I’ve been playing piano for as long as I can remember, which means I’ve been interested in the work of piano players for most of my life.

My list of favorites has grown and changed since my naïve younger days – Yanni is no longer on it, for example. Ben Folds is pretty high on the list, as is Tori Amos, especially her early work. (Can we just agree that whenever I mention Tori Amos anymore, I mean “especially her early work”?) Brad Mehldau is my favorite jazz pianist right now. I saw Bruce Hornsby live a couple of months ago, and he was fantastic – his chord phrasings are like a fingerprint.

And then there’s Elton John, with whom I have had a complicated relationship (no, not like that) for much of my life. I was an early adopter of MTV in the ‘80s, so my first exposure to Elton was the ridiculous video for “I’m Still Standing.” I never would have pegged him for a piano player from that, or from subsequent schlock-fests like “Sad Songs” and “A Word in Spanish.” Oh, and that terrible duet with Kiki Dee.

But my father, he of the Columbia Record and Tape Club subscription, had a copy of Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, Elton John’s 1973 effort, and I listened to that again and again as a child. It never occurred to me until later that the guy who wrote “Have Mercy on the Criminal” and “Texan Love Song” was the same guy behind “I Don’t Want to Go On With You Like That.” I probably wouldn’t have believed it. And then Elton went on to score The Lion King, and, well, that just cemented my impression of him as a mall-pop sellout.

And then I heard Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I still remember the way my jaw dropped the first time I spun “Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” the piano-prog opening track. The whole album was terrific, a double record full of ambition and sparkle. And go figure, the five albums before it and the three albums after it were all great too. In the 1970s, Elton John was a pop messiah, a superb and inexhaustible songwriter – he and lyricist Bernie Taupin could do no wrong. The stretch from Elton John to Rock of the Westies is one of the finest streaks any pop musician has ever released.

So what happened? Well, the ‘80s, and a lot of drugs. Blue Moves and A Single Man were fine, and then everything for 20 years was a mixture of cheeseball and unlistenable. I remember in the ‘90s Elton would keep staging comebacks – Made in England was touted as a masterpiece – and keep taking only baby steps forward. I stuck with him, but 1997’s The Big Picture was very nearly my exit. It’s excrement. And then he jumped full bore into shitty musicals with Tim Rice, and I figured that was that.

Are you ready for the latest plot twist, though? Elton’s been on an upswing lately – no, he has, I swear – and his new album, The Diving Board, is his best in nearly 40 years.

You read that right. Nearly 40 years since the man has made an album this good. Elton is back behind the piano – there’s nary a synthesizer to be found on this one – and he and Taupin have delivered their best, most consistent set of songs since I was in diapers. Elton’s older now, and his voice has aged, but it’s in wonderful, full, rich form here. In T-Bone Burnett, he’s found a sympathetic producer who convinced him to go with the sparest arrangements he could, and write from the heart.

You can hear the difference right from the opening track, “Oceans Away.” A moving tribute to soldiers lost overseas, the song is performed with nothing but piano and voices, Elton harmonizing with himself beautifully. The mood remains melancholy on “Oscar Wilde Gets Out,” a song that could have easily found its way onto Elton’s classic ‘70s records. A gliding piano figure, a minimal drumbeat from Jay Bellerose, some subtle strings, and a haunting melody. That’s it. You get to actually hear Elton John play piano on this record, more than you have in decades.

There are 12 songs and three instrumental interludes on this album. Of all of them, only “Can’t Stay Alone Tonight” never takes off, its lazy-hazy groove stuck in second gear. Elton coasts a little on “Mexican Vacation” and “Take This Dirty Water,” both New Orleans-style piano-pounders, but both songs shimmy convincingly. Everything else – literally, everything else – is tremendous, and it only gets better with repeated listens.

There’s very little here that could be called rock, but that’s OK, because Elton is at his best here when he’s diving deep, playing the minor keys and singing from a place of pain. “My Quicksand” is the first truly moving song he and Taupin have written in ages, Elton’s dark chords driving things forward, slightly goofy lyrics and all. It’s tops here, until you get to track nine, “Home Again.” You may have heard this one – Elton performed it at the Emmys. It’s simply gorgeous, Taupin’s words capturing the recursive nature of age perfectly: “We all dream of leaving, but wind up in the end spending all our time trying to get back home again…” The melody is heart-rending, the arrangement powerful, the horns perfectly balanced in the background. It’s the best damn Elton John song of my adult life.

