Why do I like Coldplay?

It’s a question I get a lot, honestly, and stating it right up front here might make this review seem defensive. But I think it’s important to explore why this is a question people feel compelled to ask. Hating on Coldplay has become an international pastime. They’re one of the biggest bands in the world, and I expect they always will be. At times they seem palpably uncomfortable with that role, but at other times they’re dueting with Rhianna and Beyonce and writing crowd-pleasing stadium-fillers. And as long as they keep doing that, I think they’ll be around for the haters to hate.

Disliking Coldplay is the expected default for someone like me with Opinions About Music, though, and I think that’s a shame. The style Coldplay is best known for is universality – they write accessible, hummable songs about vaguely emotional things, and it’s unsurprising that so many have taken those songs into their hearts. Their early hits, like “Yellow” and “The Scientist” and “Fix You,” are sweeping things with strong undercurrents, and those are harder to write than people think.

But I know I’m supposed to see through such manipulations and not be taken in by them, or so I’m told. This, first off, is nonsense – music is to be enjoyed, and if “Fix You” works for me (and it does), I’m happy to have my emotions manipulated by it. I was surprised when scanning my archives recently that I predicted “Fix You” would be a massive hit. Obvious in retrospect, but not necessarily at the time. It worked for me then, and it works for me now.

And if that were all Coldplay had to offer – lighter-worthy popular balladry – I would still feel OK liking them. I may not evangelize for them as much as I do, but I’d feel fine about it. No, I get the question at the top of this column because I seem to like Coldplay more than their best-known material would indicate that I should, and it surprises a lot of people. Almost always I can count on those people not having ventured much beyond the hits, and not having heard a Coldplay album since probably 2005.

Why do I like Coldplay? Because they’re weird. Honestly, they are. Starting with 2008’s Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends, they embarked on a decade-plus of artistic restlessness that left their “Yellow” sound in the dust. That restlessness has defined them, and is at the heart of their new record, Everyday Life, which I’ll talk about in a moment. But I have been greatly anticipating this new album, and if asked why, I would say the reason is the four records before it, on which this band explored so many different sounds and ideas that they became unpredictable. And there is no more joyous word for me as a music fan than unpredictable.

I don’t want to oversell them. They’re certainly not David Bowie levels of chameleonic. But they haven’t sounded like you’d expect them to for more than 10 years, and they show no signs of wanting to sound like you’d expect them to. They’re weird. And the bottom line for me is that Coldplay, as one of the biggest bands in the world, doesn’t have to be this weird. They could keep churning out the same material, or at least revisit their old sound now and again. But they don’t, and the fact that they choose to keep pushing forward like this makes them worth paying attention to.

I’ve even come to appreciate 2015’s A Head Full of Dreams, which I dismissed as their big pop move, and not a patch on its somber, surprising predecessor, Ghost Stories. This is all still true, but on Head Full of Dreams the band aims for the rafters in completely different ways than they had done before. It stands alone in their catalog, a gleaming and modern-sounding ball of positivity that is meticulously constructed and painstakingly produced. Some of the material still makes me want to hurl it against a wall, especially in the record’s treacly back half, but none of it sounds like Coldplay is supposed to, and I think that’s an interesting quality for an album so overtly interested in being massively popular.

Everyday Life has no interest in popularity. That’s the first fascinating thing about it, and I find the whole thing fascinating. This record is how an impossibly popular band makes an intimate and personal piece of work, I think, and that it is awkward and messy and unsure of how to proceed only adds to that sense. It’s being touted as a double album, even though it manifestly is not: it’s 53 minutes long and comes packaged on a single disc. Its songs are broken up into two loose suites, Sunrise and Sunset, but it works best when you listen to it as a single entity. The band appears on the cover for the first time, but they’re de-emphasized, inserted into a faded photo of guitarist Jonny Buckland’s great-grandfather’s band from 1919.

