Welcome to 2009’s last gasp.

Oh, I know we still have about five weeks before the year officially ends, but if you’re a music fan like I am, it’s already over. I bought one new album this week. I have two more on the schedule to pick up before December 31: an EP by Animal Collective and the fifth album by Lifehouse. Suffice it to say, I’m not expecting any last-minute additions to my top 10 list.

Ah, but every year around this time, there’s that last week full of promise, the last time half a dozen or so potentially excellent records drop all at once before the year peters out. The last gasp, if you will. For 2009, the last gasp came last week – I bought eight new albums and one deluxe edition re-release, and among them were three potential game-changers. Of course, none of them actually changed the game, and barring one British import I’ve just ordered, my top 10 list is set in stone. But they’re all worth talking about.

So we will.

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This has been a year for supergroups – see Tinted Windows, Monsters of Folk, the Dead Weather, and (if you stretch the definition of “super”) Chickenfoot. Still, when I first heard the lineup of Them Crooked Vultures, I nearly spit my tasty beverage all over my shirt.

Half the fun of these supergroups is imagining what their recombinant musical DNA might sound like, just from reading the names. To wit, then: Them Crooked Vultures is a power trio. On guitar and vocals, we have Josh Homme, of Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age. On drums, Dave Grohl, of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters (and four dozen other bands, including Queens). And returning to heavy-as-hell bass playing, we have John Paul Jones, of some little band called Led Zeppelin.

I know, right? The best part is, Them Crooked Vultures sounds pretty much like you’d expect it to – heavy, groovy, spacey, nimble and thunderous. Homme takes the lead here, so much of the Vultures’ self-titled debut album sounds like Zeppelin’s most punishing stuff, like a steamroller dancing, if you can picture it. Wide-ranging grooves that zip from note to note, and yet still crush you under their mammoth weight.

The first dancing steamroller moment comes two minutes and 44 seconds into the opening track, the wittily-titled “No One Loves Me and Neither Do I.” Those first 2:44 are a phenomenal fake-out – the production is flat and thin, the bass nearly inaudible, and what should be a knockout rock song just kind of hangs there. But then, just as you’re resigning yourself to the idea that the whole album will sound like this, the Vultures tear the roof off. The riff that comprises the second half of the song is an absolute monster, and they’re content to pummel you with it for about a minute before flipping it over and inverting it, Grohl doing his best John Bonham as Homme and Jonesy mess with your head. It’s awesome.

Half of the album is given over to stomping rockers like “Mind Eraser, No Chaser” and “New Fang,” but the other half is complex desert blues-prog – no less heavy, but more atmospheric and mind-expanding. “Elephants” opens with an explosive instrumental workout before settling into its mid-tempo thump. (Jones brings his mellotron along for a minute too.) “Bandoliers” adds color and shade, bouncing around on a neat riff for a while before Jones’ keyboards start up a dogfight.

It’s a push-pull tension between the two styles all the way through. The apex of the spacey blues stuff is the nearly eight-minute “Warsaw, or the First Breath You Take After You Give Up.” The high-pitched backing vocals, the boogie piano, the dirty solo – this thing is just neat. And two tracks later, you get “Gunman,” sporting the nastiest, most powerful riff of the record, and Grohl’s most danceable beat. Through all of these musical acrobatics, the Vultures lock into a groove, playing like one three-headed rock beast.

This album isn’t the undiluted knockout one might expect from a band of this pedigree, but for an awkward nice-to-meet-you debut, it’s pretty great. And it’s proof undeniable that John Paul Jones still has it – his work truly holds this thing together. Them Crooked Vultures is one of the most successful supergroup projects of the year, and a damn fine rock record in its own right. I sincerely hope the three Vultures follow this path wherever it leads.

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Well, here we go again with John Mayer.

I’ve come to accept that Mayer live is a completely different animal than Mayer in the studio. On stage, Mayer is a guitar player of remarkable skill and fire, ripping through blues classics and keeping up with the other two-thirds of his trio, bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Steve Jordan. Those guys have been around, and can really play, but Mayer is the leader on stage – the result is a lot more like Cream than any of Mayer’s detractors would like to admit.

But in the studio, Our John goes all mild-mannered, and becomes a latte-sipping lite-FM adult contemporary milksop. The blues goes away, the fire in his playing goes out, and you’d never know just how talented the guy is from the simple and tasteful pop he churns out. Worse, he’s been prefacing his albums of late with excited speeches about how he “took the reins” and “made the music he feels” and “unleashed his creativity.” I should have learned my lesson with the affably bland Continuum three years ago, but he did it to me again with his fourth, Battle Studies.

Now, come on. The album is called Battle Studies. Virtually every song features Jordan and Palladino, and Jordan helped produce the thing. And it includes a cover of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads.” I can be forgiven for thinking that maybe this would be the one on which Mayer busts out, right?

Not so much. This album is actually more straightforward and less bluesy than Continuum. It’s chock full of VH1-ready hits (one of which is a duet with Taylor Swift), and it never, ever, not once even implies that it might rock. Mayer spends much of his time on acoustic guitar here, augmented by slick strings and occasional Clapton-esque electric accents. (But middle-aged Clapton, not Yardbirds Clapton.) The whole thing sounds like a warm fire.

Is it bad? For all of that, not really. It’s not quite as good as Continuum, but better than Heavier Things. It’s full of perfectly sweet little songs, played very well. Mayer lets his smartass side out here and there, especially on “Assassin” and the snarky single “Who Says.” (The former is a minor-key mid-tempo wiggle, while the latter is a paper-thin acoustic folk ditty.) The aforementioned “Crossroads” cover is the album’s most ubpeat moment, and even that never gets above a slow simmer. (It does contain Mayer’s best solo this time around.) Most of it, though, is like “War of My Life” – clean-toned, neatly pressed, almost cute in its maturity. And sounding nothing like war, or battle.

