Next week, Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer comes out. It’s her third album, and the first one divorced from her Metropolis conceptual piece, and every song I have heard has been pretty amazing. The week after that we get Frank Turner and Gaz Coombes and Belly and Leon Bridges. I’m pretty excited for what’s coming up.

As for what’s already here? Well, some weeks you just have to put your head down and power through. And this is one of them.

Let’s begin with Sting and Shaggy. (Yes, for real, we’re gonna do this.) I’m a completist by nature. Sequential numbering is my nemesis. If I have one record from an artist, I feel this odd compulsion to have all of them. And if I’ve followed an artist for years (or in some cases, decades), I just can’t imagine not buying the latest of that artist’s endeavors, no matter how awful I expect it to be. This is how I have ended up with so many latter-day Tori Amos albums I will never listen to, and why I continue to buy Jandek records, despite finding him completely unlistenable most of the time.

It’s also why I have purchased 44/876, the new collaboration between English turtleneck-rocker Sting and Jamaican reggae superstar Shaggy, the man behind “Boombastic” and the anthem for all gaslighters, “It Wasn’t Me.” Sting is 66. Shaggy is 49. The pair has posed on motorcycles for the absolutely ridiculous cover of this thing. You can tell without even hearing a note that this is going to be a travesty, especially if you’re in this for Sting.

I am. I’ve been a fan of the erstwhile Gordon Sumner since I was 14. I saw Sting on the Nothing Like the Sun tour in 1988 – it was my first-ever concert, in fact – and I still love that record. If you count the Police, Sting has made more good music than bad, but he’s catching up. The arc of Sting’s career is long, but it bends toward horrible dreck. The moments when he shows what he can really do – the score to The Last Ship, for example – are fewer and further between. And now we have this.

I’m not even sure how to review this. It’s exactly what you think it will be, in the main: Sting adding his unmistakable voice to feel-good reggae music while Shaggy does his Shaggy thing. Sting has always kind of wanted to be Bob Marley, but thankfully he leaves a lot of the Jamaican vocal stylings to the actual Jamaican, which is a good thing. There are a couple songs that bring more of Sting’s style to the fore, like “Waiting for the Break of Day,” and those are the ones I dislike least.

But I can’t really say I like any of this. It starts out ridiculous and gets more so as it goes along. I can scarcely believe that Sting willingly sung a trifle like “Gotta Get Back My Baby,” or a coffeehouse reggae number like “Don’t Make Me Wait,” on which Shaggy announces “you know this is more to me than just hitting it.” “22nd Street” sounds like a Muzak version of John Mayer. “Dreaming in the U.S.A.” edges Police territory (but just enough to make you wish you were listening to the Police), and I appreciated its positive message about immigrants, if nothing else. But courtroom drama “Crooked Tree” sapped away all that good will.

That 44/876 exists in the first place is a fact I am finding it hard to wrap my mind around. I want to applaud Sting for trying new things, for stepping out of his comfort zone. But I also want to grab him by the shoulders and physically steer him back to that comfort zone, in the hopes that he’ll get back to making music I like sometime. Sting and Shaggy are reportedly best friends now, like Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart, and that’s adorable. But I hope it doesn’t portend more collaborations like this one. Listening to 44/876 makes me want to do two things: 1) cry, and 2) put on Outlandos D’Amour, so I can remember how good Sting used to be.

I didn’t expect to have the same feeling about A Perfect Circle, but alas, I do. It’s been 14 years since Maynard James Keenan’s other band made a record, and 15 years since they made a record of new songs. It’s also been 12 years since Tool, Keenan’s main band, delivered something new, and his work as Puscifer hasn’t really been hitting the spot. Fans of Keenan’s voice and work have been in something of a dry season.

So a new A Perfect Circle record should be cause for celebration. And until I pushed play, I was admittedly quite excited. But Eat the Elephant (for that is what the new album is called) is by turns boring and trite. A Perfect Circle was never really a band, and Billy Howerdel plays most of the instruments again, but for the first time, it sounds like it. These songs feel empty, constructed from keyboards and not much else, and Keenan isn’t given a lot to truly sing. These songs meander and never quite seem to get where they’re going, and without the sense of dynamics that has marked this band’s prior work, the result is dishwater dull.

