We lost Chuck Berry this month.

I’ve never been a fan of Elvis Presley, and whenever anyone would ask me who the real king of rock ‘n’ roll is, I wouldn’t hesitate to say Chuck Berry. Seeing Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, the 1987 documentary that chronicles a pair of Berry concerts, was a big moment for me. While there are a lot of musicians who can rightly be called influential, Berry is one of the few whose impact cannot be overstated. I’m paraphrasing my friend Greg Boerner here: If you like rock music, of any stripe, you owe a debt to Chuck Berry. If you play rock music, of any stripe, you owe your career to Chuck Berry.

Believe it or not, Berry has a new album coming out, his first in 38 years. That’s almost as long as I’ve been alive. It was always intended to be his last, but sadly, Berry did not live to see it released. He died at age 90 at his home, leaving behind a legacy so indelible that generations of guitar players carry it on every time they play that fast, exciting sound he pioneered. Hail to the real king of rock ‘n’ roll. May he rest in peace.

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Berry’s death (and long life) offers a good opportunity to reflect on what we leave behind us, and how we deal with the inevitable end. If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I have a particular fascination with final records, particularly those made under the shadow of impending death. Last year gave us two incredible examples of this in David Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, both difficult and bold final statements from artistic icons. And I am still captivated by Warren Zevon’s final days, and his final record, The Wind.

In truth, though, any artist’s latest work could be his or her last. Prince, for example, clearly did not intend Hit n Run Phase Two to be his last word, and it certainly isn’t a significant enough piece of his canon to shoulder that weight. Imagine if Johnny Cash’s last album had been Boom Chicka Boom, for example, instead of his extraordinary run of American Recordings. Imagine if Miles Davis had died with You’re Under Arrest, instead of swinging back with Tutu and Aura. Or imagine if he’d finished that final hip-hop-driven album, complete with Prince collaborations, instead of leaving us with the halfway glimpse that is Doo Bop. As Chuck Berry once said, you never can tell.

I wish no ill on Stephin Merritt, but if his new Magnetic Fields opus, 50 Song Memoir, sadly becomes his last, it would be a fine capper to his remarkable career. Merritt is a songwriter’s songwriter, a storyteller of breadth and depth that is much rarer now, certainly, than it used to be. Merritt sits comfortably in the lineage of masters like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, encapsulating full-length novels into the barest few lines and writing love songs that contain whole worlds. He made his name with 69 Love Songs, a monolithic set that explored that much-maligned and yet ever-present form from every angle, and has kept up a steady stream of output (with the Fields and his other projects) since, all of it worth hearing.

But one thing he hasn’t done – in fact, one thing that has made him uncomfortable – until now is autobiography. Merritt is an observer and a tale-spinner, and his songs are rarely about him. 50 Song Memoir has a gimmick that’s just irresistible: Merritt, now 50, has written a song for each year of his life, and collected them on five CDs, one for each decade. It’s as delightful as it is unexpected, and it offers, for the first time, a real window into the man behind the music.

Of course, this is Stephin Merritt we’re talking about, so this isn’t straight “and then this happened” diary entry. It’s more oblique and artful, and Merritt can’t resist looking back at 50 and commenting here and there as well. Musically he incorporates influences from the decades he’s traversing – the ‘60s material brings in some psychedelia, and the ‘80s songs sound like ‘80s songs. But of course, the entire two-and-a-half-hour thing sounds like no one else but Merritt.

50 Song Memoir, then, is a collection of moments, each filtered through Merritt’s particular prism. The early songs are mainly memories – “Judy Garland” left an impression, as did “A Cat Named Dionysus” – but Merritt makes sure to include his conflicting religious impulses at age 9, on a song called “No.” It’s the album’s first stunner, showing how he came to rely on evidence and reject spirituality early. At age 11, Merritt ordered a record called “Hustle ‘76” off of the television, sparking his love of music, which he explores in “Rock ‘n’ Roll Will Ruin Your Life” (age 14) and “How to Play the Synthesizer” (age 16).