But really, there are very few weak moments here. Even a late-period showtune like “The New Fever Waltz” scores. I’ve been a fan of Elton John long enough to have given up on ever getting a record like this one again – the good ones all came out before I could even read, I have said – so The Diving Board is the best kind of surprise. Even if he never makes another one as good as this again, it’s so nice to get the good Elton back for just an hour. Thanks, Sir Elton, for making this one something special.

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Elton John is 66 this year. I’m not sure how many generations separate him and England’s latest piano-pop prodigy, Tom Odell. I do know this – Odell is 22 years old, and he’s made a debut album that would be the envy of musicians twice and three times his age.

I first heard Odell thanks to Aaron Sorkin – the riveting, unforgettable “Can’t Pretend” scored an overly dramatic promo for the second season of The Newsroom. Every music fan knows this feeling – you hear a song that grabs hold of you, demands your immediate and undivided attention, and you must, immediately, drop everything you are doing and find out who created this song and how you can own it right fucking now. “Can’t Pretend” was such a song for me, the first one in a long while. The big chords, the rising-and-falling arrangement, Odell’s big, Buckley-esque voice, the entire amazing atmosphere of the song. Everything about it is perfect.

Odell’s debut, Long Way Down, isn’t perfect, but it’s really close. Odell writes good songs, and occasionally great ones, but it’s the way he performs them that makes this record the gem it is. His voice is elastic and dramatic, and he layers that voice atop itself, creating a wall of vocals. His playing is loud and bracing when it has to be, and tender and delicate at all the right moments. Best of all, his arrangements are striking and dramatic – he begins “Another Love” with fragile chords, but it builds into something enormous, massive, unstoppable. And he knows enough to bring it back down to earth before the end.

There isn’t a bad song on this album, although its centerpiece remains the untouchable “Can’t Pretend.” “I Know” is a swaying, Keane-style pop number with a wonderful crescendo; “Sense” is stripped back and gorgeous, rising from its own dark clouds; “Sirens” makes the absolute most of its simple, pretty piano line; and closing song “Heal” brought a tear the first time I heard it, its rising, hopeful melody backed by piano and little else. Odell even turns in a fantastic, respectful cover of Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” bringing a depth beyond his years to this treasure of a song.

The main stumbling block here is Odell’s lyrics, beyond doubt the product of a young man’s mind. In “Another Love,” for example, he aims for a portrait of a man who has spent all his affection on someone else, and has none left. But he doesn’t have the skill yet to paint the finer brushstrokes such a work needs – “I’d sing a song that would be just ours, but I sang ‘em all to another heart, I wanna cry, I want to learn to love, but my tears are all used up…” It’s fine, for what it is, but the music is so far ahead of the words that it’s almost jarring.

But that’s OK. As I mentioned, Tom Odell is only 22. I love the record he’s made – I’m not sure I’ve been this in love with a piano-pop album since Keane’s first two – but I’m over-the-moon excited now to follow his career, and hear what wonders he’ll create as he grows into his prodigious talent. His first album is great. I expect his fourth will be amazing. (And then, of course, he’ll get hooked on cocaine and slip into banal mediocrity for about four decades, before finally finding his voice again in his 60s and making a comeback album full of joyous melancholy. Seems to be what English piano players do. )

For right now, though, Tom Odell is my favorite discovery of 2013, and Long Way Down one of the year’s best. His potential may be limitless, but the music he’s making now is pretty damn great too.

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You know what time of year it is. This is the last column in September, and we’re rounding third on my annual top 10 list. So it’s time for the Third Quarter Report. Here’s where I reveal what the list-in-progress looks like right now. The last few months have been incredible, with superb album after superb album hitting stores. The list looks very different today than it did back in June, and given what’s to come for the rest of the year, I expect it will look pretty different in December as well.

For now, here’s the list:

#10. Little Green Cars, Absolute Zero.
#9. My Bloody Valentine, m b v.
#8. Elton John, The Diving Board.
#7. Laura Mvula, Sing to the Moon.
#6. Daniel Amos, Dig Here, Said the Angel.
#5. Tom Odell, Long Way Down.
#4. Frightened Rabbit, Pedestrian Verse.
#3. Daft Punk, Random Access Memories.
#2. Janelle Monae, The Electric Lady.
#1. Over the Rhine, Meet Me at the Edge of the World.

