How is everyone’s lockdown going?

I know not everyone is locked down, but given the rapid spread of this thing, I imagine we all will be before long. Despite my love of my own company and my surplus of music and books, I’m starting to go a tiny bit stir crazy. It turns out being told to stay home is not the same thing, psychologically, as choosing to stay home. Who knew? I miss the people I used to see regularly, although we have worked out virtual ways to still connect.

As some of you know, I also started a new job recently, and I was in the office for six days before being told to pack up my desk and go work from home for the foreseeable future. I’ve been doing that now for almost a month, and it’s quite strange, especially since I didn’t get to know any of my colleagues before being banished to my house. All of our meetings are virtual now, and since everything was done electronically in the first place, this isn’t a lot different. But I do miss seeing co-workers in person.

The best part about this situation is that I can play whatever music I like, as loud as I like. I am certainly taking advantage of the extra music time to delve into records I have bought but not heard. Which makes up a surprising percentage of my collection, to my shame. For my own work process, it’s better for me if the music is familiar, or if it has no lyrics to distract the wordsmithing part of my brain. So when I need motivation lately, I’ve been turning to old favorites like Marillion and (believe it or not) Def Leppard.

Thankfully there have been a couple releases lately that fit the “without words” mold very well. I’ve been very much enjoying one in particular: Aporia, by Sufjan Stevens and Lowell Brams. Sufjan’s collaborator here is his stepfather, the Lowell of Carrie and Lowell, and Aporia is an album they made by swapping files back and forth over the internet. I have absolutely no idea which parts of this are Stevens and which parts are Brams – or, for that matter, which belong to their bevy of collaborators, including James McAlister and Steve Moore. But it’s not worth trying to puzzle it out.

Instead, just put Aporia on and get sucked in by it. This is a deep forest of synthesizer goodness, each track its own landscape. Some of them are fully developed, like the delightful “Agathon,” while others feel like sketches, like the 57-second “Matronymic.” But when Stevens and Lowell hit upon something magnificent, like the dark and pulsing “The Red Forest” or the sole track with vocals, “The Runaround,” this record feels alive. It’s definitely a patchwork product made in isolation, but in a lot of ways that makes it the perfect soundtrack for our current moment.

An aporia, in philosophical terms, is an expression of doubt, an acknowledgement of contradiction. This album feels uneasy in a lot of respects, like it can’t quite piece together what it sees around it, but it’s doing its best to describe it. There are very few drums, but there is always a sense of forward movement – this is not a record that lingers in one place for any length of time. There are 21 tracks and the whole thing is over in just more than 40 minutes. It doesn’t seem to come to any conclusion, either – final tracks “Eudaimonia” and the minute-long “The Lydian Ring” are just like the others, synthscapes that drop you somewhere new and are over before you’re acclimated.

As this is kind of how I feel about our new world – we’ve been dropped in and are still trying to find our footing – I am finding Aporia oddly comforting. There are some truly excellent moments here, and while I might wish that Stevens and Brams had cooked a few of these tracks a little more thoroughly, I’m fascinated by it. It also plays as a sweet coda to Carrie and Lowell, with Stevens finding artistic connections to strengthen the bond he spoke of so nakedly on that album. I’m not in love with this odd artifact, but I am in pretty deep like with it, and it is soundtracking my days nicely.

Stevens gets accused of excess a lot, but on that score he has nothing on Trent Reznor. Here’s a guy who never stops working – in addition to his three recent Nine Inch Nails projects, he’s scored everything in existence, working tirelessly with longtime collaborator Atticus Ross to bring his signature sonic sculptures to movies like Bird Box and TV shows like Black Mirror and Watchmen.

And somewhere in there, the pair found time to record two and a half hours of new instrumental music, which they have just released for free. Billed as a continuation of 2008’s fantastic Ghosts I-IV, these two new collections are wider in scope and ambition, filtering Reznor’s film work back through his NIN template. Unlike Aporia, these two albums don’t sound like hard drive clearing houses. They each feel of a piece, as if they were composed and recorded in this intended order.