Am I disappointed? Well, not any more – as I said, I’ve grown to accept Mayer’s two different approaches, much as I wish he’d meld them a little. I like some of the songs on here, especially “Assassin” and the bittersweet “Do You Know Me.” But I don’t love anything here, and I wish I did. It’s become clear that this is how John Mayer wants to sound in the studio, and he may even consider Battle Studies his masterpiece. But when the supple tones of “Friends, Lovers or Nothing” fade away, I find myself yearning for something with more of a pulse.

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Like, for example, the new Switchfoot album.

You can admit it. You’ve written Switchfoot off as a radio-ready alt-rock act, an all-too-typical group of hitmakers with six-strings. I did it too, at first, when I heard their singles “Meant to Live” and “Dare You to Move.” But I soon discovered how underrated they are, and they just keep on rewarding my faith. Their sixth album, 2006’s Oh! Gravity, was full-on wonderful, nimbly skipping from style to style – it was practically a mix tape, and it was full to bursting with really good songs.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Switchfoot, but they’ve been busy. (As has leader John Foreman, collaborating on the Fiction Family album and releasing four solo EPs.) First, they extricated themselves from their Columbia Records contract, and I’d like to think the label’s utter mishandling of Oh! Gravity had something to do with it. And then they spent some time in the studio. So much time, in fact, that they’ve completed their seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth albums.

Yeah. Four new albums at once. Of course, the question is, can they maintain quality control over that much new material? We’ll see in the coming months – Foreman and company are releasing their four new records one at a time, in stages. The first one, Hello Hurricane, is here. The next, Vice Verses, is scheduled for early next year. It remains to be seen if they’re splitting the sessions up by style, or by some other method, or if they just recorded 50 or so Switchfoot songs and put them on four different discs.

Hello Hurricane offers no clues. This record sounds like Switchfoot to me, albeit somewhat louder and rawer. It’s not another exploration of diversity – its dozen songs stay within the band’s established framework, with a number of driving rockers and an equal number of slower, more tranquil pieces. And it preserves the band’s gift for intelligently-constructed pop, although you’ll probably have to listen a couple of times to absorb just how well-written something like “Free” is. Oh! Gravity was a whiz-bang showcase, but Hello Hurricane is a Switchfoot album – a cut above most alternative rock, but in the same ballpark.

And so we have first single “Mess of Me,” and “The Sound,” and the title track, all of which are loud and proud, yet sport convincing melodies. “Hello Hurricane” especially takes a U2-ish framework and runs with it, segueing a sweet chorus into an “oh-oh-oh” refrain, and then building an awesome bridge. And we also have the quieter moments, like “Enough to Let Me Go” and “Always.” That song is one of the simplest things here, almost old Coldplay in its plaintive yearning, and yet it’s lovely. Every breath is a second chance, indeed.

I could have done without “Bullet Soul,” a garage-rock outing that misses the mark. But I could never do without songs like “Sing It Out.” The album’s epic at 5:17, it starts with a keyboard drone and Foreman’s emotion-packed voice, and then builds in intensity, finally cresting like a wave before crashing down and ending where it began. The chorus is moving, the bridge even more so. I’m a sucker for big-hearted songs like this, and this is one of Switchfoot’s best.

The album isn’t, but that’s all right. Hello Hurricane is a solid return for a band that too often gets lumped in with lesser lights. There isn’t a single song here that rewrites the rules, but these dozen tracks stand as further proof that Switchfoot is vastly underrated, and deserves better. I can’t decide whether its consistent quality is a good or bad sign for the three forthcoming records, but on its own, Hello Hurricane is quite good. Other bands of this ilk, in fact, should take notes.

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Next week, some people I know. Only five more columns this decade. That just feels weird. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Good news out of Tennessee: The Choir is working on a new album.

If you’ve read this column for any length of time, you know of my sometimes irrational love for this band. For more than 25 years, the Choir has been crafting some of the finest spiritual dream-pop you’ll find anywhere. I first started listening with 1990’s Circle Slide, an album that has grown in stature for me with each passing year. If you only hear one Choir album, it should be that one.

But if you hear two, check out their last release, 2005’s O How the Mighty Have Fallen. The Choir welcomed Hammock guitarist Marc Byrd into their ranks, and delivered their finest long-player since Circle Slide. I was doubly pleased, since every Choir album these days carries with it the threat that it will be the last, and Mighty would have been a good way to go out. I’m glad to see it isn’t the band’s swan song, though, and delighted at the prospect of new Choir tunes in 2010.

Check the band out here. It promises to be a very good year for fans of the spiritual pop corner of the music world: Choir members Steve Hindalong and Derri Daugherty are also in the Lost Dogs, and their long-awaited Route 66 album and movie project should see release next year. Also, Mike Roe will hopefully give us his new album, his first all-original platter after two solid collections of old gospel tunes. Expect much rejoicing.

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It’s been six months since Doctor Who graced our television screens, and it’s been longer than that since I’ve talked about it here. But this weekend’s special, The Waters of Mars, was so fantastically good that it deserves a little ink.

We’re in the last days of David Tennant, the 10th Doctor. For those who are not fans of the longest-running science fiction show ever, let me explain Doctor Who’s extraordinary gimmick: the Doctor is a Time Lord who doesn’t die, he regenerates. That means every few years, we get a new lead actor in the title role, and theoretically, a shot of fresh blood. But it also means we get the heart-wrenching final episodes with the current actor – essentially an emotional series finale every couple of years.

And that’s where we are now with David Tennant, one of the finest actors to ever play the part. Tennant’s final season ended last year, but he stuck around for five hour-long specials, to give his Doctor a proper send-off. The first two were time-wasting knock-offs, but pretty decent little Doctor Who episodes for all that. But this one…

The Waters of Mars starts off like a typical base-under-siege story, the kind Second Doctor Patrick Troughton would go through three times a year in the ‘60s. We’re on an isolated base on the red planet, and a new form of alien infection that transmits itself through water is turning the crew into over-hydrated zombies. Just one drop, and it will happen to you too. It’s like a sopping 28 Days Later, until we find out just what the central dilemma is going to be – this is one of those “fixed in time” moments the Doctor can’t change. He has to let everyone die, or history will be irrevocably altered.

