I’m very late, I know. I’m sorry. It’s been a hell of a week.

I woke up Monday morning and the first thing I read was George Carlin’s obituary. I’ve long admired Carlin and his work, from his earliest gag-based humor (“And now, a message from the National Apple Council: Fuck pears”) to his more cynical mid-career material, and even the bitter ranting of the last couple of decades.

I know, as with Woody Allen, many preferred the early, funny stuff, but I think Carlin offered a glimpse into a black-as-midnight mind. He saw no magic in the world, and while I hope to never be that way myself, I think his this-is-the-worst-case-scenario outlook allowed him to sweep aside a lot of the bullshit of everyday life. He was an irascible, incorrigible, bleak and cynical man, and a damn funny one at that. He was more than a comedian, he was a modern-day philosopher, and though I disagree with many of his conclusions, as I do with many philosophers, there’s no arguing his brilliance. Even if you can say three of his seven dirty words on television now. Carlin died of heart failure at age 71.

So that sucked, but the week got a lot better from there. If you’re interested in what I do for a living, and what I’ve done all week, go here. Be sure to watch the videos, too – I’m pretty proud of those. The whole thing took about 75 hours to put together this week, and I’m exhausted, but happy.

And then I ended the week by reading about the death of Michael Turner.

Turner was a comic book artist who made his name on a book called Witchblade, then moved to his own creations, Fathom and Soulfire. He never produced groundbreaking work, but he had a nice style, and more than that, a reputation as one of the nicest people in the comic book industry. Turner finally succumbed after a long struggle with cancer, leaving the first volume of Soulfire incomplete. He was only 37.

So a week bookended by death, and including some of the most life-affirming moments of my year in between. With all the hours I put in at work this week, I just haven’t had the time to write a silly music column. And I only have about another half-hour to write one now, so I’m going to cop out and take a little break.

But don’t worry, I do have my second-quarter report for you. However, I have good news and bad news on that front as well. The good news is you’ll find the list below, but the bad news is I can’t decide on an order for the 10 entries. So I didn’t – you’ll find them in alphabetical order. I have rearranged the top five probably 200 times in the last two weeks, and then had to add a new entry this week too (more about that below, and in our next installment). I just can’t pick a number one.

There are three albums on the list right now that I’m still working through. I keep spinning the Coldplay and Death Cab records, and they’re working for me more and more, to the point where I think they belong on the list as it stands now. And then this week, Sigur Ros released their new one, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Enalaust, and it’s utterly befuddling. It’s beautiful, and it’s in the list, but I still don’t know what I think about it.

You’ll also find an album I haven’t reviewed yet – the self-titled debut by Fleet Foxes. I’ll talk about this one next week, too, but consider its placement in the list an early recommendation. And yet, I don’t know where this one belongs either. It’s amazing, but in a totally different way from just about every other record on this list. In fact, every one of these 10 CDs pushes a different button for me than any of the others. It makes it hard to compare them.

Anyway, the list:

Coldplay, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
Counting Crows, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings
Death Cab for Cutie, Narrow Stairs
The Feeling, Join With Us
Fleet Foxes
Joe Jackson, Rain
Aimee Mann, @#%&*! Smilers
R.E.M., Accelerate
Sigur Ros, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endlaust
Vampire Weekend

Apologies again for falling down on the job this week. I’ll be back in force next week with reviews of Sigur Ros, Fleet Foxes and the Seventy Sevens. And hopefully I’ll get some sleep before then, too.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m still not sure what I think of the new Coldplay album.

I’ve given myself the better part of a week, listening to nothing else, and I still don’t have a cast-iron opinion ready to go. I suppose that’s a good sign for the record – previous Coldplay albums had me either excited or bored by the second listen. I’ve heard the new one, portentously titled Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, about 12 times now. Each time is a different experience – one trip through, and the record will click, and I’ll sing its praises. Another, and I’ll stumble over each one of its flaws.

I will say this up front – this is a bold album for Coldplay. They’ve never been known as the most daring band, and I criticized their last effort, 2004’s X&Y, for being too timid. The band stretched out a bit on about half the songs, but played it safe on the others, aiming for the charts. Perhaps, I mused, the band was a bit too concerned with the expectations placed upon them, and the hundreds of suit-and-tie drones who would be affected by a low-selling album.

If they were before, they’re not now. For their fourth outing, Coldplay hired Brian Eno to twiddle the knobs. Eno is perhaps best known as part of the production team behind U2’s biggest albums: The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. He’s also an electronic music pioneer, and a master of reinvention – he produced Paul Simon’s dazzling Surprise in 2006, introducing Simon to trip-hop beats and ambient soundscapes.