The two albums are very different from one another as well. Ghosts V: Together, the shorter of the two at 70 minutes, is softer and prettier, arrangements unfolding from melodies. It’s not exactly hopeful material, but it is calm and peaceful most of the time. Unlike the ones on the first four Ghosts volumes, these songs have titles, and they seem to offer insight into Reznor and Ross’s intentions: “With Faith,” “Your Touch,” “Hope We Can Again,” “Still Right Here.” This is music, at least on some level, meant to reassure.

So we get lots of quiet pianos and hushed background drones. The title track is ten minutes of slowly building shimmer, the pianos eventually buried beneath clouds of sound and a lovely Robert Smith-style guitar. There’s definitely some tension building across this record – just listen to the spine-tingling low-voice choir on “With Faith,” underpinning everything – but even something called “Apart” is 13 minutes of calm ambience. Like all of Reznor and Ross’s work, this stuff is detailed – listening carefully will bring out so many layers, so many small nuances, and many of those serve to needle the calmer atmosphere with a sense of dread.

That dread comes to the fore on Ghosts VI: Locusts, and honestly, I have to say this: if you’re having a hard time dealing with the ongoing pandemic and the tidal wave of anxiety it has created, listening to this may not be the best idea. Locusts is 83 minutes long, and I found absorbing it all the way through to be physically unsettling. There’s no reprieve – this is the sound of the world quietly collapsing around you while you slowly go mad trying to survive. If you think you couldn’t handle that right now, you’re probably right.

Locusts is no louder than Together, but it’s a lot more menacing. We still get the pianos, but they’re playing dissonant figures now, and the soundscapes behind them are more abrasive. The Miles Davis-esque trumpet in “Around Every Corner” and “The Worriment Waltz” is the perfect touch, lending this repetitive piece a sense of otherworldly desolation. While no song on the original Ghosts broke six minutes, the first three tracks of Locusts last about half an hour, like a slowly rising tide of death from which there is no escape.

A piece like “When It Happens (Don’t Mind Me)” makes my flesh crawl – its unnerving hammered dulcimer foundation is attacked on all sides by darker textures, and it sounds like hordes of insects swarming to attack. There are calmer pieces, like “A Really Bad Night,” but most of this is like the clockwork dread of “Your New Normal,” twisting your nerves into knots. The 13 minutes of “Turn This Off Please” do to me what watching the end of Requiem for a Dream does – just sheer anguish and hopelessness. Even a song called “Almost Dawn” only lets a few shafts of light in before the song devours them.

Locusts is a dark, dark ride, and while it certainly serves as an appropriate response to our new nightmare, it will not serve those with anxiety issues well. What’s amazing to me is that Reznor and Ross recorded these two albums over the last few years, they work well as a reaction to the current world situation. I know a global pandemic could not have been on their minds when they created this music, but in the context of now, it sure sounds like it was. And while I have heard Locusts only the one time, and probably will not go back to it for a while, Together has been a fine companion these past few days.

You can get both Ghosts V and Ghosts VI for free right here .

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So it’s finally the end of March, the month that has felt like a million years. (Can you believe it was only January when we lost Neil Peart? That feels like a lifetime ago.) It’s time for my First Quarter Report, and more than usual, this is a list you can just ignore. The final top ten in December will look nothing like this, I am certain. It’s been a strange and random year, and here is the strange and random list-in-progress to reflect that.

10. Kesha, High Road.
9. The Men, Mercy.
8. Field Music, Making a New World.
7. Drive-By Truckers, The Unraveling.
6. Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts V and VI.
5. Pearl Jam, Gigaton.
4. The Innocence Mission, See You Tomorrow.
3. Derek Webb, Targets.
2. Nada Surf, Never Not Together.
1. Matt Wilson and His Orchestra, When I Was a Writer.

I genuinely love the top records on this list, but I don’t expect them to be the best of 2020. I know there’s an album here I haven’t reviewed, too, but I will get to that. Next week, in fact. Join me then!