That’s handled extremely well, but even the emotional weight inherent in this situation didn’t prepare me for the final 10 minutes. Let’s just say it’s the darkest 10 minutes in the program’s history, and it elegantly pays off five years of character development. The Doc’s been building to this moment for years, and as much as it hurt to see, it was perfect. And David Tennant, well… what’s left to say about him? He was magnificent.

Sure, The Waters of Mars has its problems, and its logical lapses. Every story written (or co-written, in this case, with Phil Ford) by showrunner Russell T. Davies has those. But the emotional center has never been clearer, or darker, or better. There are two episodes left before Matt Smith takes over as the Doctor, and for the first time, I’m wondering what kind of character path he’s going to inherit. How can an entirely new man make up for the mistakes of his past incarnation? We’ll see.

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New Choir, new Who. Let’s see, what could bring me down? Oh yeah, Tori Amos.

I’m trying to imagine what my 1994 self would have done had he been given a glimpse of Tori’s future. This was the year Under the Pink came out, and Tori Amos was still one of the best and most emotionally devastating performers and record makers on the planet. I’m imagining going up to my old self, all of 20 years old, and saying, “I have good news and bad news about 2009.”

“The good news,” I would say, “is that Tori Amos will release 31 new songs in 2009. All in all, you will get more than two hours of new music by one of your favorite artists.”

I imagine I would be all but drooling at the prospect. “Two hours of Tori? How amazing is that going to be, 35-year-old self? Seriously, tell me. How amazing?”

“Well, 20-year-old self, that’s the bad news,” I would say with a sigh. “You’re not going to like any of those songs very much. 17 of them will be on a mediocre new album saddled with the awful title Abnormally Attracted to Sin. And the other 14 will be on her Christmas album, Midwinter Graces. Her terrible, terrible Christmas album.”

And then I would stand back and watch my head explode. (Okay, there are flaws in this plan.)

But it’s all true. 31 new Tori Amos songs, and I don’t particularly like any of them. Still, I had hope that Amos was still above something like Midwinter Graces. But here it is, a lame, inoffensive, tepid, adult contemporary stab at a holiday record. She’s floating in the sky on the front cover, next to an angel in white jeans on the back. That alone made me want to fling my copy across the room, but of course, I had to actually hear the thing before writing about it. Journalistic integrity, and all that.

So. Midwinter Graces is split into traditional songs and originals. The traditionals are more old-time folk songs, like “Jeanette, Isabella” and “Holly, Ivy and Rose” (which I have seen called “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”). They are ruined by lukewarm production, strings that barely rise above wallpaper level, and a seemingly all-consuming desire to have this album sold at Walmart. Everything is rounded off and shiny. I can’t even get excited by Tori Amos singing “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” my favorite Christmas carol. Her version is boring, not moving.

The covers are one thing, but the originals are just awful. “A Silent Night With You” belongs on a Sarah McLachlan album, and it’s almost the best thing here. I can, without trying very hard, imagine “Harps of Gold” sung by Jewel. “Snow Angel” is nice, but forgettable. I wish I could forget “Pink and Glitter,” a horn-driven jazz ballad that could not have been a worse experience for me if it had leapt out of the speakers and punched me in the face.

Tori picks things up at the end – “Winter’s Carol” is impressively progressive, and “Our New Year” has some fine moments. And the bonus tracks, “Comfort and Joy” and “Silent Night,” are my favorite things here, both performed with piano and voice, just like the old days. But it’s too little, too late. My 1994 self would have laughed at the very idea of the author of “Me and a Gun” and “Precious Things” making a Christmas album, but my 2009 self isn’t laughing. This is just too depressing.

Tori Amos used to be one of my Reasons to Stay Alive. Now, listening to Midwinter Graces, she’s sapping my will to live. Ho, ho, ho. Sigh.

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On the other hand, we have Joy Electric. The existence and longevity of this band is one of those wonderful little anomalies that makes me love music.

Joy E is Ronnie Martin and an army of analog synthesizers. He uses nothing but those old-time vintage instruments, which means no digital programming or editing. It also means his stuff has a warmth and humanity about it, where most electronic music is cold and distant. Ronnie’s process is painstaking, but worth every moment. But the real difference is in the songs – Martin writes these melodic little wonders, tunes that would be hits if they were played on guitars. It would not be a stretch to call what he does pop-punk, but it’s all on synths.

Sounds like an interesting gimmick for an album or two, right? Well, Ronnie’s been at this Joy E thing since 1994, and has produced a dozen albums and just about as many EPs. In addition to Joy Electric, he contributes to a slew of other bands and projects, including the Foxglove Hunt and his own Ronald of Orange. He’s prolific, but more than that, he’s artistically restless, pushing and evolving his signature sound from album to album.

Still, I had doubts that Joy E could surprise me anymore. I thought I’d pretty much heard Martin’s bag of tricks. Which is why Favorites at Play, the new Joy Electric album, has left me with this wide, giddy grin.

Favorites is a covers album. But rather than reach back into his influences, and turn out versions of Thomas Dolby and Gary Numan and formative pop-punk tunes, Martin’s gone the other way. He’s created electro-pop takes on nine modern pop hits, none of them begging for this treatment, but all of them benefiting from it. And in the process, he’s made the most enjoyable Joy Electric record in a long time.

You can almost evenly split the selections of Favorites at Play into songs I liked and songs I hated. The fact that I enjoy what Martin has done to all of these songs – I’m not crying sacrilege or skipping tracks – is a testament to his skill and imagination. The record starts off with a song I like, Feist’s “1 2 3 4,” which here is turned into a skipping electronic march with a wonderful “ba-ba-ba-ba” coda. At the end of these two minutes and 34 seconds, I knew I was going to love this album.

