This week we said goodbye to Chris Squire.

I can tell you exactly which Yes song I heard first, but it’s a pretty clichéd answer for a child of the ‘80s – it was “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” The spooky video, featuring blank-faced men in suits forcing someone off the roof of a building, is still permanently etched on my memory. My first Yes album was 90125, of course – I was nine when it came out, so I can’t imagine I bought it myself, but I have the original cassette. I know I bought Big Generator in 1987, and Union in 1991, and every Yes album after that.

And I know eventually I drifted backwards through their catalog, finally hearing masterpieces like Close to the Edge and Relayer. It took a long time and a lot of musical study to become comfortable with 30-minute pieces with multiple movements, but once I was in, Yes did it for me like few other bands of their stripe. Even among 1970s progressive rock acts, a bold statement like Tales From Topographic Oceans – a double album with one 20-minute song per side – is rare. In many ways, Yes was the Platonic ideal of progressive music.

They also hold the record for most lineup changes in a single career. You never knew, album to album, which version of Yes you were going to get – in the ‘90s they careened from the Trevor Rabin-led pop lineup to the Anderson-Wakeman-Howe reunion to the Billy Sherwood days, all the way up to an album with no keyboard player and a full orchestra. Vocalist Jon Anderson has come and gone – he’s been gone lately, and the last two Yes albums included new singers.

But the one stalwart, the one musician who has been in every single lineup of Yes since 1969, was bassist Chris Squire. His fat tone and nimble playing provided the bedrock of every song, and even when the flights of fancy flew too close to the sun, Squire was there to ground them. He was seemingly up for anything, comfortable playing epics like “The Gates of Delirium” and pop tunes like “Rhythm of Love.” It is no exaggeration to say that without Chris Squire’s involvement, it would not be right to call it Yes.

Which is why it’s so difficult to imagine a future for this band without him. In May of this year, Squire took a hiatus from the band when he was diagnosed with leukemia. His battle with the disease was relatively short – he died on Saturday, June 27, at age 67. He leaves behind quite a legacy – his first solo album, Fish out of Water, joins all those Yes albums as classics of the genre. Whether Yes moves on from here or not, Squire will be sorely missed.

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In many ways, Venus is Joy Williams’ debut album.

It’s not her first record – she has three prior collections of sanitized gospel-pop on Reunion Records, having started her recording career at age 19. Nor is it her first foray into mainstream music, as you all probably know – her project with John Paul White, the Civil Wars, was ridiculously popular. But Venus is her first post-Civil Wars project, her first as a fully fledged musician and songwriter, her first real grown-up record. In a lot of ways, it’s the first time we are getting the real Joy Williams.

I always thought Williams’ work with the Civil Wars was overrated. I liked the band, but their simple folk music drew a lot more attention than I thought it deserved. I heard their 2012 breakup described as a tragedy, a painful snuffing out of a creative light, and I wondered what those people heard in them that I wasn’t hearing. Venus, on the other hand, is a smart, daring, memorable pop album that leaves both Civil Wars records in the dust. It hurts when it has to, stands up defiantly when it must, and delivers one great, intricately produced song after another until its end.

As much as I liked Williams’ voice atop the spare acoustic musings of the Civil Wars, I like it much more in this context. Venus is a thick and cloudy record, full of synthesizer washes and electronic beats, big strings, layers of harmonies and plenty of ambience. “Before I Sleep,” the big wave of an opener, should let you know what you’re in for – crashing drums, onrushes of keys, and Williams’ high and clear voice steering it home. These songs are patient – it takes a full minute of strings and beats for “Sweet Love of Mine” to kick in – and the album as a whole is confident in its more intricate instrumentation, most of it courtesy of producer Matt Morris.

If you’ve heard the first single, “Woman (Oh Mama),” you know what a departure it is for Williams. It’s bold and bluesy, all handclaps, foot stomps and staccato acoustic guitars, with a choir of low-moan backing vocals. The record doesn’t quite get this brassy again, but it’s a nice statement of intent for a woman stepping out on her own. Much of this record is about recrimination and regret, and the temptation will be to read it as a commentary on the breakup of the Civil Wars, the specifics of which neither Williams nor White have discussed publicly. A song like “Not Good Enough,” for example, plays right into that, as do laments like “One Day I Will”: “I’d love to write a happy song, one day I will, I’d like to feel a little less alone, one day I will…”

There is one song here that is absolutely about the Civil Wars, though, and that’s “What a Good Woman Does.” This is quite a crafty piece of work – it delves into everything but the specifics of the split. It opens with a cheeky reference (“I can’t carry the weight of this war”), and hints at a bigger story, at deeper secrets: “Hear me, haven’t lost my voice without you near me, and I could tell the truth about you leaving, but that’s not what a good woman does…” It’s simultaneously soul-baring and canny, a vague pointed finger that preserves the mystery. It’s a lovely piano ballad thing, and Williams sings it marvelously, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

I have no such conflicts about the final tracks – Venus ends with grace and acceptance. “You Loved Me” is a pretty tale of unconditional love, with a simple yet heartrending chorus: “I tried, and I failed, and you loved me.” “Till Forever” might be the record’s most gorgeous song, delicately played on piano and cloud-like guitars. It’s like a warm embrace: “Lover, find me underneath the covers, we will stay here until we discover all that we have to give to each other…” Closer “Welcome Home” is just as warm, Williams greeting a long-lost loved one over supple strings. “I’ve been waiting here,” she sings, a tremble in her voice, and it’s simple and splendid.