As you can see, several albums have gone up in my estimation, and some – The Joy Formidable, Everything Everything – have disappeared from the list completely. As the wonders get more plentiful, the list reflects my own taste more and more. I’m back and forth between the top two choices – some days Monae is number one, others OtR. I just saw Over the Rhine in concert last week, and the new material was glorious, so right now I’m leaning in their direction. But it could change next week.

Speaking of next week, we’ll most likely review Fish, or Peter Gabriel, or Justin Timberlake, or Deltron 3030, or Kitchens of Distinction, or… you know what? Drop by and find out. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Last week we were talking about audacity, about artists willing to try ideas that shouldn’t work, and bend them into reality by sheer force of will. As it turns out, that’s a great lead-in into this week’s review, so I’ll reiterate: some of the best music I know comes from a place of total trust and belief in a seemingly unimaginable idea. On paper, it reads like a recipe for disaster. On record, it’s magic.

With that in mind, check this out: Elvis Costello made an album with the Roots.

I’ll say that again, because it’s so much fun: Elvis Costello, the 59-year-old Englishman who stands as one of the worlds best and most idiosyncratic songwriters, made an album with the Roots, the premier live hip-hop band from Philadelphia best known for their long-running stint on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. It’s called Wise Up Ghost, and it was released by Blue Note Records. This is a real thing that really exists.

If you’re a fan of Costello or the Roots (or both, like me), this titanic team-up probably caught you by surprise. It’s not a natural pairing, but it you think about it, it starts to make a sort of sense. Costello is a musical chameleon, beholden to no style, and willing to try just about anything. He’s known for pairing up with younger, less pedigreed acts like Fall Out Boy and the Strokes, though he generally saves his big-deal collaborations for his albums – his knockout record with Allen Toussaint, The River in Reverse, for example.

And the Roots are one of the most versatile bands on the scene right now. They play with everybody on Late Night, and their records, though rooted in hip-hop, draw from a deep well of influences, including soul, funk and jazz. They have a strong social conscience and a knack for storytelling – see their album-length tale of woe from 2011, Undun. And in bandleader ?uestlove, they have one of the finest drummers any band could ask for – and one of the smartest.

That being said, there are two ways Costello and the Roots could have screwed this up.

1. They could have made a Roots album with Elvis Costello on vocals. Can you imagine Costello relegated to singing the hooks on a hip-hop album, trying desperately to shoehorn one of the most distinctive voices in rock into a box that would never fit it? While it might have been a strong showcase for the Roots, it would have been a missed opportunity.

2. They could have made an Elvis Costello album with the Roots as the backup band. Never mind that Costello’s songs are fussier and less loose than the ones the Roots normally play, this would have wasted one of the coolest bands around, turning them into little more than session men sitting in for the Impostors. It might have been a fine Costello album, but it wouldn’t have been much of a collaboration.

Thankfully, Wise Up Ghost is neither of those things. It’s a true collaboration, for better and for worse, between two distinct artists willing to hunt for common ground. It never comes off as effortless – they worked at this, trying to meet each other halfway, and hammering this new hybrid sound into shape. The record is full of experiments, and some of them work better than others.

Costello and the Roots have front-loaded the album with the ones that work, particularly the opening trilogy. Wise Up Ghost bursts to life with the busy streetscape of “Walk Us Uptown,” making the most of a killer beat from ?uestlove, a minimal bassline, some low-key horns and organ, and Costello’s thick-throated voice. This song comes right from his bile duct – he sounds furious, even on the major-key sunrise of the choruses. Costello’s voice has aged in recent years, and though he still sings like a man possessed, he can’t carry the same heavy tunes he used to. But he’s perfect on a song like this, with its slow orbit of a melody.

He’s even better on “Sugar Won’t Work,” a slinky old-school slice of striding soul. This one’s a good showcase for guitarist Captain Kirk Douglas, but it’s Costello’s chorus and the tasty strings that make it work. (Some of the strings are real, some are sampled, but in a nice touch, the Roots sampled exclusively from Costello’s orchestral works.) It’s “Refuse to Be Saved,” however, that truly proves the concept. This song, to put it mildly, kicks ass. Aside from some horn accents and a repeating electric piano line, this song is driven by ?uestlove’s drums, and Costello rises to the occasion with some of his angriest, darkest vocals. He spits these words out like he can barely get his tongue around his own disgust.