It takes four songs to get to anything that even sounds promising. The opening trilogy (“Eat the Elephant,” “Disillusioned” and “The Contrarian”) is so lifeless that I can barely believe Keenan stayed awake through them. That fourth song, “The Doomed,” starts with a powerhouse drum beat and sounds like it’s going to break the streak, but then it fails to offer much. If you know me, you know I was looking forward to a song called “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish,” and this one was certainly a surprise – it’s a major-key pop song with a jaunty melody and some dark lyrics. But it, as well, doesn’t go anywhere.

And on and on. First single “TalkTalk,” in addition to being a sharp condemnation of hypocritical Christianity, is the only thing here that almost sounds like A Perfect Circle, giving Keenan a chance to bring out his growl. “By and Down the River” isn’t new – it appeared on the band’s best-of five years ago, and hasn’t gotten any better. It sounds like the Cure on an off day. Howerdel finally pulls the stops out on the final couple tracks, but it’s too little, too late.

I feel pretty safe in saying that Eat the Elephant is not what fans have waited 14 years for. It has some charms, certainly, and it’s always nice to hear Keenan, but I was jumping out of my skin to hear this thing, and now I’m dejectedly filing it away as a disappointment. I’m certainly going to come back to it and try to like it, but there’s no way I can pretend that this is filling my need for more from this band, and for more from this week.

In fact, I was about to write this whole week off when we got an eleventh-hour save. On Friday, stoner metal gods Sleep surprise-issued their reunion album, The Sciences, their first in nearly 20 years. If you don’t know Sleep, you probably don’t understand why this was kept under wraps until just a few hours before it came out, nor why news of its existence caused so much excitement.

Suffice it to say that Sleep, a power trio from California, embodied and defined stoner metal for the whole of the 1990s. They play slow, powerful, endless groove metal, best exemplified by their magnum opus, Dopesmoker, a 63-minute song about the Weedian people on their way to the Riff-Filled Land. (Did I mention they smoke a lot?) Dopesmoker is one of the most impressive metal achievements I’m aware of, and it broke up the band. (It also took until 2012 to get a definitive version out.)

Since then, guitarist/singer Matt Pike has been fronting the amazing High on Fire, and bassist Al Cisneros formed the duo OM, playing the same slow stoner metal but without guitars. Still and all, neither of these bands were Sleep. Only Sleep is Sleep, and this reunion record proves it. The Sciences is adorned with a cover depicting an astronaut smoking an enormous bong in orbit, and the album sounds like the band has never been away. The riffs are huge and stunningly simple, the bass work is monumental, new drummer Jason Roeder is a powerhouse. Everything I loved about Sleep is here.

The two centerpiece songs on this new album have been around a while. The 12-minute “Sonic Titan” and the 14-minute “Antarcticans Thawed” are classic Sleep, rumbling forward without moving from square one. Of course Sleep would write a song called “Giza Butler,” and of course it would be 10 minutes long. Of course Sleep would kick things off with “Marijuanaut’s Theme,” more of their pot-laced fantasy work. No surprises here, until you come to “The Botanist,” the six-minute instrumental that closes the record. This song is the first evolution in Sleep’s sound in evidence here, Cisneros taking a back seat to Pike’s searing leads, and it’s tremendous.

Is a new Sleep album enough to put this week in the win column for me? Hard to say, but I have been digging on it since midnight Friday, and I don’t expect to stop. It would take a lot to blot out the Sting/Shaggy fiasco, but if anyone can, it’s Sleep. Still, if it takes a surprise metal release to even start balancing the scales, we’re gonna need some more good music stat.

Next week, Janelle Monae returns to save 2018. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I don’t really need to review the Derek Smalls album, do I?

I mean, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Harry Shearer, one of the three actors who portrayed fictional band Spinal Tap in the amazing mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, has resurrected his character, Derek Smalls, to release what is billed as Smalls’ first solo album. It’s called Smalls Change: Meditations Upon Ageing, and it’s a parody of every middle-aged rock star’s self-indulgent string-laden odes to growing old.