Other choices I liked: Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” works surprisingly well as a dancefloor anthem, shorn of its strings, and Martin does a very good job of emulating that other Martin on the vocals. Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know” is given a loping beat and some melancholy synth beds, the focus remaining where it should be: on the gorgeous melody. The Killers’ “When You Were Young” simply belongs in this style – the keyboard lines are perfect, as is the blippy beat, and I ended up liking this version better than the original.

I was most worried about “Falling Slowly,” from the Once soundtrack. The original, by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, is a lovely acoustic ballad full of emotion and grace. Martin’s version doesn’t quite get there, but it sounds like something Yaz might have done in the ‘80s. The vocals have long been Joy Electric’s weak point, but here Martin really pulls it together – his whisper of a voice takes this melody line and runs with it, and the results are some of his strongest singing ever, on this song and elsewhere on Favorites.

Okay, that leaves four songs I don’t like, and amazingly, Martin’s versions of these tunes are my (ahem) favorites here. Blink-182’s maudlin “I Miss You” now sounds like it could fit on a John Hughes movie soundtrack, and I always crack up at Martin’s perfect imitation of Tom DeLonge’s fake British accent. Paramore’s “Decode,” from the Twilight soundtrack, is the fastest and most aggressive piece here, and it really works – beats whirl around a thumping synth bass line while Martin spits out the melody. He even retains the gender-specific lyrics: “What kind of man you are, if you’re a man at all…”

Martin turns “It Ends Tonight,” a terrible ballad by All-American Rejects, into a zippy little pop song with the addition of a great thump and a cavalcade of swirling keyboard sounds. He does the exact opposite for Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right,” the closing number – Martin surgically removes the Timbaland beat, leaving moody synth washes and sad vocals. He really finds the heart of this song, and his version actually makes me appreciate the original. Somewhat. But it’s the imagination behind the arrangement I admire.

Best of all, Ronnie Martin sounds revitalized here, and that’s a good thing after last year’s dismal My Grandfather the Cubist. Hopefully making this fun little record has recharged his batteries, and the next Joy E full-length will be a rocket ride. Favorites at Play is great on its own terms, though, a delightful head-scratcher that shouldn’t work, but marvelously, masterfully does. You can hear the whole thing at Joy E’s Myspace page and buy it at their website.

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Next week, 2009’s last gasp, with new records from John Mayer and Switchfoot, and the debut of Them Crooked Vultures. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Two years from now, this date is going to be awesome.

So I saw two mad movies this weekend, and it got me thinking about complexity, and whether too much of it sucks all the enjoyment out of things. It’s not often that I’ll complain about filmmakers trying to do too much, instead of just lazily sleepwalking through another formulaic nothing of a movie. I’m a big fan of ambition, even when it doesn’t work out as well as it should. But I’m also a big fan of things making sense, and if there are important plot points that stayed in the director’s head, then the movie on the screen just isn’t going to work.

That’s what I think happened with Richard Kelly’s The Box. Kelly, you may remember, is the man behind Donnie Darko, a movie in which style and atmosphere made up for a lack of coherence. In some ways, the theatrical cut of Donnie Darko was a failure – the director’s cut certainly filled in a lot of the blanks, and made the whole thing make more sense. But the richness of style, the sense of creeping mystery, carried the day. The same could be said of his follow-up, the unkempt Southland Tales, although instead of style, that one had an intriguingly skewed viewpoint and lots of bizarre humor.

The Box, however, is just a mess. It’s based on Richard Matheson’s story Button, Button, but instead of the sleek and elegant shape of that tale, Kelly’s story sprawls out into NASA’s Mars probes, unexplained lightning strikes, vast conspiracies, alien personality tests, glimpses of the afterlife, and teleportation – that last involving huge columns of water that end up flooding one’s house. If you’re waiting for any of this to be explained, keep waiting. The Box just throws it at you and expects you to keep up.

I didn’t. About an hour in, I just gave up trying to understand the ridiculousness unfolding in front of me. The movie tries to do too much, and ends up doing very little. Again, I expect there’s an hour or so of missing footage that would clear a lot of this up. But the movie was too complex, too baffling and off-putting, for me to care very much.

Director Grant Helsov’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, on the other hand, tackles a similarly wide range of crazy, but you never feel like this movie is spiraling out of control. In fact, I thought it was wonderful. It’s based on Jon Ronson’s book of the same name, and details one reporter’s discovery of a secret U.S. Army unit dedicated to developing psychic powers. It’s batshit insane, but it knows it, and it winks at you the entire time. Plus, this movie has the added benefit of George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, all at their hilarious best.

The difference, I think, is that Helsov is master of his movie’s tone and structure, while Kelly is not. Helsov knows exactly what he wants to tackle – he’s making a satire of the crazy uses the military finds for its budget, in the constant search for global supremacy, and everything works to that end. Kelly isn’t sure what the hell he’s doing, and he’s piled four million different ideas into the same space, and then seems surprised when they drown each other out. Kelly’s a gifted filmmaker, but next time out, he needs to take it down a couple of notches and work on something with a clear goal.

Anyway, don’t listen to the lousy reviews The Men Who Stare at Goats has drawn. By the end of that movie, I felt like I’d just gotten off a carnival ride. Complex and wide-ranging, but very funny and easy to digest. See it!

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So, speaking of complexity…

I had a discussion with a friend this weekend about whether musicians make better music reviewers. My answer was (and is) that sometimes, they do. It depends on the music in question.

Most music is created to be enjoyed by everyone. Either you like it or you don’t, but most music doesn’t intentionally get in your way. It wants to be liked. Whether or not you know how it’s made, or how many different types of chords went into it, or what time signature it’s in doesn’t matter. Music provokes emotional responses, and most critics will simply write down their own gut reactions to a song or an album. And that’s all most readers are looking for. In fact, it’s all most music fans are looking for.

