There will never be another musician like Frank Zappa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Here’s a record you will probably hear about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you in line Tuesday morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you in line Tuesday morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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If it’s OK with you, I’m going to start this week’s column with the biggest surprise of the month.

I don’t have a lot of time for the Killers. I enjoyed Hot Fuss, and I think “Spaceman” (from their third album, Day and Age) is the best song of their catalog. Their obsession with Springsteen grates on me, however, and their faintly ridiculous 2012 album Battle Born fell off my radar quickly.

Which is why I’m so surprised at how much I’m enjoying frontman Brandon Flowers’ second solo bow, The Desired Effect. Flowers has always brought an ‘80s sensibility to his work, but this is the first album on which he gets the balance exactly right. This is an album right out of 1985, its sound only barely updated. It practically glitters with keyboards, the guitars are perfectly placed in the mix (meaning pretty far back), the drums are big and reverbed, the harmonies dripping wet. It’s like he’s finally gone the whole way, and it suits him well.

Here’s the thing he gets the most right: while that ‘80s sound might come off as kitschy in retrospect, it was absolutely serious at the time. The Desired Effect is exactly the same – there isn’t a hint of tongue-in-cheek irony to this thing. It’s not a pastiche, it’s a lovingly crafted album in a particular style. By taking even a bouncy trifle like “I Can Change” seriously, Flowers has captured the essence of the era better than he ever has. The songs here are the meaty anthems he prefers, delivered with all the earnestness he can muster. Somehow, though, they don’t come off as silly this time.

And I think it’s because he’s fully embraced the sound he’s only worn as a costume before. Something is different about this one. You can hear it in the lovely ballad “Between Me and You,” which features Bruce Hornsby on piano. The details here are perfect, from Tony Levin’s Chapman stick to the occasional “yeah” in the background. It’s a pretty song that could have walked right off of the radio in 1985. Most of The Desired Effect is the same way, and despite my resistance, I’m enjoying it more than just about anything Flowers has contributed to. If that was his desired effect, well, it was a smashing success.

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The first thing that drew me to Ace Enders was his ambition.

Enders is the leader and singer of New Jersey band The Early November. In 2006, TEN released The Mechanic, The Mother and the Path, a triple album that was equal parts brave and foolish. Clocking in at more than two hours, the album included a louder disc of modern rock, a softer one of more acoustic pieces, and a radio play that tied the concept together with some wonderful songs interspersed. It was a huge undertaking, its lesser moments easy to forgive in the face of its sprawling reach.

I loved it, and I swore to follow Enders wherever he went from there. And he’s gone a lot of interesting places, from his big and slick solo work to his messy and sparse efforts under the name I Can Make a Mess Like Nobody’s Business. When The Early November reunited in 2012 and started issuing new music again, I was excited, but it turns out that his first band is now the least interesting facet of Enders’ output. In short, they’re his rock band, and they do a fine job, but they don’t convey the scope of what the man can do.

Which brings me to Imbue, the just-released fourth Early November album. There is one fantastic winner on here, and it’s called “Better This Way.” It starts out as a slower, more atmospheric song, but the chorus just explodes: “You like it better that way,” Enders sings, before delivering the killer melody in wordless shouts. This one will stay with me, and all by itself it makes me glad I bought Imbue.

But the rest of the record is pretty average, I’m sorry to say. The band is energetic and gives these middling rockers their all, but they’re middling rockers, with few memorable moments. Things pick up at the end – closer “Nothing Lasts Forever” rocks with conviction, and bonus track “Digital Age” is unlike anything else here, whispery and pulsing. I don’t mind the rest – I quite like the piano on “Harmony,” and Enders sings all of these songs with conviction and power – but I don’t love it either, and I know Enders can do better.

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A couple years ago, I saw the Milk Carton Kids opening for Over the Rhine.

As you’d expect, it was just Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan, each with an acoustic guitar, and they spun glorious and sad beauty from their simple tools. But what struck me most about the show was how funny the two of them were. The between-song patter was dry and sarcastic and, in its subtle way, uproarious.

I mention this because it’s nice to know that Pattengale and Ryan are not as morose as their music would lead you to believe. In fact, they’re having fun making this gorgeous stuff. For some reason, the image of the two of them live colored my listen to their second album, Monterey, and even though it’s exactly the same as their debut, I enjoyed it more. Monterey is just like the live show – two guitars and two high, beautiful voices, forever intertwined, for its entire running time.

And it’s so, so lovely. Simon and Garfunkel is an obvious touchstone, as is the Everly Brothers, and the Kids are under no illusions that this sound is wholly their own. They even center one song around a particularly Paul Simon line: “Everywhere we go, we are the child of where we came.” But their commitment to it, and their ability to write spare, simple songs that can still fill you up, makes this worth hearing and treasuring.

As they did last time, the Kids use their silky sound to soften the blow of their dark, sad lyrics, in the best folk tradition. There are deaths, there are lonely wanderings down deserted streets, there are glimpses at a happier past that set the melancholy present into sharp relief. The Kids work in some Crosby, Stills and Nash-style political commentary, too: “Freedom rings loudly now, listen up, hear the sound of screaming as the shots ring out, that’s what freedom sounds like now…” One song later, they deftly reframe the political with the personal: “The letter said it all, we’re shipping out, I know they got it wrong without a doubt, the war ain’t over there, it’s here with me, the battle of the bloody century…”

There are no changes and no surprises on Monterey, and while I might wish for some artistic growth, I’m not sure what that would mean for this particular sound they’ve conjured up. I don’t think this needs to be bigger, or more fleshed out. It’s something special just as it is.

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As if on cue, here’s an example of an acoustic duo that has beefed up their sound, for better and for worse.

It’s been five years since we’ve heard from Deb Talan and Steve Tannen, the married couple known as the Weepies. Their fifth album is called Sirens, and it’s pretty clear that they spent most of those five years working on it. The Weepies write adorable little folk-pop ditties, and at the start of their career, they played them primarily on acoustic guitars, letting their pretty voices do most of the work. But they’ve been building up that sound, while being careful not to obliterate the precious fragility of what they do.

Sirens is, sonically, the biggest thing they’ve done, and on it, they tackle a few styles they’ve never tried before. “No Trouble” comes early, and it’s the biggest surprise, a slinky piano-led minor-key tune with a big beat. “Fancy Things” is the kind of electro-jazz lounge music The Bird and the Bee do so well, with flitting electric pianos and some thick processing for Talan’s voice. “Early Morning Riser” goes for a bit of a ska beat, with full horn section. There’s a cover of Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly.” Mostly, these experiments work, and it’s at least partially due to the parade of big-name session musicians, including Gerry Leonard, Tony Levin and two of Elvis Costello’s Imposters.

