I think the day I stop knowing how to let go and be silly is the day I will have finally grown old.

I know a lot of music fans who just can’t enjoy something unless it’s deathly serious and out to Say Something. Hell, below you’ll find my second quarter report, and it’s chock full of important albums with resonant themes and a serious air. But I also love the silly. I love music that makes me grin like an idiot, and dance around the room. I love catchy, fun tunes with nothing to say.

I get a lot of flack for that. If you’re a Serious Critic, you’re not supposed to like effervescent, fun pop. You’re supposed to hoist your nose in the air and describe it with words like “lightweight” and “disposable.” I hesitate to point this out, but the Beatles, often considered the greatest pop band ever, specialized in lightweight and disposable. I love those records, and I love their modern antecedents, bands with nothing more on their minds than to write well-crafted, fun songs that bring a smile.

So when Adam Young sings, “Reality is a lovely place, but I wouldn’t want to live there,” I know how he feels. Young is Owl City, and that line comes within the first two minutes of his new album, All Things Bright and Beautiful. Young plays bubbly synth-pop, complete with liberal use of the auto-tune and – best of all, as far as I’m concerned – no hint whatsoever that he is in any way kidding. This is the candy-coated, fun, infectious music he makes, and he doesn’t care who hates it.

And man, do people hate it. Speaking just for my own corner of the world, I hope Young appreciates all the bullets I’ve taken for him. I love Owl City, pretty much unreservedly, and it’s been suggested more than once that I should turn in my critic’s card for such an offense. What can I say? Young’s music makes me smile. I am getting a little tired of defending it, but I’ll try again to explain what I like about it.

First, though, I want to deal with this Postal Service thing, because it really bothers me. The Postal Service, if you didn’t know, was a one-time collaboration between Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) and electronic artist Jimmy Tamborello. They made one album, a cold and skeletal thing that married Gibbard’s high, even voice with whirring beats and minimal synth noises.

Adam Young also has a high, even voice, and he uses synthesizers. This has led critic after critic to cry foul and accuse Young of ripping Gibbard and Tamborello off. I think that’s lazy and simplistic. I also think Owl City makes music so silly, so uncool, that the Postal Service guys would never even dream of doing it. Give Up, the Postal Service’s one album, is a self-serious mope through a rainy cityscape. Owl City albums are delirious peppermint trolley rides through Candy Land.

Just listen to the second track on this new record, “Deer in the Headlights.” It’s my favorite, but that’s because it’s just so… goofy. The opening piano arpeggios give way to a zipline synth bass, a riff that would be rocking in a different context. And then Young, auto-tuned and fresh-faced, sings this: “Met a girl in the parking lot, and all I did was say hello, her pepper spray made it awful hard for me to walk her home…” The chorus is similarly charming and silly: “Didn’t you know love could shine this bright? Well, smile, because you’re the deer in the headlights…”

All the while, candy-coated synths provide a glimmering sheen. It’s fun! It’s singable, hummable, danceable fun. And that rarely lets up on All Things Bright and Beautiful. It does get weightier – an introductory benediction for the Space Shuttle Challenger astronauts gives way to “Galaxies,” a stomping shout-out to God – but not much. And the better tracks are the ones with nothing serious on their minds, like “The Yacht Club”: “I stood under the waterfall with a kiwi pineapple parasol, as Cinderella dropped the crystal ball, and made a concrete caravan of caterpillar concert hall.”

If those lyrics have you cringing right now, Owl City’s probably not for you. But this is joyous, dance-in-the-rain music that doesn’t care how uncool it is. Some of this album stumbles – the duet with Breanne Duren, “Honey and the Bee,” is a bit too twee for its own good, and “Hospital Flowers” doesn’t quite hang together.