See you in line Tuesday morning.

As of this writing, I haven’t left my house for more than a few minutes in eight days.

I like to think that I’ve been training for something like this my whole life. I’ve always been content with my own company, even as a child. Give me a good book or a good album and I’m set. Give me the literally hundreds of seasons of television on Netflix and Disney Plus and I should be able to ride out a global pandemic. I can go days without talking to another human being and feel OK about it.

But in more other ways than I can count, no one is prepared for what lies ahead of us. This new virus has spread through our population quickly enough that our only defense against it is what experts are calling social distancing, and over a much longer term than I think people have been suggesting. There’s no doubt that any concert or other gathering you had in mind for April and May will be canceled. Now I’m seeing events in June join the list. The only one on my calendar was AudioFeed in Champaign in July, and I have no doubt whatsoever that it will not happen this year.

It’s all for the good, of course – I am one hundred percent behind efforts to slow the spread of this virus, and I’ve been forcefully preaching the Gospel of Stay the Hell Home for a couple weeks now. We’re too late to prevent hundreds of deaths, but I hope we are not too late to prevent thousands, if not millions, in the coming months. It’s a scary thing, to know that just by leaving your house or forgetting to wash your hands you could contract something that spreads so quickly from person to person. I remember reading The Stand for the first time in middle school and wondering what it would be like to live through something like it. And here we are.

And I think we’ll be here for a while. Some of the estimates I have seen have us housebound and social distancing for five months at a minimum. I have no idea how the U.S. economy survives that, and I imagine we will come out the other side of it a changed nation. (Maybe one that values its front-line workers more, and considers health care a basic human right?) But it’s the only way we have to save millions of lives around the world.

There is hope. There is always hope. I personally know some of the scientists working on characterizing the structure of this new virus, in order to design some kind of blocking agent as a treatment. In some areas of the world, like South Korea, the curve has already been flattened, the virus more under control. It can be done. It will be a long and lonely slog for most of us to get to the point where there is a vaccine, there is a treatment, and it’s our job to make sure the hospitals and medical facilities are not overwhelmed with cases before then.

In a lot of ways, it feels like a sacred duty. One of the recurring themes of The Good Place, a show I feel beyond fortunate to have lived to see, is the notion of what we owe to each other. This is exactly the kind of crisis that brings that concept out of the abstract. And what I see right now is billions of people, all around the world, sacrificing so that others may live. My staying home is not out of fear for my own safety. It’s out of love and concern for people I don’t even know, people I may unknowingly infect by going about my daily routine.

It’s an act of worldwide empathy, and I think that’s beautiful.

The world feels strange and new now. It’s like humanity has drawn in a deep breath and is holding it. Eventually we’ll have to let that breath out, but for now it’s quieter, it’s more still. The things we thought mattered a month ago don’t seem so important. The people we know and love, that’s what matters. I’ve had people I haven’t spoken to in years reach out to me over the past two weeks, and it’s been lovely to reconnect, even as distanced as we are right now. It’s a time of deep reflection for everyone, I think.

As always, music is getting me through even the darker and more lonely moments. I’m hearing songs in different ways now, with different layers of meaning. (Jellyfish’s “I Wanna Stay Home” is a particular favorite at the moment.) I’ve had a lot of time to think about which music brings me the most hope, shines the brightest light into the darkened tunnel ahead. I’ve been asked a couple times on Facebook to contribute to playlists of inspirational songs, and have given those a lot of thought. I’d like to share one song now that has long been my “anything is possible” anthem, and I hope I can explain why.

It’s “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane.

Whenever I have trouble thinking about how I will manage to do some daunting task, it helps me to remember that in 1959, four guys made this, live. This music sounds impossible to my ears. It was unlike any jazz that had been recorded to that point – Coltrane built “Giant Steps” around a chord pattern that modulates constantly between three keys, and the notes that work in one of those keys won’t work in another, so you have to keep those changes in your head constantly. This is made far more difficult by how quickly the thing moves – the changes come at you like 100-mile-an-hour fastballs, and you have to be prepared.