Together, Eno and the band deliberately stripped away everything identifiably Coldplay from the new material. Gone are the willowy piano ballads, gone is the majestic mid-tempo pop the band made its name with, and gone is the reliance on Martin’s voice and emotional resonance. I’m sure there are discs and discs full of outtakes that sound like Coldplay, but none of them made it to Viva la Vida. It is a strikingly different, frequently marvelous transformation, but it rarely sounds like the same band that made A Rush of Blood to the Head.

This is good and bad news. There’s little doubt in my mind that Viva la Vida is a transitional work, that Coldplay used the sessions to throw new sounds at the wall and see what stuck. What emerges, though, is a series of homages to other bands. “Lovers in Japan” is so U2 that Bono and company could have grounds for a lawsuit. “42” (a sly Douglas Adams reference, just like their earlier “Don’t Panic”) is their Radiohead pastiche, grafting a Thom Yorke piano melody to a Jonny Greenwood guitar workout. “Lost!” is Us-era Peter Gabriel. “Strawberry Swing” is David Byrne through and through.

The good news, though, is that Coldplay convincingly sells each of these sounds, and occasionally comes up with their own. The album opens with an instrumental, “Life in Technicolor,” that marries a shimmering synth line to some terrific guitar work from Jonny Buckland. That segues into “Cemeteries of London,” a haunting, wonderful piece with an otherworldly “la-la-la” chorus. And “Lost!,” for all its Gabriel tricks – front-and-center organ, hand percussion, etc. – is a great song, with a great first line: “Just because I’m losing doesn’t mean I’m lost…”

This is an album with a sprawling array of sounds, but it’s surprisingly compact – 13 songs in about 45 minutes. Only a few of these songs break four minutes, and those only by a couple of seconds. It’s quite the trick. Viva la Vida is a short trip through a surprising number of different neighborhoods – dig the Middle Eastern string lines on “Yes,” the circular guitars of hidden track “Chinese Sleep Chant,” and the John Lennon-style vocal effects on “Violet Hill.”

The final track, “Death and All His Friends,” is mesmerizing – a low-key piano piece segues into a stunning instrumental explosion, some choral vocals, and a too-quick fade-out. But not to worry – the album actually ends with hidden track “The Escapist,” which brings back the synth shimmers from “Life in Technicolor” and adds some sweet, sad vocals and strings to them. It’s perhaps the most beautiful thing here, and the song that most effectively uses Eno’s penchant for ambient music.

For all that, though, the album isn’t particularly memorable, at least on first listen. The choruses are subtle, the melodies buried, and the soaring arena-pop sound the band worked so hard to cultivate is all but missing. Thank God, then, for “Viva la Vida,” the most Coldplay-esque song here. Over swelling strings, Martin unleashes the best melody on the album, and for once, his voice is right up front. You won’t forget this song once you hear it – it’s simple, effective, and astonishingly well-produced. (For example, the drums never kick in once, and yet, you could dance to this.) This is what I was hoping for from the fourth Coldplay album – a natural, organic growth of their sound, instead of a rejection of it.

But honestly, this album is pretty marvelous. Coldplay has been taking baby steps forward since their first record, but on Viva la Vida, which takes its name from a Frida Kahlo painting and its cover art from a depiction of the French Revolution, they rip up the maps. Listen after listen, I’m continually knocked out by the band’s willingness to experiment – they run the risk of leaving their old fans in the dust with this album, but it’s the first one that really tries to earn them their status among the most important bands in the world. And given a few listens, even those fans who miss the old sound will find much to love here.

* * * * *

I’m not sure why I’ve given Coldplay such a hard time for swiping other bands’ sounds. Many of my favorite artists do the same thing all the time – hell, it’s a trademark for some of them. Music is a neverending cycle, feeding off its own history. As Todd Rundgren once said, “Louie Louie” is “More Than a Feeling” is “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” forever and ever, amen.

The British do it better than anyone. In the 1960s, they took the all-American template for rock ‘n’ roll and perfected it – they gave us the sleazy barroom side with the Rolling Stones and the literate pop-rock side with the Beatles, and we’ve been cribbing from both of them ever since. Americans invented the blues, too, but it’s British white guy Eric Clapton who has arguably had the most success with that art form. And in the 1970s, a little Brit band you may have heard of called Led Zeppelin took the old blues sound, ripped it off completely, and refashioned it as thunderous, godlike, capital-R Rock.