With all that, though, it’s the songs that sound like the Weepies that capture my heart here. The title track is absolutely wonderful, a dark tale of death at sea (and emotional ruin on land) with a sweet, hummable melody. “Wild Boy” had me at “don’t I know it,” and sealed the deal with its lovely wordless backing vocals. “Ever Said Goodbye” is perfectly adorable, Tannen singing gently of regret: “You said with a smile that one day I’d make you cry, I don’t know why I ever said goodbye.”

Having said that, the swirling “Does Not Bear Repeating” may be my favorite thing here, with its chiming synthesizers, double-time beat and circular melody. It’s a great example of building on the band’s sound without changing its DNA. I love the Weepies, and while I love hearing them try new things – and for the most part, Sirens’ steps off the beaten path work well – I love hearing them sound like themselves even more. They do an equal amount of both here, and after a five-year wait, I’m happy with the balance they’ve struck. Sirens is a delight.

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And we may as well complete the musical-duos trifecta by talking about Best Coast.

Bethany Cosentino and Robb Bruno have made their name by embracing the innocent pop of a bygone era and playing it loudly, with no concessions to fidelity. On their third album, California Nights, one of those things has changed: this record is big and polished and shiny. The guitars jump out of the speakers, the drums (by session musician Brady Miller) pop in perfect balance, and the harmonies are fuller and thicker.

In all other respects, though, this is a Best Coast album, and so this feels like a natural progression. Cosentino still writes catchy little ditties that play in the shallow end, lyrically. It’s all about love and heartbreak, as usual. Sample line, from “Heaven Sent”: “I never meant to make you cry, I can’t pretend I never told a thousand lies, it’s not the end, I just want you to know that I think that you are heaven sent…” Another? OK, this one’s from “In My Eyes”: “I wake up alone, I look at the phone, there’s no one there, I look to the sun, know I can’t run from my cares…” It’s all on this level.

But if you’ve listened to Best Coast before, you’re used to this, and there’s no point complaining about it at this stage of the game. Cosentino is a songwriter that is just fine with a line like “I climb into the sky and my eyes they cry,” or with anchoring a song called “Jealousy” around the line “Why don’t you like me?” She’s hearkening back to the teen-pop of the ‘50s and ‘60s (and, let’s face it, the ‘80s). If you’re good with that, California Nights is the loudest and best of her band’s three records. These songs are undeniably catchy, and a tune like “In My Eyes” even achieves a bit of catharsis. The fuller sound does wonders for these tunes.

I generally like my silly pop to be a bit smarter than this, but if I put away the lyric sheet, get in the car, roll down the window and drive with this cranked up, it works for me. I can’t imagine Cosentino is looking for anything else, so I’d say California Nights is a success.

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I saved the best for last, so I hope you’re all still reading.

For 18 years, the Danish band Mew has been known for two things: magnificent soundscape-rock that would blow the socks off anyone who listened to it, and bizarre album titles and artwork that seemed designed to make sure few people did. I’ve been into them since Frengers in 2003, and trying to get people to listen to albums called And the Glass-Handed Kites and (deep breath) No More Stories Are Told Today, I’m Sorry They Washed Away, No More Stories The World is Grey, I’m Tired, Let’s Wash Away has been a bit of a struggle.

Mew has never been as impenetrable musically – they’re a little like Sigur Ros, except they write pop songs and sing in English. Their sixth album is called + –, and that’s the least accessible thing about it. On this record, Mew has harnessed their grandiose sound into little chunks of magnificence, and in doing so they’ve crafted their most welcoming work. The sound remains extraordinary, otherworldly, massive and layered – Mew stacks keyboards and guitars and vocals atop one another, basically building enormous yet perfectly sculpted towers. And yet, the songs within these towers are singable, uplifting gems.

The first eight songs on + – are some of the loosest and flat-out prettiest material the band has written. The album starts with the glistening “Satellites,” easing in on an ethereal harp figure while spectral synths build up. Jonas Bjerre’s voice is high and strong, and you’ll rarely hear it without glorious harmonies stacked around it. The guitars crash in around the one-minute mark, and the song takes flight, rising up and up, weighed down by nothing. The chorus is grand, and by the four-minute mark the song is in full glory, big and bold. “My life is my own, and now I’m always home.” It’s masterful.

“Making Friends” sounds like Mew’s version of modern pop, with an electronic beat, some ringing pianos, funky bass and a high, memorable melody. It’s gentle yet insistent, those Mew keyboards coming in for the choruses. Bloc Party’s Russell Lissack joins in on guitar on the darker “My Complications,” which merges Mew’s sweep with the slashing attack of Lissack’s band, a mash-up that works wonderfully. “Water Slides” takes a simpler and slower approach, as does “Interview the Girls,” but both songs carry you along in their current.

It’s the last two songs, though, that really make + – for me. Mew is always top-notch when they stretch out, and “Rows” is their longest song at 10:42. It’s transcendent, easing you in over several slower minutes before reaching full flower. As big as this one is, closing track “Cross the River on Your Own” is even more immense, an ever-expanding straightforward anthem in 7:28. It’s based on a simple sentiment – “You be good to me, and I’ll be good to you” – but this one almost (almost) gets too gigantic for itself. The band does keep control, but by the final guitar solo, there isn’t anywhere to go. Hence, the album ends.

This is the prettiest and most open Mew album, and just for that, it gets a strong recommendation. If you’ve never heard them, but you like bands like Sigur Ros, you should hear + –. It’s full of everything I like about them, but here the band is holding out its hand and drawing you in like they never have before. They want you to hear this one, and I think you should. It’s certainly one of my favorite things they’ve done.

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Well, all right. Next week we get Indigo Girls, Florence and the Machine, and Dawes. Be here. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Elliott Smith was my Kurt Cobain.

I’ve been in love with Smith’s music since the ‘90s, but I only recently realized the truth of that statement. For my money, Smith was the best songwriter of my generation, an honest and sad poet with a fragile heart. Like Cobain, he recoiled from the light of fame, and once it shone on him, he spiraled down into drug abuse and depression. And like Cobain, he wrote his own ticket out of this world – in Smith’s case, reportedly stabbing himself twice in 2003, at the age of 34.