Coltrane is absolutely on fire here, from the first moment to the last. By the time of this session, he’d had months to work out how he wanted to play “Giant Steps,” and it shows – he’s confident, playing at blistering speed without missing any of the tricky key changes. He’s inspired, and he inspires his bandmates too. Listen to Paul Chambers – that isn’t a bassline, it’s a 100-yard dash in musical form. Art Taylor’s drum part sounds simple, but it’s deceptive, and it’s really fast. This is basically a speed metal tempo, the song carrying the quartet along in its current.

But it’s pianist Tommy Flanagan I most want to talk about here. To set the scene: at this point in his young career, Flanagan was one of the hottest session pianists in jazz. He’d played with Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins and Ella Fitzgerald, and he’d led his own trio with celebrated results. He was one of the most reliable musicians you could tap for your recording, which is why it’s so strange to hear what happens to him on “Giant Steps.”

The simple truth is that Flanagan had never seen anything quite like the chart for “Giant Steps.” He’d practiced it, of course, but at a much slower tempo, so when Coltrane called for the one you hear on the recording, it caught him off guard. You can practically hear him learning how to play “Giant Steps” as the tape rolls, and when the time comes for him to solo – as if anyone could match Coltrane’s intensity – he starts and stops, falters and picks back up, uncertain of the changes as they come one by one.

It’s not bad work, mind you. It’s certainly better than any piano solo I’ve ever played. I think the important thing to remember about it, though, is that Flanagan got through it. He was blindsided by the material, unsure of how to navigate it, but he did it. I find that inspirational. Even more so, to me, than the courage to change jazz as an art form in four minutes the way Coltrane did here. Coltrane changed the world, but for Flanagan, the world changed around him, and he still made his way through.

This new world we find ourselves in is going to feel a lot like that. The changes will come quickly, and we won’t always know when to expect them. Very few of us will be like Coltrane, anticipating and skipping over the top of them with grace. Most of us will be like Tommy Flanagan when life calls a tempo we are not expecting. But we’ll find our way. Like any good jazz ensemble, we’ll help each other along, until our tentative strides toward the light become giant steps.

We can do this. Stay home, stay safe, stay connected. Love one another.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Trip Shakespeare was a band I just kinda missed.

I certainly was aware and paying attention to music when Across the Universe came out in 1990. That was the band’s third album, but their first to receive major-label national distribution, so it’s the first one I could reasonably have been expected to hear as a high school student in New England. But I have no memory of it or its follow-ups at all. I was already turning my attention to Seattle, and aside from a certain purple-frocked genius, I think I missed Minneapolis completely.

No, I should be ashamed of this, but the first I became aware of the Wilson brothers – Matt and Dan – was when I heard “Closing Time,” the worldwide smash hit from Dan’s band Semisonic. I frankly loved Semisonic. That is not the part about which I feel ashamed, by the way – Dan Wilson is a legend in my house, and even his most overplayed material still makes me smile. It’s the fact that it took one of the Wilsons hitting it big to turn me on to their first project together.

I got over it, though. Trip Shakespeare was a strange, beautiful band, and Matt Wilson was often the equal of his younger brother as a songwriter. Lulu is a forgotten gem of the era, an album that any fan of ornate, well-written guitar-pop should hear. It was also the band’s last. Since the breakup, Dan’s star has ascended while Matt still toils in obscurity. Even here – I’ve written a ton about Dan Wilson, songwriter to the stars, and virtually nothing about his brother.

That ends now, because Matt Wilson has just released my favorite album of 2020 so far.

His new project is called Matt Wilson and his Orchestra, and while it doesn’t quite live up to that lofty promise, the lineup is unique. Wilson has enlisted Quillan Roe of the Roe Family Singers to play banjo, Phala Tracy to play harp and Jacques Wait to play bass. The result is somewhere between bluegrass and baroque, and these arrangements not only complement Wilson’s new songs, they elevate them.