But elsewhere, Young tries on new styles, new wrinkles in his sound, and they suit him well. He shouts his way through “Kamikaze,” leaving the auto-tune behind, and invites rapper Shawn Christopher to contribute a verse to “Alligator Skies.” He collaborates with Matthew Thiessen of Relient K on the closing song, “Plant Life,” and it’s an epic. It’s warm and romantic (“If I were to tug on your heart strings, would you strum on mine”) but also terribly silly (“I’d rather waltz than just walk through the forest, the trees keep the tempo and they sway in time…”).

The bottom line is this: Adam Young appears to live in a world where everything is bursting with color, and joy is in the air he breathes. This is a place I’d love to live as well. Owl City’s music takes me there, and makes me love life. I can’t say it any simpler than that. Young is really on to something here – his skill as an arranger keeps improving, and here he seems even more willing to let his sense of wonder overtake him.

And that’s the key. Owl City music is full of wonder, and that’s what makes comparisons with the Postal Service irrelevant. Adam Young is on a delightful trip all his own, and even though it’s defiantly, ridiculously uncool, I love it dearly.

* * * * *

I had high hopes for our other two silly pop bands this week, but both of them let me down, to varying degrees.

First up is The Feeling, for my money one of the best British pop bands of the past few years. They burst out of the gate in 2006 with Twelve Stops and Home, which contained four of the finest pop singles I’d heard in years. (The rest of the record was pretty damn good too.) Then, in 2008, they refined and exploded their sound on Join With Us, which played like five decades of British pop distilled into an hour of delight. I honestly hadn’t heard a pop album so detailed, so bursting with sound, since Jellyfish’s 1993 masterpiece Spilt Milk.

So of course, I’ve been breathlessly anticipating their third album. And now that it’s here, I’m not sure what I think. It’s called Together We Were Made, and in the edition I bought, it spans 25 songs (26 if you count the bonus track) over two discs. And it’s… not bad, but not as extraordinary as I was hoping. To use a McCartney analogy, if Join With Us was Band on the Run, then Together We Were Made is London Town. It’s perfectly acceptable, but doesn’t dazzle.

In fact, it just kind of… happens. Many of these songs rely on grooves instead of melodies, and the band makes more use of synthesizers and drum loops than in the past. Sonically, it’s all just mid-range mush. Nothing about it leaps out of the speakers and takes you dancing. On past Feeling albums, I’ve had trouble picking my favorites. Here, I have trouble picking the songs I remember.

Some of them stand out. “Say No” is a classic Dan Gillespie-Sells piano ballad, and “Another Soldier” makes fine use of its creepy string section. “Leave Me Out of It” is an adult-contemporary slog, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor turns in a fine guest vocal performance. I like a lot of the second disc better (despite the fact that the band considers these tracks lesser works – the discs are titled The Birds and The Bees), like the groovy “Dia De Los Muertos.”

The best song of the lot, though, is the epic closer of disc one, “Undeniable.” Still, this is a sound the Feeling did better on “The Greatest Show on Earth” last time out. I’m not exactly sure what happened here, but instead of the pop giants I was expecting, the Feeling sounds mortal and earthbound here. This album isn’t bad, but it isn’t the stunner of which this band is capable. It’s a bunch of pretty good songs, nothing more.

And then there’s Ann Arbor, Michigan quintet Tally Hall. Their 2008 debut was called Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum, and they all dress in white shirts with color-coded ties. They’re practically overflowing with quirk. But Marvin’s is a tremendous pop album, novelty or no – from first note to last, it’s just so much fun. Ukulele odes to bananas, a song pledging love to both Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, a tune introducing the band, carnival barker-style, called “Welcome to Tally Hall” – this thing is a delirious trip.

In the intervening years, Tally Hall has apparently been dropped from Atlantic Records, and in the process, they’ve lost their sense of humor. The new one, Good & Evil, is a self-released affair, and it’s a mature pop record, full of good-to-great acoustic tunes. The band still makes use of fantastic vocal harmonies, and their sense of melody remains undiminished.

But this just isn’t nearly as much fun as I had hoped. Only one song, “Turn the Lights Off,” reaches the heights of the prior record. The rest is well-written, fine pop music, especially “&” and “Hymn for a Scarecrow,” but it’s dour-faced, as if the band decided they were tired of being typed as a novelty act. There’s no chance of that here, but there’s also no chance this album will bring as many smiles.