British rock has been feeding off itself for decades. Sure to be in my top 10 list is Join With Us, the second album by the Feeling – they rip off Electric Light Orchestra and 10cc and countless other British pop bands of the last 40 years. And I don’t even need to mention the dozens of bands taking pages from Radiohead’s book, including Coldplay and Travis and Muse and on and on. That’s what pop music is all about – you take the good stuff from your predecessors and try to move it forward.

Which brings us to Supergrass, one of the finest British burglar bands around. I liked their first three records well enough, but their fourth, Life on Other Planets, was a masterpiece. Not only did the quartet, led by brothers Gaz and Rob Coombes, swipe a hundred different styles and puree them together, but each element was produced to sound vintage. If the bass line was taken from the Velvet Underground, well then, it would damn well sound like a VU bassline, even as it supported a Beatles piano sound and a Who guitar figure. For a music history junkie, it was a lot of fun.

2005’s Road to Rouen wasn’t nearly as enjoyable – it felt like a last gasp, in fact. So I’m pleased to report that album number six, the regrettably titled Diamond Hoo Ha, is all kinds of awesome, a grand return to form.

For starters, this one simply rocks. The guitars are dirty, the drums explosive, the electric pianos funky, and Gaz Coombes’ voice wonderfully ragged. After the dark and brief Rouen, Diamond Hoo Ha is a party in a box. Of course, its most blatant rip-off is right up front – “Diamond Hoo Ha Man” steals the guitar riff from Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick,” grafting on a great chorus. It’s a rock and roll monster, and “Bad Blood” is even better, all flailing drums and thick six-string. This is Supergrass as live band – the energy on this album just bursts out of the speakers.

That energy never flags, either. The first hint of a slowdown is “Ghost of a Friend,” at track eight, but even this acoustic piece, reminiscent of Jay Ferguson’s songs for Sloan, is propelled ever onward by Danny Goffey’s double-time drums. Towards the end, the band gets more experimental – you simply must hear the horns and chanting on the intro to “Whiskey and Green Tea,” before the song explodes into a guitar-and-sax fiesta. But the record never loses steam.

Midway through Diamond Hoo Ha, Gaz Coombes celebrates “the return of inspiration,” and he’s right to. The album is informed by a hundred different rock-pop-funk records, but the result is thoroughly Supergrass, and is their finest album in years.

* * * * *

The best artists find ways to weave their influences into their own sound. Supergrass are there – the songs on Diamond Hoo Ha don’t usually bring specific antecedents to mind, the title track notwithstanding. The last of our British pop bands this week is not quite there yet – their influences are firmly on their sleeves, and certain songs absolutely take from certain other songs. But that hasn’t stopped them from making one of my favorite bursts of pop-and-roll to come out this year.

The band is the Hoosiers, out of London, not Indiana. Their album The Trick to Life was released in October of last year in the UK, which disqualifies it for this year’s top 10 list, even though it came out a month or so ago on these shores. That’s a shame, because it would probably make it – The Trick to Life is a whirlwind 37-minute synthesis of Jeff Buckley and ELO, cribbing from a million things at once and ending up with a slice of near-perfect pop.

Let’s get the rip-offs out of the way first. Lead track “Worried About Ray” takes the verse melody from “Happy Together” by the Turtles, then shoots it into orbit with a thunderous chorus. Lead singer Irwin Sparkes can hit the high notes like a junior Freddie Mercury, although his most obvious vocal influence is Buckley – you can hear his songwriting style all over “Run Rabbit Run,” among others. “Cops and Robbers” sounds an awful lot like “The Lovecats” by the Cure, and “Goodbye Mr. A” borrows a bunch from ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky.”

But I dare you to care while you’re listening to this thing. The Trick to Life barrels forward, throwing one awesome melody after another at you – “Worst Case Scenario” is an amazing two minutes, and if you can sit still for the whole thing, you’re probably dead. The aforementioned “Goodbye Mr. A” is fan-bloody-tastic, zipping from one wild melody to the next. At 4:27, it’s the longest song here. Every one of these little pop gems is exactly as long as it needs to be.

If you think head-spinning pop music is all the Hoosiers have to offer, think again. They take a liberal dose of epic rock from Buckley, especially on stunners like “A Sadness Runs Through Him.” It’s on the acoustic-based, slower tunes, like “Clinging On for Life,” that Sparkes stretches out vocally, whipping out a strong falsetto, and the other two band members match him with Queen-worthy harmonies. For the emotional high point, listen to “Everything Goes Dark.” Over a simple acoustic figure, Sparkes gives his best vocal performance here, reaching impossibly high in the verses and stretching the word “dark” into the most memorable melody on the album.