Not that these songs needed elevating. Wilson’s first album with his orchestra is called When I Was a Writer, and the title song, about his more fertile songwriting period in the ‘80s and ‘90s, is typically self-effacing. These 10 tracks prove he’s still a writer, and a great one. Just “Decent Guy,” all by itself, makes the case: it’s an unfailingly melodic ride through dark alleys of self-loathing, narrated by someone who wants to be seen as decent but knows it’s out of his reach. This is just a great, great song, one worthy of writers like Aimee Mann.

The album never gets worse. The piano-led “Come to Nothing” has been stuck in my head for days, the orchestra’s harmonies sweet and organic. The album does have drums and percussion, but they’re light (and I have no idea who played them). The focus is on the sparse acoustic interplay of Wilson’s guitar with the banjo and harp. That interplay is never better here than on “Real Life,” the album’s highlight. This song is masterful, and it would have been fine even without the incredible bridge that culminates in Wilson’s flawless falsetto, but it’s there anyway, taking things to new heights.

Wilson’s voice is certainly not what it was – it’s older and more weathered, creakier and more strained. But even that works beautifully with these folksier arrangements. There’s an authenticity to When I Was a Writer that instantly makes this my favorite of Wilson’s many projects. I’ve only had this record for a week or so, and these songs are already like old friends. I initially questioned Wilson’s decision to end things with “Mental Patients,” but now I think it’s the perfect closer – this is a record about Wilson’s inner turmoil, and here at the end he extends that gaze outward, concluding that we’re all mental patients, living in a world of blues.

I predict this will be the sleeper album of 2020, and it’ll be the one most everyone sleeps on. I found it almost entirely by accident, thanks to YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. I’ve thought more than once about how this lovely little gem of a thing nearly passed me by. Don’t let that happen to you. Even if you’ve never heard of Trip Shakespeare and your favorite Wilson is a volleyball, try this album out. It’s a wonder.

You can hear and buy Matt Wilson and his Orchestra here: https://www.minneapolismatt.com.

* * * * *

Aside from this clear standout, it’s been a weird, random year for music. We’re still waiting for the end of the month for some of the bigger guns to come out, like Pearl Jam and Sufjan Stevens. But in the meantime, here are a couple good examples of what we’ve had to deal with.

I can’t say I was overly excited for Citizens of Boomtown, the first Boomtown Rats album in 36 years. Bob Geldof has never been my favorite singer or songwriter, and much of the classic Boomtown material is pretty basic stuff. I respect Geldof greatly – he was one of the few musicians in the ‘80s who used his platform to do some real good in the world. I think it’s completely possible to hold the man in high regard and still not much like his band.

And I definitely didn’t like Citizens of Boomtown very much. I’m not even sure what convinced 68-year-old Geldof to put this thing together, but it wasn’t a surplus of great songs. Most of these, like “Trash Glam Baby” and “She Said No,” sound like any band you could hear in any bar in any city in the world. And those are in the good half. When Geldof and the Rats embrace awkward rap on “K.I.S.S.” and house music on “Get a Grip,” it’s cringe-worthy. A song called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Ye Ye” really lives down to that title.

Is there a bright spot? Absolutely. “Passing Through,” at track five, is the record’s one sober, lovely moment. Buoyed by a circular piano figure, the song – about being visited by ghosts of the past – builds to a sweet and hopeful chorus: “We will not break, we will not bend, we’ll take these rented souls and render them immune to loss or pain, we’ll pretend it’s all the same…” This song by itself doesn’t justify the rest of Citizens of Boomtown, but it is worth hearing. You can take or leave the rest.

Faring better is the Flaming Lips, a band that I guess I will follow down any rabbit hole they choose to dive. I’ve rolled with their Beatles cover albums, their 24-hour song and their collaboration with Miley Cyrus. Most recently the band issued King’s Mouth, a collection of music written for a bizarre art exhibit by frontman Wayne Coyne, and it was one of their best sets in years. Had I gotten off the train at Miley’s dead petz, I would never have heard it. So I’m on board.