I mourned Elliott Smith the way others mourned Cobain. In a lot of ways, I’m still mourning him – his later records, Figure 8 and the posthumous From a Basement on the Hill, are tough for me to listen to. That’s why, even though I still haven’t seen the Cobain documentary Montage of Heck, I drove 45 minutes to see the only screening of Heaven Adores You, the Elliott Smith documentary, playing anywhere in my general area.

As you might expect, the film was sad and lovely. It traced Smith’s entire life, beginning with his death and looping back to his childhood, his first musical efforts, his time in Heatmiser (a surprisingly loud band for those who only know Smith as a folksy finger-picker), and the growing fame that met each of his six solo albums. The sight of white-suited Elliott Smith playing “Miss Misery” at the Academy Awards hasn’t lost any of its grand oddness, but here it is played like a victory, not just for Smith but for lovers of quality music. “We won one,” says Rob Schnapf, who produced Smith’s fourth album, XO.

And he’s right. Elliott Smith was never going to be a rock star. He’s too soft-spoken for that, his music too fragile and complicated and beautiful. That the measure of fame he attained was the worst thing that ever happened to him is clear throughout Heaven Adores You. But the fact that this gentle genius was able to touch so many with his work remains miraculous to me. That XO, which is on my short list of absolutely perfect albums, was released by a major label to massive critical acclaim is still a cause for celebration to me. As is the fact that I heard it at all, amidst the clang and clamor of the ‘90s.

Heaven Adores You is a fine tribute to a songwriter who means a lot to me, and watching so many people who knew him well say such nice things about him did my heart good. Twelve years on, I still miss him, and I still wish we could hear more of his sad, perfect songs. Watching this film brought all of that back. I highly recommend it, whether you’re new to Elliott Smith or, like me, his work is finely woven into the fabric of your life. Heaven Adores You will be out on DVD on July 17.

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Speaking of the ‘90s, there’s a new Faith No More album.

I have a list of songs that changed my perception of music, songs that tore down my mental barriers between styles and genres and showed me that music could be anything. Most of that list wouldn’t surprise anyone, but the fact that Faith No More’s “Epic” is on there does raise some eyebrows. I’m not sure I can overstate just how weird that song was in 1989 – they were a metal band, but Mike Patton rapped the verses, and they had prominent and dramatic keyboards, including a haunting piano outro that accompanied footage of a dying fish in the promo clip. This was unlike anything else out there.

And when I bought the album, The Real Thing, I found that “Epic” was unlike anything else the band had done too. The Real Thing is a metal-pop-prog smorgasbord, at times tongue in cheek (a vampire thrash song called “Surprise! You’re Dead!”) and at others deathly serious (the fantastic title track). There has never been a frontman like Patton, but he particularly stood out amidst the leather-clad hair-metal prancers of the day.

If Faith No More led to the horrors of Limp Bizkit and Sevendust, well, you can’t hold them responsible for that. Especially since they did everything to distance themselves from the rap-rock crowd in the following years. Angel Dust, their remarkable next record, practically spit in the face of everyone hoping they would produce “Epic II.” A singularly off-putting and uncompromising album, Angel Dust remains the band’s finest and craziest work. I don’t know any other band who would record both “Jizzlobber” and a cover of “Midnight Cowboy” in the same sessions, let alone sequence them back to back.

After guitarist Jim Martin left, Faith No More began sputtering, and finally ran out of gas in 1997. Their final effort, ironically titled Album of the Year, was fairly underwhelming, if still decent. It is this band, the 1997 band that includes guitarist Jon Hudson, that reunited in 2009 for years of successful tours. And it is this band that has written and recorded the first Faith No More album in 18 years, Sol Invictus.

I emphasize this because if you’re hoping for something on par with The Real Thing and Angel Dust, this is going to disappoint you. But if your benchmark is Album of the Year, you’ll find that Sol Invictus more than lives up. It is, blessedly, an album that doesn’t care if you like it. It’s clear the band was allowed to do whatever they wanted, and they used that freedom to create a dark collection of dramatic, keyboard-driven sorta-metal, a collection that makes full use of the versatile, amazing Patton.

Truly, Patton is the star here. The album begins with the piano-led title track, which he sing-speaks in his trademark unnerving way, and that leads into “Superhero,” a riff-heavy dirge that finds Patton unveiling both his scream and his strong melodic voice, and then into the nimble “Sunny Side Up.” These three songs should set the scene for you – they’re all pretty average, yet fully competent, and while the band sometimes sounds like they’re going through the motions, Patton is on fire. His material doesn’t always match his passion – he’s amazing when he has something to really sing – but it’s great to hear him in this context again.

I wish I could say this album knocked me out. I like the dark crawl of “Separation Anxiety,” especially when it erupts around the two-minute mark, but it doesn’t go anywhere spectacular. I love hearing Patton spit out the spoken lyrics of “Cone of Shame,” then shout “I’d like to peel your skin off so I can see what you really think,” but that’s about all I love about that song. I’ve disliked “Motherfucker” since I first heard it, and I have reserved feelings about the dark six-minute epic “Matador.” My favorite thing here might be “Black Friday,” a jaunty acoustic tune about commercialism that explodes into a fiery refrain of “BUY IT!”

None of Sol Invictus is bad, and I’m inclined to be lenient considering the band hasn’t written new material together in nearly two decades. This certainly doesn’t reach the heights that those who would be interested in it might expect. As a second album from the band that made Album of the Year, it’s not bad. As a continuation of the Faith No More legacy, it falls a bit short. It’s nice to have these guys back, and it’s especially nice to hear Mike Patton snarl and shout his way through a new batch of songs. If this is a true reunion, though, I hope their next record edges closer to the revolutionary work they’re known for.

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That’ll do it this week. Next time, I try to catch up, and (I’m sure) fail utterly. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s a sad reality that as far as pop culture is concerned, you are the first thing people know you for.

That’s how you can have someone like Elvis Costello, who for nearly 40 years has proven himself adept at a million musical styles from pop to jazz to orchestral, and people still clamor for a return to his “angry young man” days. That’s how a genuine chameleon and all-around genius like Frank Zappa can be written off as a purveyor of comedy music. Whatever the culture sees first, that’s your identity, and it’s very difficult to decide that you’re actually something else.

