliott Smith – brilliant, troubled, with an uncanny gift for melody and a knack for expressing his own deepest despair, and making you feel it too. Smith killed himself in 2003, proving once and for all that all of that despair was real, but he left five full-length albums and one half-completed stunner in his wake.

That album, From a Basement on the Hill, was later finished by friends and released in 2004. I love it, but I also understand that it’s probably nothing like the album Smith would have released had he been around to oversee it. The same can be said of New Moon, assembled by his family and former record label, except there’s a difference: there’s nothing half-completed about any of these songs. Most of them are outtakes from the sessions that produced his third album, Either/Or, but any of them could have stood proudly on his early records.

Honestly, I can’t tell you how it feels to experience Elliott Smith songs I’ve never heard before – it’s just too much. My throat all but closed up at the opening strains of acoustic guitar on “Angel in the Snow” – has anyone before or since played guitar quite like Smith? And my God, what a song “Angel” is. Smith, in his brief life, never ran out of haunting, moving melodies, and New Moon’s 24 songs don’t break that streak. It’s like getting two extraordinary lost albums from him, and I can’t even express how grateful I am to have them.

While I question whether Warren Zevon would have wanted me to hear Preludes, my only question about New Moon is how Smith could have let these songs go. These are not outtakes, these are fully formed pieces – you could swap out New Moon’s first disc with Elliott Smith in the official discography with no drop in quality. “Go By” is an atmospheric wonder, “Looking Over My Shoulder” is good old acerbic Smith at his best, and “Going Nowhere” is one of his finest songs ever, a ghostly whisper of a thing that chills to the bone. And the early version of “Miss Misery” here doesn’t yet mention the title character by name, and it illustrates just how hard Smith worked on these songs, how much of a craftsman he was.

Everything here is, in one way or another, unspeakably beautiful, but some moments cut deeper than others. When he mentions suicide in “Georgia, Georgia,” the swell of emotions that surrounded me when I heard of Smith’s own untimely death come rushing back. And I have always loved his spare take on Big Star’s “Thirteen,” this set’s only cover – his voice, so thin and fragile, winding around Alex Chilton’s melody and making it Smith’s own.

But I honestly can’t objectively review New Moon. I can’t even subject it to the same criteria as other posthumous releases – I believe with all my heart, listening to this, that Smith was wrong to cast these songs aside, and that with this collection’s release, the world has been made right once more. These are songs to wrap yourself up in and love with everything you have. These are 24 more reminders of just what the world lost on October 21, 2003.

This is simply Elliott Smith, at his heartbreaking best.

And I miss him terribly.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I can’t believe it. It’s a Christmas miracle.

It’s been nearly 10 years since Tori Amos made a full-length album I can stand to listen to all the way through. She used to be (and in her best moments, she still is) one of my very favorite musicians, one whose work reaches into my life and re-orders it. Little Earthquakes is still one of the finest albums I own – even the b-sides from that record are heart-wrenching – and its two follow-ups were practically flawless, even as Amos strove to explode her trademark girl-and-a-piano sound.

And then, I’m still not sure what happened. 1998’s From the Choirgirl Hotel was something of a misfire, though about half of it was still excellent. Amos tinkered with electronic backdrops, and chose to rock out in some more traditional ways, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I could forgive one misstep, but that was the start of a seriously steep decline.

Her work for Epic Records, with whom she signed in 2002, has been the absolute nadir of her career. Scarlet’s Walk buried a half-decent EP under tons of dreck, and was, to that point, the worst record she’d made. She topped it (or bottomed it, or whatever) with The Beekeeper two years ago – 78 minutes, and not one decent song. It sounded to me like she’d run the whole thing through a Blandifier machine, sanding off all the rough edges I’d always loved about her. The Beekeeper retains a fascinating distinction – it’s the only Amos album with no redeeming qualities at all.

But, you know, I held on through all of this, because here and there, I found flashes of the brilliance that used to flow so effortlessly. The Welcome to Sunny Florida EP was better than all of Scarlet’s Walk. The DVD bonus track on The Beekeeper, “Garlands,” put the entire album to shame. And the live box set, The Original Bootlegs, showcased just the woman and her piano, and it was marvelous. Amos still has it, she just hasn’t proven it on record in a long time.

Advance publicity for American Doll Posse, her ninth album, didn’t really thrill me. Here was Tori, bleeding down one leg, standing in front of a church with a Bible in one hand and the word “shame” written across the other. Oooh, that’s shocking. Here was another ass-aching concept about womanhood and identity, propping up another 79-minute monster of a record that would undoubtedly be too long and too boring.