And even during his teenage years, he is unsparing with his mother and the succession of boyfriends and stepdads he grew up with. “Happy Beeping” is a frightening tale of abuse from age 17, and it sets up the difficult “Fathers in the Clouds” from age 34, and this couplet: “There’s a lie on my birth certificate, and the other guy would like me to change it, I’ve met each of them twice…” The teenage years are full of music and exploration – dancing to Ultravox on “Foxx and I,” going clubbing on “Danceteria” – while the twenties are full of sex (“Me and Fred and Dave and Ted”) and scraping by (“Haven’t Got a Penny”). The second and third discs here serve as a splendid portrait of what it was like to grow up gay in the ‘80s, with the specter of AIDS hanging over every encounter.

The fourth disc, detailing Merritt’s life from age 31 to 40, is the saddest. It even begins with a song called “I’m Sad,” and it includes a tribute to New York after 9/11 (“Have You Seen It in the Snow”) and a concluding trilogy about an ill-fated romance. (The second entry in that trilogy, “Cold-Blooded Man,” is one of the best songs here, and one of the harshest.) During these years Merritt moves from his beloved New York to Los Angeles, chasing after a boyfriend, and it’s a decision he comes to regret.

Thankfully, the final disc isn’t full of recriminations and regrets. It’s actually the most beautiful of the five, save for the opener, “Quotes,” an unleashed smack at irresponsible journalists. (Only Merritt would rhyme “speech defects” with “homosex” and then continue the word – “uality” – on the next line.) “You Can Never Go Back to New York” finds Merritt returning to his home and finding it wonderfully different, while “Big Enough for Both of Us” finds him falling in love again, and playing on our sense of double entendre to talk about his heart. “I Wish I Had Pictures” could have been the final track, as a 49-year-old Merritt looks back on his life wistfully: “I’m just a singer, it’s only a song, the things I remember are probably wrong, I wish I had pictures of every old day ‘cause all these old memories are fading away…”

But true to perverse form, Merritt chooses to end with “Somebody’s Fetish,” which sums up what he’s learned about love: there’s someone for everyone. “And I, even I, with my wildebeest’s face, my eccentricities and my freedom from grace, even for me has Cupid found a place,” he sings, and somehow he makes even his hangdog vocal style sound giddy here. It’s a quirky, beautiful thing, and it ends this memoir on a hopeful, joyous note.

The question everyone will ask is whether 50 Song Memoir is as good as 69 Love Songs, and I think that’s the wrong question. They’re very different works, despite being twin pillars of the Magnetic Fields catalog. I think 50 Song Memoir is the more significant achievement for this reclusive, reticent artist, giving us an extended look at his own life for the first time, and on his own terms. It’s quite a ride, and by the end you feel like you know Stephin Merritt, finally, as more than just a clever, sad songwriter. That’s worth a million love songs to me. 50 Song Memoir is a treasure, and I’m glad both of us lived long enough to see it happen.

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As Mark Twain once said, though, the trouble with stories is that if you keep them going long enough they always end in death. That’s something my friend Noah Gabriel knows well. He’s dedicated his new album (his tenth!), Dead Reckoning, to an extended reflection on life’s inevitable end, and in the process he’s shed the blues-rock style he’s worked hard to establish, both on his own and with his band, Noah’s Arcade. In its place he’s spun a moody web of subtle sounds, and over 32 minutes those sounds will wrap you up and carry you along.

Dead Reckoning is split into two sides. On the first, Gabriel writes from the perspective of someone on his deathbed, staring down eternity. He does so with his usual straightforward language, and it’s heartbreaking. “Jericho Walls” finds our character wondering if he will weigh down those he’s leaving behind, and on “Temporary State” he curses whatever disease has left him where he is: “God damn this temporary state, each day the hollows they wait, God damn this restless mind of mine, got me doing time…” He wrestles with belief throughout these songs, noting that “everybody’s born destined for the dirt” on “Heavy” but holding out hope on “Invitation”: “If heaven is a promise, I hope it never breaks, I hope to find it open when I reach the gates…”

Death comes on “Damage Been Done,” and it’s tough to listen to: “I hear the beat of the angel’s wings, come to take me home, rest with me here, child, can’t you see the damage been done…” This is Gabriel’s most emotionally resonant material ever, and the 18 minutes of side one play like a single piece, setting a mood and seeing it through. “Heavy” feels like an extended introduction to “Invitation,” and I mean that in the best way – when the drums crash in on the latter track, it feels like a chapter turning, like a journey moving on. And “Damage Been Done” is a powerful, sparse conclusion.