Which means I picked up Deap Lips, a full-length collaboration with badass guitar-drums duo Deap Vally. In truth this isn’t the full Flaming Lips, just Coyne and Stephen Drozd working with guitarist Lindsey Troy and drummer Julie Edwards. In a lot of ways, this is like a new band, combining elements of both and coming up with something new. Deap Lips is written and arranged like a single song, with the raucous vocals and guitars of Troy and Edwards and the synth-y ambience of Coyne and Drozd in equal measure.

How is it as a piece of music? Weird in all the best ways. From the start, as the relatively straightforward “Home Thru Hell” segues into the Tron-like instrumental “One Thousand Sisters With Aluminum Foil Calculators,” this thing wants to take you on a journey. The folksy “Hope Hell High” is like Neko Case surrounded by cloudy keyboards, the shouty “Motherfuckers Got to Go” is a hilarious interlude, and the centerpiece of the album, the seven-minute “Love is Mind Control,” really works. It all feels like a single thought, though maybe one that suffers from a bit of attention deficit disorder.

This album is without a doubt the strangest thing Deap Vally has contributed to, but it’s par for the course for the Flaming Lips, a band that has always and forever only done what they want. They’ll work with anyone, they’ll try anything, and most of the time, it’ll stick. This isn’t a masterpiece by any means, and it won’t make my best-of-2020 list (at least, I hope it won’t), but it’s another fascinating piece of work, and I’m thankful for it.

Next week, who knows? I started working from home today, and I expect we’ll be under a stay-at-home order before long. Scary times. We’ll see what seven days brings.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I play piano.

I definitely would not describe myself as a piano player. I never took lessons – I taught myself, with some initial help and encouragement from my grandmother, a concert pianist. I know what I’m doing behind a keyboard, but I’m nothing special, and my technique is terrible. The one time my parents did take me in for piano lessons, after years of learning on my own, I was told that I’d have to forget everything and start from scratch. So I quit.

Basically, I know enough about playing piano to know that I’m not particularly good at playing piano. I know enough to recognize great playing when I hear it, to recognize that sweet spot between talent and hard work that produces some of the very best ivory-ticklers in the world. I have a running list of those people in my head, my piano-playing idols. These are the folks I listen to when I want to feel simultaneously awed and dismayed.

McCoy Tyner was definitely on that list.

Tyner should be on any short list of extraordinary jazz pianists, up there with Monk and Evans. I first heard him as a member of John Coltrane’s epic 1960s quartet, and I know there will be plenty of remembrances of Tyner that begin and end with this period of his career. It’s hard to fault people for that – the albums Tyner recorded with Coltrane, including My Favorite Things, Live at the Village Vanguard and the immortal A Love Supreme, are among the best ever made.

And Tyner’s playing on them is magical. A Love Supreme is one of my favorite albums, a perfect synthesis of pieces and players, and perhaps the most complete distillation of Coltrane’s genius on wax. There’s a lyrical complexity to Tyner’s playing that I can barely describe – it’s so knotted, and yet flows so effortlessly. If you can, seek out the one extant live recording, laid down in July of 1965. (It’s on the deluxe reissue of the album.) That’s where you get to hear just how on-fire this whole band is. You can really hear Tyner’s energy and force, especially on “Part II – Resolution.”

I completely understand if your familiarity with McCoy Tyner begins and ends with this quartet, or even with this record. It’s a masterpiece, and it belongs in every home. But Tyner had a long solo career before, during and after playing in Trane’s band, and I love much of that material equally. He was a softer-touch player before his stint with Trane, but when he released The Real McCoy in 1967, he emerged transformed. That album is amazing, from “Passion Dance” on down, and sparked a run of dozens of very good records.

I keep coming back, in fact, to the last one he made. Tyner recorded Solo: Live from San Francisco in 2007, and released it in 2009. He was 69 years old when he sat down at the piano at the Herbst Theatre, but was still clearly capable of spinning up a whole world just by himself. His signature heavy left hand was in full force, smashing down those bass notes and chords, and his superhuman dexterity had not lost a note. Most of all, this performance sounds like McCoy Tyner, and like no one else. It’s incredible.