Venus is, in many ways, Williams’ first album. I genuinely hope it is not her last, because this strong collection of confident and lovely little songs points toward an equally strong solo career. This is one of those modest yet powerful records that grabs hold of you and keeps you close. If the Civil Wars had to break up to get Williams to this point, then it was absolutely worth it.

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It seems like lately many of my favorite albums stubbornly refuse to come out in my home country.

Last year’s marvelous Husky album, Ruckers Hill, finally made its way to these shores this month, where of course it died a quick death. Two of this year’s most interesting albums, Aqualung’s 10 Futures and Daniel Johns’ Talk, are only available as imports from the UK and Australia, respectively, with no plans to release them here. And now there’s the third album from awe-inspiring UK art-rockers Everything Everything, only available across the pond. I don’t know that the coming global release date will do anything to fix this. As of right now, some of the year’s best records aren’t making any impact in the U.S., and that’s unfortunate.

It’s especially galling in the case of Everything Everything, who have moved mountains to be more accessible on Get to Heaven, their new record. The quartet has always balanced their powerful, catchy melodies against their more angular and progressive tendencies, but on this album, they’ve amped up both, and wound up with their most explosive and immediate collection. Particularly in the first half, these songs are all about their choruses, and they’re just wonderful. Jonathan Higgs has a strange, off-kilter voice, but a dynamite range, and when he lands these melodies, he really lands them.

This band has never given us a one-two punch like they have here – opener “To the Blade” wafts in on shivering synths and Higgs’ falsetto, but when the guitars kick in, the song turns massive, leading into the most danceable number here, “Distant Past.” Amid some odd samples and Higgs’ surprisingly effective rapping, the chorus burst forth like light through the trees – “Take me to the distant past, I want to go baaaaaaack…” I first heard this song three months ago, and it’s been in my head ever since.

Much of the record follows suit – interesting, bizarre grooves that explode into big, lovely refrains. EvEv retain their penchant for abrasive, almost new-wave guitars and winding songs that don’t go where you’d expect, but the results here are more compact and instantaneous. As the album goes on, the balance shifts more toward the progressive – the instrumentation of “Blast Doors” reminds me of Minus the Bear, but the speak-shouting, high falsetto pre-chorus, and tremendous, smooth chorus mark it as the work of this band alone. Only closer “Warm Healer” stretches out – the nimble, complex riff fuels a six-minute powerhouse, but one that doesn’t skimp on the melody.

I’ve been hoping Everything Everything would make an album like Get to Heaven, one that retains all they’ve been good at, yet packages it in a more accessible way. “Distant Past” should be the hit of the summer, and maybe in the UK it will be. Those not inclined to pay import prices will be missing out on a tremendous step forward for a truly unique band, and on a bunch of wonderful melodies that would be bouncing around their heads for months. Get to Heaven is worth the extra cost. It is everything, everything I wanted it to be.

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This weekend, I am headed to the AudioFeed festival for the third year in a row. I’ll have thoughts about it, of course – maybe next week, maybe the week after. I still have a few more albums to get caught up on. Be here in seven for one or the other. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

There will never be another musician like Frank Zappa.

Which makes sense, since there has never been another musician like him. I own a lot of music, and I’ve heard a lot more, and I can’t name a single artist who pulled from as many different sources as Zappa, and whose brain functioned on the level necessary to bring all those sources together. Zappa was an orchestral composer, a jazz bandleader, a doo-wop balladeer, a sarcastic political commentator, an electronic music pioneer, an avant-garde freakshow and one of the finest rock guitar players to ever walk the earth.

Zappa’s catalog is massive and daunting. Between his debut in 1966 and his death in 1993, he released about 65 albums, some with the Mothers of Invention, most on his own. Many of them were double-record sets, and when the CD era came along, he expanded his scope, creating enough music to fill many two-hour-plus running times. But that’s not what makes it daunting. It’s the sheer scope of his musical range. Zappa could masterfully go from an album of sleazy ‘70s guitar-rock to an album with the London Symphony Orchestra to a three-LP concept piece about censorship and its disastrous consequences. Every one of his albums is maddeningly complex – it’s taken me years, in some cases, to absorb what they have to offer.

Zappa is often dismissed as a novelty artist, because his silliest songs (“Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow,” “Dinah-Moe Humm,” “Valley Girl”) are his biggest hits. As a humorist, Zappa often left much to be desired, and as time went on, his distaste for lyrics of any stripe fed into his grumpy-old-man streak – his humor ossified into something tasteless and mean. I have a tough time with some of the later Zappa records, which is one reason why I stopped writing my Frank Zappa Buyer’s Guide a few years ago (serialized here). But Zappa the composer and musician still fires my imagination.

Zappa died before I had the chance to discover him – I didn’t start listening to his work until around 1999. I knew, once I began delving into his dense catalog, that this was a journey I’d be taking alone. I love sharing music with people, but Zappa music is tough to recommend. There are no casual Frank Zappa fans. His work demands a patience and a concentration not required by many other artists, and the diverse nature of his work, as well as his penchant for dissonance and complexity, turns many people away. Zappa believed that anything could be music, and spent much of his life tearing down the walls between rock, jazz, orchestral and avant garde.