Good & Evil concludes with a true epic, “Fate of the Stars,” and the band pulls it off well. In fact, as mature pop albums go, this one is pretty splendid. But it’s not why I liked Tally Hall. This album strips away most of what I found original and invigorating about them. I can’t fault the record – it does what it’s supposed to, and with a few more listens, I may fall in love with it. But right now, it’s only making me remember how much I liked Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. Next time, they need to remember how to let go and be silly again. It suits them.

* * * * *

All right, it’s time for the Second Quarter Report.

What’s that, you ask? Well, I keep a running top 10 list every year, and at the end of each quarter, I share that work-in-progress, so you can see my thought process. Essentially, this is what my list would look like if I were forced to finalize it right now. But I’ll tell you, I wouldn’t mind that at all. The year could stop six months early and this list would suit me fine. Check it out:

10. Lady Gaga, Born This Way.
9. R.E.M., Collapse Into Now.
8. The Boxer Rebellion, The Cold Still.
7. Elbow, Build a Rocket Boys.
6. Over the Rhine, The Long Surrender.
5. The Violet Burning, The Story of Our Lives.
4. Bon Iver.
3. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake.
2. Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues.
1. Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What.

I mean, really. Just look at that list. That’s tremendous. And we have six months left.

Next week, my thoughts on Cornerstone 2011. 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.

Sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense.

You look around, and nothing’s the way it was. Friends have grown older and grown apart, loves have gone cold, sunrises are a subtly different color. Worst of all, no one seems to notice the change. Everything feels strange and unfamiliar, and everywhere you look, people are just going about their business, as if the pieces all fit together perfectly. It’s unsettling, disturbing. It’s wrong.

I’ve had one of those weeks. Everything feels out of place. I’ve been sleepwalking through my life for days, distracted and out of sorts. I had an intimate encounter with a UPS truck, and walked away unscathed, but with thousands in damage to my car. I had lunch with one of my best friends, and spent it somewhere else, mentally speaking. Relationships I cherish are falling apart, and I don’t know how to hold on to them.

The world just isn’t making any sense. And I’m hoping that the closer I look at it, the more sense it will make, when I know that never works. You have to stop seeking out the connections, and once you do, they will become apparent.

As usually happens with me, my musical experience this week has mirrored my life. I’ve spent the last seven days trying to figure out my place in the world, and I’ve also spent it trying to decipher the new Bon Iver album. And what’s working for me, right now, is turning off my analytical brain and letting the thing wash over me. Nothing about it really makes sense, but if I just let it happen to me, instead of working my synapses to death trying to understand it, it all works out.

Certainly, the experience of Bon Iver’s new self-titled album is an unexpected one, but if you think about it, it’s no more unexpected than the story so far. In 2006, a then-25-year-old Justin Vernon watched his band break up, his girlfriend leave him and his health deteriorate, all at the same time. So he retreated to a cabin in the Wisconsin woods, and he spent three months making an album. It was called For Emma, Forever Ago, and when it was given a national release by Jagjaguwar in 2008, people responded to its warmth and intimacy.

The “cabin story” will probably haunt Vernon until he dies, but it’s a fascinating hook. Who hasn’t wanted to chuck it all, go someplace remote and just make something? Something real, something that reflects the world the way you see it. That’s what For Emma did. It fulfilled that fantasy for countless people, including me. The fact that it was also a well-made, well-observed piece of work certainly didn’t hurt. Seemingly overnight, Bon Iver was a highly-regarded success. And Vernon was left with the eternal question: now what?

Because you can’t make For Emma again. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, a trick that only works one time. Vernon spent the intervening years making all kinds of directionless weirdness, from the strange EP Blood Bank to the atmospheric Volcano Choir album, to his collaborations with Kanye West, of all people. Anyone looking to his endeavors since 2008 for some notion of where he would go next came away stymied, scratching their heads, bewildered.