Which is why I admire it when bands and artists try. Reinvention is so tricky, so complicated, so risky that it’s usually easier to just keep pumping out what people want to hear. When artists make radical changes, it’s usually driven by a creative desire, and I’m all about supporting those. Reinvention is different from evolution – Daniel Johns has slowly morphed from grunge-era clone to an exciting pop artist, for example, but he did so over 15 years. When I talk about reinvention, I’m talking about complete 180-degree turns, usually with no warning.

And I love them. I love figuring them out, trying to understand the connections between an artist’s earlier work and this new stuff, trying to map the journey that we didn’t get to hear. I’m not always successful – sometimes the change is so abrupt and so complete that I can’t imagine how someone got from one place to another. But sometimes, you can hear it. You can hear the conscious decisions about which elements to leave in, which elements to change and how to change them. And sometimes, you can even hear why the changes were made.

All of which brings me to Mumford and Sons. I feel bad for Mumford. Six years ago, they appeared out of nowhere with a sound quite unlike anything else around at the time. Before long, their thumping bass drum, wailing banjo and earnest lyrics became a trademark, then a cliché, then a joke. Their second album, 2012’s Babel, proved that the sound was a creative dead end – it was exactly like their debut, only less inspired. So what do you do when your entire musical identity has been co-opted into a now-passe scene, and you’re not even getting any artistic satisfaction out of it anymore?

Well, you completely change. Mumford’s third album, Wilder Mind, came with an avalanche of pre-release buzz promising one of those fabled reinventions, with photos of full drum sets and electric guitars and keyboards and not a banjo in sight. It rarely sounds anything like Mumford and Sons, at least on the surface – there are big, chiming guitars screaming out at every opportunity, there are powerhouse drums propelling things forward, and Marcus Mumford’s voice is processed and reverbed and forcibly removed from the earnest trappings of their first two records.

At first blush, this feels successful, at least somewhat. While the album opens with two slow burners, including the half-finished first single “Believe,” it erupts at track three with “The Wolf,” a big rock song on which this new Mumford meshes like well-tuned gears. When Mumford reaches high for the emotional refrain (“You’re all I’ve ever longed for”), you won’t miss the banjos at all. “The Wolf” is the record’s high point, but it’s such a strong one. Other songs in this new style work pretty well on first listen too, like the title track and “Just Smoke,” with its Mike Rutherford-style guitar figure.

But here’s the thing. Mumford and Sons used to have an interesting identity, before the copycats got hold of it. (I’m looking at you, Lumineers.) And now they’ve consciously stripped that identity away, and they haven’t really replaced it with anything. Much of Wilder Mind sounds like Coldplay used to in 2002, or like The National does now, only less compelling. Honestly, this is only a radical reinvention if the only band you’ve ever heard in your life is Mumford and Sons. Compared with literally any other band, this is average, even boring. Say what you want about their thump-thump-thump folk music, but at least it was original. Now they’re just anonymous, trying to make electric guitars and drums sound like something they’ve just discovered.

They probably could have taken several steps in the right direction by writing some compelling material, but aside from “The Wolf” and late-album anthem “Only Love,” there isn’t a song here I remember. Not the way I remember hearing “The Cave” or “Little Lion Man” for the first time. “Monster” is indicative of the whole – it’s a slow, simple song with a lazy beat and no melody to speak of. I wasn’t happy with the songwriting on Babel, and I’m similarly unhappy with it here – Mumford and Sons have decided to let their new instrumentation do all the heavy lifting. And after a couple of listens, that’s no longer enough. The moment halfway through “Snake-Eyes” when the drums crash in and the electric guitars crank up, that no longer disguises the fact that the song keeps on doing the same one thing it’s been doing all along.

The problem with reinventions is that they have to work, because what can you do next if they don’t? You can go back to your old sound, tail between your legs, or you can try a completely different kind of reinvention, but once you have one failure under your belt, it’s harder to bankroll another big risk. I don’t want to say that Wilder Mind doesn’t work, not completely. But it relies pretty heavily on the shock of hearing Mumford and Sons play with new toys, and once that shock has worn off – once the fact that Mumford has, for all intents and purposes, gone generic sinks in – the album becomes a much less enjoyable affair.

Still, I’m interested to see what they do after this. “The Wolf” is proof enough that they can still aim high and get there. I have no idea where Mumford goes next, but I hope it’s someplace more original and compelling than this. This reinvention needs another reinvention, stat.

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You want an example of how to do it right? I have one of those, too, and I’ve been holding on to it for just such an occasion.

For almost 15 years, Matt Hales has been playing sad and wonderful piano pop as Aqualung. (No, I still don’t understand why he chose the name, but I’ve learned to live with it.) His pretty songs and wavery voice put him firmly in the British piano-pop tradition, but it’s a tradition I love with everything I have, so I’ve enjoyed all of Hales’ work. In fact, he’s been responsible for some of the most gorgeous songs of the last decade, including “Arrivals” and “Broken Bones” and “Thin Air.” Still, after the masterpiece that was 2007’s Memory Man, it’s been slightly diminishing returns, with 2010’s Magnetic North the (still enjoyable) low point.

Hales needed to shake things up, and oh my lord, he has. The new 10 Futures, released only overseas, makes several important changes to the Aqualung formula, and in the process completely blows it up. This is the most exciting music he’s made since Memory Man, and the changes in direction seem to have invigorated him. For most of this album’s running time, you won’t believe you’re listening to Matt Hales. And in fact, you often aren’t – this is his most collaborative effort, featuring guest spots by Joel Compass, Lianne La Havas, Sweet Billy Pilgrim and others he’s worked with as a producer in Los Angeles. He’s opened up his one-man show to other voices, and it works phenomenally well.

In fact, the first voice you hear on 10 Futures belongs to Compass, not Hales. “Tape 2 Tape” opens with the sound of a cassette deck ejecting, and then glides along on sparse pitter-pat electronic drums and whirring noise. Blatty synths and vocal samples slide in after a while, with organic drums and wailing guitar erupting near the end. The whole thing is off-kilter, odd, completely unexpected. It leads nicely into “Eggshells,” which certainly doesn’t reorient you – it’s a dreamy, almost ambient song with a skittering electro drum beat and a strange chorus, which Hales sings through a vocal processor. Lianne La Havas steps in for the second verse, and by this point, you won’t have any idea what this record’s going to throw at you next.