Late in his life, he discovered a machine called a synclavier. A primitive sequencer, the synclavier allowed Zappa to sample orchestral instruments and compose music electronically. This was a revelation for him – throughout his life, he’d tried to find orchestral ensembles that could play his demanding, challenging, often impossible pieces to perfection, with little success. (His best collaboration on that score, if you’ll pardon the pun, came in 1992 with the Ensemble Modern. Their sessions are preserved on The Yellow Shark, the last album Zappa released in his lifetime.) The synclavier allowed him to realize these extraordinary pieces with precision.

Of course, some called his synclavier work cold, but I’ve always loved it. I’m particularly fond of Civilization Phaze III, a two-hour tour de force he completed before his death. The album shows an amazing growth in Zappa’s ability to use his electronic instrument like an orchestra, and to bring that sound together with his penchant for dark conceptual records. Civilization Phaze III ends with the collapse of the world, and the sound of a crop duster killing the audience. It really was the most final final statement he could have made.

But it wasn’t his final statement. As it turns out, Zappa had two more albums ready to go when he died, and many more in various states of completion. There are some three dozen posthumous Zappa albums now, mostly live collections from various tours and audio documentaries. Zappa’s family has kept a steady stream of unreleased Zappa aimed at the market for the last 22 years, and while I’m certain Frank himself wouldn’t have wanted some of it out there, I’ve enjoyed it all. However, it’s been an agonizing wait to hear Frank’s actual final works. We got one of them, the guitar extravaganza Trance-Fusion, in 2006. But of the other, the synclavier piece Dance Me This, there was no sign for more than two decades.

Well, now it’s here. Dance Me This is the last album Zappa finished before his death, and I’ve been waiting to hear it for as long as I’ve been a Zappa fan. Why it took so long, I will never know – it’s officially the 100th release in Zappa’s catalog, and perhaps Gail Zappa was just waiting for that big round number. The cover image is a drawing by artist and photojournalist Dan Eldon, who also died in 1993. I don’t know if it’s what Frank would have chosen, but it adds a touch of poignancy to this record. We now have the end point, the period to Zappa’s amazing sentence. Here is where he ended up.

The album, of course, was not intended to carry such weight. Like all of his work, Dance Me This just sounds like the next step he took on a long journey. By this point, he’d already combed the archives for his legacy (the You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore series, The Lost Episodes), and he’d already made that final grand statement in Civilization Phaze III. With all that secure, Dance Me This finds him simply getting on with making more music.

Dance Me This was almost entirely composed and performed on the synclavier, and represents another leap forward in his growing skill with the instrument. The entire album segues, like almost every Zappa album does, and it plays like a single piece. Three of these tracks feature the throat singers of Tuva, adding a wonderfully bizarre organic element to the proceedings. The title track, in fact, features throat singing underneath a synclavier piano and percussion bed, and also includes what I expect was Zappa’s final guitar solo, a 15-second little wonder that pops in out of nowhere. If this is the last time Zappa strapped on a guitar in the studio, it’s a nice thing to have.

The centerpiece of this album is the 27-minute “Wolf Harbor,” a piece intended for what was then modern dance. It’s typically dissonant Zappa, setting a dark mood and breaking it with percussion sculptures in the vein of his idol, the composer Edgard Varese. “Wolf Harbor” sounds like a lot of Zappa’s orchestral work – dense and difficult and off-putting at first, but full of riches. As the last major piece he worked on, it’s an impressive, monolithic thing that, to the unfamiliar ear, will just sound like random noise. This is the essence of orchestral Zappa – fiendishly complex material that will appeal to a very small group of people. I’m glad I’m one of them.

The most accessible things here are at the end. “Piano” is seven minutes of holy-hell impossible-to-play piano music, all of it melodic and interesting, and “Calculus” brings the Tuvans back for three minutes of light (yet mathematically fascinating) closing credits music. While much of the record sounds like the next step in Zappa’s computer orchestra style, these songs (and others, like “Goat Polo”) are like just about nothing else in his catalog. Given the size and scope of his catalog, that’s impressive by itself. That Zappa was still pushing himself musically only weeks from his death, and coming up with pieces like “Wolf Harbor” and “Piano,” is astonishing.

If I’m making Dance Me This sound like hard work, well, it is. Like all of Zappa’s “serious” music, it’s almost frighteningly complicated, and Zappa didn’t care if you liked it. In many ways, I’m glad that this experimental record is the one that caps Zappa’s career. It shows with perfect clarity a musician who never stopped moving forward, never stopped growing, never stopped breaking into new territory. As much as I would have liked to hear the next 10 Zappa albums after this one, I’m glad I can finally listen to Dance Me This, and can finally see the shape of the man’s entire career. There will never be another like him.

You can get Dance Me This (and every Zappa album) direct from his family at zappa.com.

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So now it’s time for the 2015 Halftime Report. I know we have one more June column, but it’ll be kind of a busy one, so I wanted to do this now. What follows is what my top 10 list would look like if I were forced to write and release it now. If you saw my First Quarter Report in March, you know that the top picks haven’t changed. But there are some interesting additions to the bottom five, I think. Here’s what we have:

10. Mew, + –.
9. They Might Be Giants, Glean.
8. Florence and the Machine, How Big How Blue How Beautiful.
7. Copeland, Ixora.
6. The Weepies, Sirens.
5. Aqualung, 10 Futures.
4. Timbre, Sun and Moon.
3. Quiet Company, Transgressor.
2. Punch Brothers, The Phosphorescent Blues.
1. (Tie) Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly; Sufjan Stevens, Carrie and Lowell.