Turns out, that’s what he was going for, because upon first listen, his second record is just as mystifying, like looking at a puzzle with a dozen missing pieces. It doesn’t make any sense, that first time. There is literally nothing to connect Bon Iver with For Emma, save Vernon’s voice, and even that is often unfamiliar. Imagine if Iron and Wine jumped directly from The Creek Drank the Cradle to Kiss Each Other Clean, with none of the connective tissue in between. That’s what this is like. It makes me feel like I missed four albums of evolution somewhere in there.

As intimate as Vernon’s first effort was, this one is initially off-putting. Nearly every song is named after a place, either real or imagined, and the lyrics generally have nothing to do with that place. Vernon’s words on For Emma were direct and full of heartache, but here they are abstract, sometimes even random: “It was found what we orphaned, didn’t mention it would serve us picked, said your love is known, I am standing up on it, aren’t we married?” Like the music, the lyrics take some serious parsing.

And the music. I have heard Bon Iver probably 20 times in the past week, and it still sometimes sounds like there are parts missing. It wouldn’t be wrong to call it layered, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s a meticulously crafted studio piece, one that can feature a thousand instruments one moment, and the barest whisper of sound the next. Vernon has not written easy folk songs here – this album is practically hook-free, its tunes dense and meandering and difficult.

And yet, it would be a lie to call this record hard work. It’s oblique, it’s fascinating, it’s unlike anything else I’ve heard this year, but it’s not a strenuous listen. Opener “Perth” is immediately striking, fluttering to life with one of the most memorable guitar figures I’ve heard in some time. The military-style drums slowly build it up, and before you know it, you’re in the loudest stretch of Bon Iver music ever put to tape. Thunderous, pounding drums supporting electric guitar and a full horn section and Vernon’s infinitely-overdubbed voice. And just like that, it’s over, the reverbed guitars segueing nicely into the Sam Beam-esque “Minnesota, WI.”

Really, I could describe each of these songs, and it wouldn’t mean much. This is an album you just have to hear. I could tell you how lovely it is when the clatter and cacophony of the aforementioned “Minnesota, WI” evaporates, leaving just a finger-picked acoustic and Vernon’s voice, repeating “Never gonna break, never gonna break.” I could tell you that “Holocene” is strikingly beautiful, pivoting on the line, “All at once I knew I was not magnificent.” I could tell you that the repeated piano lines in “Hinnom. TX” and “Wash.” circle back on themselves in ways you don’t expect.

But most of all, I could tell you that this record, with few exceptions, is baffling, and I would never get the true sense of that across to you. Nothing sums it up, however, like the last couple of tracks. “Calgary” is as straightforward as this album gets, if Peter Gabriel-style synth anthems are your definition of straightforward. “Lisbon, OH” is about a minute of wordless atmosphere, and then comes “Beth/Rest,” what will no doubt be the most controversial thing here. It’s an ‘80s power ballad, with cheeseball keyboards, flailing electric guitars and two, count them, two saxophones.

“Beth/Rest” makes no sense the first time you hear it. It’s like Vangelis meets the score for The Karate Kid. It is utterly, head-spinningly baffling. Ah, but that’s just the first time you hear it. Dive in again, and again, and stop trying to figure out why Vernon has done this, and the song will begin to crystallize. And you’ll start to hear it – and the nine tracks that precede it – as oddly beautiful. Keep listening, and it all locks into place. I can’t imagine this album any other way now, and I can’t stop spinning it.

I still cannot tell you how Vernon got from there to here, just like I can’t tell you how my world went from what it was to what it is now. In fact, I’m not really sure knowing that would make much of a difference. Vernon was the guy who locked himself in a cabin and poured out his heartbreak, and now he’s the guy who has meticulously crafted one of the strangest and most compelling records of 2011. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, particularly from an album he self-titled, it’s that he’s not going back. The world will not reverse course. It may never seem normal again, but you have to learn to live in it. Forcing the pieces together will not make them fit.