This seems like a good time to talk about the lyrics, the most complex and rage-filled set of words Costello has given us in a long while. The cover of Wise Up Ghost is designed to resemble City Lights Publishing’s Pocket Poets series, which first published Alan Ginsberg’s Howl, among other notable works. This is not just a clever marketing gimmick – the album is politically charged poetry, red with anger. Costello is done being amused, and he’s back to being disgusted full time.

“Refuse to Be Saved” is a strong example. It’s terrifying: “They’re hunting us down here with liberty’s light, a handshaking double-talking procession of the mighty pursued by a TV crew, and coming after them, a limousine of singing stars and their brotherhood anthem, the former dictator was impeccably behaved, they’re mopping up all the stubborn ones who refuse to be saved…” Costello stands up against the dystopia in the song’s final moments, repeating “I refuse to be saved” as the world collapses.

Costello reuses some older lyrical concepts here, reworking “The River in Reverse” for the relentless stomper “Wake Me Up,” and fashioning his first flirtation with hip-hop, “Pills and Soap,” into the even more venomous “Stick Out Your Tongue.” Throughout the record, he works in apocalyptic imagery: “Someone went off muttering, he mentioned thirty pieces, Easter saw a slaughtering, each wrapped in bloodstained fleeces…” The songs are littered with messy revolutions and uncaring gods.

I only wish Wise Up Ghost were more consistent. You can hear the scaffolding creaking on “Tripwire,” a decidedly Costello-esque ballad with lyrics that should have been shouted, but ended up crooned. After that, the record sags – it’s one mid-tempo, melody-free jam after another, and despite some nice surprises, like “Cinco Minutos con Vos,” it fails to keep the interest level high. I’ve ended up liking all of these songs, at least somewhat, but the stretch from “Come the Meantimes” to the title track could have used some tightening up, some pruning, or a shot of adrenaline. They’re all valiant attempts at musical alchemy, but they fall short.

Odd, then, that the album ends with its most typically Costello song, and it’s a winner. The tender “If I Could Believe” finds Costello stretching that aging voice to its limit, singing his heart out over Ray Angry’s delicate piano. The song is a cry of anguish: “If I could believe, then I know I might sleep all through the night, but how many times must I wake in fright, nagging doubts still tugging on my sleeve, if I could believe…” His weathered voice adds a lovely dimension to this song – he’s not choosing his fate, he’s unable to choose anything else. There’s an indescribable sadness to it, one I did not expect on an album like this.

I feel pretty certain that Wise Up Ghost is a one-off – both Costello and the Roots are too restless to stay in this place for too long. That’s kind of a shame, since in the record’s early going, they seem to have hit upon something worth exploring. If the entire album had remained at the standard of the first five songs, this would be an unqualified success. As it is, it represents a fascinating collision of disparate styles, a potential chocolate-and-peanut butter situation that could have used some further digging. This album works much more often than it should, and that alone is a sign that they’ve struck some form of gold. I like Wise Up Ghost, for the most part, but I’d like another one, and then another, to really see if Elvis Costello and the Roots can truly connect. This album is audacious, and it’s almost great.

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I just heard that Girlyman broke up.

As I understand it, the four members of the band split up some time ago, but Doris Muramatsu and Ty Greenstein made formal announcements this past week. It’s a sad day – Girlyman was a consistently lovely band, built around three extraordinary voices that blended together like angel hymns. Muramatsu, Greenstein and Nate Borofsky wrote some gems during their decade-plus together, and drummer JJ Jones rounded things out, joining full time in 2010.

I first heard Girlyman courtesy of my friend Mike Ferrier, who saw them opening for the Indigo Girls. He bought me Remember Who I Am, the band’s debut, and I was hooked from then on. They made five albums, including last year’s excellent Supernova (which I never got around to properly reviewing), and one superb live album. And they wrote one song in particular that changed my life – “Somewhere Different Now” became my anthem of hope in 2008, a decidedly simple yet astonishingly beautiful work of art.

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I guess I should have seen this coming – Ty has a solo album, One True Thing, and the other three Girlymen recently collaborated on a children’s album under the name Django Jones – but I didn’t. So here’s a toast to a band that should have been more widely heard, and more widely loved. Thanks for everything, guys, and I look forward to following your future endeavors.

Next week, two generations of English piano pop. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I am a fan of swagger.