Yeah, the Hoosiers pilfer from more artists than I can count, but I oddly don’t care – the songs, the sound, the overall vibe of The Trick to Life is just so much fun. It’s not as self-consciously important as Coldplay’s record, and it doesn’t integrate its influences as well as Supergrass’ effort, but I find myself returning to the Hoosiers disc more often. When they learn to only take what they need, building their own sound and using their influences as decoration, they’re going to be an amazing band. The seeds are there, they just need to water and grow them.

Next week, Sigur Ros and Fleet Foxes. And the second quarter report.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I mentioned my longtime friend Chris L’Etoile here last week, but I feel the need to bring him up again, since he’s the reason I’m a Sloan fan. I have no idea how Chris first heard “Underwhelmed,” Sloan’s first single from 1992. I do know it was the standout track on one of the many mix tapes he made me.

(And I mean mix tapes, not mix CDs – this was back in the dark ages, when you’d have to spend three or four hours planning, recording and editing a mix tape. You had to do it real-time, song by song, and it actually took some math, because you had to plan out the exact length of the mix beforehand to make sure it fit on the tape. I vividly remember that sinking feeling when the tape you were recording onto would run out 30 seconds from the end of the last song, meaning you’d have to go back and remove a song, re-editing the whole mix from that point forward. Kids these days have it so easy…)

“Underwhelmed” was, in a word, awesome. A snarky three-chord clever-o-rama, the song was about a guy who loves a girl, but can’t stop correcting her grammar. How could you not love a song with a line like this: “She wrote out a story about her life, I think it included something about me, I’m not sure about that but I’m sure of one thing: her spelling’s atrocious.” Sloan’s debut album, Smeared, never reached those heights again, but it was nerdy-cool when nerdy-cool was in. If they’d just stayed on that path, they’d have been million-sellers by 1995.

Instead, they quickly embraced 1960s and 1970s rock, becoming this completely different, yet dramatically better band. And unlike most of their early ‘90s contemporaries, they’ve stuck around – they’re one of the most popular bands in their native Canada, despite playing a style of music that gets you relegated to the indie-pop ghetto here (Lenny Kravitz notwithstanding). For years I’ve had this theory that Sloan has a time machine – when they need to release an album, they pop back to 1971 and find one nobody’s ever heard, bring it forward, slap their name on it, and voila. Vintage-sounding pop-rock.

But that wouldn’t account for the band’s secret weapon, the musical personalities of the four members. Sloan is the music world’s best argument for democracy – all four members write and sing their own songs, usually in equal measure, so you get the pseudo-cock-rock of guitarist Patrick Pentland and the complex punk of drummer Andrew Scott next to the soaring pop of other guitarist Jay Ferguson and the emotional balladry of bassist Chris Murphy. The four contributions are all so vital that the one album on which Scott didn’t write anything, 2003’s Action Pact, sounds like it’s trying to drive on three wheels.

That diversity fueled last year’s amazing Never Hear the End of It, a 30-song, 77-minute seamless suite of tunes that played like the White Album without the filler tracks. It was the kind of one-hit-after-another magnum opus many pop bands would kill to be able to produce, and it left only one question – how do they follow it up?

Well, here’s how: Parallel Play, Sloan’s ninth album, is less a follow-up than a companion piece. It’s a 37-minute slab of the same stuff, although a bit lesser – it sounds like it was made up of the songs that didn’t make the cut on Never Hear. That’s not to say it’s a bad record, of course, but it is smaller and packs less of a punch. The four Sloaners are all in good form, however, and even a middling Sloan album is better than most of what you’ll find on the radio.

Parallel Play was named after a child psychology term for children who play alongside one another, but not together. It’s a clever way of explaining just how the band operates these days – they basically make solo EPs and combine them into a Sloan album during the mixing process. But you’d never know it, since the sound is so consistent. The album crashes to life with Pentland’s pure ‘70s “Believe in Me,” then glides into Ferguson’s sweet “Cheap Champagne” and Murphy’s eminently singable “All I Am is All You’re Not” before exploding with Scott’s minute-long rave-up “Emergency 911.”