Here’s a f’rinstance. I love the music of Ben Folds. I also play piano and (sometimes) write songs. But when I’m listening to Ben Folds, it’s not usually as a piano player or a songwriter, but just as a guy who loves music. I liked Whatever and Ever Amen partially because of the tremendous skill that went into crafting it, but mostly because it moved me and made me laugh. I didn’t like Way to Normal because it did neither.

But there is some music made almost exclusively for musicians, music that requires you to have a working knowledge of theory and some idea just how difficult it is to play each instrument involved. This is music whose entire purpose is to show off the inhuman chops of its players. This is nothing new – orchestral music has followed the same path for centuries, and there are pieces only those who have mastered their instruments can play.

For the purposes of this silly music column, though, I’ll be talking about two genres – thrash metal and prog. This is music that most people will simply greet with a befuddled look. With thrash, you can feel the aggression, and respond to it, but if you don’t know what it takes to create this music, and how damn difficult it is to play, its reason for being will go right past you. Prog is similar, for different reasons – the whole point of prog rock is to create symphonies with standard instrumentation, so songs will go on for 20, 30, even 60 minutes, testing the patience of those who don’t care how impossible it all is to perform.

Metal is, of course, all about the chops. This is music that prides itself on being louder and faster and more technical than anything else. These are bands that want you to hate them, to consider them too loud, too fast. But behind the snarling attitude, these musicians worked very hard to be able to make exactly this kind of racket, and make it this well. It’s music full of pride in accomplishment – if you knew how hard this is to do, it screams, you’d be bowing to us right now.

For nearly 30 years, the best thrash metal band in the world has been Slayer. Of the Big Four American thrash acts – which also includes Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax – Slayer is the only one who never went through a Period of Great Sucking. There have been minor variations on their theme, but they have consistently done what they do – abrasive, complex, explosive music of hatred and anger, played uncommonly well.

Their 11th album, World Painted Blood, is as good a place to start as any. It is the second since the return of original drummer Dave Lombardo, a man whose calf muscles must be the size of honeydew melons. The reunion album, Christ Illusion, was a solid, uninterrupted, 39-minute onslaught of blistering riffs and unbelievably fast drumming, more of a statement of purpose than anything else. World Painted Blood is more diverse, but just as pummeling – more the sound of Slayer just getting on with being Slayer.

In its way, this one is most like 1990’s Seasons in the Abyss, still on any fan’s short list of finest Slayer records. Some of it is surprisingly slow – the title track, which kicks off the record, has some dirge-like qualities that make it a strange opening shot. But with “Unit 731” and “Snuff,” all doubts are erased – this is Slayer, playing their little black hearts out. Along the way, they find some interesting detours, like the creepy midsection of “Human Strain,” and they incorporate more melody than usual. But mostly, this is four guys playing crazy-angry stuff at top speed, while Tom Araya (now 48) screams his throat raw.

Slayer’s lyrics? Well, they are what they are. If you don’t think you would be into a song called “Public Display of Dismemberment,” then this band is probably not for you. And those with strong religious beliefs probably wouldn’t come within 500 miles of a band called Slayer anyway, but I’d still warn them to stay away from “Not of This God.” (And naturally, all of Christ Illusion.) Some of this is clearly role-playing, some just morbid fascination with death and serial killers. But it comes with the territory when you’re talking about music like this.

Lyrics aside, will you like this if you don’t care how difficult it is to play? I don’t know. Slayer works for me when I am angry at the world, and want to shout myself blind. But even then, I am marveling at the stop-on-a-dime moments, the crazy time and tempo shifts, the ridiculous speed of Lombardo’s drums, and the fact that melody actually emerges from this muck once in a while. Musicians will appreciate it on that level, but hell, if you just want something to soundtrack your darkest moments, this is probably perfect.

On the other end of the spectrum is prog-rock, and for my money, you’re not going to find a more classic progressive band these days than Transatlantic. For one thing, they’re something of a supergroup – you have Neal Morse, formerly of Spock’s Beard; Roine Stolt of the Flower Kings; Pete Trewavas of Marillion; and the ubiquitous Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater. But even though those bands all take from 1970s prog in one way or another, they dilute it – Dream Theater plays prog-metal, for instance, while the Flower Kings dress it up with jazz, and Marillion has perfected an ambient pop sound.

But in Transatlantic, the foursome plays straight, classic progressive rock, influenced by Yes and Genesis and ELP and others of that ilk. Songs are written not as discrete numbers, but as flowering epics, every musician going as big as possible. There are definite melodies – sometimes several at once, interlocking – and plenty of chances for these four guys, among the best on their respective instruments, to show off what they can do.

It’s been eight years since Transatlantic last convened for sophomore effort Bridge Across Forever, and if you thought that album was excessive – four songs in 76 minutes, two of the tracks edging 30 minutes each – then you need to stay far away from their third album, The Whirlwind. The album proper is a single song, clocking in at 77:54. That’s seventy-seven minutes and fifty-four seconds.

You might be tempted to think that no song could possibly warrant 77 minutes of time, let alone the 54 seconds, but in this case, you’d be wrong. “The Whirlwind” is a carefully-composed, intricate work, one that certainly sprawls here and there, but ends up earning its extended running time. It is handily broken up into 12 “chapters” on the CD, but these are not separate songs. There are no breaks, it just motors on for nearly an hour and 18 minutes.

And I can hear you groaning now. This is why I say this music is written for musicians – the average listener doesn’t want to spend that much time digesting a single work. It’s exhausting. I can only imagine how tiring this piece must be to play – and they will play it all live. But here’s the thing about good prog like this. There are melodies galore, sections that sound like accessible pop and folk, lots of glorious harmonies, and a real sense of joy and wonder to it all.