Side two, then, approaches death from the other side, from the point of view of people watching a loved one slip away. “Fast Train” feels somewhat disconnected from the rest, though it provides a two-minute burst of strums and drums that is much needed at the halfway point of this record. But the next three songs explore Gabriel’s theme thoroughly. “Far From Home” finds him wishing he could hold on to his loved ones as they go: “Through worried eyes I watched you try, you gave and I prayed but you couldn’t stay, I gave all my love…” “Midnight Blue” is like a lullaby, but one full of dread and longing: “And we both know the sun, it couldn’t come too soon…”

And “Shine,” the final song (save for a bookending instrumental), hearkens back to the spirituality of the first side, Gabriel’s character recovering from his loved one’s death and promising to make the most of life. “I know there’s something more than living, I know there’s reason for the rhyme, life is love and love is giving, so now I’m giving in to shine…” It’s a hopeful finish to what is basically a half-hour of mourning, and it’s the closest thing here to Gabriel’s usual style – he sounds like he’s coming alive at the end, soaring guitar solos and all. It’s really the best message anyone could take from an album about death – in the words of Warren Zevon, enjoy every sandwich.

You can buy Dead Reckoning from Noah here. Be sure to check out that great cover by Aurora artist Chris Hodge.

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This one ran long, so I’m going to save the First Quarter Report until next time. Speaking of next time, I have Aimee Mann’s new one to talk about, as well as a few others. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I love synthesizers.

I grew up in the ‘80s, so I appreciate the sound of synthesizers, when used well. I’m the guy who spent at least part of high school listening to Yanni and thinking he was pretty great. (His old stuff is much better than his later material. Yes, I am critically assessing the career of Yanni.) I wasn’t all that interested in Van Halen before “Jump.” I loved the Pet Shop Boys and the Art of Noise and anything with big, blocky keyboard chords. And don’t even get me started on “The Final Countdown,” which was actually considered awesome before Arrested Development got ahold of it.

I play keys, too, and have spent an awfully large percentage of my free time shaping new synth sounds and composing massive electronic music pieces, none of which really deserve to see the light of day. My first keyboard was a Casio SK-200, with tiny keys and an on-board sampler so I could loop my own voice. (Badly.) I made several instrumental albums full of goopy keyboards, and then in my twenties made many, many more, filling hours of tape with sloppily programmed beats and sloppily played keyboard leads right out of bad prog.

The point is, I love them. So it’s never struck me as odd for a rock band (or any band, really) to use them. Incorporating synths has become a bit of a cliché, something bands do when they need new ideas, but to me it’s always sounded natural. For instance, I barely even noticed that the new Spoon album, Hot Thoughts, makes much more use of keys than prior albums by the band. Only by putting this record next to older, more piano-driven ones like Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight did I register just how far they’ve evolved.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise – Hot Thoughts was produced by Dave Fridmann, longtime sound-shaper for the Flaming Lips, who guided OK Go, to name one, through a similar transformation recently. Fridmann loves his synthesizers, and loves that woozy, not-quite-distinct sound he creates. (He tends to overdrive the drums and vocals, and blur everything else.) Hot Thoughts sounds like you’d expect Spoon to sound when filtered through Fridmann’s prism, complete with an increased fascination with synth sounds.

But at its heart, it’s still a Spoon album. Britt Daniel still sports one of the best vocal swaggers since Jagger, and his songs are clap-along gallops. Only a couple tracks here – the six-minute shiver “Pink Up” and the closing saxophone-laden instrumental “Us” – sound like true experiments with form, and feel like Fridmann taking the wheel. The other eight tracks retain that essential Spoon feeling – just check out the slinky groove of “Can I Sit Next to You,” or the welcome return of the piano pounding in the slow burn “Tear it Down.” (And the bass line of “Shotgun” should have its own record deal.)