And on it goes like that, one song bleeding into the next like parts of a whole. Ferguson’s “Witch’s Wand” floats on delicious high harmonies before Scott’s “The Dogs” wallows in the muck for five minutes. Pentland sounds like he’s on autopilot with “The Other Side,” a lazy cowbell lope, but the tempo picks back up for Scott’s Bob Dylan pastiche “Down in the Basement.” And Murphy hits a home run in the late innings with “I’m Not a Kid Anymore,” which includes some of his cleverest lines: “I relied heavily on Styx and Stones, not so much Styx once I heard the Ramones…”

Still, when Parallel Play ends (with Scott’s anti-war anthem “Too Many”), you’re left with more of a shrug than a satisfied smile. It’s good, but it’s nothing special – it’s just another Sloan album, better than some and not as good as others. I’m actually surprised how few of these songs leave me humming them afterwards. Never Hear the End of It, for all its excesses, earned every second of its running time, where the comparatively tiny Parallel Play drags in places. This is a B-minus Sloan album, but it’s still a solid effort from a band too few in this country have discovered. I probably wouldn’t recommend this as your first Sloan purchase, but like everything they’ve done, it’s worth hearing.

* * * * *

Ah, Weezer. I don’t even know where to start anymore.

I’ve never been one of those who idolizes Rivers Cuomo and his band. I like the first two albums well enough, especially the self-titled debut (known as the Blue Album). The early stuff is loud, catchy, nerdy pop with an undercurrent of endearing self-doubt, and Pinkerton, the much-lauded second record, stands as this nakedly emotional island in the Weezer catalog, and deserves praise just for that.

Since then, it’s been like riding down a river of crap. The second self-titled record (called the Green Album) was pretty much perfect, for what it was – a 28-minute chunk of emotionally distant pop-punk. But it’s been a sad downward spiral since then, with 2005’s Make Believe the apparent nadir. There were a few songs worth hearing on that one, but mostly, it was overproduced, underwritten, trite bullshit.

But man, Make Believe sounds like Revolver when placed next to the Red Album, Weezer’s just-released third self-titled record. This one is very, very bad. This one goes beyond bad, actually, to this whole different universe of horrible. It’s like Cuomo took the reviews of Make Believe as a challenge – “You think that was bad? We can be so much worse. Watch this.” And then he opened this space-time rift, this hole in the world, and brought through this unholy, steaming, ludicrous, stunningly shitty music, music so bad that it bespeaks of a darker, more infernal influence than Cuomo could have devised on his own. This is music to commit mass suicide to.

And you know what? It’s the most fun I’ve had listening to a Weezer album in years.

Cuomo and his cohorts have been on a course towards awful for this entire decade now, but this is the album where they burst past awful and into so-awful-it’s-awesome territory. It’s like the audio equivalent of Mystery Science Theater 3000, something so entertainingly crappy that it has to be a joke. I don’t know how else to explain it. In retrospect, though, Make Believe was just too tentative – it was like Cuomo timidly exploring bad music, tossing out a “Beverly Hills” while countering it with a “Perfect Situation.” Here, it’s like the band committed themselves fully to making the worst music they possibly could. They cannonballed into the pool of crap.

Weezer opens with “Troublemaker,” one of the deliberately-crafted “hits” here. It’s two chords, two minutes, and full of stupid lyrics. I’m of the school that believes “Buddy Holly” was clever-silly, where this is just dumb-fuck hideous. “I’m growing out my hair, I’m movin’ out to Cherokee, I’m gonna be a rock star and you will go to bed with me, ‘cause I can’t work a job like any other slob, punching in and punching out and sucking up to Bob…” This has nothing on “Pork and Beans,” the lousy first single, which references Timbaland and spends three minutes establishing that Cuomo doesn’t “give a hoot what you think.” (Which, of course, means he does give a hoot what you think. He very much gives a hoot.)

Sandwiched in between these crapfests is the best Weezer song ever. It’s called “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived,” it’s six minutes long, and it sounds like Freddie Mercury visited the studio to lend a hand. It’s insanely over the top – it’s all based on this old shaker hymn, and it opens with delicate piano, only to be smashed by sirens and horrid white-boy rap. But the song shifts every few seconds, from pop-punk to acoustic interludes to spoken word sections to choral arrangements. It’s nuts, and it will have you laughing out loud, especially the bit where Cuomo speaks the following: “And if you don’t like it, you can shove it, but you don’t like it, you love it.”

“Heart Songs” is a sweet acoustic piece utterly destroyed by its lyrics, which list off in excruciating detail all of the songs Cuomo loved growing up. He doesn’t pass over Iron Maiden, Slayer, Rob Base and the Fresh Prince – they’re all there, all taken seriously. “Everybody Get Dangerous” is just as stupid as it sounds, if not more so, its half-rap beat the showcase for more brain-dead sung-spoken lyrics.