Yes, there are solos, and yes, they are long. Stolt gets a few on guitar, Morse gets several on keyboards, and the four of them jam on lengthy instrumental passages sprinkled throughout. And the average listener, one looking for those soaring moments this music delivers so well, will likely tune out during these bits. Prog, like thrash metal, is largely about how good the players are, and how often they can prove it. If you don’t care, you won’t like these sections – you’re bound to find them self-indulgent. And I sometimes find them that way too. But sometimes I’m just too blown away by the sheer musical skill on display that I’m sucked in.

Morse wrote most of the lyrics on The Whirlwind, and if you’re familiar with the last eight years of his career, you’ll know what to expect. Morse quit Spock’s Beard in 2002 when he converted to Christianity, and his solo albums have been full-on evangelical prog-rock. The spiritual nature of “The Whirlwind” is at least a little more subdued, but it’s right up front – the final section is called “Dancing With Eternal Glory,” for example – and if you’re turned off by that, you might find the work irreparably marred. I don’t mind it, although I often wish Morse would dig a little deeper into his faith instead of giving me cookie-cutter stuff.

It’s the music that counts here, though, and if the first disc isn’t enough for you, there’s a second, another hour of songs. You get four originals, the longest lasting 9:58, and four covers, including a rip-snorting take on Genesis’ “The Return of the Giant Hogweed,” and a nimble run-through of Santana’s instrumental “Soul Sacrifice.” It’s almost too much to take in, and I find myself amazed at how effortless these four guys make this masterful, complicated, very skilled music sound.

But if there’s any band lately that’s been appealing to my purely music theory side, it’s North Carolina quintet Between the Buried and Me. If I’m left flabbergasted at the metal might of Slayer and the progressive tapestry of Transatlantic, then imagine just how stunned I am at a band that seamlessly combines them both?

I know, you’re thinking Dream Theater, but you’re wrong. BTBAM is much, MUCH heavier than Dream Theater. They started as a grindcore/death metal band, terms which mean nothing to you unless you’re already a fan of the genres. Basically, they play impossibly loud and impossibly fast, with garbled, growling, atonal vocals on top. I ordinarily can’t stand this style, since it’s so monotonous – poundpoundpoundpound chugchugchug GRRRRRRRRR! Rinse, repeat. And on their early albums, BTBAM certainly fell into that trap.

But lately? Man oh man. I confess, I’ve only been listening to this band for a few months, but their recent catalog is mindblowing. I was initially intrigued by 2006’s The Anatomy Of, a covers album that found them perfectly aping Soundgarden, Queen, King Crimson, Faith No More, Depeche Mode, Counting Crows and Motley Crue. Look over that list again. Yes, these are all influences. Then, in 2007, they dropped Colors, an impossible-to-play mass of endlessly shifting metal that also included bits of jazz, polka, acoustic pop, and a thousand other things. It was so technical, so extremely difficult, that the next year, the band put out a live CD and DVD of them playing the whole thing straight through, just to prove they could.

Now here is album six, entitled The Great Misdirect, and astoundingly, BTBAM has outdone Colors. This album is sick. Insane. Inhuman. Complicated to the point of head-spinning confusion, the songs on The Great Misdirect rarely repeat, never stagnate, and expand to epic lengths – three of the six tracks break the 10-minute mark, with closer “Swim to the Moon” clocking in at 17:54. It is intense beyond belief, but there are also moments (and in the case of “Mirrors” and “Desert of Song,” entire tunes) full of great beauty.

It’s really a musician’s dream. Here’s how just one of the songs, “Fossil Genera: A Feed from Cloud Mountain,” maps out. It begins with carnival-style electric piano, swaying drunkenly in the breeze. Before long, the heavy (HEAVY) guitar comes in, playing along with the piano – the effect is very Mr. Bungle. We’re then flung headlong into seven minutes of mayhem, drums thudidng and guitars screaming in harmony as Tommy Rogers bellows in his best death-metal growl. But the music is uncommonly complicated, and as it goes on, weird keyboard noises break through, and very strange lead lines take over for brief stretches.

Finally, at about the nine-minute mark, the skies part and the acoustic guitar starts strumming. Rogers starts singing a beautiful melody while the instruments slowly build up, turning the repetitive finale into something epic. Finally, all melts away as the piano finishes things off. It’s a 12-minute journey with several stops along the way, and you feel like it’s taken you places when it’s done.

But if you’re not into musical structure, or diagramming songs, or trying to count out bizarre time signatures, all of this will mean nothing. It will sound like chaos, like random flailing that never holds together. This couldn’t be further from the truth, but by making music this complex, BTBAM have effectively limited their audience to those who can puzzle out what they’re doing. The Great Misdirect is the single most jaw-droppingly incredible musical work I’ve heard this year. It’s also one I can’t readily recommend to most people I know.

Is that a good thing? I’m not sure. The guys in BTBAM have found a way to push themselves far beyond the capabilities of most musicians I’ve heard, but the result is something insular, something that drives away more people than it attracts. I love it to death, but my reaction is geeky and cerebral, more akin to giddy disbelief than anything else. I love that this music exists, and that there are people talented enough to write and play it. But in this case, the music critic who’s never played a note in his life might have a more readily understood reaction to it.

I don’t mean to steer you away from bands like Slayer, Transatlantic and BTBAM. They are all musically tremendous, and well worth hearing. But even as I revel in the mad mathematics and finger-blister playing that goes into these records, I know they’re not for everyone. If you like them, terrific. If you don’t, I don’t blame you a bit. But there will always be a part of me that seeks out the particular kind of insanity on display here, even if I have to enjoy it alone, in my own little world. I don’t know what that says about me as a music critic, but while these records are playing, I’m just a fan, one with a seriously blown mind.

Next week, Tori Amos does Christmas, and Joy Electric does covers. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’ve been described as a big kid.