All of this feels designed to wrong-foot you, to make you uncertain of what to expect, and the album manages that same trick for its whole running time. At first Everyday Life will feel scattered, unfinished, messy. It feels like an entire album made from the interludes and stranger tracks from previous Coldplay efforts. Songs drift in and out, wrapping up before you can get a handle on them. Guest musicians – and there are dozens – take the spotlight, never staying for long, just handing you off to the next sparkling performance. The guiding principle here seems to be to never sound like Coldplay, and they pull it off, but none of these 16 tracks sound anything like any of the others either.

Everyday Life is the most restless album from a band I love specifically for their restlessness. I spent my first listen through in a state of astonishment, not only that the band would create this record, but that Coldplay Inc. would marshal its forces behind releasing it. Despite the double-album fanfare, this is one of the band’s smallest and most intimate things – it’s moody and stark, and several of these tracks seem to feature Chris Martin on his own, accompanied by one instrument as if caught practicing in the corner of the studio. There are no songs here that sound like hits, no songs that 2005 me would predict to take the world by storm.

Instead we have the sound of one of the world’s biggest bands creating something just for themselves. This is their most topical and pointed record – and you know things are bad in the world when even Coldplay is commenting on them – and the whole thing feels like a response to the wave of hatred sweeping over us. Because they are Coldplay, their response is love, but on the way there they get more specific than they ever have about what they are up against. “Trouble in Town” is a foreboding piece of work about racism, and includes a recording of Philadelphia police officer Philip Nace harassing two African-American men on the street. “Guns” doesn’t top two minutes, but it takes aim at the NRA and the proliferation of firearms, Martin proclaiming that “everyone’s gone fucking crazy.”

In that light, the album’s plethora of sounds from around the world feels like a plea for unity. There are lines in Arabic and French, chants in Zulu, and musicians and singers from all over the globe lending their skills to this. There are gospel choirs and children’s choirs, and spoken poetry from Persia and Nigeria. In the end, the message is simple: we are all human beings, and we are all children of God, whatever name you choose to give God. The spirituality here is as all-encompassing as the humanity, which is as all-encompassing as the music.

The weak link, of course, remains Martin’s lyrics, which are often frustratingly banal. “Daddy” is a prime example of a song that is both deeply touching and cringe-worthy – it’s written from the point of view of Martin’s children, missing him when he is gone, so the child-like lyrics work on one level, but are embarrassing on another. “Orphans” tackles the Syrian refugee crisis, and Martin’s stated aim was to depict these refugees as people just like us, hoping to get back to some sense of normalcy. That the best way he could come up with to capture this is “I want to know when I can go back and get drunk with my friends” is prime Chris Martin.

But most of the time, his naked sentimentality works in this record’s favor. Sparkling acoustic pieces like “Eko” and “Old Friends” fit their simple lyrics nicely. The gospel pieces “Broken” and “When I Need a Friend” feel open and vulnerable, and when the band enlists Femi Kuti’s extraordinary horn section for the astounding highlight “Arabesque,” Martin’s words about how we share the same blood seem worthy of the power behind them. (Seriously, this song, with its two-minute saxophone solo, is amazing.)

Best of all, when the band brings it all together at the end with their most Coldplay-esque material, Martin’s naked emotional writing does the trick nicely. After an album of turmoil, the title track comes gliding in like a minor classic, soaring without erupting into cheesiness. I probably shouldn’t admit how affected I am whenever Martin repeats “you got to keep dancing when the lights go out,” but man, it really works for me. The song is a marvel of restraint, keeping things quiet even when the band’s instincts might send them into orbit. Even the ending hallelujahs could have been so much bigger, and I’m grateful that they’re not. The ending is graceful instead of overpowering.

I’d never suggest that Everyday Life is a perfect record. In fact, it’s the imperfections I like most about it. For a band so polished, so methodical to deliver something so messy and personal is a gift. I never know what kind of album I’m going to get from this band, and this one was a genuine surprise, one I am still diving into. You won’t find anything like “Clocks” here, but you will find a band pushing itself to create something outside their own boundaries, something that speaks love into the world with as much boldness as they can muster. That’s Everyday Life, and I love it immensely.