And it’s great. Of course it is. Shearer somehow gets us to care about Smalls while never betraying an ounce of emotion. It’s even better that he can’t really sing – Smalls’ worn-out croak is exactly what these tunes need. The title track is a sweeping anthem about Spinal Tap breaking up. “Memo to Willie” is exactly what you think it is, if you think it is about Smalls trying to talk his penis out of erectile dysfunction. “MRI” is a horror-rock tune about getting an MRI. “Gummin’ the Gash” should need no explanation. Neither should “Hell Toupee.”

As Spinal Tap did on their last album, Break Like the Wind, Shearer gathered an insanely prodigious group of musicians together to make this thing, including Joe Satriani, Rick Wakeman, Steve Vai, Richard Thompson, Dweezil Zappa, Taylor Hawkins and, in a cameo that will have you choking with laughter, Donald Fagen. The final track is a nine-minute epic called “When Men Did Rock” that looks back fondly on the days of long hair and loud guitars, and cements Derek Smalls as a man stuck in time, unable or unwilling to move on, squeezing himself into leather pants and trying to relive his glory years. There’s a sadness to this, as there often is to Shearer’s work, behind all the hilarity.

“When Men Did Rock” is a sharp satire in another way, too: it looks back on a time when women musicians were a lot more rare. It was the men who did the rocking in Derek Smalls’ nostalgic reverie, and I’m glad the world has moved on from then, because it’s the women who are going to save 2018, musically speaking. Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer comes out in two weeks, and everything I’ve heard from that has been intense. There’s a new Belly album coming, and new things from Beach House, Courtney Barnett, Chvrches, Neko Case, Lykke Li and the Innocence Mission. And that’s what we know about right now.

You can tide yourself over with the three terrific records by female artists I have on tap this week, too. Start with the new Wye Oak album, their sixth. I haven’t had a lot of time for Wye Oak in this space. I’ve always liked this duo, just not with the fervor their more ardent fans express. Jenn Wasner is a fine singer and a pretty good songwriter, and though I didn’t think their breakthrough record, Civilian, was quite as revelatory as many did, I enjoyed it and have kept up with the band since.

While some might consider Civiliantheir masterpiece, I’m going to present the counter-argument: The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs is the best album Wye Oak has made. This one takes the more tentative experiments with keyboards and synthesizers that marked 2014’s Shriek and fully brings them on board. During the best parts of The Louder I Call, it’s almost hard to remember that the band hasn’t always sounded like this, hasn’t always had one foot in the realm of Kate Bush. It’s a transformation so complete at this point that their more guitar-heavy work of just 10 years ago feels like a centuries-old memory.

That wouldn’t mean a lot if Wasner and Andy Stack had not delivered possibly their best set of songs. But here they are, and I almost couldn’t believe how much I liked The Louder I Call as it unspooled. I often find Wye Oak songs forgettable, but I’ve been humming some of these for a while now. The title track is a rapid-fire bit of keyboard-y goodness. “Lifer” is a lovely little lament, and “Over and Over” tumbles me with its tricky beat and its ethereal harmonies. “You of All People” has the makings of an ‘80s ballad, all ringing guitars and Wasner’s clear, strong voice, and I’ve had the “oh-oh” chorus stuck in my skull for days.

All of that pales next to “It Was Not Natural,” the best song on this record and one of the best songs of 2018. It’s a melodic piano-led wonder, the kind that singer-songwriters the world over would kill to conjure from the air. “Only human hands could give us something so unforgiving,” Wasner sings over big synth chords, and I’m in, completely. Most of this record is a proof of concept of this new Wye Oak sound, and “It Was Not Natural” is its flying-colors flagship. The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs is the best kind of surprise, the sound of a band completing a risky metamorphosis into something better than they’ve been.