That’s the entire experience, really. “Be Beautiful” is like Hales’ “Viva La Vida,” a skyward-shout wonder played mainly by a string quartet. “Seventeens” brings the piano front and center for the first time, but the song takes some getting used to – it’s in 7/8, and its refrain finds Hales stuttering to imitate the sound of a slowly buffering audio file. “New Low” is a modern pop song extraordinaire, covered in strange and chiming percussion and produced with an ear toward tripping yours up every few seconds. “Clean” is low gospel with vocals by Sweet Billy Pilgrim, “Shame on Me” flirts with dance-floor funk, and “Hearts (Spinwheeloscillate)” finds Hales sitting in with Glaswegian electro outfit Prides, and fitting in nicely.

The massive variety of sound is what will thrill you at first about 10 Futures, but it’s the well-crafted songs that will keep you coming back. Every one of these 10 tunes finds Hales in fine, fine form, writing to his new styles but not forgetting the fundamentals of his pop roots. Even something as experimental as “Everything,” which feels like a proper template for Thom Yorke to follow in the future, lives and dies by its melody. And when Hales strikes a more straightforward vein, as on closer “To the Wonder,” he can make your heart soar. “To the Wonder,” like “Seventeens,” is closest to Hales’ old sound, but still sounds fresh and new thanks to the fascinating forward-thinking production.

It saddens me that 10 Futures might never be released on these shores, that American fans might stop with Magnetic North and not hear this complete (and completely successful) reinvention of the Aqualung sound. This is how you do it. This is how you rewrite your story from the ground up and make it work. There are things on 10 Futures that I never expected to hear on an Aqualung album, and now that I’ve heard them, it’s clear that Matt Hales can take this anywhere. I hope he does. I’ll be there for the ride.

Next week, the first Faith No More album in 18 years. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s been 25 years since I first heard the Choir’s Circle Slide.

That’s simply unfathomable to me. I’ve recounted this story before, but I bought Circle Slide on a whim, after seeing the gorgeous cover – the sweeping sky, the tire swing, the threatening storm. It just grabbed me. What I found when I listened was exactly the kind of human, doubt-filled spirituality that 16-year-old me had been searching for, wrapped up in some of the most bizarre and beautiful music I’d ever heard. The Choir has been on my short list of favorite bands ever since.

And I have never stopped listening to Circle Slide. It’s been with me for a quarter-century, for my entire adult life, and I’ve never grown tired of it. I’m still hearing new things within it, seeing new twists in the lyrics, feeling new emotions. I’m not sure what it is about this short collection – there are really only seven songs, and it’s over in less than 40 minutes, but there seems to be an entire world contained in there. Even now, 25 years later, that tom roll at the start of the title track, the one that leads into that dark and reverbed web of sound, makes my pulse quicken.

I love this record, and I don’t think I will ever stop loving this record. Which is good, since I’ve just bought it for the fourth time. I originally picked it up on cassette in 1990, then quickly upgraded to a CD, and then bought it again on CD as part of the Never Say Never box set in 2000. And now, here it is in a sparkling remastered anniversary edition, complete with a second disc containing enlightening commentary from the band. Thankfully, it sounds exactly the same, only better – this new edition makes it easier to sink into the glorious, thick, room-filling sound of this album.

I bought this new edition at the Choir’s show in Aurora, Illinois, where they played Circle Slide from beginning to end. That was an incredible experience – it was standing-room-only, the great Mike Roe filled in on bass, and the band brought a quarter-century of experience and love to these tunes. Some of them – “If I Had a Yard,” “Merciful Eyes,” “Laugh Loop” – they had never played live, but the thunderous, spacey title track benefitted from years of concert airings, and the astonishingly loud closer “Restore My Soul” was everything I could have wanted. All these years later, it’s still magic.

The Choir is touring Circle Slide now. If they’re anywhere near you, don’t miss this opportunity. Check tour dates and hear some Choir music here. And if you miss the tour, the band will play the AudioFeed Festival again in July.

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The Choir’s Circle Slide show capped off an incredible two weeks of music for me, which included a trip to Montreal to see Marillion play three times. I also got to see Zappa Plays Zappa take on the One Size Fits All album in Chicago, which was thoroughly remarkable.

But my two-week live music binge started off with a record release party by my friends in Noah’s Arcade. My standard disclaimer applies here: I know these guys, I see them play whenever I can, and I’ve talked with them at length about their music. I would like them as much as I do if none of that were true. Noah’s Arcade is accomplished singer-songwriter-guitarist Noah Gabriel and one of the best rhythm sections you’ll find anywhere: bassist Chad Watson and drummer Justin O’Connell. What started as a songwriter and his backing band has evolved seamlessly into a democratic power trio, and watching them grow into what they are now has been a treat.

You can hear that evolution on their second album, Easy. Coming only a year after their self-titled debut, Easy is a brief collection – nine songs in about 35 minutes. But in a short time, it makes the case for the band’s continued growth. The songs are surprisingly varied – the opening title track is a bit of a whisper, gliding in rather than making a splash, and from there we get the gloriously ‘90s rocker “All the Roses,” the tender and sparse love song “Angeline,” and the tense crawl “Lookin’ Back.” None of these tunes pick up the bluesy torch held high by the first record, preferring to strike out in new directions.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Easy was recorded essentially live, and only after the full band arrangements were worked out on stage. The album has that feel – a song like “Vultures” shows that Watson and O’Connell are equal partners, and all three carry the song at different times. The trio is completely in sync on Easy, and even the simplest of these songs – the bluesy “Better Things,” for instance – work well here because of that interplay. The best example is “For You,” a last-minute addition that enriches the final third of the record. It’s three chords in search of a chorus, but listen to the way Watson carries things with his loping, melodic bass lines. Listen to how the three of them play that solo section like a unit, O’Connell building up and easing back, Gabriel riding the wave perfectly.

That said, here is what’s always been interesting to me about Noah’s Arcade: they’re a rock band that only rarely rocks. Most of Easy is either slow or mid-tempo, the band only cranking it up a couple of times. I like this material, and I can see why the band likes to play it. But for my money, the best song on this record is the last one, “29 & 66,” a mini-epic in 5:06 that starts off in a slower place, but soon erupts in a hail of furious instrumental firepower. After half an hour of restraint, it’s great to hear Noah’s Arcade cut loose in the record’s final minutes, and just like their debut, this album ends just as it really gets going. I could have listened to that jam for another 10 minutes and been good with it.

None of that is to say that the band doesn’t pull off the slower and moodier material well. Easy is a fine step forward and a statement of intent from one of Illinois’ best bands, a short yet varied set that adds a couple new twists to their story. I’m interested to see what they do next. You can listen and buy here.