I don’t mean cockiness. There’s a certain negative connotation to the word swagger that I don’t think it deserves. When I say an album swaggers, I mean it has a confidence that informs every song, every line, every decision. It’s particularly invigorating when those decisions shouldn’t work, when the record achieves a kind of alchemy on pure willpower and determination. When you know the music you’re listening to would fall flat on its face in the hands of a lesser artist, but the record itself betrays no sense of self-doubt, that’s swagger.

And that’s as fine a description of Janelle Monae as I’ll be able to muster. Her work swaggers. She’s incredibly ambitious – she’s rounding third on a seven-part concerto about robots on the run in a futuristic city, with five of the seven suites wrapped up – and she effortlessly combines old-school soul with a dozen other, more modern influences. When reviewing her last album, The ArchAndroid, I said her music sounds like the spawn of Prince and Erykah Badu, if that kid really liked Blade Runner. It’s still true.

I couldn’t have known this at the time, but both Prince and Badu pop up in guest spots on Monae’s second full-length album, The Electric Lady. This should tell you where she’s coming from – she creates some of the most imaginative, eclectic, original-sounding soul-pop you’ll ever hear. The Electric Lady covers suites four and five of the story of Cindi Mayweather, an android who committed the sin of falling in love with a human, and is simultaneously hunted and made famous for it. But if you think it gets bogged down in sci-fi concepts, you’re not familiar with Monae. Like everything she’s done, this record… well, swaggers.

The Electric Lady is a little more streamlined and personal than prior efforts, with a few songs that seem like stabs at radio hits. It’s in no way a typical pop record, though, and the first three tracks will dispel that notion. It opens with a surf-rock-inflected overture, then slams into “Givin ‘Em What They Love,” which features Prince on vocals and guitar. It’s a slow-burn powerhouse, a surprisingly mid-tempo opening to the record, but as it steps forward, sure-footedly, it builds into a convincing stomper with a soaring chorus. And then comes “Q.U.E.E.N.,” Monae’s duet with Badu. Over a particularly ‘80s synth line, the two knock this collaboration out of the park – it’s like they decided to show everyone else attempting soulful pop music these days just how it’s done.

The quality of Suite IV never flags, and its 33 minutes zips by. The title track is an absolute triumph, the ballad “Primetime” overcomes its cheesy lyrics with a fine vocal performance by Miguel, and “We Were Rock and Roll” is a lovely bit of nostalgic ‘70s funk mixed with ‘60s soul. And then there is “Dance Apocalyptic,” one of the year’s best singles – it’s a quick-step pop tune that somehow mixes ukulele, cheesy organ, cheerleaders, finger snaps and a killer chorus into an irresistible brew. You simply will not be able to sit still through this one. It’s fantastic, and it even ends with a Prince trademark – pitch-shifted spoken word.

“Look Into My Eyes” brings the suite to a close, and it’s marvelous, a James Bond theme with a male voice choir in the background and a hundred little Henry Mancini-esque touches. And this is what I mean by swagger – you won’t find another singer on modern pop radio who would do anything like “Dance Apocalyptic” or “Look Into My Eyes,” and they certainly wouldn’t do both on the same record. It’s an incredible show of confidence.

Suite V doesn’t quite hit the same heights, but it’s still excellent. After another overture, Monae slides into the traditional soul number “It’s Code,” and follows it up with the Stevie Wonder-esque “Ghetto Woman.” With the story confined largely to a series of interludes in the form of radio call-in spots, the songs are free to explore anything Monae wants, and she chooses love and yearning. There’s even a song called “Can’t Live Without Your Love,” with swelling strings, deft clean guitar and glorious harmonies. It’s perhaps more typical than you’d expect, but stick around for the middle eight, in which Monae pulls out a humdinger of a jazz melody.

The last few tracks are pretty much perfect, concluding the suite on a stratospheric high. “Sally Ride,” named after the first woman astronaut, is a dense, jazzy piece floating by on guitars and strings, Monae giving the delirious vocal line everything she has. “I wanna fly, fly,” she sings, as the electric guitar crashes in. Nothing about this song is typical, and neither is “Dorothy Dandridge Eyes,” which features another new-school wunderkind, Esperanza Spalding. The record ends with an anthem, unlike anything else Monae has done. “What An Experience” brings up her ‘80s influences, including that plinking, echoed guitar that found its way into half the radio hits of the decade, but mashes them into a perfect, blissful, easygoing end credits theme. There’s even a reggae breakdown. Yes, it all works.