But guess what? If I have any doubt from now on that 2007 is the best year ever for music, I just need to listen to American Doll Posse, the single best piece of work Amos has turned out since Choirgirl. Yes, it’s too long, and yes, some of it is boring. But the vast majority of it virtually explodes with life – Amos is invested in this record, in a way she hasn’t been in ages, and for the first time since Boys for Pele, I can forgive her excesses and experiments, because when she’s on, she’s amazing.

American Doll Posse comes wrapped in a shaky conceptual framework that could have drowned it. Here’s the idea – Amos plays five different characters, one of them (the one striking a pose outside that church) a caricature of her own image. The others are all aspects of her and her work. Bleached-blonde photographer Isabel is political-minded, for example, while white-haired Santa (really) is sensual and sexual.

Amos seems to be making a point about confining women to one set image – these are all aspects of her, and therefore, of all women, I guess. It seems an obvious point to make – people are complicated, and more than the two-dimensional cardboard cutouts you see on television – but Amos is committed to making it. She splits Posse’s 23 songs up amidst her five characters, depending on its subject matter, and she dresses up as each character for the cover and booklet art.

You might think there would be some reward for following along, for keeping track of which character sings which song, but there isn’t. It’s sort of the point here that these are all Tori Amos songs – the characters are all aspects of her, after all – and they don’t fit together into any kind of story or thematic framework otherwise. So, blessedly, you can just ignore the whole concept entirely and enjoy the record.

And for the first time in a decade, I did enjoy it. Not only is this the first Amos album since Choirgirl that I can get all the way through in one sitting, it’s the first one since that I can’t stop listening to. And she didn’t do it by stripping everything away and returning to the girl-and-a-piano thing that I love, either – American Doll Posse is quite simply the fullest, most rocking Tori album ever, with most of the songs drenched in thick, 1970s-style guitar and fueled by some absolutely punishing drumming. But “bland” is the absolute last word you’d use to describe any of it, thank God.

Unfortunately, Posse is cluttered with a number of weak interludes, like the opener, “Yo George,” a satin slap at our Idiot in Chief. These minute-long ditties don’t do anything to improve an already overlong and scattered record, even though some of them (the stark “Devils and Gods,” for example) are pretty great. Listening to Posse straight through is like hearing a swell hour-long album and all of its b-sides on shuffle, which isn’t inherently bad, but keeps this record from being a home run.

Enough complaints, though. Posse’s first real song is “Big Wheel,” a skipping double-time rocker that sets the pace. Amos sounds invigorated right at the start, belting out the chorus with a passion she hasn’t shown in years. “Bouncing Off Clouds” is even better, lifting off the ground with ease as Amos weaves her own voice around itself again and again. It’s such a treat to hear that voice in full bloom again – she bellows all of “Teenage Hustling” with verve and force, and even takes a mid-tempo meander like “Code Red” into orbit with a few emotional moans.

Highlights are, amazingly, too many to mention, but here’s a few. “Girl Disappearing” is the only example here of her signature piano-and-strings sound, and it’s lovely, although it’s eclipsed in the beauty department by “Roosterspur Bridge,” a heartbreaking song of leaving and loss. “Father’s Son” is similarly gorgeous, and it’s buoyed, not anchored, by its electronic percussion. “Body and Soul” positively rocks, Amos taking on the chorus with all she’s got. I even like the experiments here, like the jazzy shuffle “Mr. Bad Man” and the wank-rock sex romp “You Can Bring Your Dog.”

But it is, honestly, way too long, and it doesn’t help that the boring ones are sequenced near the end. “Almost Rosey” is the low point, at track 18, plying one typical chord progression over and over for five minutes. The album actually finishes up really well, though – despite the fact that “Posse Bonus,” at track 21, makes the final three songs seem like extras, both “Smokey Joe” and “Dragon” are haunting pieces that deserve their place as the finale.

“Dragon,” especially, is great, concluding things with a couplet that sums up Amos’ girl power message with a caress instead of a smack: “Now it has come to light, the gods, they have slipped up, they forgot about the power of a woman’s love…”

I admit, I’ve been worried that Tori Amos had forgotten her own power, and that we’d never hear anything worth praising from her again. It struck me that the last time I heard a Tori album I liked this much, I was in college – I’ve been through numerous jobs in numerous states since then, taking a journey worthy of Scarlet and her walk. I’ve carried Tori’s immortal first three albums with me through all of that, and I kept believing that one day she’d do something that good again.

American Doll Posse is not that album, of course, but it comes closer than anything since, and it has renewed my faith. Amos sounds awake and alive and passionate and engaged with her muse, in ways I’d dreaded she’d never be again. Posse is the sound of one of the world’s best artists waking up, taking stock, and getting about the business of being who she is again. It is her best work in far too long, and the sweetest surprise of 2007 thus far.

Welcome back, Tori. Welcome back.

Next week, letters from beyond the grave.

See you in line Tuesday morning.