I’m not sure there’s anything coming down the pike that could beat Kendrick Lamar and Sufjan Stevens, but there are some very promising releases in the next few months. Jason Isbell’s Something More Than Free is out in a couple weeks – Isbell is playing the Two Brothers Summer Festival here in Aurora, Illinois this weekend, and his Southeastern made my 2013 top 10 list. Tame Impala and Foals have new records, and they’re two of my favorite modern rock bands. Ben Folds has an album called So There with a chamber orchestra. Iron Maiden will release their first double album (92 minutes long!) in September. And Mutemath will come roaring back with an as-yet-unscheduled fourth record called Vitals.

So anything can change. Be here next week as we talk about a more contenders from Joy Williams and Everything Everything. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Here’s a record you will probably hear about.

Nate Ruess has called his first solo record Grand Romantic, and that’s likely a better description of it than any I am about to offer. It is romantic, and it is grand, in that pomp-and-circumstance sense. Though Ruess hails from the band Fun., there isn’t much fun to be found on this record – it’s largely a serious attempt at epic pageantry, and it’s easily the most boring and bland record he has contributed to. Which, of course, means it will be a massive hit.

Looking back, I suppose an album like Grand Romantic was inevitable. Ruess first came to national attention as part of the quirky pop outfit The Format – they issued two quirky pop records in the 2000s, and then broke up without making much of an impact. Ruess then joined up with Jack Antonoff and Andrew Dost to form Fun., another quirky pop outfit. They released Aim and Ignite, their quirky pop debut, in 2009, and it also failed to make much of an impact.

And then came Some Nights, the band’s 2012 sophomore effort, and they went big, in more ways than one. Some Nights aimed for scope, trying to position Ruess as a new Freddie Mercury atop some of the fullest and most strident pop songs you’d ever want to hear. Still, they managed to balance it off with some of the old quirkiness – “It Gets Better” and “One Foot” were pretty weird. But it was the massive anthems with the simple hooks that made their name. “Some Nights” and “We Are Young” ranked among the most celebrated hits of that year, and they set Ruess’ course, for better or worse.

Frankly, it’s mostly for worse. Grand Romantic is a plodding collection of ballads and towering, synth-y rallying cries. After a quick introduction, it opens with its best and most interesting song, “Ahha,” named after the wordless call to attention that launches it like a starting gun. It never sits still, sliding from movement to movement over four minutes, its layered “We Will Rock You” verses providing a perfect counter to its typically pompous chorus. Alas, Ruess follows that up with “Nothing Without Love,” the astonishingly boring first single. Generic chords, virtually no hooks (there’s a “na na na” bit I sort of like), just Ruess yelping over thunderous drums and massive synthesizers. It’s almost difficult to get through, honestly.

Here’s the thing – Ruess has a big voice, but it works very well when layered over interesting music. The Format was interesting. Fun. was interesting. But without anything to distract from it, Ruess’ full-throated, always-on voice gets wearying. Yes, it’s impressive, but when he’s singing simple tripe like “Take It Back” at the top of his lungs, it just tires me out. Virtually every song suffers from the same malady – it’s very simple stuff played as if it were the most important music ever made. Even a sprightly pop song like “You Light My Fire” feels weighed down by the ponderous tone of the whole thing. Beck even shows up on the almost-country “What This World is Coming To,” and he adds nothing – no spark, no joy.

All that’s left to focus on, then, is Ruess’ voice and his words. The lyrics are just as generic as the chord progressions here – he’s all about love, both cherished and lost, from “You know that I can’t stop thinkin’ about you” to “I just need a moment to cry.” “It’s a great big storm and we’re holding our own,” he sings, and you can just hear thousands of people singing along with him. Since that seems to be the only purpose behind that song, I’m glad it sounds like it will do the trick. (He does this carnival barker thing near the end of it that makes me want to find a dark hole and crawl down in it.)

And so there’s the voice. I’m actually amazed at how annoying I find that voice on this record. I’ve always liked it, but here he goes for the American Idol up-to-eleven thing on virtually every song. My favorite track in the back half is “It Only Gets Much Worse,” a tender piano piece about delivering bad news in the gentlest way possible. But he over-sings it to death, stomping all over any sense of dynamics and grinding any subtlety into dust. There’s no doubt that this whole album is meant as a showcase of that voice, and the fact that it makes me twitchy and irritated – good lord, the high note just before the two-minute mark of the title track drives me crazy – is just unfortunate.

Unfortunate is a good word for this whole record, actually. In aiming for the grandest music he could, Ruess stripped away everything interesting about what he does – the bright sparks on Grand Romantic are dragged down and drowned by one mediocre, straight-faced reach-for-the-sky plod after another. I didn’t expect to end Ruess’ solo album wishing for a Fun. reunion, but here we are. I do expect, though, that nothing can keep Ruess from solo stardom. Grand Romantic is just the kind of record his accountants were hoping he would make. I wish I were one of his accountants, so I could enjoy it more.

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Here’s a record you probably won’t hear about.

Bill Mallonee has been plying his trade for more than 25 years. I’ve lost count of how many albums he has now, between the major releases and the download-only sets and the works in progress and the live records. He’s toiled virtually all of that time in obscurity – I’m not sure Mallonee would know what to do if lots of people started paying attention – but the last decade or so has been particularly painful to witness. Every few weeks, it seems, Mallonee sends an email to his mailing list offering old instruments and gear for sale, objects that have meant a lot to him. He needs to pay rent, you see, and the music just isn’t doing it.