Hot Thoughts is a subtle enough transformation that it barely registers as one. Spoon makes judicious use of synthesizers, but incorporates them into their own template. They’re enhancements, not replacements for core elements of their sound. More interesting to me is when artists formerly known for guitars or other more organic instruments take the deep dive into cold electronics. That’s when you see how much of their humanity and warmth comes through.

David Bazan is an excellent example. The former Pedro the Lion frontman made his name by playing shambling guitar-driven indie rock, and his first solo albums stuck to that sound, with some electronic embellishments. But with Blanco, his third, he dove in, and his fourth, Care, continues that exploration. There aren’t any organic instruments on Care, as far as I can tell – it’s all computer beats and blipping synth sounds. “Disappearing Ink,” one of two previously released songs here, sounds like a dispatch from 1982, but it works. Bazan’s hangdog voice and melodies complement this instrumentation very well.

And like Spoon, Bazan hasn’t changed what he does, at its core. His songs are still Bazan songs – dark and memorable, filled with turns of phrase that are like twists of a knife. Care is one of his most optimistic, lyrically speaking – it’s full of love songs, albeit realistic ones. “Inner Lives” captures a domestic scene between two people not quite connecting: “Without a word you made coffee for us both, without thinking I sat down and made a joke, the way you laughed at me threw off a little spark, in an instant I remembered who we are…”

“Keep Trying” contains a rare (for Bazan) shaft of light, a sweet tableau (“Isn’t there something that we both like to do? That’s not what I was thinking, but as long as it’s with you…”) in which he admits that “sometimes love isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be,” but, he repeats, you “keep trying.” On “Make Music” he uses a band as a metaphor for a relationship, and brings that to its full flower on the closer, “The Ballad of Pedro y Blanco,” a beautiful series of letters from one partner to another through their lives. “Dreamin’ on in a hospital bed, I’m holding her hand and kissing her head, kids and grandkids in unison howl, ‘Put down your guitar, go enjoy her right now…’”

Care is another terrific Bazan album, and proof that this transformation into a homespun electronic artist suits what he does very well. The key to its success, though, is that Bazan truly hasn’t changed – the trappings are different, but the songs and sentiments are pure David Bazan, and if he were to play these tunes on guitar, they would sound like his older work.

No, if you want someone who has made a complete transformation, you need to look at Anohni. She was once Antony Hegarty, who sung torch songs and orchestral numbers with a haunting, unforgettable voice. That voice is the only thing connecting her work as Anohni to her past. With last year’s album Hopelessness, she emerged as a powerful electronic artist, and her new EP Paradise continues along that path. In fact, although it is only six songs and 22 minutes, Paradise is a stronger and more complete statement, I think, thanks in part to noisy production by Oneohtrix Point Never.

I remain amazed at how well Anohni’s utterly unique voice works in this setting. Jumping from strings to rapid-fire electronic drums and glittering synthesizers is like time travel for her, and on Paradise, she sounds energized, alive, angry, standing on mountaintops and harnessing lightning. Several of these songs explode into noise, and the darkness of the sound is tangible. “Jesus Will Kill You” is perhaps the darkest, a sustained torrent of rage aimed at our leaders. “Burning people, burning hope, burning planet, all for your wealth, your wealth is predicated on the poverty of others, others must be poor if you’re to be rich…”

“You Are My Enemy” is surprisingly gentle, Anohni’s astounding voice rising above the subtle organ sounds as she sings about being ready to “cast from this world.” The glorious harmonies in the chorus belie the rancor in the lyrics. “Ricochet” is a song about reincarnation – specifically, about how Anohni doesn’t want to be reincarnated, and will be mightily pissed if she is.  Final track “She Doesn’t Mourn her Loss” is an ode to her mother, and one of the saddest and prettiest things she’s ever given us. “She fed me all those years, and now she’s dry as her tears, and I’m asking, ‘Who will remember her if not her children?’”