Why does it work? Because throughout this record’s 68 minutes, Janelle Monae’s self-confidence never falters. She’s innovating before your ears, pushing soul-pop into new and more fulfilling directions, showing off her chops as a singer, songwriter and producer, and oh yeah, becoming a top-notch role model for female artists who are too smart to be music industry pawns. And she does all this with an effortless grin. The Electric Lady is another terrific piece of work from one of the best pop artists to emerge in decades. It swaggers like nobody’s business.

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It would be hard to call Neko Case’s music swaggering, but her own confidence has grown immeasurably since she first emerged as a solo artist with The Virginian in 1997. She was a country-rock crooner then, covering the Everly Brothers and Queen with equal aplomb, but over four more solo albums (and five records as part of the Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers), she’s blossomed. Her work now contains strains of country, but is a glorious hybrid of all the styles she’s absorbed over the past 15 years.

Her evolution reaches its apex (at least so far) on her sixth solo album, blessed with this delightful mouthful of a title: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. She still composes tuneful meanders, but this album pulses with a sense of purpose, of drive. Case has called it her most personal work, the one on which she stopped telling stories and started baring her soul, and if that’s what it took to get her to this next level, then more power to her.

Just listen to “Man,” on which Case subverts her own gender to talk about the roles she has played. “I’m a man, that’s what you raised me to be, I’m not your identity crisis…” The lyric is pure awesome, and the music rocks, hard. It’s louder than the last couple New Pornographers records, chugging forward with purpose. She follows it up with “I’m From Nowhere,” on which she sings over nothing but an acoustic guitar, lamenting a life in the music biz. It’s pretty, and it’s even more poetic and bracing after “Man.”

The Worse Things Get is Case’s most diverse effort, diving from the thick indie rock of “Bracing for Sunday” (“Friday night girl, bracing for Sunday to come”) to the completely a cappella “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” – that song’s beautifully rendered “get the fuck away from me” will take you by surprise, but it sounds perfect in context – to the sweet acoustic ramble of “Calling Cards,” complete with subtle trumpets. All that in just over seven minutes, too. A couple minutes later, she’s covering Nico’s “Afraid” with nothing but piano, vibes and autoharp.

It’s Case’s vision that keeps all this together, wraps it up as a single piece of work. When she asks, seemingly unironically, where she left her fire on the lovely dirge of a penultimate track, it’s puzzling – the fire is all over this album. Case seems to answer herself just fine on the closing number, “Ragtime,” one of her finest and most confident tunes – “I will feel myself invincible soon,” she sings, before the horns start blaring. It’s a tremendous closer, so much so that the three bonus tracks on the deluxe edition feel as tacked-on as they are. The Worse Things Get is a unified whole, and “Ragtime” is its climax. (The hidden snippet – Case saying “That was awesome” – sums it up.)

Case has taken some flack for the softer bent of a lot of this material, as if the only way a female artist can express her fire is by rocking out. Ignoring the fact that that’s ridiculous, Case has built her… um, case on a platform of diversity here, branching out in a dozen directions, yet infusing everything with her own stamp. I say that’s a perfect expression, and I hope she keeps on expressing it. Neko Case has blossomed into something simply splendid over the past decade and a half, and while The Worse Things Get is certainly a high point, I hope it’s just a rest stop, and she keeps on climbing.

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Next week, Elvis Costello meets the Roots. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Music is physical.

I don’t just mean this as another argument for physical packaging, though that certainly adds to the experience. This week, Fish’s excellent new album A Feast of Consequences ended up in my inbox, and though I’ve listened through twice, I don’t feel like I own it yet. I won’t feel that way until the deluxe hardbound CD/DVD edition winds its way to my house. To me, the physical object is the album, and the files currently resting in my iTunes library are nothing but ghosts. The music’s there, but it isn’t tangible. It isn’t real yet.

But that isn’t what I meant when I said music is physical. I’m talking about sheer sound, about the tactile impact of putting on a record and letting it fill your room. If that record is really well made, the effect can be felt. The music has form and texture. My favorite records are like that. Nothing against the raw and bare-bones recordings many artists choose to make, but give me an album that plays with the shape of the sound. Give me a Spilt Milk or a SMiLE or a The Age of Adz. Last year’s extraordinary album by Lost in the Trees, A Church that Fits Our Needs, did exactly that. Frank Zappa called it moving the air molecules around in the room. I call it sculpting with sound.