Laura Veirs doesn’t undergo any such change on The Lookout, her tenth album. Two years after joining Neko Case and k.d. lang in a delightful supergroup, she’s returned with another in a long line of gorgeous, low-key, atmospheric records in her usual style. Luckily it’s a style I am nowhere near getting sick of. The Lookout’s 12 songs weave a magical spell, akin to Beth Orton’s best material, and continue the hot streak she has been on since at least July Flame.

Veirs writes moody and sweet acoustic pieces and performs them with a tremendous band that includes her husband, producer Tucker Martine. This album includes guest vocals from Karl Blau, Jim James and Sufjan Stevens, but as usual, her voice and her songs are the star. “Everybody Needs You” is an early standout, its electronic drum beat underpinning a murky web of acoustic strums and chiming electric notes, violins shimmering their way through the clouds. “Seven Falls” works in that breezy California sun-strummed sound, complete with lap steel, while “Mountains of the Moon” sounds like an old folk song dusted off and sung with deep feeling.

Stevens shows up on “Watch Fire,” repeating the title line in the verses of one of the more upbeat songs on the record. The title track is a wispy love song that pivots on the simple yet satisfying line “man alive, I’m glad that I have you.” The strings on that track and on “The Meadow” are terrific. “When It Grows Darkest” sashays along on a 5/8 beat and a lovely sentiment: “When it grows darkest the stars come out.”

Really, I could spend the next eight paragraphs talking highlights from this record. I’m hopeful that her work with Case and lang has widened her audience, because The Lookout is another swell little record, one that easily puts Laura Veirs on the same footing as her more celebrated contemporaries. Here’s hoping more people hear it, and she gets to keep making records like this one.

So that’s two great options for you, but if I’m being honest, I haven’t enjoyed anything quite as much lately as I am enjoying Juliana Hatfield’s tribute album to Olivia Newton-John. Yes, you read that right, the woman who made the angry, scrappy Pussycat last year has just returned with 14 loving renditions of songs made famous by Sandra Dee from the Grease film. And she’s done this completely without irony.

Granted, Newton-John’s discography is quite a bit deeper than the soundtracks (Grease and Xanadu) she is best known for, and Hatfield pours her heart into this tour of her hits from the ‘70s and ‘80s. The best part of this record is that Hatfield never winks at you. These are just great songs, and she treats them as such, playing them the way she would any melodic power-pop tunes. She opens with “I Honestly Love You” and follows up with “Suspended in Time,” from the Xanadu soundtrack, and these songs set the tone. If you didn’t know their origins, you’d just think these are great Juliana Hatfield tunes.

I also love that Hatfield didn’t skip ‘80s material like “Physical” and “Totally Hot.” Both of these tunes are transformed into six-string-heavy rockers, and Hatfield performs them with conviction. She only dips into Grease once, but it’s the biggest of Newton-John’s hits: “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” Hatfield performs it straight, and it’s perfect. I’ve been anticipating this record ever since I heard about it, and it did not disappoint. The love Hatfield has for these songs is evident in every note, and she makes me love them too. You couldn’t ask for more than that.

Next week, it looks like a rough one. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Everybody loves a good debut album.

For instance, many of my friends are going nuts over a band called Lo Moon, whose debut album dropped a few weeks ago. It’s a fine little 49 minutes, drawing from several influences I love, like Talk Talk and Peter Gabriel. The lyrics are often at a Chris Martin level, but they don’t detract too much. It’s a good record, and I am interested to see where this band heads next.

Yeah, everybody loves a good debut album. But I find myself more interested in bands and artists who have been at their thing for a while, plying their trade for years or even decades, building up a body of work. That’s how you can take the measure of an artist, to me: if their catalog tells a story, and that story ends up being worth hearing. As the saying goes, you have your whole life to write your first album, and only a couple months to write your second. I imagine it gets exponentially more difficult to make your 12th album interesting.

Oddly enough, I have a pair of 12th albums to discuss this week. In both of these cases I’ve been following the bands since their inception, and often marveling at the ways they have found to keep innovating throughout their long careers. After a dozen albums, though, the tricks are usually all out on the table. For instance, there are really only a few kinds of Eels songs – snarling rockers, sad ballad-fests and groove experiments. There’s some overlap sometimes, but those are the three modes Mark Oliver Everett writes in, and 12 albums in, he’s not changing.