I know it’s meant as an insult, but I never take it that way. I haven’t done the things most people my age have done – marriage, kids, the house with the picket fence – and I have no interest in them. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I spend most of my disposable income on music. And this week, just for fun, I bought a box of Boo Berry cereal. The cashier probably thought I have a three-year-old at home or something, but I just wanted the blueberry-marshmallow goodness.

I also honestly like silly pop music, the kind that captures the giddiness of young love and endless possibility and sets it to catchy, inescapable melodies. If it’s done well – The Click Five, for instance, or this year’s Tinted Windows album – silly power pop can fill me with joy like no other music can. I don’t want to say it makes me feel younger, because that’s not quite right. But it does make me feel like I’m still young, and the horizon is an infinity away.

It was exactly that affinity for power pop that led me to Weezer in the first place. I wasn’t overly enamored of “Undone (The Sweater Song),” but when “Buddy Holly” exploded on the scene, complete with its Happy Days video, I was sold. I’ve never understood why people consider Rivers Cuomo some tortured genius – when he’s at his best, his music is silly and overflowing with giddy happiness. Even on Pinkerton, which many hold up as proof that Cuomo has hidden depths yet to be explored, the best songs turn his simple angst into super-fun pop.

Since then, it’s been a bizarre downward slide, culminating in the so-bad-it’s-amazing Red Album from last year. As a wise man once said, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid, and Weezer seemed to be getting stupider with each new single. “Beverly Hills.” “Troublemaker.” “Pork and Beans.” These are dumb songs, but they’re not dumb-fun songs. They’re just dumb. In my review of the Red Album, I said playing the classic Blue Album and this back to back was akin to looking at before and after pictures of a stroke victim, and it still feels that way to me.

Cuomo hasn’t gotten any smarter on his band’s seventh album. In fact, from all advance outside appearances, it looked like this one would be even more idiotic and unlistenable than the Red Album. It’s called Raditude, the front cover features a high-jumping dog, and it contains songs with titles like “The Girl Got Hot” and “I’m Your Daddy.” I braced myself for another depressing round of stupidity disguised as fun, and sharpened my critical knives for the dissection.

But you know what? I like it. Raditude is, in fact, my favorite Weezer album since Pinkerton. I know, I’m as shocked as you are.

Here’s the thing. Raditude is an incredibly dumb record, but it’s just so much fun. I felt the ridiculousness of the last two Weezer albums evaded Cuomo – he actually thought these were good records. But on Raditude, I have no doubt that the bespectacled wunderkind is in on the joke. These are songs about going to clubs, hanging out with friends on weekends, wasting time at malls and trying to impress girls – basically, all the preoccupations of a 15-year-old. The four band members are pictured riding their dirt bikes on the back cover. This is a giddy album about being young again, and fittingly, the band sounds revitalized.

Cuomo is 39 now, so penning a record full of teen-pop fluffiness might seem like a mid-life crisis, if it weren’t so convincingly energetic. Opening track and first single “(If You’re Wondering if I Want You To) I Want You To” is the catchiest Weezer song in many years, its rousing chorus coming on like a freight train full of awesome. On the Red Album, Cuomo looked back on his youth with wistful nostalgia, but here, he’s right in the moment, 15 years old again. He compliments his lady friend’s Slayer t-shirt, watches Titanic and goes to Best Buy with her, and then advises her to “make a move, ‘cause I ain’t got all night.”

The whole album is like this, peppered with pop culture references and wide-eyed teenage love and drama. “I’m Your Daddy” is about meeting the girl of your dreams (“You’ve got the brains, the body and the beauty, to top it off, you’re cool”), while the Gary Glitter-esque “The Girl Got Hot” sensitively examines the effect of female body maturation on the male libido. (No, it doesn’t: “Satin tights, boots so white, leather handbag out of sight, what used to mean a little now means a lot, oh my goodness me, the girl got hot.”) All of this set to some of the crunchiest and most convincing power pop of the band’s career.

Cuomo deviates from the guitar-heavy pop template three times on Raditude, and things get dicey when he does. “Love is the Answer,” originally performed by Sugar Ray (and there’s a phrase to chill the blood), is here an Indian-flavored stab at a George Harrison-style anthem, complete with sitars and wailing female vocals. Closer “I Don’t Want to Let You Go” is a sophomoric ballad about not wanting to break up, the kind a budding junior high musician might pat himself on the back for writing. It’s nice, but pedestrian.

And then there is “Can’t Stop Partying,” the strangest thing Weezer has ever done. It was co-written by Jermaine Dupri, produced by Polow da Don, and it features a guest rap by Lil’ Wayne. It’s an anomaly here, because there’s no joy in it – it’s a dark look at party addiction, setting club-banging lyrics (“Monday to Sunday, I get all the clubs, and everybody knows me when I pull up…”) to minor-key electronic music and haunted “woah-oh” backing vocals. This shouldn’t work at all, and the fact that it works as well as it does is… well, stunning.

But then the band is off and running on “Put Me Back Together,” and all is right with the world. When Weezer sticks to sweet power pop, as they do on 70 percent of Raditude, they knock it out of the park. “Trippin’ Down the Freeway” could have been on the Blue Album, and “In the Mall” could have fit nicely on the underrated Green Album. Cuomo and his bandmates sound like they had a grand old time recording Raditude, and the result is the most fun you’ll have in 35 minutes this year. (Sorry, Tinted Windows, you’re in second place now.)

Raditude sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a teen movie full of hormones and love triangles, so it’s kind of a surprise that the actual soundtrack to a film just like that, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, is utterly devoid of that kind of energy. Even moreso than the music from the first Twilight movie, this is a low-key, maudlin listen – which is, honestly, what the soundtrack to my teenage years was. I didn’t have Weezer-style fun as a young man, I was too busy trying to Be Something Important. And that’s the sense I get from this soundtrack.