There are a few artists who are consistently fantastic at this sort of thing. Not for them the simple pleasures of the acoustic album – these folks take their damn time, crafting every millisecond of their records until the right shape appears. They know that the exact right tone of a bass note, or an ambient flourish, can add new dimensions, even if they’re inaudible on first pass. They’re architects, building real structures out of imaginary materials, and the resulting albums are always worth diving deep into.

Trent Reznor is one of the best. Ever since The Downward Spiral in 1994, Reznor has been obsessed with physical sound, and obsessive about making sure every detail of his finely crafted records is perfectly placed. His journey from leather-wearing, rage-filled frontman of Nine Inch Nails to Academy Award-winning composer seems like it would feel disjointed, but it’s been a smooth straight line. The Downward Spiral and The Fragile were both symphonies, after all, arranged for electronics and guitars with all the precision of an orchestral score.

In recent years, Reznor has left Nine Inch Nails behind, focusing on his film work (he co-created the remarkable scores to The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and his new band, How to Destroy Angels. The latter project released its debut full-length earlier this year, and it was a surprisingly slow and ambient beast, gliding forward on the gilded tones of Reznor’s wife, Mariqueen Maandig. It was as grown-up and reserved as one might expect from the now-48-year-old, and the fury of NIN seemed a thing of the past. Once you see Trent Reznor in a suit and bow tie at the Oscars, you can’t un-see it.

But surprise surprise, here is Hesitation Marks, the eighth Nine Inch Nails album, and the first in five years. If you’re wondering how Nine Inch Nails can exist in 2013, you’re not the only one. What, exactly, would Reznor have to be upset about these days? Isn’t this a skin he’s already shed, a cocoon he’s outgrown? Hesitation Marks provides a canny answer – its concerns are more complex than NIN has been, although no less full of existential dread, and its music follows suit. It is still Nine Inch Nails, but it’s airier, moodier, less visceral and more fascinating. This is an evolution, an album that finds a way to bring the NIN sound into middle age without losing its core.

What does that mean? Hesitation Marks is considerably more open and electronic than previous NIN albums. Reznor would often build towers of sound, monoliths stretching to the sky, blotting out the sun with layers of guitars and white noise. This album is comparatively minimal, letting shafts of light through – there are many songs here without recognizable guitars at all. Second single “Copy Of A” burbles to life on a Kraftwerk-esque squiggle bass, and leaves spaces where walls would have been. “Came Back Haunted,” the first single, is probably the most classic-sounding NIN song here, and even this one bears the marks of this new sonic attitude.

You can hear it most clearly in an ethereal number like “Find My Way,” or a bizarre epic like “In Two.” Both of these songs sound sort of like Nine Inch Nails – the former like one of the slower pieces on The Fragile, the latter reminiscent of “Ruiner” in places – but they also sound completely different, like new territory for Reznor. “All Time Low” is the funkiest NIN song since “Into the Void,” “Satellite” is a full-on electro-dance track, and much of the album’s second half is surprisingly slow-building and patient. What connects all these songs together, and to NIN’s rich history, is the sonic detail in each and every track. This is Reznor the master craftsman, providing new little moments every few seconds. Final song “While I’m Still Here” mixes Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar and Reznor’s own saxophone playing into a crawling slice of dread. The entire album is full of surprises like that.

Yeah, the lyrics are still kind of stupid, but they’re more intricate here than they’ve been. While previous NIN albums have been about losing oneself, Hesitation Marks is about struggling to find oneself, about working to right the ship and make things better. Nowhere is that more evident than on the song that launched a thousand angry fanboy tweets, “Everything.” A relatively sprightly pop song with chugging guitars and harmonies, “Everything” is about overcoming: “I survived everything,” Reznor sings at its beginning, and repeats a mantra at the end: “I am home, I believe, I am home, I am free…”

The fact that Trent Reznor feels liberated enough to write such a song as Nine Inch Nails speaks volumes about this record. Hesitation Marks is the man’s finest electronic symphony in many years – maybe even as far back as The Fragile – because he harnesses his deep talent for sonic sculpture and molds NIN into unseen shapes before our ears. He allows his most famous project to grow older with him, retaining everything that makes it NIN, but evolving it. This is classic Nine Inch Nails. This is something new. It’s pretty terrific.