Anohni’s cocoon-like transformation is so complete that she almost sounds like a completely different artist. This isn’t just a matter of adding synthesizers and tweaking her songwriting. This is a change of artistic outlook, a totally new skin, and it shines. Hopelessness and Paradise are the best work I’ve heard from her, and no matter how sad and dark this material gets, I can’t help but think that she sounds reborn through it.

Of course, while all these kids are finding keytars in their parents’ closets, the boys in Depeche Mode are sitting back and laughing. They’re early adopters of this sound, and are celebrating 37 years together with a new album called Spirit. And it sounds like Depeche Mode, through and through. Slow crawlers built on thumping drums and pulsing keyboard thrums, Dave Gahan’s deep voice (which also hasn’t changed a lick in nearly four decades), songs about liars and false religions and standing up for truth.

In short, it’s a Depeche Mode album, and in a column entirely about reinvention, they’re the counter-argument for consistency. Is it a strong argument? Well, it’s a strong album, though it doesn’t distinguish itself from the last one (or two, or…). I do find it ironic that the second track is called “Where’s the Revolution” (a plea for social change), and it sounds like every Depeche Mode song in recent memory.

Still, I quite like this record, and Depeche Mode in general, if for no other reason than as ongoing inspiration for the younger artists discovering how effective synths can be. But if you want a real revolution, look toward the likes of Bazan and Anohni, ripping up their own rulebooks and blazing new paths.

That’ll do it for this week. Next week, the Magnetic Fields trace fifty years in fifty songs. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This is a column about long-awaited returns, and while I was deciding on that theme, one of them happened.

In fact, it’s the most important of them – Fleet Foxes have ended their six-year exile with a nine-minute song and the announcement of their third album, Crack-Up. And good lord, that song, “Third of May/Odaigahara,” is excellent. Robin Pecknold’s merry men have kept everything I loved about them – the folksy timelessness, the unearthly harmonies, the soul-lifting tunefulness – and indulged in their ambition. Just listen to that propulsive space-rock section in the middle! Crack-Up is out in June, and it feels to me like the difficult third album, which means I’ll probably love it to pieces.

But the fact that Fleet Foxes resurfaced after six long years with a complex slice of folk-prog does lead to some interesting questions about artists going AWOL and what we expect when they come back. Pecknold has been promising new Fleet Foxes music for many of those six years, and you can hear in “Third of May/Odaigahara” just where those years went. Do we look to returning artists’ new music to justify the time they spent away? Do they owe us that time? Do we even deserve an explanation? I know it can feel like we do, but do we?

And I mean, of course we don’t, but I’ll admit to feeling relieved and more on board with this new Fleet Foxes because I can hear the steps forward the band has taken in the past half-decade. I’m one of maybe fifteen people alive who enjoyed Chinese Democracy, partially because the years of work that went into it were audible in every groove of that thing. (Whether it was overworked is another question for another day.) But is it necessary for a band to move ahead by leaps and bounds over a long absence? Or is it enough to just remind you of how good they were, and still are?

Take Grandaddy, for instance. The project of California songwriter Jason Lytle, Grandaddy emerged in the mid-‘90s, but made its mark in 2000 with an excellent second album, The Sophtware Slump. I originally heard that album while working at a record store, and I can still remember first experiencing the long, glorious coda of “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot.” Lytle and his comrades made two fantastic albums as Grandaddy after that, and called it quits in 2006 with a stunning denouement called Just Like the Fambly Cat.

Eleven years later, Lytle has revived the Grandaddy name for Last Place, the band’s fifth album. In truth, Lytle never went away – he delivered a few strong solo albums and produced records for others, including last year’s Band of Horses effort Why Are You OK. But bringing Grandaddy back isn’t just a matter of enlisting Aaron Burtch to drum on these songs. It’s an aesthetic, a point of view that is distinct from Lytle’s own work. And on Last Place, he ably recaptures not just the sound but the feel of classic Grandaddy. This may be a solo effort under the band name (like Fambly Cat was), but Lytle knows what makes Grandaddy special.