But if you let it, this record will slowly make itself clear. While it may never unfold logically, it achieves a certain grace, a grandiose yet subtle beauty. And that is, I think, the best we can hope for. Sometimes, the world just doesn’t make sense. Stop trying to understand it, and you’ll see how wonderful it can be. I am learning this every day.

Next week, some silly pop from Owl City, the Feeling and Tally Hall. 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’m back, refreshed and invigorated after my week off. Thanks for your indulgence as I turned 37. I know, I can’t believe how damn old I am either. Forty is in sight. And not “in sight” as if it were a land mass in the distance, seen through a telescope. In. Sight. It’s crazy.

I promised myself years ago (more years than I’d like to admit) that I would never be one of those old people who loses track of new music. I know too many of them – it’s like they reached a certain age and said, “Well, I have all the music I need. I’m all set.” And they stopped looking for new experiences, and started thinking of everything “the kids” listen to as garbage – or, at the very least, not as good as the stuff they grew up on.

That will never be me, I said. So I’m constantly on the lookout for that attitude within me, clawing its way out. Don’t misunderstand me – I definitely detest a lot of the music on the radio these days, but I try not to dismiss that music without giving it a fair chance. I’m wary of that tendency anyway, but I’m extra sensitive when it comes to music aimed at the younger generation. At the same time, I don’t want to be Randy Marsh from last week’s brilliant South Park episode, pretending to love music that sounds like shit just to prove I’m not old.

So I try things. A lot of things. I end up disliking a lot of it (and not bothering to write about it in this space), but I just can’t abide recoiling from music and not giving it a chance. As a wise songwriter once said, what would you be if you didn’t even try. You have to try.

Which brings me to Lady Gaga.

For a long time, I clung to the belief that there were only a few things I knew for sure. The sun will rise, the sun will set, the planet will keep turning, the government will continue to take too much of our money, and we will all eventually die. And Lady Gaga sucks, and the world will be immeasurably better when she goes away for good. I have been known to leave the room when Gaga songs come on the radio. I simply cannot stand her.

And I said all of that for years without hearing a single one of her records. I know, I’m not proud of it. But I have reasons for recoiling – I’m allergic to image-driven pop stars, and there hasn’t been one working on Gaga’s scale in some time. I hate her stage name. I know she took it from Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga,” and that only makes me hate it more. I hate the attention-starved “outrageousness.” I hate the meat dress, the bubble dress, the giant fucking egg. I hate it all.

I can tell you why. Most of the praise I hear heaped on Gaga has little to do with the actual music she makes. It has to do with how “crazy” she is, how over-the-edge she is, how she showed up nearly naked to Lollapalooza and stage-dived, and on and on. It’s a persona. It’s not real. She’s acting outrageous when the cameras are on her, and like most stars of her ilk, she’s doing it because she has nothing to say musically. She’s manipulating the star system like no one since Madonna, and people are falling for it.

Just about every Gaga song I’d heard backed up that impression. My first brush with her was “Lovegame,” which pivots on the poetic line, “I want to take a ride on your disco stick.” If pressed, I would admit to liking “Poker Face,” but I liked it more when Cartman sang it on South Park. The other songs I’d heard – “Just Dance,” “Paparazzi,” “Bad Romance,” “Telephone,” “Alejandro” – left me utterly cold. In fact, they left me angry that so much attention was being given to this woman who clearly wasn’t any better than her peers, who clearly had nothing of any substance or value to contribute.

And with every breathless media pile-on, every “OhmygodidyouseewhatGagadidnow??” exclamation I heard, every video of some public spectacle she made of herself appearing online, I got angrier. And still, I hadn’t listened to a single record. I finally realized I had to rectify that. And the much-heralded release of Gaga’s new album, Born This Way, seemed like the perfect opportunity to do just that.