Granted, some of this is self-inflicted. Mallonee writes great songs and makes great records, but he’s been writing the same kind of great song and making the same kind of great record for two decades, hoping the world will change around him. As I mentioned, he puts a lot of music out there, and it can be hard to know where to start, or how to move through his vast catalog. And much of it sounds very similar – strummy heartland rock with observational lyrics and a love of the electric guitar. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Mallonee’s done little else in a quarter-century of music making, so I’m not too surprised that no individual album has captured the public fancy.

So you won’t be hearing a lot about Mallonee’s 712th record, the self-released Lands and Peoples, as it treads the same ground Mallonee’s been walking for his whole career. Here’s the thing, though: he’s very, very good at this. Lands and Peoples is the second album in a row that Mallonee has made almost entirely by himself, playing guitars, bass, drums, harmonicas and other things, but he’s so skilled that you’d never know it. Even more than last year’s Winnowing, this one sounds vibrant and full, couching Mallonee’s aging-yet-strong voice and lower-key songs in ringing, chiming tones. Just on pure sound, this should be on every Americana-loving music fan’s list.

By and large, the songs here are slower than those Mallonee cranked out with Vigilantes of Love, and their viewpoints are more weathered and worn. The result is a sober set of world-weary numbers that find Mallonee holding on to whatever joy he can find. Opener “At Least For a Little While” sets the tone perfectly: “There was a Rosary on the rearview, this time it went unsaid, but if love gets the last word, well maybe I’ll be OK… no more dark clouds, at least for a little while.” From there we get tales of the lonely open road, of northern lights and southern crosses, of endless strings of days, of dust and bones.

Mallonee’s gift with words remains his strongest asset, and it never lets him down here. Much of this record is downtrodden, bowed yet unbroken. “Losing streaks take no pity on the meek, and they’ve got a way of going on for miles,” he sings on “String of Days” (with lovely accompaniment by his partner in life and art, Muriah Rose), and on “Falling Through the Cracks,” he documents a descent: “Take another swallow, take another breath, one life poured out in a million little deaths, you can saturate magnetic tape and bleed through the playback, falling through the cracks…”

But elsewhere, he tackles hard-won hope. The piano-led “I’ll Swing With Everything That I’ve Got” spins gold from its baseball metaphor, its eyes on love: “When it comes to fates and furies, it’s hard to get on base, when you’re playing every game in their park, but ever since my eyes beheld your beauty and your grace, I’ll swing with everything that I’ve got.” On “I Just Hope the Kids Make It Out,” he details the destruction of a town: “Well it all dried up here years ago, they moved it all overseas and let us go, no back-up plan and it’s all gone south, I just hope the kids make it out.”

The biggest surprise this time for me was the rustic title track, on which Mallonee takes aim at American imperialism: “We made promises with fingers crossed, deals brokered with a wink, every bet is firmly hedged with flags and rhetoric…” It’s a tough song, a moment of striking anger that gives this album a nice spark. But Mallonee chooses to end in despair, with “It All Turns to Dust,” the tale of a farmer who gambled and lost. “There’s not much you can count on, but here’s one thing you can trust, everything and everyone, it all turns to dust…”

Lands and Peoples is a dark record, but it’s a good one. It’s the kind of album that can only be made by someone who has been there in the trenches for as long as Mallonee has. At this point, it’s clear that Mallonee is going to do this – exactly this – for as long as he has in him, and he’ll probably do it for the same small group of fans he does it for now. If it isn’t obvious, Mallonee makes this music because he has to, because it pours out of him. Much as I’d like him to try new kinds of songs, new approaches to his work, I accept that this is what he does, and I’m glad to keep listening. Because Bill Mallonee is very, very good at this.

Lands and Peoples is as good a place as any to start listening to Mallonee’s work. If you like that, move just about anywhere in his discography. It’s all available to listen to and buy here.

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Next week, a little Richard Thompson and a whole lot of Kamasi Washington, maybe. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

If there’s one thing I love more than music, it’s sharing music with people.

I can’t speak for others who make mix CDs and organize listening parties and things like that, but for me, it’s about joy. Music brings me so much joy that it overflows from me pretty regularly. If there’s a chance that someone I love will get the same amount of joy from a song or an album that I will, then I feel like I need to share it. It would almost be wrong not to. I love hearing from people who tell me they wouldn’t have experienced something wonderful if I hadn’t recommended it. That basically makes my whole life.

Case in point. Last Friday was my birthday, and a group of friends asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate. I suggested going to see Love and Mercy, the Brian Wilson movie. I’ve been waiting for this film for more than a year, and the fact that it opened on my birthday allowed me to imagine that it was a present just for me. My friends agreed, despite not knowing much about Wilson, and they came out of the movie hungry to hear more. I am so happy to share some of my favorite music with them, and envious that they get to hear Pet Sounds and SMiLE for the first time.

The movie, by the way, was very good. Paul Dano captured ‘60s Brian perfectly, a tender and wounded genius who hears the music of the universe in his head. And John Cusack stunned me with his spot-on portrayal of ‘80s Brian, under the thrall of the sinister Dr. Eugene Landy (a particularly nasty Paul Giamatti), broken and yearning for rescue. The movie focuses on just these two periods of Wilson’s life, but somehow manages to say all it needs to about the man and why millions of people love him.

But enough about Brian Wilson, let’s talk about me. I’m sure my animated enthusiasm can get annoying for those who know me, so I try to ramp it down, but often I can’t help it. I’m regularly grabbing people and making them listen to songs, and I do that most often when I hear something that surprises me. Musical surprises come in all different shapes, but my favorites involve artists completely redefining themselves. I love playing songs for people without telling them who they’re listening to – the wide-eyed looks I get when I reveal the artist make my heart sing.