From the first notes of “Way We Won’t,” Last Place is a classic Grandaddy record. The ever-present quarter-note shimmy that propels the best Grandaddy songs is everywhere here, along with the low-tech synths, Lytle’s whispered vocals and the songs about how technology leaves us even more alone. Had this come out right after Sumday it would have fit right in with the band’s catalog. Lytle is cognizant of just how a song like “That’s What You Get for Getting Out of Bed” can and should fit in with the aesthetic he’s established, and a bona fide Grandaddy epic like “This is the Part” feels as comfortable as a well-worn suit.

Is this a good thing? I think so, in this case. It’s been 11 years since we had a Grandaddy record, and all Lytle had to do with Last Place is remind us how much we love and miss this sound. By album’s end, he’s done that and more. He resurrects Jed the Humanoid from Sophtware on “Jed the 4th” (this being the fourth song to bear his name), giving his story a tragic update, and then offers up what might be his best thesis on the mingling of technology and humanity, the piano-driven “A Lost Machine.” “Everything about us is a lost machine,” Lytle sings, his voice cracking and pleading, over and over. It’s beautiful.

And it’s 100 percent Grandaddy. If the goal of Last Place was to remind us that no one, not even Lytle on his own, sounds like Grandaddy, that mission was accomplished. I hope this return is a long-lasting one, and of course next time out I will be listening for growth and ambition, but for now this is exactly what I wanted after more than a decade away.

Perhaps it’s just a function of time. Eleven years is long enough that all I need is a reminder of how wonderful Grandaddy was. But five years – the amount of time between the new Shins album, Heartworms, and the last one – might not be enough to forgive a lackluster effort just because I miss the band. In fact, Heartworms, like Port of Morrow before it, makes me miss the band even more, since virtually nothing I loved about them is in evidence here.

That probably shouldn’t be a surprise, since the Shins effectively broke up after 2007’s delightful Wincing the Night Away. Since then, James Mercer has been offering solo efforts under the band’s name, and they’re decidedly lesser things. The Shins made their mark by merging Brian Wilson-esque melodies with shimmering lo-fi production, and even as their sound grew, the twisting, mesmerizing melodies remained. But when Mercer emerged as the Shins in 2012 with Port of Morrow, the writing had taken a dive into the average, the normal.

That trend continues on Heartworms, an album that sounds as overworked as it does underbaked. The album was written and produced by Mercer, and it is positively overloaded with sounds, mainly goopy synthesizers. The synths aren’t used for effect, as they are on the Grandaddy album, but to fill spaces left empty by the songs. Like the last Shins album, Heartworms sports some of Mercer’s laziest and least exciting songwriting. When one of the highlights is a simple one-four-five bit of blues-country like “Mildenhall,” something’s off.

And honestly, it’s only by comparison that Heartworms suffers. As an average indie-inflected synthesizer pop record, it’s not bad. It just doesn’t live up to the name it’s been released under. There are bits of it I like – the “ba-da, ba-da” bits of “Rubber Ballz,” for example, and the verse melody of “Dead Alive” – but there’s nothing that rises to the level of the band’s first three records. It’s slightly less underwhelming than Morrow, but still underwhelming. The Shins started off by creating Pet Sounds on a shoestring, and now Mercer is giving us the equivalent of Brian Wilson’s first few solo albums. This is his Imagination, a fairly uninspired effort drowned in keyboard sounds.

After five years away, I definitely hoped for more. I’m finding myself questioning why this took five years to make, whereas I was impressed with the sheer amount of work that went into the Fleet Foxes single. It is, of course, silly to expect that Mercer spent all five of those years working on Heartworms, or that Pecknold spent all six years crafting Crack-Up. We don’t deserve to believe that we own that time, or that we’re owed it. We get the music we get. But there’s no way to deny that absence sets expectation.

I’d be more forgiving of Heartworms had it come out three years ago, and I know that’s just my own desire for more and better Shins music. Life is short, time is finite, we’re only going to get to hear so much. That’s really at the core of my excitement over returns and reunions – the sense that I lived to hear this. I want to live to hear it all. I know I won’t, but I still want to. So I will wait however long I am able, and if what I’m given at the end of that wait isn’t enough, I will keep on waiting.