So why do I like Coldplay? Listen to this record. All the reasons are here.

Next week, Beck and Leonard Cohen, and then we dive into the end-of-the-year festivities. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s getting close to the end of the year, which means it’s time to start thinking about the best of 2019. But it’s also time to think about the weirdest of 2019, the albums that just by their very existence would make any reasonable person say “WTF?”

That’s right, it’s time for the annual WTF Awards here at Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. This is our yearly celebration of the records that I just cannot believe are real things, but which, against all laws of God and man, actually were made and released. To be clear, receiving a WTF Award doesn’t mean that an album is bad, or that it shouldn’t exist. It’s just an acknowledgement of the utter improbability of its existence. In fact, the more improbable an album is, the harder the artist probably had to fight to bring it into being, so respect is due.

Anyway, we have three such awards to give out this time, and I’ll go in ascending order of improbability. The first one may not even seem that improbable, considering it’s the second in a series: it’s Juliana Hatfield Sings the Police. Hatfield is, of course, one of our least appreciated songwriters – her catalog, beginning in the ‘90s with the Juliana Hatfield Three and continuing through a prolific solo career, is full of gems, and her voice is instantly recognizable to ‘90s kids like me. She’s generally been pretty serious, so when she issued an album of Olivia Newton-John covers last year, it was a pleasant surprise.

With Sings the Police, she makes these covers records a going concern. (Much like The Bird and the Bee did with their Van Halen tribute this year.) I did not know to expect a second volume, but had I known, I would have guessed probably 30 or 40 other artists for her to honor before Sting and his law-enforcing compatriots. (Much like the Bird and the Bee, actually, and the more I think about it, that record also deserves a WTF Award.) I love the Police, though, and was very much looking forward to hearing this.

I only wish I loved it. Hatfield’s Newton-John record was a loving pastiche, perfectly calibrated to straddle the line between tribute and send-up. Sings the Police, in contrast, sounds like something she did in a week in her basement. She’s the only musician on most of these tracks, and she’s contented herself with demo-quality production. The Police had Stewart Copeland, one of the best drummers of his era, so I was surprised to hear that Hatfield had elected to go with extremely basic bongos-in-a-box drum patterns for most of this thing. There’s a cheap and dirty sloppiness to this effort that I can’t get past, sadly.

Some of this is fun. I do enjoy hearing Hatfield sing these songs, harmonizing with herself and easily hitting notes Sting hasn’t been able to for a while. I like what she did with “Canary in a Coalmine,” and I appreciate her selection of “Landlord,” a pretty well forgotten b-side. But she takes an axe to some of my favorites here, and it makes me sad. “Next to You” is one of the best early Police numbers, and here it’s slowed down to match a $5 drum pattern, all the energy sucked out of it. “Roxanne” is worse, those same drums propping up a bass-less electric guitar smear, and that’s followed by a depressingly basic take on “Every Breath You Take.”

Things pick up near the end when Hatfield welcomes Boston-area drummer Chris Anzalone to the mix – “Hole in My Life” actually sounds like something she put effort into – but it feels a bit late by then. I wanted to love this, since I adore both Hatfield and the Police, but only found a few tracks worth revisiting. If she’d put as much into this as she did her Newton-John album, I would have been much happier with it.

But it’s barely worthy of a raised eyebrow in comparison to my next WTF Award. For this one we need to pull in Kip Winger. You remember Kip – he was the leader of ‘80s hair-proggers Winger, immortalized forever on Beavis and Butthead. They were always better than their reputation, and Kip’s solo career has been one to watch for me – he’s revealed a true talent for composition and arrangement, producing a small yet superb catalog of progressive pop-rock that can stand with anything in the genre.