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Brian Transeau is another guy with an ear for sonic architecture.

Over nearly 20 years recording as BT, Transeau has made “obsessively detailed” his middle name. His meticulous music clearly takes years to put together, tiny note by tiny glitched-out note. He’s impossible to pigeonhole – he started as a trance artist with the extraordinary Ima in 1995, but by the time he created Emotional Technology in 2003, he was embracing pop, rock, rap, dance, prog, ambient, and nearly anything else he could get his laptop to do.

Since then, he’s made a string of masterpieces – the instrumental wonderama This Binary Universe, the explosive double album These Hopeful Machines (which included a cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You”), and the incredible ambient works If the Stars Are Eternal So Are You and I and Morceau Subrosa. Every one of them was crafted with infinite patience and love of sound. I have always considered BT a cut above most electronic artists, and in the past 10 years, he’s been on a roll like no other.

That hit streak continues with his ninth album, A Song Across Wires. It’s BT’s first real attempt at a dance record, but of course it’s not that simple. A triumph of progressive dance production, Wires is a 79-minute journey that will make your head spin. BT’s trademark is his restlessness, and this record vaults through trance, dubstep, pop, ambient and full-on four-on-the-floor club tunes, each song a multi-part suite of seemingly infinite twists and turns. It begins with perhaps its most traditional piece, the transcendent “Skylarking” – nine minutes of sun-dappled trance music that sounds like supernovae exploding across a brilliant starscape. It’s utterly amazing, but surprisingly straightforward for Transeau.

Not to worry, though, as the album then cycles through a series of astonishingly detailed dance numbers, teaming BT up with the likes of producers Fractal and Adam K, and singers Jes (with whom he has worked before) and Tania Zygar. The latter sings on “Stem the Tides,” a phenomenal dramatic pop song with an insistent beat. For the past decade, Transeau has been perfecting the art of producing pop songs like electronic dance music, while retaining their tunes and structures. “Stem the Tides” is a perfect example of such a hybrid – it swoops from section to section, synth lines darting in and out, but it never loses sight of its sweeping melody. (Sometimes Transeau fails in that mission – “Tonight” runs on too long for its threadbare and repetitive chorus.)

The celebrity singer this time is Matt Hales, better known as Aqualung. He adds a yearning earthiness to the blissful “Surrounded,” a song that sounds like a vortex of beats and tones. Transeau himself sings the dramatic “Love Divine,” another perfect fusion of pop-rock and dance. The major departure here is “Must Be the Love,” a slow-burner nestled in a bed of ringing chimes, lifted by the voice of Nadia Ali. Every song on this album segues, offering what seems to be Transeau’s unified field theory of dance music – it all comes together as a seamless whole.

Despite all that, A Song Across Wires is the first BT album that feels like Transeau limited himself. It focuses entirely on dance, and even though it provides an extraordinary journey through the multiple genres that call that descriptor home, dance music is but one small part of what Transeau does well. It’s phenomenal, rich and detailed and thoroughly enjoyable, but by its end, you may feel like BT hasn’t taken you to as many places as he could have. The places he does visit are wonderful, but next time I’d like to hear more of what he can do when he’s not worried about genre.

Aside from that complaint, this album is splendid. It’s another in a long line of beautiful art from Brian Transeau, a richly detailed collection that could only come from the mind of a sonic architect. Music is physical, and BT’s music will rearrange those air molecules like little else. Everything he has done is worth hearing, worth exploring, worth getting lost in, and A Song Across Wires is no exception.

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I feel the need to clarify BT’s bizarre release strategy for this album, so bear with me. If you buy A Song Across Wires on CD, you get a 79-minute perfectly segued mix of an album, with tracks ranging from five to eight minutes. But if you download it on iTunes or Amazon, you get considerably shorter edits of these tunes – between three and four minutes each, with the continuous mix as a bonus track. And if you buy it from Beatport, you can get extended tracks (six to 11 minutes) – the album on Beatport runs 98 minutes, and contains the continuous mix as a bonus. It’s very confusing, but luckily all these versions are worth hearing. I think the continuous mix is the album, with shorter and longer edits available, but the release strategy doesn’t make that clear.

Anyway, next week, it’s Janelle Monae, and after that, Fish, Elvis Costello with the Roots, Neko Case, Tom Odell and a bunch of others. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.