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Just time and space for a few quick takes of recent records. Naturally, more worthy stuff is coming out than I can get to, particularly considering the depth to which I like to explore new music. I’m finally going to get to that Aqualung record next week. No idea when I will review the Weepies, San Fermin, Best Coast, Mew, Todd Rundgren, etc.

In the absence of long looks, here are a couple glances.

One would think that the first album in 12 years from one of the most important bands of the 1990s would generate a little bit of fanfare. The relatively quiet release of Blur’s The Magic Whip is sort of mystifying, especially considering it’s a bona fide reunion record, the first featuring founding guitarist Graham Coxon since 1999, and the first produced by Stephen Street since 1997. They probably could have made a bigger deal out of this.

But the album, by all accounts, came about quickly and accidentally – it’s the product of a week’s work in Hong Kong after a canceled Japan tour – and that’s been the tone of the release. The Magic Whip just kind of… squeaked out. Thankfully, the record itself is better than it should be. About half of it resorts to loping grooves, like the first single “Go Out,” but the other half is just as grand and pretty as Blur has ever been.

The production is surprisingly dense, given the album’s origins – songs like “There Are Too Many of Us” and closer “Mirrorball” are big and lovely things, and the expansive epic “Thought I Was a Spaceman” feels like the product of weeks of work, instead of days. It’s great to hear Coxon and Damon Albarn together again – the quick stomper “I Broadcast” recalls their glory days, and there’s more than a hint of the Kinks-inspired Blur of old on tracks like opener “Lonesome Street.” For all that, my favorite thing here is “New World Towers,” a slower, statelier piece that captures the beauty Blur could achieve when they were firing on all cylinders.

Hopefully The Magic Whip isn’t just a one-off. Given how good it is, I’d like to hear what they can do when they really work at it.

Michael Angelakos is another guy who is great when he works at it. As the sole member of Passion Pit, he took his one-man show from the humble beginnings of Chunk of Change to the sublime Gossamer in a scant four years. His high voice, his oddly retro-yet-futuristic dance-pop, his way with a soaring melody – Angelakos was going somewhere, and it was fun to be along for the ride.

Which is why the third Passion Pit album, Kindred, is a bit of a letdown. It’s the first one not to really go any new places – it just distills the good stuff from Gossamer into a slighter 37 minutes. None of this album is bad, and it all sounds like Passion Pit, particularly the delightful “Lifted Up,” the very ‘80s “Where the Sky Hangs,” the grand “My Brother Taught Me How to Swim” and the “Five Foot Ten”/”Ten Feet Tall” diptych. The theme of family runs deep through these songs, and they’re all at least pretty good. But it never lifts off, and never goes somewhere Angelakos hasn’t already taken us.

That type of consistency can be good and bad, though, and in the case of Built to Spill – never the world’s most innovative band anyway – it’s a good thing. Ever since the sprawling Perfect From Now On in 1997, Doug Martsch and his fellow Idahoans have walked a fascinating line between Dinosaur Jr. and Crazy Horse, reveling in the sounds of the electric guitar and the full-band freakout.

Album eight, Untethered Moon, comes six years after its predecessor, but it’s pretty much the same – quirky fuzzed-out pop songs right next to eight-minute guitar-heavy jams. If you ever liked them before, you’ll like this. I’d begrudge them this lack of evolution if they weren’t still so damn good at this. I’m not sure why this gets a pass and Passion Pit doesn’t, but when Martsch and company lock into the blistering groove of closer “When I’m Blind,” I just respond.

That said, if you want something new from Built to Spill, this album won’t provide it. If you’re looking for further proof that they’re one of the last remaining great rock and roll bands, though, Untethered Moon should do the trick.

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Next week, reinventions from Mumford and Sons and Aqualung. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

They Might Be Giants have always been great.

The longer they’re around, the more a statement like that means. I was eight years old when Johns Linnell and Flansburgh formed the band, and a wee lad of 12 when the video for “Don’t Let’s Start” captured my adolescent fancy. These guys were weird, no doubt, but even then, I knew a good melody when I heard one. I was 16 when “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Istanbul Not Constantinople” briefly made TMBG household names. I remember several sing-alongs to “Why Does the Sun Shine” my sophomore year of college. I was 30 when I named The Spine one of the ten best albums of 2004. I was 38 when I finally saw the band live for the first time.

I’m 40 now, and the band is 32. They Might Be Giants have been with me for almost all of my life, and I can count on one hand the times they’ve disappointed me. They have always been great. Even so, once in a while, they create something that I love even more than usual. Last time that happened, as I mentioned above, was with The Spine in 2004. And now they appear to have done it again with their 17th (!) album, Glean.

What makes me love a TMBG album more than other TMBG albums? For me, it’s when the Johns are able to harness their natural quirkiness into solid, catchy, grown-up pop music. There’s a tendency to write off TMBG as a novelty band, and while I would never want them to curb the inspirations that lead to things like “Fingertips” or “Insect Hospital” or “Wicked Little Critta,” I’m overjoyed when they put together a collection that shows unequivocally what great pop songwriters they are. One listen to the tight and consistent Glean and that fact is undeniable.

I was honestly expecting something a lot more haphazard. Glean is a collection of songs written for and debuted on TMBG’s resurrected Dial-a-Song service – a new song each week that you can hear by calling a phone number. (The modern innovation is a Dial-A-Song website that lets you scroll through previous tunes.) It’s surprising, then, how much Glean sounds like a focused full-band effort. Longtime cohorts Marty Beller (on drums), Danny Weinkauf (on bass) and Dan Miller (on guitars) are here, lighting fires under Linnell’s wonderfully distinctive voice, and there are horns and strings and clarinets aplenty.

But it’s the songs that count, and these 15 quick little numbers whoosh by in a flood (ha!) of hummable ideas. Nothing overstays its welcome – this is an album on which the epic “Music Jail Parts 1 and 2” finishes up in 3:10 – and everything works. Some of these songs are silly, like “I Can Help the Next in Line,” which is literally about assisting customers. But some of them, like the tough “End of the Rope” and the clever-sad “Answer,” are unique looks at adult relationships, and as serious as this band gets. “Answer” is fairly dark – “It may take an ocean of whiskey and time to wash all the letdown out of your mind, and this may not be the thing you requested but I am the answer to all your prayers…”

Nestled among these tracks are some of the catchiest pop songs you’ll hear all year. The crunchy opener “Erase” is one, exploring the benefits of wiping one’s mind of bad memories. “Button marked erase, when darlings must be murdered, when your heartbreak overrides the very thing you cannot face…” The hero of “Unpronounceable” cannot connect with the elusive object of his affection, her name “distorted and illegible.” I love the bridge that sounds like the CD is skipping, and I love this lyric: “Now I spend my days and nights looking at a depression on the sofa, and over time it flattens out, but I am still depressed…”

The lyrics to “Hate the Villanelle” are, of course, in that form: “Don’t hate the villain, hate the villanelle, with these picky rules and odd jigsaw rhymes, curses, these verses are my prison cell…” “Aaa” is simply yet aptly titled, its horror-movie hook a wordless cry of alarm. And “Let Me Tell You About My Operation” returns to the theme of removed memories over a Dixieland beat. Right up to the brief closing instrumental title track, They Might Be Giants never put a foot wrong here.