Lately, though, Kip’s been trying to branch out. He now goes by C.F. Kip Winger, the C.F. standing for Charles Frederick. In 2016 he gave us an orchestral album called Conversations with Nijinsky that was nominated for a Grammy and reached the top of the classical charts. Having basically conquered that realm, he’s now turned his eye toward Broadway. His new project is Get Jack, a legit two-hour musical, and he’s produced a full-cast concept album of the whole thing.

Yes, you read that right: Get Jack is a two-hour musical written by Kip Winger. It gets weirder. The play is about Jack the Ripper, or more accurately, about the ghosts of Jack the Ripper’s victims, who come back to life to exact revenge on him. Listening to this was such a weird experience. You cannot claim that Winger and his lyricist, Damien Gray, haven’t fully committed to this thing. Get Jack is a restless, constantly moving slab of orchestral rock, marrying Kip’s big guitars with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s big, it’s confident, it’s complex. I’d like to see it on stage.

As a musical, this is more like Les Miserables than Dear Evan Hansen, which is to its credit. I don’t hear any pop hits here, nor do I spot anything that would betray this as the work of the guy who wrote “Seventeen.” The orchestrations are subtle, leaving much of the theatricality to Levi Kreis, who plays the Player (basically the narrator). The canonical five victims – Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly, Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols and Elizabeth Stride – are all well cast. Winger spends the first act introducing the victims one by one in the afterlife, and the second dramatizing their vengeance, and as a structure it works really well.

I didn’t expect to like this as much as I do. The cover is cheap-looking, and the very idea of a two-hour Jack the Ripper musical written by Kip Winger seems to promise more wrong-footedness than this delivers. This is actually quite good – dark, vicious, full of twists and turns. As a former theater kid I know the rhythms of Broadway shows, and Winger has captured them. I admit I shook my head at first, not quite able to believe that Winger had devoted years to this idea, but he’s really pulled it off.

I feel the same way about our infinitely stranger final entry, Therion’s Beloved Antichrist. Therion is one of those bands I have a tough time accepting as real anyway. They’re an operatic metal band, and I don’t just mean operatic in the Judas Priest sense. I mean all of their vocalists (and there are many) are actual opera singers, and for decades they have been mining the Venn diagram overlap between Dream Theater and Wagner. I’m consistently surprised by the way mastermind Christofer Johnsson mixes those genres, showing no clear preference for either one.

Therion’s catalog is vast, so I wouldn’t suggest starting with Beloved Antichrist. But in a lot of ways, this is the record they’ve been building toward their entire career. Even more than their usual material, this is a rock opera. It’s an astonishing three hours long, divided into three acts, and it incorporates more than 20 lead singers and a full choir. It’s based on Vladimir Soloviev’s A Short Tale of the Antichrist, and over an incredible 46 songs, it creates its own universe. There is literally nothing else that sounds like this, for better or for worse. (This only works if you don’t giggle – it’s very serious, despite how monolithically silly the sound can be.)

What’s the story? Well, in a nutshell, there’s this guy who tries to kill himself because the world is terrible, and the devil appears to him, offering to make him the antichrist. He accepts and uses his powers to make the world a better place – he eliminates all suffering and brings peace to the world. But then it’s revealed that he’s the antichrist, a truth that separates the world into factions – one side wants to depose him because he’s a demon, and the other side is willing to accept a demon if their lives improve. (Sound familiar?) In the end there’s a big war and everyone dies.

Holy hell, right? This is all dramatized with operatic voices over big guitars and synth orchestrations – if you can imagine Pavarotti fronting Trans-Siberian Orchestra, you’re part of the way there. It also takes forever to get through, and you’ll feel exhausted on the other end of it. Is it worth it? I think Therion’s style is unique for a reason, but if you can buy into what they’re doing, there’s a lot to admire here. There are no throwaway songs here – everything was slaved over. There were no moments here where I felt like the band were not absolutely committed to this bizarre thing they had created.