And “Dreamin’” may take the ridiculous cake. It’s another multi-part epic, but this one drifts off into insipid hippie-tripe early on and never comes back. Imagine a round-robin vocal chorale singing the following over lightly-strummed acoustics: “There are bluebirds in the meadows and the bees are flying around, and the goslings at the river at a loss so far from the ground…” It’s like a third grade class project: “Let’s go outside and write a poem about what we see!” It’s jaw-droppingly terrible.

And then, for three tracks in a row, Cuomo gives up the mic to his bandmates, one at a time, to sing their own songs. This stretch is almost intolerable – without Cuomo’s outsize personality, Weezer just sounds like any other band. Brian Bell comes off best with his Uncle Kracker impression “Thought I Knew,” and if you take a moment and realize that I just called an Uncle Kracker impression the best thing about these three songs, then you’ll have some idea how bad they are. Weezer sputters to a close with “The Angel and the One,” a six-minute forlorn-love dirge that almost redeems things, but just can’t.

Many have said that Cuomo’s crippling self-doubt has been holding Weezer back – he was wounded by the reviews of Pinkerton, and never fully recovered. But on the Red Album, he sounds almost stupidly confident in his own work, taking a thousand risks a minute and falling on his face each time. This album isn’t the work of a timid artist. This is the work of a guy who believes he’s a genius, because everyone has told him so for years, and when he steps up to the plate, all smirk and swagger, he strikes out on three pitches. It’s even worse, though, because Cuomo apparently thinks he’s hit a grand slam here, winning the game in the bottom of the ninth. This kind of delusion is just laughable, as is this new album.

But Weezer leaves me in a conundrum. This record is like the Feces Park roller coaster – it’s terrible, but because it’s so terrible, it’s so much fun. A few years ago, I wanted Cuomo to go away and stop tainting his legacy. It’s too late for that now – play the Blue Album and the Red Album back to back, and it’s like listening to before and after pictures of a stroke victim. But oddly, I want him to stick around now. I’m fascinated to see if the next Weezer album can possibly be worse than this one. Has Weezer bottomed out, or are there depths yet to plumb? I’m perversely fascinated to find out.

* * * * *

I really should be getting on Aimee Mann’s case more.

I mean, I’m always calling other artists out for not changing things up enough. Though there are cosmetic differences from LP to LP, essentially, Aimee Mann has been plying the same trade for more than 20 years. She specializes in pretty, sad, traditionally-structured pop songs about loners and losers, and you always know what you’re going to get when you pick up an Aimee Mann record.

I’m not sure why, but that’s fine with me. You can call it preferential treatment if you like, but I think Mann is one of the finest songwriters in the world, and as far as I’m concerned, she can keep on writing and playing these songs until she dies, or I do. I wanted to be clear about this up front, because I’ve already heard that some people are disappointed in her new album – it’s the same as all the others, they’re saying, and to me, that’s not a bad thing. Would I like to hear her stretch out and try new things? Sure. Can I chastise her for filling her new album with 13 brilliantly-crafted sad-sack lullabies once again? No way.

So here is how @#%&*! Smilers, Mann’s wittily-titled sixth album, differs from her other five. Where her last one, the amazing The Forgotten Arm, took on a raw, live, loose feel, this one is meticulous, yet still warmer than Lost in Space. There are no electric guitars at all on this record – where they would be are waves and waves of sound, from synthesizers and strings and horns. Yet for all of that, the sound is often like thin glass, ready to break at any time. There’s a carnival feel to a couple of these songs, and a streetcorner reverie feel to a few others. But mostly, this is a series of lovely ballads about losing hope.

Here is how it’s the same – the songs are wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. Smilers opens with one of its weakest, “Freeway,” and even that one will stick in your head, with its memorable hook line: “You’ve got a lot of money but you can’t afford the freeway.” If you’re looking for a moment when this album takes off and doesn’t come back down, it’s “Phoenix,” a traditional Aimee Mann slow dance that revolves around the line, “You love me like a dollar bill, you roll me up and trade me in…”

“Borrowing Time” is great, a shuffle with a call-and-response chorus and a plastic synth line. Those synths come back on “31 Today,” one of my favorites – it’s the saddest song about growing older I’ve heard in years. The verses describe a series of wasted days and fumbling encounters, and the chorus drives it home: “I thought my life would be different somehow, I thought my life would be better by now, but it’s not and I don’t know where to turn…”

You may have surmised that very little light creeps into the corners of a Mann album, and you’re right. “Columbus Avenue” is an extended portrait of failure with a great string line, and “Medicine Wheel” is another in a long line of wonderfully crafted breakup songs. That one, in fact, is like nothing Mann has done – it’s a full-on Dusty Springfield-style piano ballad with sumptuous horns. As good as that is, the album’s masterpiece is “Little Tornado,” a spiderweb-thin acoustic piece about hoping for release. The repeated “Oh no, no we don’t, no we don’t know” is the most heartbreaking thing here, and that’s saying something.