On Friday, March 6, McCoy Tyner became the last of Coltrane’s great quartet to pass on. He was 81. I don’t suppose I will ever grow tired of listening to him play. He still fills me with that mix of awe and dismay, mixed with a little bit of disbelief. May it always be so. Rest in peace, McCoy.

* * * * *

I suppose I could end this with a look at some of the albums I’m excited about in the coming months. This has been the strangest year so far, and with the global pandemic breathing down our necks, it’s about to get even stranger. Tours are being canceled, and albums are probably next. But given what we know right now, here’s the best stuff that I think the next few months will bring us.

March doesn’t really take flight until its last week, but it’s a good one. New things from Pearl Jam, Sufjan Stevens (with his stepfather Lowell Brams), Brian Fallon, Waxahatchee, Vanessa Carlton and the debut of Coriky, which brings Ian McKaye and Joe Lally together for the first time since Fugazi. In April we’ll see a new Rufus Wainwright and new things from Lady Gaga, the Strokes, the Watkins Family Hour, Haim, Pure Reason Revolution and – and I swear I am not making this up – something called Danzig Sings Elvis.

May holds new ones from Alanis Morissette, the Psychedelic Furs, Built to Spill (playing the songs of Daniel Johnston), Jason Isbell, Sparks, the Magnetic Fields, Weezer and the Killers, along with the long-awaited return of Phantom Planet. Beyond that we will get new Steven Wilson, the fourth Husky album and a new record from the Choir, which they are taking pledges for right now. Oh, and a near-Jellyfish reunion with the new band The Lickerish Quartet.

It’s pretty random, right? So far there are no big-deal announcements, no huge records that will bring everyone out of their homes to listen. Which, given the pandemic, might be a good thing.

Anyway, that’s it for this week. Next week, some more random March records.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Ozzy Osbourne has never been scary.

I say this as a massive fan of Black Sabbath, particularly the early albums. Sabbath is one of the few bands I can name who actually created their own genre, and every doom metal band that came after them, from Sleep to Bell Witch and all points in between, owes them a massive debt. The first five Sabbath albums are unimpeachable, and the lock-step slow-death grooves laid down by Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward are legendary.

But Ozzy? Ozzy was always kind of funny to me. From the very beginning, when he rhymed “masses” with “masses,” he struck me as just some bloke up front, not so much leading the band as being led by it. Theatrically scary became Ozzy’s go-to as he left Sabbath and began his solo career, but he was never as convincing at it as Alice Cooper was. And when he agreed to star in The Osbournes, all pretense was gone. Ozzy has always been an ordinary man.

So I wasn’t too surprised when, at age 71, he titled his 12th solo album Ordinary Man. He does appear on the cover in a “scary” costume with black wings, but turn the record over and you’ll see a photo of him in regular clothes taking a leak in his back yard. That’s the real Ozzy, and this decent effort does a lot to put the focus on him. And really, there’s no way it couldn’t, as Osbourne’s voice is a wavery shadow of the strong instrument it once was.

But this ordinary man has an impressive contacts list, so we get a bevy of superstars playing on this thing. Most of it was made with Guns ‘n’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, with guitar work from Slash and Tom Morello, in addition to producer Andrew Watt. (Yep, the guy who made Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy.) The instrumentation is full and solid, with strings on a couple of tracks and loads of keyboards.

And yes, the two big guest stars have rightfully taken up a lot of the ink this record has received. Sir Elton John plays piano and sings on the strikingly autobiographical title track, on which Ozzy sings “Don’t know why I’m still alive, the truth is I don’t want to die an ordinary man…” At the other end of the spectrum is rapper Post Malone, who appears twice here. “It’s a Raid” is one of the heaviest things here, while the bonus track “Take What You Want” is pulled right from Malone’s album and definitely doesn’t fit here.