It must be interesting to have accomplished a major achievement like this in a field of one, though. Johnsson’s only competition is himself. I have no idea who, besides me, might have even bought this thing. I can imagine working for years on this and releasing it to the vast indifference of the world must be disheartening. But then, I would think Johnsson is used to that by now, and if he were going to give up, he would have long before taking on a three-hour opera. This is what he does, and here he does it over a wider canvas than he ever has.

I don’t know whether to recommend this. If you think you would enjoy three hours of heavy metal opera (and to be clear, it is opera, not operatic metal), then you probably already have this. I can’t imagine I am increasing Therion’s audience by mentioning them here. But if three hours of this doesn’t deserve a WTF Award, I don’t know what does. It’s the kind of record these awards were made for.

Next week, the last big new music Friday of the year. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I am not emotionally prepared to talk about Nick Cave’s Ghosteen.

As a way of easing into it, I will say this. Every year I hope that there will be some kind of fourth-quarter miracle, an album that arrives late in the year and surprises me, rewriting my top 10 list in the process. I hope for this even in great years, because I love to be blindsided by brilliant music. This hasn’t been a great year, but it’s been a good one, and I would have had a perfectly respectable end-of-the-year summary even if nothing worthy happened to arrive between now and year’s end.

But here is Ghosteen, and after only a couple spins, I cannot imagine I would write a 2019 top 10 list without it. It’s a harrowing masterpiece, the kind of record spoken about in hushed whispers. I feel like it’s already revered in certain corners, already being evangelized as an extraordinarily moving experience unlike anything else this year, and it deserves every accolade it’s getting. If one of the year’s more celebrated releases can be considered underrated, though, I think Ghosteen might be.

And if it is, it’s because this is a difficult album to listen to, despite how absolutely gorgeous it is. In 2015, Cave’s teenage son Arthur fell to his death, and this entire record is about that loss. I need to gird myself before listening, because I know once the ethereal synths of “Spinning Song” begin, I will be in for the long haul, and these 68 minutes are almost impossibly heart-wrenching. I will not be able to summarize or encapsulate the grief that pours out of this thing, nor should I be able to. That grief feels larger than the known universe, heavier than the weight of the world. It’s too big for Cave to even process in these 11 songs – he picks at it until it bleeds, but he cannot find his way over it.

It’s almost as if he knew going in that he would not be able to even name this grief, let alone shape it here. Cave is a born storyteller – his career has found him relating myths and tales from various traditions, giving them new resonance. “Spinning Song” begins with a fairy tale about Elvis, one that collapses before our ears, as if to say that even stories will not heal this pain. He ends this song not with a lesson, but with a mantra, one that he repeats throughout Ghosteen: “Peace will come in time.” But it will not come easy.

From here Cave uses metaphors – a returning train, Jesus (who makes several appearances here) – to symbolize Cave’s overpowering loss and his yearning for a reunion with his son. Much of the language here, though, is remarkably straightforward, and even when Cave is describing a vision of children climbing up to the sun, as he does on the glorious “Sun Forest,” his voice shakes with emotion. This is an album screaming for connection, for simple human understanding, and even though it is richly layered, it feels stark and bare. Drums are only used sparingly – the sound is mainly conjured with airy synths and chiming guitars, filling the higher spaces above Cave’s baritone voice.

For most of this album, Cave describes his efforts to be with his son again, in his mind. “Galleon Ship” is about searching for the other side, sailing into the unknown. (The choral arrangement here is so beautiful.) One track later is “Ghosteen Speaks,” and I can’t hear this any other way than as Arthur Cave (the ghost teen) speaking to his father. “I am beside you, look for me, I am within you, you are within me…” These songs feel like dreams, like rowing out onto some imagined, endless sea, feeling helpless and alone, and if that isn’t a metaphor for grief, I don’t know what is.