Smilers ends with “Ballantines,” a brief theatrical number with duet vocals by San Francisco songwriter Sean Hayes. It’s nice, but it plays like closing credits music instead of a finale – I think Mann missed a trick by not closing with “It’s Over,” a gorgeous orchestral ballad trapped at track six. But that minor quibble aside, Smilers is another terrific – nay, glorious album from Aimee Mann. Every year she releases an album, I set aside a spot on the top 10 list for her. That spot is then hers to lose, and so far, she’s never lost one. Smilers is bleak and beautiful, and one of the best records of the year.

* * * * *

Next week, a Britpop spectacular with Coldplay, Supergrass and the Hoosiers.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So, where were we?

One week after returning home from my Ann Arbor Jandek experience, I drove nearly the same distance in another direction to see The Moon Seven Times in Champaign, Illinois. Jandek was a purely left-brain experience – I am oddly fascinated by this strange, talentless man and his single-minded commitment to a singular sound. The Moon Seven Times was completely different. They’re on a short list of bands that mean the world to me, and seeing them was an emotional high I’m not going to be able to adequately describe.

To talk about that, I have to talk about Chris L’Etoile. I’ve known Chris since eighth grade – he was a full-fledged member of the Losers Club, the self-deprecating name my friends and I had for our little group. We were the odd kids, the ones that always gravitate towards each other when all other options are exhausted. I love these guys like brothers, and being more than a thousand miles away from all of them is often difficult.

Now, throughout my life, many people have accused me of being ahead of the curve when it comes to music. I have a decent sense of history and I can hold my own, but when it came to discovering bands no one on the planet had ever heard of, Chris L’Etoile was the man. In high school, he had shit I’ve still never heard of. And he’d make me listen to it, and of course, being the teenage metalhead I was, I just didn’t get most of it.

In the late ‘80s, everyone with taste was into the Cure and the Smiths, and Chris had that stuff. But he was also into bands like An Emotional Fish and the Curtain Society. He played me Treat Her Right’s first album long before anyone had heard of Mark Sandman or Morphine. He turned me on to Sloan back when “Underwhelmed” was their best song. He got me to buy Peter Murphy’s Deep, which led me to all the old Bauhaus material. He was so far ahead of me it wasn’t funny.

And in 1993, he introduced me to The Moon Seven Times.

The first M7x album was released on Third Mind Records that year, with an indistinct and abstract cover, and no pictures of the band members. We had nothing to go on except the sound, and it was astonishingly beautiful. Imagine this – you’ve got the bass and drums of a rock band, but the guitars sound like clouds, and this gorgeous female voice floats above them like a disembodied ghost. It was grounded as almost-pop music, but untethered, vaporous, spectral and ethereal. I’d never heard anything quite like it.

Ambient music fans may now recognize the name Henry Frayne, especially from his well-respected Lanterna project. But in the early ‘90s, I only knew Frayne as the guitar genius in The Moon Seven Times. His unearthly tones and beautiful seascapes of sound were a big part of what I loved about M7x. Lynn Canfield’s lovely voice was another big part.

Two more albums followed. The band’s masterpiece is their second record, 7=49. (Say the band’s name, then the album title.) This is the one that deftly balances their earthbound and heavenly sides – many of the songs are acoustic, and while some have that misty, reverbed sound, some are more grounded. It was a perfect mix. Sunburnt, their final effort, tossed that balance aside and turned the band into the Cowboy Junkies. But it was still a pretty decent album.

And then, in 1997, they broke up. I had no idea at the time, of course – I had barely heard of the Internet, and didn’t know where to get news about my favorite bands. And as far as I knew, The Moon Seven Times had only two fans on the planet – me, and Chris L’Etoile.

Fast forward 10 years. I’m in Illinois, about three hours from Champaign, working for a newspaper. Chris is in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada, working for one of the world’s premier video game companies. He writes the words the characters say – you may have heard of his company’s latest game, Mass Effect. Anyway, Chris writes me out of the blue with a link to the Moon Seven Times blog, and I read the good news – the band is getting together again for a reunion show. In Champaign.