I want to be sure I’m clear. When I say that Glean is the best TMBG album in a decade, I don’t mean to imply that the others produced since 2004 aren’t worth your time. They absolutely are. (Nanobots in particular was excellent.) But this one rises above even their usual high standard. It wraps everything quirky and unique about They Might Be Giants into 39 minutes of sterling pop music, proving once again that they’re more than people think they are. This album is dynamite.

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Shall I admit that I was initially underwhelmed with the new Josh Garrels album?

Garrels is an Indiana songwriter with a powerful voice and an even more powerful talent. His new one, Home, is the follow-up to 2011’s Love and War and the Sea In Between, and to be fair, pretty much anything Garrels did after that would be underwhelming in comparison. Love and War was easily one of the best albums in a very good year, a tour de force that nimbly skipped between folk, rock, rap and orchestral grandeur. It even culminated in a six-song conceptual suite. It’s a remarkable, ambitious album, and I guess I was looking for something similar from this new one.

Instead, Garrels has stripped back and made a slighter, prettier collection, one that stays moored to a few touchstones. It took a few listens to figure out that I do indeed like it, and to understand why. Where Love and War is a battle cry, the work of a man in turmoil, Home is an often deliriously contented record – there are songs of confusion bordering on despair, but they’re early on, and they’re surrounded by so much love and peace and joy that they feel like temporary backslides, quick stumbles. Home shines its light brightly, and it chases out what darkness is there.

I don’t want to discount that darkness, because it fuels some of this record’s best tunes. “A Long Way” is a song of farewell – it’s almost certainly about death – and “Leviathan” is a Jewish hymn of pride falling before the might of God. Best is “The Arrow,” with its acrobatic falsetto and splendid dirty groove. “How on Earth did it all go down like this, I’ve got no words to make sense of it, my shield, my fight for righteousness could not protect me from myself…”

But that’s it. For the rest of its running time, Home – a deeply religious record – is about love, both heavenly and earthly. Most of it sounds like a Ray Lamontagne album to me, with its soulful grooves and horns buoying Garrels’ arresting voice. “Colors” even dips into that Motown sound. And once you’re past “The Arrow,” the album turns fragile, acoustic and pretty until the end. “Morning Light” is about opening the windows and letting the joy in, “Always Be” drops the record’s one electronic beat over a gorgeous harmonized mantra about “singing for thee,” “Home at Last” is a jazz-inflected lullaby about coming back to the Lord’s house, and “At the Table” continues the theme of children returning home to their father.

The album ends with “Benediction,” a quiet and contented blessing. “When the way is rough and steep, love will make your days complete,” Garrels sings, completing a cycle of his most peaceful compositions – this is music for lying out in the sun, for drinking in life, for being thankful. Garrels has traded in the ambitions of his last record for a stillness that sounds well and truly earned. I can’t fault him for that, even if the resulting record is not quite as striking. Home is pretty and bright and joyful, though, and while it’s playing, that’s enough.

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Seeing the Eels live has become something of a tradition.

My good friend Jeff Elbel is an Eels superfan, and whenever the band plays Chicago, we make the trek to see them. We’ve done it three times now, most recently last year on the Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett tour. That show was a delight – a low-key chamber-pop stroll through some of Everett’s slowest and loneliest songs, the band buttoned up in suits and ties. I love Everett in disheveled rocker mode, but I also love him in lonesome troubadour mode, and this show was an extended visit with that guy.

What a treat, then, to pick up the new Eels live album and DVD, Royal Albert Hall, and find very nearly the exact same show preserved for posterity. Eels songs are generally simple things, and usually either about Everett watching his life fall apart or starting to put it back together. The songs he strings together for Royal Albert Hall are an even mix of both, performed on piano or nimble acoustic guitar with strings, horns and pedal steel. Everett jokes throughout about the downbeat set – “This one’s another bummer” – but no one seems to mind.

I certainly don’t. Taken as a whole, this live record is Eels at their most transcendent. The new songs (“Parallels,” “Lockdown Hurricane”) sit nicely next to songs I am coming to think of as classics, like “Fresh Feeling” and “It’s a Motherfucker.” Things do pick up by the end, with the sprightly “I Like Birds” and “My Beloved Monster” livening up the proceedings, but the encores return to the spare and the quiet. The second encore is a particular treasure, Everett turning in swell versions of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and Nilsson’s immortal “Turn On Your Radio.”

My favorite moment might be right at the end, though, when Everett finally gets to play that massive Royal Albert Hall pipe organ. He jams out the riffs to “Flyswatter” and “The Sound of Fear,” and even on the CD, you can hear him grinning like a little kid. If Eels albums and tours are essentially cycles, taking Everett through his mania and his depression, then he’s on his way back up. I’m looking forward to a louder album, a louder tour, and another great night with Jeff and the Eels.

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Next week, probably Built to Spill and Passion Pit. I’ll be posting that one from Montreal, where I will be for my first Marillion Weekend. Three nights, three shows, thousands of fellow fans. I’m rather looking forward to it, and I’ll be sure to report back here. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Because of the nature of a weekly column, I always find myself writing about records at the extremes.

If I’m moved to write about it, generally I either really like it or I strongly dislike it. Those are the two conditions under which I’d have the most to say. But that covers maybe 20 percent of my listening experience. Most of the time I’m indifferent to the music I hear – it doesn’t leave a mark one way or another. Quite often I reservedly like something. And quite often I’m just a little let down, slightly disappointed.

This week, in the interest of equal time, I have two records that left me with that slightly empty feeling, that sense of mild unhappiness. I don’t hate either of these records, but I don’t love them either, and my listening experience tended more toward the negative. In both cases, I think some more time immersing myself could improve my initial impression. And maybe someday I’ll do that. Right now, here’s how I feel.