Ghosteen is divided into two halves, and Cave has described the first half (eight short songs) as the children and the second half (two long songs and a spoken word piece) as their parents. It’s an interesting way to put it, especially on an album about a father and his lost son, but it’s apt. The lengthier pieces on the second disc use much of the same imagery as the songs on disc one, but they add context and depth. The title track describes the little ghost, dancing in Cave’s hand then flitting off, and he concludes that “there’s nothing wrong with loving something you can’t hold in your hand.” It’s 50/50 whether I cry whenever he sings this line. The music here is sweeping and grand, contrasting with the tiny pulsing nugget of grief at the song’s center.

“Fireflies,” the connecting piece, is similarly emotionally raw: “We are photons released from a dying star, we are fireflies a child has trapped in a jar, and everything is as distant as the stars, I am here and you are where you are…” This piece uses the vastness of the universe as a way of expressing the enormity of loss, the way that the separation of death feels like unimaginable distance. “A star is just the memory of a star,” Cave says, and it’s true: the light we see is millions of years old, and the stars that generated it may not even exist anymore, and certainly are not where we see them.

It’s powerful stuff, and nothing here is more powerful than “Hollywood,” the 14-minute closing track. This one catches Cave on a long drive, still waiting for the peace he longed for in the first song. He speaks to his son: “Your dreams were your greatest part, I carry them in my heart.” Cave has rarely been as direct as he is here, giving us a scene from his own life, and it’s like reading his diary. It’s almost a relief when he decides to end this record with a tale, a story drawn from the Buddhist tradition – it’s as if he searched the entire album for a story like this one to tell, to comfort himself.

The story is of a woman named Kisa Gotami, whose child grows deathly ill. She visits the Buddha, who tells her that he can heal her child if she brings him a mustard seed. But she must obtain this seed from a home in which no one has died. She asks at every home in the village, but cannot find one that has not been touched by death. And so her child dies. “Everybody’s losing someone,” Cave sums up, and ends the album where it began: “I’m just waiting now for peace to come.”

And I’m hollowed out. It’s the most devastating conclusion – grief is universal, everyone has experienced death and loss, and that is the only comfort. We can wait for our loved ones to return, we can steer that galleon ship into the sun looking for them, but it won’t bring them back. All we can do is ride it through and wait for peace of mind. I cannot imagine what a difficult lesson this has been for Cave to learn. Just the sliver of emotion he lets through on this album is enough to do me in.

And look, this is all dancing about architecture. I’m describing a musical depiction of grief, and not even coming close to giving you an idea what it is like to hear this album, to take it in and sit with it. It’s an incredibly difficult and soul-enriching experience. I don’t know that I would wish it on anyone, but if you believe that music can connect us even in our darkest places, this album will prove it. We’ll be talking about Ghosteen again in a few weeks, when 2019 draws to a close. It’s an extraordinary thing, an album I wish Cave never had the inspiration to make, but one that towers over much of what I have heard this year. It hurts, and it leaves you hurting, and it’s beautiful.

Next week, the 2019 WTF Awards. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

There’s no time like early November to talk about the Early November.

TEN is a band I have never quite loved, but I have always had huge affection for. Ace Enders won my heart back in 2006 with his band’s second album, a full-on three-CD concept piece that held together a lot better than it had any right to. It also broke up the band for a bit, while Enders focused on solo projects like his I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business. For a short while I chalked this band up as a cautionary tale about burning too brightly too quickly.

But then, lo and behold, the Early November reunited in 2011 and have been going strong ever since. Their new one, Lilac, is their fourth since their return, and it continues at the same pace as the last three. That means it doesn’t nearly scale the heights of that triple-CD effort, but at this point it might be a good idea to stop comparing the more mature Ace Enders with his more ambitious younger self. What’s here is certainly delightful enough.

So what is here? Another 11 melodic rock songs delivered with sweetness and a looking-back-along-the-road perspective. Early November songs are little meditations on the distances between us, and Lilac is no exception. It’s front-loaded with winners: “Perfect Sphere (Bubble)” starts with pianos and harmonies, Enders and his bandmates singing “I will always be there, to keep you up in the air.” “My Weakness” is classic TEN, surging forward into a memorable chorus, and “Ave Maria” should please anyone who has followed this band from its early days.