Next week, speaking of time passing, I’ll dive into the Magnetic Fields’ 50 Song Memoir. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I buy a lot of music. Most of it is mediocre, and gets played once or twice, shelved and forgotten. The albums that leave a mark on me are either very good or very bad, and perversely, I’m interested in both to an almost equal degree.

In fact, sometimes I’m more interested in the very bad. I love listening to train wrecks like a forensic scientist, poking through the wreckage to discover what went wrong, and how. I’m fascinated by records with terrible reputations, records that transcend the merely bad and become something else entirely, something legendary.

Case in point: I was watching a VH1 Behind the Music on Styx some years ago, for some reason. I’ve never been a fan of Styx, but have been aware of them, and the songs I’d heard that didn’t remind me of bargain-basement Asia reminded me of treacly late-period Chicago, so I never investigated further. But my interest was piqued by a segment of this episode that eviscerated the band’s 1983 album Kilroy Was Here. And I don’t mean the assembled panelists gave Kilroy a hard time. I mean they tore it to pieces, one after another calling it the worst album ever made.

And I thought to myself: Damn. I have to hear this.

So I did. I bought Kilroy Was Here that week, and lo, it is absolutely awful. Perhaps the best thing about it is how amazing it thinks it is. Kilroy tells the story of a dystopian future in which a fascist government has outlawed music, which is also the plot of both 2112 and Joe’s Garage, only Styx tells this story in the most heavy-handed and obvious way possible, set to some of the most cheese-tastic pop metal ever churned out. It is epically, catastrophically bad, and I treasure that kind of go-for-broke direness wherever I can find it.

Which explains why I recently picked up the self-titled fifth album from a California metal band called Suicide Silence. I’d never heard of this band before a few weeks ago, when I started seeing no-star reviews for this album, and was immediately intrigued. The metal community apparently believes this album is apocalyptically terrible, the worst pile of garbage in many years, a failure on every level. These are magic words to me.

Now, make no mistake – had these reviews simply said that Suicide Silence is bad, I would have ignored them. But no. One after another, they made the case for this record as radioactive, cancerous waste, as if some fateful wrong turn had been taken and now everything had fallen apart. As I investigated, I discovered that Suicide Silence had started off as a deathcore band fronted by lead screamer Mitch Lucker, who died in 2012. His replacement is Eddie Hermida, formerly of similar shouty band All Shall Perish.

It’s Hermida taking the lion’s share of the blame for Suicide Silence, which is definitely a departure. The band enlisted Ross Robinson to produce, which should tell you a lot about how it sounds – Robinson was one of the architects of the nu-metal sound in the ‘90s, and helped turn Sepultura (for one) from a straight-up metal band into a down-tuned groove monster. He’s done the same thing here, helping Suicide Silence essentially make a Deftones record. The riffs are simple, the drums slow and locked in, the grooves deep, and the feedback and noise quotient ratcheted up a hundredfold.

And there’s Hermida, who sings what I’m told are the first clean vocals in the band’s history. He sounds like Chino Moreno, or like someone trying to sound like Chino Moreno – he’s off-key a lot, but in that tortured, wobbly, I’m-trying-to-express-my-pain kind of way. I’m sure these vulnerable vocals are difficult for fans of full-on aggression to swallow, but they don’t sound out of place or particularly strained to me. I even like “Run,” which is all pained singing. It’s right out of the White Pony playbook.

So in a way, I’m disappointed that Suicide Silence isn’t awful. It’s fine, really, a pretty successful transformation from one kind of metal to another. I don’t know if I’ll buy another album from these guys, but this one doesn’t bother me as much as I expected it to. My quest for truly awful music goes on, however, and I’ll report back when I find it.

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I had a discussion this week with several of my music-loving friends about Jeff Tweedy. He’s not an infrequent topic in my circle, since I find Tweedy alternately self-indulgent and boring, and virtually everyone else I know thinks he’s a genius. It has long been my belief that Tweedy’s best quality is attracting collaborators better than he is, and his worst quality is pushing those collaborators away.