Lately he’s been giving us albums that focus on one kind of these songs, like the recent trilogy of Hombre Lobo, End Times and  Tomorrow Morning. The previous Eels record, The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett, was more of a sad-sack piece, and there are really only a couple directions Everett likes to go after those. So for The Deconstruction, we get an existential meditation in song, an album akin to Everett’s early triumphs. Only not quite as good.

The Deconstruction splits the difference between more electronic, beat-driven numbers and sparse, slow rambles. Neither style hides too many surprises anymore, but they can both still be affecting. Early highlight “Bone Dry” rumbles by on its big drums, sounding like a second cousin to tunes like “Flyswatter,” and I can’t help smiling at repetitive lunkhead happy-dance number “Today Is the Day.” Meanwhile, you know exactly how a song like “Premonition” or “Sweet Scorched Earth” will go as soon as it starts, but Everett’s earnest croak still works.

But this album still ends up feeling more tired than I wish it did. Everett tries his best, trying these songs together with interludes that call back to one another and working to weave a story out of them, but the songs themselves are weaker than he’s been in a while. I like the simple lyrics of “Be Hurt,” but find the turgid music off-putting. I’ve heard Everett do the shimmy-blues of “You Are the Shining Light” so many times at this point that what should be an exciting moment late in the record just treads water. “There I Said It” might be the prettiest thing here, and is no doubt a deeply felt piece of work, but it sounds like every other Everett piano ballad. By the end of this record Everett has found love again, and I’ve heard him chronicle this cycle from despair to hope more than once.

I don’t want to suggest that The Deconstruction is bad, or that it doesn’t work. In fact, I don’t know why Everett’s whole thing works as well as it does, given his rudimentary lyrics, pedestrian voice and simple song construction. And yet, I love what he does. I like The Deconstruction in spite of itself, as it tries and fails to be better Eels albums, and I find myself swept up by the time the sweet “In Our Cathedral” ends. After more than 20 years at this, Everett ought to be surprising me (and, frankly, himself) a lot more than he does here, but I’m still susceptible to his inexplicable charms.

The same can be said for Nova Scotia’s own Sloan, a band I never expected to hit 12 albums. It took them four years longer than Eels to do it, but here we are. I’ve followed the ups and downs of this one-of-a-kind quartet since high school, moving with them through their ‘60s phase, their early ‘70s phase and their late ‘70s phase, listening as they slowly transformed into a classic power pop band. They’ve changed so much since their shoegazing early days, and that’s down to the myriad influences of the four members, all of whom write songs and sing them. Sloan is a true democracy, which has so far kept their work from slipping into pastiche or boredom.

That said, there are good Sloan albums and there are great Sloan albums. Last time out, they delivered a great one. 2014’s Commonwealth divided its four sides up between the band members, giving each a chance to shine over an extended suite, and the results were revelatory. It was a bit of a gimmick, but after a couple of nondescript platters, Commonwealth shook things up.

The just-released 12, on the other hand, is a good Sloan album. Each of the Sloaners gets three songs, and if you know what each one usually turns out, you won’t be bowled over by any of these tunes. Chris Murphy gives us the energetic guitar-pop he’s known for, particularly on opener “Spin Our Wheels” and late-album highlight “Wish Upon a Satellite.” Patrick Pentland is all about the rock, as always, and he delivers the biggest surprise: a thick return to the Smeared guitar sound on “The Day Will Be Mine.”

Jay Ferguson, meanwhile, turns in his eminently likeable, breezy pop, strumming an acoustic on “Right to Roam” and pounding a piano on the delightful, Kinks-esque “Essential Services.” And Andrew Scott gifts us with three more of his cerebral, scrappy standouts. I like “Gone for Good,” which meanders about on a space-y bass line and some lush harmonies, but I love “Year Zero,” his dirty, tricky guitar anthem. I remain impressed at this band’s ability to play on each other’s songs, retain each writer’s core identity (to the point where you can tell almost immediately who penned what), and still come together to create a Sloan sound.