Lilacdoes kind of blur together as it goes along, but Enders has grown a lot more interesting as he’s grown older, and even the deepest cuts here, like the tricky “I Dissolve,” have something to recommend them. (In this case, it’s the soaring wordless chorus.) There aren’t any bad songs here, and closer “The Lilac” is as pretty a piece as Enders has given us, even with the out-of-tune trumpet solo. I’m always glad to hear more from Ace Enders, in whatever incarnation, but there’s something special about Early November albums. I can’t really put my finger on it, but Lilac has it, whatever it is. It’s a lovely little record.

* * * * *

I can’t listen to the Early November without thinking about my friend Heather, who loves them. She’s one of those fantastic people I should keep in better contact with. I met her when she interned at the newspaper I worked for, and now she lives on the west coast and is working every day to save the world. Last time I connected with her, she let me know that her partner, Ethan Buckner, had finished and released a new EP under the name The Minnesota Child.

So I did what any friend would do: I went to Ethan’s website and listened. It took all of 30 seconds to buy the new EP, and I’ve been listening pretty obsessively ever since. The other day I found myself randomly singing the chorus of “Love is Everything” in my head, and that’s when I knew I had to write about this.

Buckner is the Minnesota Child, but Fireflies is his first EP with a band and full production. He enlisted Jeff Saltzman, who worked with the Killers during their heyday, to produce this thing, and together they’ve adorned these tunes with strings, synths, a choir and several guitar solos. It’s to their credit that it never sounds like too much. I can hear the solo acoustic origins of each of these songs, which means the focus here remains on the melodies and Buckner’s beautiful voice.

The title track kicks things off, and if you can get through the first 30 seconds of Buckner’s voice and guitar without wanting to own it, you’re better than I am. The strings kick in before long, and the song takes flight. It’s a terrific introduction to Buckner and what he does, but stick around, because “Home” is even better. Buckner sings the opening lines over a space-y organ, but by the time he’s done, he’s joined by a choir and is wailing away on lead guitar, and he’s delivered a song you want to wrap yourself in.

All five of these songs are this good, and it’s hard for me to pick a favorite. If forced to, at gunpoint, I would point people to the closer, that song I got stuck in my head. It’s hard to make a song called “Love is Everything” without it sounding trite or twee, but this one manages nicely. It’s a simple mission statement of a tune with an ascending-then-descending melody line that I just adore, and some transporting electric guitar flourishes. This whole EP is really superb, and I’m grateful to have heard it. I’ll be following Buckner’s work from now on.

You can too, here: http://theminnesotachild.com.

* * * * *

Shall we get heavier? OK.

A couple years ago I caught a pretty tremendous triple bill: headliner Between the Buried and Me, my once and future obsession The Dear Hunter, and a Norwegian band called Leprous. I’d never heard them before, but in preparation I picked up their fifth album, Malina. And I enjoyed it quite a bit, enough to track down their previous material and wait in anticipation for new stuff.

That new stuff is here – the sixth Leprous album is called Pitfalls, and it’s my favorite thing I’ve heard from them. I’m not quite sure how to describe this band. They remind me of Muse sometimes, with their heavy dance-prog edge, and with the massive (MASSIVE) vocals of leader Einar Solberg. He’s got that widescreen Jeff Buckley quality to his voice, and he never has any trouble leading the band’s sound, no matter how big it gets. At times he reminds me of Jimmy Gnecco, the highly underrated mastermind of Ours, and the band is often as dramatic as Gnecco’s too. (With a voice like that at the front, they kind of have to be.)

Pitfalls is more Solberg’s album than any other Leprous record before it. He wrote most of the songs on his own, and it’s his falsetto that takes center stage. Opener “Below” is a showcase for him, its chorus a feat of vocal acrobatics that washes over you like a tidal wave. The band steps into Radiohead territory more than once here, most notably on “Observe the Train,” but definitely kicks up the heaviness quotient enough times (like on the shimmering “By My Throne”) to keep the prog-metal tag.