You can see where this is going. Memorial Day weekend, Chris hopped a plane from Canada and flew to Chicago (at significant expense), and the two of us drove three hours to see one of our favorite bands play their first show in 10 years, and quite possibly their last show. Adventure!

The gig took place at a club called the Highdive, which is much nicer inside than its name would lead you to believe. For a while, it felt like crashing someone else’s college reunion – the bill included six bands popular in the early ‘90s, and while the bands reunited, so did their fans. I think Chris and I were the only people in the place not from Champaign.

The first band to the stage was Driver Has No Cash. They consisted of a drummer, a hulking singer, and (stay with me here) an electric ukelele player. And they were amazing. They closed their set with covers of “Hot Blooded,” “Juke Box Heroes” and “We’re an American Band,” and I couldn’t stop laughing, in a good way. They were awesomely ridiculous, and I’d love to go see them again.

Corndolly were decent, but reminded me of a Breeders tribute act. And then there was Dick Justice. Named after an associate dean at the University of Illinois, who introduced the band on stage, Dick Justice was an absolute scream. They started their set by eating fruit suggestively, then launched into one tight, fast, silly, stupid punk song after another. The drummer, especially, was a joy to watch – I thought he was going to die between each song, as he gasped for breath. (At one point, he even asked for a minute before counting in the next number.) They were a full-body-workout kind of band, and they were so much fun.

And then, they appeared. I’d seen pictures of The Moon Seven Times, in the liner notes to Sunburnt, but wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a lineup. But Chris recognized Canfield and Frayne right away, as they lugged equipment up on stage and started to plug it in. I think it was about then that I realized this was really happening. We were about to see The Moon Seven Times live.

I don’t know if I can articulate this, but I greeted the prospect with a mixed sense of fear and excitement. I’d been listening to The Moon Seven Times for 14 years, without ever seeing them play. As hard as this may be to grasp, I wasn’t sure I wanted to contextualize them – their music is so otherworldly, so inexplicably beautiful, that I couldn’t imagine how I’d feel watching living, breathing people create it. And it was odd. Canfield opened her mouth, and that voice came out. Frayne plucked his strings, and that sound wafted out over the room. Don Gerard played that bassline for “Miranda,” and Brendan Gamble made those drum sounds for “My Game.”

I think it took until “Crybaby,” my favorite M7x song, to really come to terms with it. These are the people who wrote and crafted this music I’ve loved since I was 19. I found myself envying those in the room who got to watch the evolution of this band, and know them as people. It was like taking blinders off and really experiencing something for the first time.

Observations I made when not in blissful euphoria for the next 50 minutes:

Lynn Canfield is adorable. Before the show began, she lugged this massive foot locker onto the stage, knocking aside monitors to set it at her feet. You know what it was filled with? Moon pies. Seriously. She passed them around to the crowd, remarking that they go well with beer. Because her voice is so ethereal, I’ve always pictured someone more ghostly, but Canfield was full of life. Sparkling, even.

Henry Frayne is exactly like I pictured him. He didn’t move, the whole show. He stood there, looking down and strumming his guitar, almost like a studious professor conducting an experiment. I was worried that the sound system in the room wouldn’t be able to handle Frayne’s sonic arsenal, but it did just fine. And Frayne surprised the hell out of me by ripping through a snarling guitar solo on closing song “Through the Roses.” (Trivia – on Sunburnt, that solo was played by Jay Bennett, who went on to form Wilco with Jeff Tweedy.)

Every song was terrific. The band played like they were still a going concern, like I could drive to the Highdive next weekend and see them again. And I wish I could. After the show, we got to meet all four members, and they were unfailingly nice, even when I forgot to introduce myself. And Chris got his CD cover signed – I’ve never seen him so giddy.

So, I can cross “see The Moon Seven Times live” off the list of things I want to do before I die. Thanks to Chris for accompanying me on this adventure, and endless thanks to the band for reuniting just for this one special night.

If you’ve never heard The Moon Seven Times, I would recommend starting with 7=49, if only because you need to hear “Crybaby,” and it’s on that one. Their albums are hard to find now, but they’re worth every second it takes to track them down.

I’m writing this on my 34th birthday. Thanks to everyone who wrote and called with birthday wishes. You’re all very important to me. I hope I get at least 34 more years. I’d be happy with that.

Next week, Aimee Mann, Weezer and Sloan.

See you in line Tuesday morning.