Lately, the artist I’ve been pulling people aside to hear is Daniel Johns. It’s especially fun with people my age, who have a particular memory of Silverchair, Johns’ old band. The Australian answer to Seattle grunge, Silverchair started out as a pretty awful three-chord misery machine, their ubiquitous hit “Tomorrow” sitting nicely beside all the Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains clones clogging the airwaves in 1995. Johns was just 16 when his band broke big, so I can forgive him for sounding like an emotionally turbulent teen on Silverchair’s first two albums, since he was one.

But here’s the thing – Johns evolved, first bringing Silverchair with him – the band’s 2007 opus Young Modern was my favorite record of that year – and then striking out on his own. Talk is Johns’ first solo album, and if you have no preconceptions about him, you’ll just think it’s a really good modern pop record. If you know that he’s the guy from Silverchair, the metamorphosis he’s undergone here is striking – it’s a little like if John Legend used to be in Nickelback.

Talk is an electronic pop album, at times brooding and sexy, at others effervescent. It exists in a realm partway between Prince and The Weeknd, with some elements of James Blake and Frank Ocean mixed up in there. Some of it is reminiscent of his collaboration with Paul Mac in the Dissociatives, but Talk plunges into brand new territory for Johns, and it suits him remarkably well. He’s honed his voice into a fine instrument, with a shivery falsetto that glides atop his sparse and echo-y drum sounds and his blipping keys.

The album opens with a statement – “Aerial Love” is as smooth and spare a pop song as you’ll find on here, Johns crooning “Ooh, I’m ready” over a single droning keyboard and click-clack drums. “We Are Golden” slips into dissonance, and perhaps should not have been at track two despite its sensual feel, but “By Your Side” picks up the pace with a tremendous, full pop chorus. “Cool On Fire,” a collaboration with Lorde producer Joel Little, matches waves of warm synthesizer with a catchy melody, and sounds like a hit to me.

The album gets more experimental as it goes along – “Dissolve” takes a new wave direction, while “Sleepwalker” sounds like what I was hoping Chet Faker’s album would deliver. At some points here, Johns’ intricate pop sensibilities come to the fore, but at others, like “Sleepwalker,” he aims for something that is initially off-putting, but rewards repeated listens. Talk is a deceptively sparse piece of work – the whole thing is immaculately produced, with subtle harmonies and almost inaudible layers of sound.

Talk a bit long, and at 15 songs not all of it works – I would have dumped the grating “Going on 16,” for instance. But when Johns finds a groove, as he does on the kinetic “Faithless,” he sells this new direction with all he has. If there’s an overriding quality that has characterized Johns’ career, it’s that he doesn’t care what people think of him. He’s a restless artist doing whatever he wants, and I’m enjoying hanging on for this ride. If you still think of Johns as the kid crooning in his best Eddie Vedder voice, Talk will leave you stunned and amazed.

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Of course, I don’t need a radical reinvention to be surprised and happy. In fact, sometimes the opposite works just fine.

I’ve been a fan of English trio Muse since 2003, when their masterpiece Absolution hit stores. Here was a perfect distillation of everything I wanted from post-OK Computer Radiohead, but didn’t get. Absolution was loud, vast, intricate, dynamic and sweeping, and in Matthew Bellamy, the band had a singer who could handle all the universe-spanning magnificence they could throw at him. Bands who unironically aim for greatness are few and far between, and Muse were one of them.

They still are, but over three subsequent albums, Muse drifted further and further over the top for me. They indulged an experimental side that led them from the dancehalls to the concert halls, and their unwinking earnestness took their ever-more-grandiose music into self-parody territory more than once. I felt like they kept it together even through The Resistance, a synth-heavy smorgasbord that ended with a 13-minute orchestral piece, but on The 2nd Law, they finally slipped into the ridiculous. Between their gigantic Olympic anthem “Survival” and their two-part dubstep suite, the record flew right off the rails with gusto.

So it is nothing but the most pleasant of surprises that Muse’s seventh album, Drones, is their tightest, most focused and most consistent effort since Absolution. This is the album on which they remembered that, at their core, they’re a three-piece rock band. The great majority of this record is built on guitar, bass, drums and vocals, and it rocks harder and tighter than they have in many years. Strikingly, they retain their sense of drama – this is a concept album about military technology as metaphor for our daily sleepwalking lives, after all. But throughout Drones, I was surprised at how often I was hearing a really great band just playing.

Opener “Dead Inside” is the record’s one concession to the dance-pop grooves that have been present in Muse’s work since “Supermassive Black Hole,” and they’re more of an embellishment here as Bellamy’s guitars take center stage. “Psycho” is a pummeling riff rocker, but it’s nothing next to “Reapers,” a six-minute power trio workout that finds all three in top form. (Just listen to that steamroller that assaults the last 90 seconds.) “The Handler” follows suit, growing from a riff that would have seemed at home on a ‘90s Megadeth album. Chris Wolstenholme’s bass playing on this track is epic.

Not all of it works. This is revolution music, but being Muse, it’s painfully straightforward and often silly revolution music. “Defector” opens with these lines: “Free, yeah, I am free from your inciting, you can’t brainwash me, you’ve got a problem.” That’s representative of the whole thing – the main character starts off… well, dead inside, and allows society to control him, but he defects on “Defector” and revolts on “Revolt.” “War is all around, I’m growing tired of fighting,” he sighs on “Aftermath,” as simply and plainly as he can. The songs in the latter half – the revolution songs – don’t hold up as well, particularly the sing-songy “Revolt.”