But I couldn’t just buy the new record. If I was going to do this, I was going to dive in. So I dropped nearly $50, and bought everything. The Fame. The Fame Monster. The two-disc special edition of Born This Way. Even the remix record, and the three-song Cherrytree Sessions. All of it. And when I ended up hating it all, no one would be able to accuse me of not giving her work a fair shake. I did all this with a certain smugness, knowing that no matter how open my mind, this experiment likely would not change it. And I’d get to rip Gaga a new one in this space.

But then a funny thing happened. I started… well, liking some of it.

Not all of it, and certainly not at first. The Fame is pretty much what I thought it would be – a harmless, faceless electro-pop record. In fact, it’s almost shockingly anonymous. These songs could have been written for anyone, and while Gaga talked a good game during these years, she never backed it up with freaky-awesome music. “Just Dance” could be any club-ready pop star. It has not an ounce of personality. “Poker Face” still brings a smile, but virtually everything else here – particularly the fluffy “Eh Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say)” and the obligatory rap cameo “Starstruck” – just slides by. There are two songs performed with guitars, but even they don’t stand out. They sound like No Doubt at their poppiest.

I didn’t end up liking The Cherrytree Sessions as much as I expected to, either. The jazzy piano take on “Poker Face” shows that Gaga can really sing, but she isn’t in the same league as, say, Christina Aguilera. And apparently her idea of a “stripped-down” version of “Just Dance” is one with the drums turned down a bit. The thing of it is this – none of the music on The Fame or its attendant EP matches the outsize personality of its author. It’s all just kind of boring.

And that brings us to The Fame Monster, her 2009 EP. The Fame Monster begins with “Bad Romance,” and so now we have reached the point in this experiment where I was, of my own volition, listening to “Bad Romance,” a song I would erase from time if I could. I’m not sure why, but I really don’t like this song. Perhaps it’s my strong distaste for Gaga’s habit of singing her own stage name in her songs. Perhaps it’s just the overall obnoxious tone. Perhaps it’s the lack of any hooks – well, not really, but the lack of any hook that makes me want to listen again.

So anyway, Gaga wants my love, and doesn’t want to be friends, and then sings in French, and blessedly, it’s over. Comparatively speaking, though, the rest of The Fame Monster sounds timid. It definitely has more personality than its predecessor, but not enough. “Alejandro” is second-rate Madonna, “Monster” is boring and silly, “Dance in the Dark,” “Telephone” and “So Happy I Could Die” are all harmless and forgettable. That leaves the vaguely Queen-like “Speechless,” which I like, and the down-and-dirty “Teeth,” which I love. “Teeth” is the best song on the EP, in fact, a relentless crawl through the jungle that leaves you sweaty and smiling.

But as far as the first four records go, the most successful is The Remix, which casts Gaga’s voice against thudding club beats and interesting electro-arrangements from the likes of Richard Vission and Passion Pit. It’s dance music that knows its place – if you can’t go big, at least as big as your public persona, then slink back and do this. It doesn’t take a pop genius to come up with clubby bangers like these, but they’re more explosive and inventive than anything Gaga had given us to that point.

So it was with trepidation that I pressed play for the first time on Born This Way, a 17-song behemoth that arrived with the media-hype force of a hurricane. By this point, I was expecting a whole lot of not much.

This next part is tough for me, because I have to admit I was wrong. Born This Way is nothing less than the first anything-goes wild pop album Lady Gaga has made, the first one that sounds like it might have been written by the weird woman in the bubble dress. Yes, there are 17 songs, and for the first time, I don’t want to skip any of them.

Born This Way is… well, it’s kind of awesome.

I know, I don’t quite get it either. The differences are not enormous. Born This Way is an electro-pop album with a couple of live-band tracks, just like Gaga’s first efforts. But it’s clear that everything before this has been a rough draft. Sometimes literally – “Bad Romance” is self-evidently an early sketch of the awe-inspiring “Judas,” which takes it to its fullest extreme. But often, Born This Way just feels like an artist finally coming into her own.