There’s nothing at all wrong with 12. It contains no bad songs, no filler, no embarrassing moments. It’s the sound of a long-running band just doing what they do, and doing it well. That said, there’s nothing amazing about it either, and after a dozen albums, there are enough amazing ones to compare something like this to. This one is about the same quality as The Double Cross, or Action Pact. Those are really good records, so that’s nothing to scoff at.

And maybe sometimes, the secret to keeping things interesting after more than 25 years is just to keep on doing it. At various points during their career, I have been convinced that I would never hear a new Sloan album again, that I’d just listened to the last one. And each time they’ve proved me wrong. I hope Sloan goes on forever, making good albums like this one and occasionally punctuating them with great albums. I’ll be here, listening for as long as I am able.

Next week, the unlikely pairing of Wye Oak and Derek Smalls, probably. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It took me a long time to like Jack White.

My first exposure to the White Stripes came during the height of the garage-rock wave of the early 2000s. No one remembers bands like the Hives and the Vines now, but at the time they were considered the future of rock and roll: lo-fi, scrappy, high-energy sounds made by people who could barely play their instruments. Into this arena waded Jack and Meg White with their mega-hit “Fell in Love With a Girl,” two minutes of yelping over shambling guitar and drums that sounded like they were recorded live and drunk. White Blood Cells, as an album, fell into the sound of the moment very well, and it took a while for me to realize there was more going on there.

In fact, it wasn’t until Get Behind Me Satan, still my favorite White Stripes record, that I started considering Jack White beyond just “that guy in that garage band.” My mistake, of course – there’s plenty of evidence on those early Stripes records of White’s intriguing blend of blues, rock and soul, and of his prodigious talent as a player and a curator of influences. It didn’t help that his most famous band was his worst one – I enjoyed his power-pop outfit The Raconteurs and his swampy blues band The Dead Weather quite a bit more. But by the time of Blunderbuss, his quite good debut solo record, I was on board.

I mention all this because my appreciation for Jack White is like a train gaining steam, and I fear that White’s third solo record, Boarding House Reach, may have derailed that train, at least temporarily. I’m listening for the fifth time right now, and I still have no idea what he was thinking when assembling this thing. “Assembling” is the right word, too – this album sounds pieced together from jams and recording sessions that should have been thrown away. Boarding House Reach sounds like negative space, like White carefully excised all the parts that sound like songs, leaving only incoherence.

White himself describes this thing as bizarre, and that’s being kind. If you’ve heard “Connected By Love,” the sorta-swaying first single, you’ve heard one of the most complete and fulfilling songs here. Yes, it’s two chords over and over, and yes, the organ and gospel choir rub up uncomfortably with the buzzing synthesizer bass, and yes, it pretty much falls apart by the end, but it’s seriously one of the highlights. From there we just sink into nonsense. “Why Walk a Dog” would be a laughable b-side, yet here it’s given a prominent position. “Corporation” is five and a half minutes of formless jamming, followed by “Abulia and Akrasia,” a minute and a half of spoken-word filler. By the time you get to “Ice Station Zebra,” on which Jack White raps (“If Joe Blow says, yo, you paint like Caravaggio, you’ll respond, no, that’s an insult, Joe…”), half this record will have meandered by.

The second half is stronger without ever quite being strong. The guitar comes out for “Over and Over and Over,” a patchwork rock song with some piped-in-from-nowhere gospel-style backing vocals. It is, by far, the best song thus far, even if it does repeat its signature riff over and over and over. After that, “Everything You’ve Ever Learned” is the definition of filler, “Respect Commander” is a mess, “Esmerelda Steals the Show” is the second definition of filler, and I don’t even know what “Get in the Mind Shaft” is, really. “What’s Done is Done” is a traditional country song about suicide, sung over a wavery synth noise and some bongos in a box. White saves the best song for last, which isn’t a high bar on this record, but “Humoresque” is still pretty good, a jazzy little ballad that he probably considers a joke. But it sports the album’s one interesting melody, so it wins.