But this being Muse, they save their biggest wallop for the end. “The Globalist” is a 10-minute powerhouse about eradicating country lines, and it builds magnificently from a Sergio Leone strum to an explosive, full-on jackhammer-beat stunner. This piece never stops moving, never stops impressing, and when it dissolves into the title track, an a cappella coda based on a piece called “Sanctus and Benedictus,” it’s riveting. The haunting choral arrangement, ending (of course) with a grand “amen,” makes for an unsettling ending.

Drones shouldn’t be that much of a surprise – when you fall off the tightrope the way Muse did on The 2nd Law, you either keep pushing forward into incomprehensibility or you retrench and recapture what you did best before you lost your way. Drones does that magnificently, reclaiming Muse’s place as a grand rock band. It’s their most cohesive effort in more than a decade, and one of their best.

* * * * *

And sometimes, just the very existence of a band or album surprises me so much that I need to share it, just to get other opinions on it.

In the case of FFS, I’ve heard the album three times and I still sort of can’t believe it exists. FFS is a collaboration between long-running American crazy-pop brother act Sparks and less long-running Scottish dance-rock band Franz Ferdinand. If you know both bands, you’re probably tossing this information around in your head now, imagining how it will sound. And you’re probably right. While I’m fairly certain the six members of FFS thought of the band name first and everything else second, the hour-plus album they’ve created is as much fun as you’d hope it would be.

Throughout the band’s self-titled record, you can hear the Mael brothers and the Franz Ferdinanders working to integrate their sounds. When they get it right, as they do on “Police Encounters” and “Save Me From Myself,” the result is a slinky, danceable concoction with just the right amount of sneering from both parties. “Dictator’s Son” is almost the ideal, the Maels trading lead vocals with Alex Kapranos as the song careens from synth-piano theatrical rock to gyrating guitar crunch. Sparks adds a touch of tongue-in-cheek grandeur to Franz, while Franz adds a rawer rock edge to Sparks.

Even when they’re off balance, the team does good work. “Little Guy from the Suburbs” is a Franz Ferdinand-style ballad – a couple chords, some low-key intonation. Likewise the cheeky “Collaborations Don’t Work” is pure Sparks with some Franz-y touches to bring it home. Basically a rock opera in seven minutes, “Collaborations” is the perfect purposely-disjointed snarky statement from these two bands: “Mozart didn’t need a little Haydn to chart, Warhol didn’t need to ask De Kooning about art, Frank Lloyd Wright always ate a la carte…”

Really, if you’re a fan of either of these bands (or, ideally, both), all you need to know is that this exists. Franz Ferdinand and Sparks formed a band called FFS, and created an album that includes a song called “Collaborations Don’t Work.” If that doesn’t make you want to hear it, then nothing I can say is going to do the trick. If it does, then you’re in for a fun hour of somewhat silly, mostly delightful operatic-yet-danceable pop. That FFS exists at all is a surprise. That it’s good is just the icing on the cake.

Next week, some random catching up with Of Monsters and Men, Bill Mallonee and Jamie xx. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The first order of business this week is to correct a pretty glaring oversight.

I have somehow let Florence and the Machine get to a third album without sparing more than 50 words on them. This despite the fact that I enjoyed their first two, particularly the second, Ceremonials. In my criminally short Fifty Second Week review of it, I called Ceremonials a go-for-broke second album, and it is – Florence Welch took the opportunity her hit single afforded her and poured it into a statement of intent. The Machine goes big or the Machine goes home.

So when I heard about the third Florence album, How Big How Blue How Beautiful, and when I heard the smashing first single “Ship to Wreck,” I knew I would have to reserve some space here for it. This almost never happens – I can’t even remember the last time I repeatedly failed to review something I enjoy as much as I enjoy Florence and the Machine. There’s a particular switch in my head reserved for big-voiced, dramatic female singers, from PJ Harvey to Kate Bush to Neko Case to Natasha Khan, and Florence Welch trips that switch consistently.

I admit I was a bit worried about this record, since advance word described it as a quieter, more intimate affair. As is so often the case, advance word is a dirty, dirty liar. Since Ceremonials was released in 2011, Welch has lived through a breakup and a breakdown, and while there are a few tracks that could be considered restrained (most notably the lovely dirge “St. Jude”), the overwhelming majority of How Big lives up to its title. It’s produced by Markus Dravs, the man who stacks sounds for Arcade Fire, and some of these tracks have dozens of guest musicians. If what you like about Florence and the Machine is their penchant for the massive and the dramatic, this album won’t let you down.

It starts with “Ship to Wreck,” which is already one of my favorite singles of the year. A portrait of an out-of-control downward spiral set to jangly guitars, this song features a big-throated singalong chorus that sets the tone for the rest of the set. Second single “What Kind of Man” follows, its quieter introduction shattered by guitars and brass as Welch cranks that voice up. She practically yells her way through most of this tune, and it’s riveting. The title track follows suit – quieter opening, building up to something massive. This one debuts the 36-piece orchestra that makes sporadic appearances, and its brass section plays the song out in grandiose fashion.