With all this, Ordinary Man is best when Ozzy is just being Ozzy. “Eat Me” is just as carefree and stupid as you think it will be – he takes the title literally, and asks the listener to “bite ‘til I’m dead.” “Scary Little Green Men” is about aliens that are not as cute and cuddly as we’ve been led to expect. Opener “Straight to Hell” is Sabbath-lite, his spooky narrator promising to “make you defecate.” It’s all silly fun, and it all rocks with competence.

Truth be told, you’ve already heard the best song: the single, “Under the Graveyard,” makes the best use of Ozzy’s swooping voice and gives us the most convincing riff of the lot. The lyrics are so dark that I hope they’re not genuine. It’s a remarkably fatalistic song, from “we’re all rotting bones” to “we all die alone,” but if you’re looking for a classic – and one could argue that these lyrics about death only contribute to its classic status – this is your best bet.

As Ozzy ages, each new album could end up being his swan song. Ordinary Man is a pretty good one, with some deeply personal touches that elevate it from the muck he gave us in the 2000s. If this is his last, he went out just being Ozzy, and that’s all one could ask for.

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At the exact other end of the musical mood spectrum, we have Best Coast.

I have long thought of Best Coast as the indie-rock equivalent of Rush of Blood-era Coldplay. The duo of Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno write simple, catchy songs with lyrics that are so simplistic that they can’t be anything but genuine. This pair has given their albums such straightforward names as Crazy for You and The Only Place and California Nights, and now here they are with their fourth, Always Tomorrow. The songs are exactly what you think they will be from that title.

That’s not to say this isn’t enjoyable stuff, though. The songs are driving and full of verve – this is Cosentino’s healing record, and its pivotal song, “Everything Has Changed,” has an appealing Joan Jett feel to it that sets the tone. “Everything has changed, I like it this way,” she sings, and I can’t deny the little smile the simple chorus brings to my face. Single “For the First Time” feels like an old-school Bangles tune, Cosentino claiming she feels like herself again for the first time.

This is another 41 minutes of catchy, easy rock, with some gems (“Wreckage,” “Master of My Own Mind”) hidden among the pretty good tunes. It’s nearly impossible to dislike this, a quality it shares with every previous Best Coast record. They’re a fun, unexceptional band, and Always Tomorrow is a fun, unexceptional record.

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I have yet to talk about The Men in this space, which is odd. I wouldn’t call myself a fan of this band, but I’m definitely an admirer, and they deserve some attention from me.

When I say I’m an admirer, I’m mainly talking about the artistic evolution this Brooklyn quartet has undergone since crashing onto the punk scene in 2009. Their first two albums were abrasive, cheap noise-punk efforts, but since joining Sacred Bones Records in 2011, the Men have dabbled in all kinds of things, stretching their wings while retaining their original scrappiness.

Their eighth album, Mercy, continues along this path, and all told, I think it’s their finest. My favorite thing here is the swampy 10-minute organ-fueled jam “Wading in Dirty Water,” which rides a groove you’d never expect from these guys and takes it into the stratosphere. Sequencing this second on the album is a perverse act – the opener, the breezy “Cool Water,” is soon forgotten among the waves of this monster, and everything after it pales in comparison.

That’s not to say Mercy peters out from there. Taken on their own terms, the five remaining songs are all worthy, from the minimal piano sketch “Fallin’ Thru” (which feels like eavesdropping on a rehearsal) to the big ‘80s guitars of “Children All Over the World” to the thrashing “Breeze” to the haunting title track. Nothing here is slick or even particularly well-made, but it’s all appealing, and the many different moods the Men stack next to each other turn this brief record into a journey.

I’m not at all sure what convinced me to try this band out in the first place, but I’m glad I did. Over eight albums and an EP they have evolved considerably while still retaining their core identity, and while I can’t say I think any of those eight albums are masterpieces, they all work for me, both individually and together. The Men are one of a kind, and I’m glad to know them.

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Next week, no idea. March isn’t all that promising, so I’d look forward to more columns like this one, about records that are fine but not amazing. Hoping to be surprised.

See you in line Tuesday morning.