One need look no further than Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy’s first band. I love Uncle Tupelo, but I found as I dug deeper that my favorite of their material came from Jay Farrar, Tweedy’s partner in crime (and songwriting). When Tupelo split, Tweedy formed Wilco (and if you don’t know my thoughts on Wilco, check the archive) while Farrar created Son Volt. Farrar’s work has always been the more traditional of the two, and in many ways the less exciting. Wilco takes enough risks that, in theory, they should never be boring, while Farrar sticks to more time-tested avenues.

And yet I’ve been happier with Son Volt’s output over the last 20 years. True, Farrar can’t boast a high water mark like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but he has no low one like A Ghost is Born to apologize for either. He’s a steady, solid, dependable writer, and his catalog is an argument in favor of keeping an even keel. The eighth Son Volt album, Notes of Blue, keeps the streak alive. It’s a brief brush with blues and Americana that makes fine use of Farrar’s distinctive voice and love of simplicity.

I’m particularly fond of the bluesier ones this time, like the raucous “Static” and the dark and dusty “Cherokee St. Girl.” A few years ago Farrar explored the country backwater of his sound on Honky Tonk, and he does the same for blistering electric blues here. “Lost Souls” is an elementary rocker, but he sells it, and the guitar tone he sports here and elsewhere on Notes of Blue is arresting. “Sinking Down” is a slide guitar ride into the swampland, and while it’s nothing new, it’s fun and well-made.

That pretty much sums up Son Volt for me. Farrar is probably never going to try anything as drastic as Suicide Silence has done, but that’s OK. Notes of Blue is another enjoyable Son Volt album, and that’s enough to get me to the next one, smiling and tapping my feet along the way.

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Finally, for this week brought to you by the letter S, we have Peter Silberman, who has just made one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve heard this year.

If Silberman’s name is unfamiliar to you, I’d point you in the direction of his quietly consistent band, the Antlers. They began as a solo project, but in 2009, fully formed, they released an extraordinary album called Hospice, all about letting people in and letting them go. While Silberman has never quite captured that magic again, the next two Antlers albums (and two EPs) have been swell. They play a particularly dreamy style of art-rock indie that soars on Silberman’s powerful voice – it’s reminiscent of both Jeff Buckley and Jimmy Gnecco.

That voice is at the center of Impermanence, Silberman’s first true solo album, and it stands revealed as an incredible instrument. Where the Antlers piled on the instrumentation, Silberman cuts everything to the bone, leaving only his guitar and some percussion to carry most of this record. Opener “Karuna” is nearly nine minutes of nothing but guitar, voice and subtle drums, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite Silberman songs. It aches with loneliness, offering quiet catharsis with its round-robin chant near the end.

The rest of the album follows suit. “New York” nearly floats away, it’s so sparse, but it’s absolutely lovely. There are flutes and brass here, but they’re the softest, most ambient flutes and brass you’ve ever heard. This song directly addresses the tinnitus Silberman has been dealing with for years: “When my nerve wore down, I was assailed by simple little sounds, hammer clangs, sirens in the park, like I never heard New York…” This is a quieter record for a reason – he’s been recovering from hearing loss and an all-consuming ringing in his left ear, and Impermanence artfully dances around the subject.

The heartbreaking “Gone Beyond” is another eight minutes of glorious beauty, and its first verse tackles his hearing loss: “I’m listening for you, silence, but god, there’s so much noise, and now I fear I’ve found you, you’re partially destroyed.” Silberman’s voice is reined in here, his chiming guitar like ripples on a quiet lake. The entire album is a lovely meditation, and it plays like a single thought. Closer “Ahimsa” is the ray of hope the record needed: “Time is all we have, I hope I have enough, enough to show you love before my time is up…”

There may be more goosebump-worthy albums released in 2017, but right now, I’m not betting on it. Impermanence is the most delicate and gorgeous of Peter Silberman’s works, a record so ethereal that it sounds at times like Jeff Buckley come back to life, and yet so personal that it couldn’t be anyone else. Like Hospice, this is an album I’ll be listening to for many years to come, getting lost in its stillness. Despite his album’s title, I hope Silberman’s return is a permanent one.

Next week, a pair of longed-for returns. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am. See you in line Tuesday morning.