Yes, she takes from Madonna here, a lot. But she also shows off a remarkable affection for Pat Benatar, and she refuses to be ashamed of her obvious love of ‘80s pop. The album opens with the sublime “Marry the Night,” which could have fit nicely on Crimes of Passion, if not for its European techno leanings. Its glorious anthemic chorus slides into a dance-house fever dream in its second half, and it’s so exhilarating I wondered if it set a bar the rest of the record couldn’t clear.

Not so. “Born This Way,” an obvious pinch of Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” works well in context, keeping the momentum going, if not impressing as a song. But “Born This Way” does exactly what it is meant to do – it delivers an anthem of individualism, a fist-pumping singalong about embracing who you are, no matter how odd others think you. That sentiment would mean nothing if the rest of the album had not been as weird and individual as it is.

Can you name another pop star who would unleash something like “Government Hooker” on the general public? I can’t. It’s German techno meets American club pop, with an uncredited sample from the Cure’s “Lullaby,” and it contains the line “Put your hands on me, John F. Kennedy.” The aforementioned “Judas” takes the “Bad Romance” template and finally makes something out of it – I don’t even mind her shouting her own name, the song is that good. The lyrics throw up religious iconography as a metaphor for making bad romantic decisions – and, of course, to get under the skin of the easily-offended. But I think she’s actually saying something with these images, and they certainly beat the bland, straightforward lyrics of her previous records.

I give Gaga points for inventiveness on most of the album’s lyrics. Even “Hair,” a song whose central conceit – that hair is the outward sign of one’s identity, and can inspire you to be free – strikes me as goofy and contradictory to the record’s theme, is unlike anything on pop radio right now. (It achieves a kind of techno-Bruce Springsteen grandeur, complete with Clarence Clemons sax solo.) There’s a thumping techno song based around the German word for “shit.” There’s a terrific mid-tempo ode to Mary Magdalene. And there’s a song called “Highway Unicorn,” which is pretty great. You’ll only find one typical lyric here – “Fashion of His Love,” easily the record’s low point.

“Fashion” is one of three songs not included on the standard edition of the record, but it’s the only one I would drop. “Black Jesus Amen Fashion” is awesome, a Europop stomp with robotic vocals and dark, slithering synths. And “The Queen” is a rave-up that drops a Freddie Mercury reference, which I suddenly don’t mind as much. In fact, Gaga wins my love by bringing Brian May aboard for “You and I,” a live-band ballad that serves as a late-album highlight. It caps off a stretch of stranger tunes that begins with the filthy, circular “Heavy Metal Lover” and continues with the guitar-fueled “Electric Chapel.”

But as interesting as these sonic diversions are, they don’t sum up the record. Most of Born This Way accomplishes the neat trick of updating early Madonna for the 21st Century, with lyrics that could have come from Marilyn Manson in his heyday. (That’s a compliment, by the way.) Final track “The Edge of Glory” brings all that bubbilicious ‘80s-ness to full bloom – it’s completely cheesy, and brings back Clemons on the horn, but it’s totally satisfying. All by itself, it justifies my change of heart.

So yeah, Born This Way is the first Lady Gaga album I like, mainly because it’s the first one that’s as inventive as her wardrobe and makeup. The music is finally as eccentric as its author, and finally worthy of the attention it’s getting. For the first time, I feel like there’s something here, something worth exploring. And I’m glad I decided to hear it.

I have a running bet with a former co-worker. I bet him that Lady Gaga will be a cultural nonentity in 10 years (well, seven now, I think), that her style-over-substance attention-mongering would prove empty in time, and people would stop caring. I’m going to lose that bet, but if she’s able to make huge, crazy-ass pop records like this one, and keep doing it, I’ll be very happy to lose. Here endeth the Lady Gaga experiment, and I’d call it a success.

Next week, silly pop-o-rama, with the Feeling, Owl City and Tally Hall. That is, if my copies of all three show up. If not, it’ll be Bon Iver, or maybe Weird Al. Or maybe both.

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See you in line Tuesday morning.