The record stays in the same mode for probably too long – it’s only the passionate vocals that distinguish “At the Bottom” from the songs before it – but pulls off some magic tricks at the end. The noisy electronic shuffle “Foreigner” gives way to the 11-minute “The Sky is Red,” a true powerhouse and the best thing here. It closes Pitfalls on an ominous note, and hopefully sets the stage for more full-band explosions like it on future records. If Pitfalls has a (ahem) pitfall, it’s that it remains coiled for too long before striking. It’s a tense affair, and it will leave you in awe of Solberg’s singular talent, if nothing else.

* * * * *

Even heavier? Can do.

I will admit to you that I never heard French band Alcest before last month. I can’t get to everything, of course, but the way my friend Jeremy talked up this band and their new record, Spiritual Instinct, well, I knew I had missed something special. I’m sure this is a no-brainer for anyone familiar with them, but I loved Spiritual Instinct and I will definitely be tracking down the rest of this band’s output. (And, apparently, the hundreds of side projects associated with leader Niege.)

Let’s get this out of the way first: Alcest sing in French. You will not care. I know enough rudimentary French to figure out some of what they’re saying – titles translate to “The Garden of Midnight” and “The Island of the Dead,” among others – and it’s generally metal-sounding stuff about isolation and dark souls and truthful mirrors. Again, you won’t care. It’s the sound that will knock you over. Alcest is considered a blackgaze band, and I’m not sure I know any others – they combine heavy-as-hell black metal, screams and all, with the atmospheres of shoegaze. I love both of those things, and intertwined like this, they make Spiritual Instinct sound almost impossibly enormous.

This is the kind of heavy that feels like tons of water pressing down on you, and floating you up at the same time. “Protection” is amazing, its thick walls of sound masking what is a genuinely gorgeous melodicism. There are harmonies all over this record, drowned in gigantic guitars – like the best shoegaze, it takes a couple listens to tease out all the elements, especially the prettier ones. But if you want a master class in what this is, try the nine-minute “L’ile des Morts.” It comes screaming out of the gate, but slowly unfolds into something quite beautiful.

Spiritual Instinct is a lot shorter than I expected – 41 minutes exactly – especially since I wanted to live in its world for hours. The closest analogue I can think of is Deafheaven, but Alcest is even more concerned with beauty. This is a powerful little record, a universe contained in less time than it takes to watch an episode of television, and I’m very much looking forward to spending more time with this band.

* * * * *

Spiritual Instinct is the kind of massive, all-encompassing musical experience that you can’t really follow up with much. But lately, after its last strains have faded out, I’ve found a weird kind of solace in segueing into the new album from A Winged Victory for the Sullen.

It’s called The Undivided Five and it is only this duo’s third album in eight years. But like the last one, 2014’s Atomos, this was well worth the wait. Only Hammock makes more immersive ambient music, for my money. The Undivided Five takes its cues from Claude Debussy, particularly his piano works, and wraps its simple, big chords in strings and synthesizers, all processed and folded out of shape. This is music to float into orbit to, and it lifts my soul in ways I can’t express.

I know some people will spend the entirety of The Undivided Five (another surprisingly short record at 46 minutes) waiting for something to happen, and I understand that reaction. This is music you have to give yourself over to in order to enjoy it. You have to let the music direct your mood, not the other way around. I’m making it sound new-agey, and it’s in no way that – it’s wider than the sky, and more emotionally direct than anything you might meditate to. I’m in awe of the orchestral elements here. The strings on “Sullen Sonata” alone knock me flat.

In short, this record is beautiful, and worth the five years I waited for it. If I were able, this is the kind of music I would make all day and all night. It touches something deeper within me. It feels like a connection to something grander that I cannot describe. In a lot of ways, most music is aiming for this kind of transcendence. A Winged Victory for the Sullen gets there, every time, and my life is better for knowing and loving their work.

Next week, Nick Cave. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.