I dove down song by song because there’s no way to talk about this album as a whole. It’s just a scattered thing, seemingly laughing at the very idea that these songs should connect in some way. Only a few minutes of this are worthwhile anyway, but some sense that this was meant to be an album and not a Jackson Pollack-style splattering of tones would be nice. I understand completely that this off-the-deep-end approach is intentional, and I’m absolutely certain Jack White doesn’t care if I don’t like it.

But I don’t like it. Perhaps it’s me. Perhaps I have far too much of an attachment to songwriting and melody to praise something so disconnected from those things. Maybe Jack White has created his Kid A with Boarding House Reach, and in years to come it will be hailed as a masterpiece, and I’ll be on the outside looking in. It’s a pretty familiar place for me to be. I appreciate and applaud Jack White’s willingness to color outside the lines, to break out of his blues-rock rut here, but I would appreciate and applaud it more if the end result weren’t such a total mess.

On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, we have this week’s other J band, Jukebox the Ghost. I’ve been hard on this Washington, D.C. trio of late as they transitioned away from their early, more progressive piano rock into a more streamlined pop sound. I may have gone so far as to mourn the band they used to be on my generally positive review of their self-titled fourth album. The more modern Jukebox creates infectious ear candy with clap-your-hands choruses, and I love that stuff. It’s just taken me longer than it should have to let go of the past and realize that what they’re giving me now is enough.

Well, I seem to have finally broken through that barrier with the band’s fifth album, Off to the Races. In fact, I think this thing is marvelous. Some of it is the band – they’ve upped the Queen influences here, without losing the toe-tapping, melodic bliss of their previous record. Hell, “Jumpstarted” begins with what can only be considered a minute-long tribute to Freddie Mercury, with singer/pianist Ben Thornewill giving that falsetto a workout. But then comes the beat and the chorus, and there’s Jukebox the Ghost, peeking through.

But some of it is just me. I’ve had to face the fact that I’m just in love with this sound, even when they drop the Queen pastiches and just play what they play. The album is front-loaded with Mercury – all of “Jumpstarted” sounds like they’ve been listening to nothing but Sheer Heart Attack for months, and single “Everybody’s Lonely” keeps that momentum going with a very Freddie piano figure and melody, and an absolutely wonderful dance-pop chorus. But as the album progresses, it becomes more Jukebox, and I like all that material just as much.

Case in point: “Fred Astaire.” This is just a delightful little pop song about love’s blissful blindness, and Thornewell sings it with such an energy that you can’t help but dance like the song’s protagonist. This one has been stuck in my head for more than a week. I’m also a big fan of the slower songs this time out, including the off-kilter “Time and I” and the more straightforward “See You Soon” and “Simple as 1 2 3.” Those last two deserve to be radio hits, the former with its sweeping “ooh-ooh” refrain and the latter with its gorgeous, naked optimism. These are songs the Ben Thornewill of the band’s first two albums would probably never write, but this Ben Thornewill wrote the hell out of them.

For his part, Tommy Siegel has become the Colin Moulding of this band. His songs aren’t as good as Thornewill’s, but they’re still worthy, and his voice isn’t as immediately captivating, but it still works. His best one this time is “Boring,” a barbed ode to growing old and lame. (“I’m a little ashamed to say, the house out in the suburbs calls my name…”) Siegel only contributes three this time, and they’re counterpoints to Thornewill’s boundless, colorful joy.

Speaking of colorful, that’s the name of the last song on the record, and it’s superb, an anthem for running through the streets with abandon. There’s a bit of a Springsteen feel to this song, and the band captures the galloping, anything-is-possible feel of Bruce’s best work. On an album where they also perfectly pay tribute to the late, great Freddie Mercury and, at the same time, firmly establish their buoyant sound. I’d say that’s an achievement. The only thing missing from Off to the Races, which clocks in at a mere 34 minutes, is one more song: their delirious single from last year, “Stay the Night,” would have fit perfectly. But when the worst thing you can say about an album is that you wish there were more of it, that’s pretty damn good.

Next week, Sloan and Eels, most likely. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.