And so it goes, from strength to strength. Welch has such a big, bold voice that the music often has to be big and bold behind her, or she’ll overpower it. The wall of music on How Big allows her to cut loose, as she does on the gigantic chorus of “Queen of Peace.” When she does decide to rein things in and croon, the results are similarly splendid. She sings the hell out of “Various Storms and Saints,” a lower-key meander with a delicate string section. “Hold on to your heart, don’t give it away,” she warns, echoing a theme of loss and building back up that permeates these songs.

The material on How Big remains strong and vibrant straight to the end. I’m a fan of the Neko Case-esque “Caught,” with its supple rising-chord chorus and Welch’s more subtle singing on the verses. I love the relentless “Third Eye,” the one song here that builds in an Arcade Fire influence, and the aforementioned “St. Jude,” with its orchestrated ambience. Closer “Mother” is a slinky bit of soul-pop that suits Welch down to the ground, with synth-y goodness provided by Paul Epworth. Even the bonus tracks are solid, particularly the rolling “Make Up Your Mind.”

Throughout, the main attraction is Welch’s voice – hearing it wrap around each of these songs, giving them exactly the amount of force and restraint required. She’s a great singer, she’s a very good songwriter, and this is a very strong album. I have no idea why it’s taken me this long to put all that in words, but there’s no way I’ll be ignoring her work here again.

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Speaking of bands I’ve unjustly ignored, there’s a new Dawes album.

I’m pretty sure I first heard about this Los Angeles quartet on The A.V. Club. If you’re a regular reader of that site, you probably know what I mean – in 2011, the Club posted a recommendation for the second Dawes album, Nothing is Wrong. This recommendation, no matter how sincerely meant, was written in such a way that the notoriously sarcastic and savvy commenters called it out as a paid advertisement. And from then on, to varying degrees, everything the A.V. Club staff recommends has been looked at suspiciously and compared, by the commenters, to Dawes, the undisputed pinnacle of all music.

It’s a funny meme, and it might not be as funny if the band itself were not so pleasant and unassuming. That’s probably why I’ve all but forgotten about them in this space, despite having liked all of their records. I included Nothing is Wrong in the 2011 Fifty Second Week, but that’s it. I wrote nothing about their third album, Stories Don’t End, despite listening a few times and enjoying it. And if not for two things, I might have forgotten about their fourth, the just-released All Your Favorite Bands, as well.

But yes, there are two things that have kept this album at the forefront of my mind. First is that it’s produced by David Rawlings, longtime musical partner of Gillian Welch, and I thought (correctly, as it turns out) that would be a smart pairing. And second, Dawes will headline the best summer festival in my hometown of Aurora, Illinois later this month, and if you live anywhere near the area, you should come. (Jason Isbell is headlining the second night, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about his new album too.)

So I paid particular attention to All Your Favorite Bands, and I’m glad I did, because I think it’s my favorite Dawes album. It’s their prettiest and most sentimental work, and you can hear the magic Rawlings brought to the table – songs are arranged with room to breathe, harmonies are recorded with a bit more natural roughness. Taylor Goldsmith’s writing remains straightforward, and Rawlings’ organic production suits it perfectly, adding new dimensions to what this band does.

The result is something that remains sweet for most of its running time, but never becomes saccharine. “Somewhere Along the Way” epitomizes Goldsmith’s approach – it’s a song of renewed hope, beginning in pain (“Somewhere along the way, the dots didn’t all connect, the promise became regrets…”) and ending with a hint of new dawns to come (“Somewhere along the way I started to smile again, I don’t remember when…”). The song rides a pleasant, delicate mid-tempo groove, a description that would work for a lot of these tunes.

The title track is a lovely piano-driven toast to a friend. I can think of few such toasts I like as much as “may all your favorite bands stay together.” “I Can’t Think About It Now” is a shuffling minor-key tale of obsession (with a swell guitar solo and Welch on backing vocals), while the sad “To Be Completely Honest” details the end of a relationship: “To be completely honest, I think I know how it ends, the universe continues expanding while we discuss the particulars of just being friends…”

My main quibble with this album is that the band sequenced one of its finest songs, “Right on Time,” near the end, almost like an afterthought. This song is superb, its alt-country beat and tasty main riff driving it onward. (It’s also one of a few on this low-key record that rocks.) Closer “Now That It’s Too Late, Maria” is a stream-of-consciousness story of dissolution: “There’s always more to say but I’m just skipping to the ending, when you move back to Texas and I meet a girl who wants to change her name…” It runs almost 10 minutes, it changes only slightly over that time, but it holds my attention all the way through thanks to some supple playing and a well-conjured dusky atmosphere. It’s unlike anything this band has done, and they pull it off.

Dawes is never going to be the kind of band that knocks your socks off. They’re more of a gentle caress, a lovely visit with friends in your backyard. All Your Favorite Bands is the prettiest thing they’ve made, even when it’s full of sorrow and regret, and it’s further proof that there is nothing at all wrong with pretty. I’m looking forward to hearing these songs live. Until then, I intend to keep listening to the record – I like it more each time I do.

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I don’t even want to mention the new Barenaked Ladies album, except to say that if any band should just pack it in, this one should. Their third post-Steven Page LP, Silverball, is a boring disaster, “mature” in all the wrong ways. I’m never going to hate this band, but really, they should stop. And that’s all I want to say about that.

Enough of that, though, because next week we have Muse, Of Monsters and Men and that bizarre collaboration between Franz Ferdinand and Sparks, winningly titled FFS. We shall reconvene in seven. And when we do, I will be forty-one. Happy birthday to me.

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See you in line Tuesday morning.