And like most soundtrack collections, I find I like about half of this. I bought it largely for the killer opening track, Death Cab for Cutie’s “Meet Me on the Equinox.” It’s another typically excellent literate pop number from this band, with a nice melody and some wonderful Chris Walla guitar tones. Even with its rain-streaked, grey-sky mood, this is one of the most upbeat numbers here, as you probably could guess from scanning the list of contributors: Thom Yorke, Lykke Li, Anya Marina, Grizzly Bear, etc.

The highlights are all dark pieces – but then, what do you expect from the second in a series of increasingly darker vampire movies? Justin Vernon and Annie Clark, also known as Bon Iver and St. Vincent, collaborate on the beautiful “Roslyn,” performed with little other than acoustic guitar and their spectral voices. Anya Marina’s “Satellite Heart” is simple and sad, and Grizzly Bear’s “Slow Life,” which they played with Victoria Legrand of Beach House, is typically gauzy stuff.

But even some of the bands you’d expect to rock out delivered slower tunes for this disc. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club eschewed its normal Jesus and Mary Chain sound for the atmospheric blues of “Done All Wrong,” and OK Go hints at its new album, which, like the nearly tribal “Shooting the Moon” here, was produced by Dave Fridmann. And the Editors launch their new keyboard-driven sound with the piano lament “No Sound but the Wind,” a bit of Morrissey-lite for the masses.

There are some lowlights, of course. Start with Thom Yorke, who continues in the vein of The Eraser, stringing together computer beats and not much else on “Hearing Damage.” Lykke Li follows up with the impossibly boring “Possibility,” and the Killers finish up the job with the ridiculous “A White Demon Love Song.” Muse shortens and lessens the worst song on The Resistance, “I Belong to You,” for inclusion here, while Band of Skulls barely remembered to write a song at all with “Friends.”

But from the lineup to the song selection, this is an atypical soundtrack, and the New Moon team should be commended for that. It’s poised to be one of the most popular movies of the year, and like they did with Mutemath and Iron and Wine last time, they’ve used their platform to hopefully kick the door open for some very deserving artists. If the bit of Alexandre Desplat’s score included at the end here is any indication, New Moon is going to be a dark and wintry movie – much closer to the angsty and self-important feel of my teen years.

But oddly, while the new artists that make up the bulk of New Moon’s roster make me feel old, it’s a band from my teen years that lately has me dancing about the room, and feeling the glorious weight of untapped potential once again.

I had all but written off R.E.M. After the departure of drummer Bill Berry, they seemed to come unmoored, putting out three increasingly boring, synth-driven, forgettable records. The most indelible moment on 2004’s Around the Sun was a guest rap by Q-Tip. This was a problem, one the band didn’t seem too intent on solving – they released a middling live album to celebrate the Around the Sun tour, even though there seemed to be precious little worth celebrating.

I’m not sure how the band realized a retrenching was needed, but I’m sure glad they did. Last year’s Accelerate was the best, most alive album they’d made in more than a decade – stripped down to essentials, the trio (with de facto full-time drummer Bill Rieflin) ripped through 35 minutes of excellent (and excellently loud) new material, all of it vital and energetic. And now, they’re allowing you to peek behind the curtain, and hear the rebirth as it happened, with the release of Live at the Olympia.

This new 150-minute document was recorded at a series of open rehearsals in Dublin in 2007, before they jumped into the studio to record Accelerate. The idea was to run the new material by an audience before lavishing time and energy on it in the studio, but audiences there got the rare treat of seeing a long-running band rediscovering itself, and channeling that energy into new songs. In the early days, first and foremost, R.E.M. was a rock band, and by keeping things simple – a few organ splashes here and there, but mostly guitars, bass, drums and vocals – they ended up rocking out like the world hadn’t heard them do in ages.

It’s clear the band was taking inspiration from their earliest material when crafting the Accelerate tunes. Just look at the song selection on Live at the Olympia: they played almost all of their first EP, Chronic Town, and took on forgotten ‘80s classics like “Second Guessing” and “Disturbance at the Heron House.” They played “Sitting Still,” and “Feeling Gravitys Pull,” and “Auctioneer,” and “Little America,” and “Pretty Persuasion,” and “West of the Fields.” They even dug out “Romance,” which landed on a soundtrack in 1987 before surfacing on Eponymous. I mean, really. They played “Romance,” for pity’s sake.

At the other end of the spectrum is the new material, which simply kicks ass live. The show opens with “Living Well is the Best Revenge,” the rip-snorting clarion call that starts Accelerate, and the band tears through virtually all of the new songs, most of which had never been heard before. “Man-Sized Wreath” is wonderful, as is the stomping “Horse to Water,” and even slower songs like “Houston” and “Until the Day is Done” come alive on stage. There’s even a couple of previously unreleased songs, “Staring Down the Barrel of the Middle Distance” and the lovely “On the Fly,” which show just what a roll the band was on.

The show is rounded off with a few mid-sized hits, like “Driver 8” and “So. Central Rain,” which are, of course, splendid. Michael Stipe and company largely stay away from their most successful period, from Green to New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and surprisingly, they pump new blood into songs from Around the Sun and Reveal – “I’ve Been High” now stands as a pretty decent tune, as does “The Worst Joke Ever.” It’s amazing what a little youthful energy can do.

Let me put it this way. If you are mystified by the continued existence and popularity of R.E.M., if you can’t figure out why Rolling Stone once considered them the best rock band in America, if you just don’t know why so many people like them, pick this up. These 39 songs will give you everything you need. This is why, right here. Live at the Olympia finds the members of R.E.M., all of whom are orbiting 50 years old, sounding like young men again. And listening to it, I feel young myself, like the years behind have taken no toll at all. The road ahead is wide open, and anything can happen.

Next week, any of a number of things, from Transatlantic to Porcupine Tree to Joy Electric to Tegan and Sara to Switchfoot. And maybe even Tori Amos’ Christmas album, if I can bring myself to listen to it. Thanks for reading. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.