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I’m never going to hate Brian Wilson.

This goes without saying, but the man is a legend. He created an entire sound, and then ditched it to create an even grander one. Pet Sounds is still one of the very best albums you’ll ever hear. When he finished his great lost masterwork, SMiLE, in 2004, it was like a miracle. That, too, is one of the best, goofiest, most astonishing albums you’ll ever hear. And when he followed that up with That Lucky Old Sun, a song suite that can stand toe to toe with his ‘60s and ‘70s work, it was like lightning striking twice.

Since then, Wilson’s been doing pretty well, by my reckoning. His Gershwin and Disney albums were both better than they had any right to be, and the Beach Boys reunion album, That’s Why God Made the Radio, was at least half-great. Wilson is 72 years old now, and I don’t know what we expect from him. He still arranges vocals like no one else on the planet, and his records still sound like his records, even if there’s always a question of how much he’s really participating in them. I’m happy to support whatever he puts out – he’s already given me enough joy for one lifetime.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it much, and I don’t really like No Pier Pressure, his tenth solo album. I mean, it’s fine, and it’s certainly better than the dross he used to churn out (remember Gettin’ In Over My Head?), and overall it beats Mike Love’s contributions to the last Beach Boys record. But I have a lot of problems with it, and chief among them is the endless parade of guest stars. I’m good with Al Jardine and David Marks making several appearances – many of these songs were written for a new Beach Boys record, so they belong here.

The rest, though? I’m not sure how many of these people Wilson asked to work with, and how many were just brought in by producer Joe Thomas. Has Wilson had a burning desire to duet with Nate Ruess of Fun., for example? Or Zooey Deschanel? Or Peter Hollens? Or Sebu, who makes the first guest appearance on the horrifying dance-pop disaster “Runaway Dancer”? I have no proof, but I sort of doubt it. Several of these guests have spoken about these sessions, and they say Wilson was active and engaged and having a great time. I hope that’s true. The finished product is kind of a hodgepodge, though, and the guests make Wilson seem even more removed.

The songs, by and large, aren’t bad. The ones intended for the Beach Boys, including “Whatever Happened” and “The Right Time,” are right in line with what you’d expect – pleasant grooves, wood blocks, harmonies. The instrumental “Half Moon Bay” is nice. And there are several songs that feel like Wilson was truly invested in them, most notably “I’m Feeling Sad” and the swell closer, “The Last Song.”

But others just feel like things Brian wouldn’t do in a million years. I already mentioned “Runaway Dancer,” the worst offender. Kacey Musgraves co-writes and sings a country ditty called “Guess You Had to Be There” that, until those Wilson harmonies come in, sounds like it’s from a different album entirely. “On the Island” is like a parody of Wilson, with its Jimmy Buffet feel and Deschanel’s disaffected vocals. The synth-heavy “Sail Away” is embarrassing, the Ruess-starring “Saturday Night” only a little less so.

As usual, it’s the vocals that keep this feeling like Wilson. When he takes lead, he sounds energized and engaged, which is great. There are harmonies everywhere, many of which he also sang, and there ain’t nothing like a Brian Wilson harmony. There are strings and muted trumpets in places where Wilson would put them. This is a pure pop record, full of kitschy and stupid lyrics, but Brian generally wouldn’t have it any other way.

And of course, there is “The Last Song,” written to close what would have been the final Beach Boys record. It’s remarkably pretty, Wilson’s tender voice sending chills, and it revolves around a sentiment this album makes me feel: “There’s never enough time for the ones that you love.” That’s why I’m sad when Wilson makes an album like this – everything he does might be his last. I don’t hate No Pier Pressure – the worst thing about it is its title – but I won’t be playing it very often, either. At times here, Brian Wilson is still Brian Wilson, and that is always a joy to hear. I just wish this album contained more of those times, because I want as many as I can get.

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Similarly, you have no idea how much I wanted to like Kintsugi, the new Death Cab for Cutie album.

This one’s the death knell. Founding guitarist Chris Walla, who has been responsible for sculpting the band’s sound since 1998, announced his departure after Kintsugi was completed. This is the first one Walla did not produce – that honor goes to Rich Costey – and the last one on which he will appear. It’s been a rough road for Death Cab lately, as they’ve dropped a notch with each album since 2005’s Plans. 2011’s Codes and Keys was, until now, the worst Death Cab record, flirting with electronic sounds but remaining pretty lifeless.

So with Walla’s departure and singer Ben Gibbard’s public divorce from Zooey Deschanel, one might hope that the personal stakes for this new album would have been raised. Instead, everyone involved seems bored. This is the most inert-sounding record the band has made – the whole thing is almost completely devoid of inspiration, and while it’s pleasant enough, it just sits there, unmoving, for it’s whole running time. Gibbard even sounds disinterested, singing the lines but not injecting them with any emotion at all, and he’s off his game lyrically to an almost laughable degree. He seems genuinely proud of couplets like “why do you run, for my hands hold no guns” and “when you’re so far beneath the floor, everything’s a ceiling” – he made them the centerpiece thoughts for their respective songs.

The first three songs are the strongest, in descending order. Opener “No Room in Frame” fires a bit of snark to Gibbard’s famous ex-wife (“Was I in your way when the cameras turned to face you? No room in frame for two…”), set to a skipping beat. “Black Sun” has a nice melody and some nice guitar tones, and the chorus of “The Ghosts of Beverly Drive” is the only moment on Kintsugi that almost comes alive. The rest of the record is just… there. “You’ve Haunted Me All My Life” is a pale shadow of “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” “Everything’s a Ceiling” and “Good Help is So Hard to Find” try on those ill-fitting dance beats again, and you’re better than I am if you can remember anything about “Ingenue.”

“El Dorado” tries to inject a little life near the end, with its double-time beat and thick, reverb-y guitar tone, but it’s too late. Things peter out with the piano dirge “Binary Sea,” a song whose last line is its most ironic: “There’s something brilliant bound to happen here.” That’s the last phrase you hear on an album on which nothing brilliant does happen. Kintsugi is named after the Japanese technique of fixing broken pottery in a way that makes the breaks part of the art. I wish the record were that interesting. I wish you could hear the breaks. All I hear is blandly pleasant music made without much care.

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Next week, definitely some music I like more than this. Let’s see, I’ll have Josh Garrels and Passion Pit and They Might Be Giants and Built to Spill and a killer live record from the Eels. So some of those, I expect. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.