I’m writing this on Sunday, January 30, and I’ve just returned from David Alexander’s memorial service.

For those lucky enough to have met him, David was probably the most interesting person you knew. He was a stage magician for four decades, having learned from some of the most celebrated illusionists in the world. He spent time as a publisher, an editor and a private detective, and is the only authorized biographer of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. He has also amassed the largest collection of silhouettes in the world, and was working on a book about the art form when he died last month.

I met David several years ago, when he started on as deputy director of Sci-Tech, Aurora’s science museum. But I wrote about him because he was just so damn interesting. I went to his house for the interview, and while there, he performed some of his illusions for me, including one in which he produced a glass of water from an empty black bag. This trick is apparently one that very few people in the world know how to do, and seeing it up close was incredible. The two of us talked pretty frequently after that, and I enjoyed every one of our conversations.

David died of a heart attack last month while investigating a leak at a rental property he owned. He was 66 years old. Today’s memorial took place at Ballydoyle Irish Pub, and included bagpipers, Irish dancers, toasts and several tearful testimonies. I thought I knew a lot about David’s life, but I knew nothing. That paragraph up there, listing his accomplishments? That’s the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Today we heard from magicians and MacArthur fellows, artists and loved ones, and I learned so much about David and the mark he left on the world.

The overriding message of today, and in fact of David Alexander’s life, is this: do something interesting, all the time. Here’s a man who never wasted a day, who did enough for 10 lifetimes. And he also took time to meet people, and mentor them, and give generously of his enthusiasm and talent. He was simply remarkable, and I feel lucky to have met him. And I hope his life will serve as an inspiration for me to do more interesting, scary, amazing things.

Rest in peace, David. And thanks.

* * * * *

I’m under the gun again this week, but that’s okay, because the real onslaught of new music hasn’t really started yet. It’s coming, though. In addition to the albums already mentioned in this column, the past few weeks have seen announcements for new albums by The Strokes, Richard Ashcroft, Duran Duran, Panic at the Disco, Robbie Robertson, Alison Krauss, Low, Panda Bear, Explosions in the Sky, and Okkervil River. And it just keeps on coming: the big news this week is Fleet Foxes, who will release sophomore disc Helplessness Blues on May 3.

But none of that arrived this week. This week we only got a few, and none of them are worth a full review. So I’m gonna give you some drive-bys this time, quick takes on three records that aren’t essential by any means, but are still pretty good. I’m not upset that I bought any of these, and I don’t think you will be, either.

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David Lowery, The Palace Guards.

For a guy who’s had a long and varied career, David Lowery has flown pretty much under the radar. He somehow stumbled upon one of the greatest band names in history his first time out with Camper Van Beethoven, and in the ‘80s released a string of quirky, funny, often brilliant records. But Camper Van’s only hit was a cover of Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” and most people don’t even know that.

His second band, Cracker, scored his second hit, the semi-ubiquitous “Low,” which rode the grunge train to radio play in 1993. (You’d know it if you heard it.) Cracker may be a one-hit wonder to most, but they’ve made nine albums, and established themselves as a respected country-rock outfit, albeit a respected country-rock outfit no one really knows.

So here’s Lowery’s first solo album, The Palace Guards, and it’s yet another solid, unexceptional, enjoyable effort no one will hear. But that’s all right, because his fans will dig this. It basically sounds like a late-period, country-inflected Cracker record, all serious songs with sly lyrics sung in Lowery’s lazy-hazy voice. It feels like something he threw together in a weekend, but as usual with Lowery, that’s not a bad thing.

With only nine songs in 39 minutes, you probably won’t expect The Palace Guards to be as varied as it is. It opens with a shambling mess called “Raise ‘Em Up on Honey,” acoustic guitars falling all over pedal steels while stomps and claps provide the only percussion sounds. The title track is deceptively tricky, while “Baby, All Those Girls Meant Nothing to Me” is a three-chord grunger that could fit on an early Cracker album. And somewhere in there is a note-for-note cover of Mint’s “Ah, You Left Me,” sweet and breezy.

My favorite song here sports the unlikely title “I Sold the Arabs the Moon.” It’s a dreamy waltz with some nice violin work, and lyrics that make no sense, but convey terrific images: “I was the man who sold the yankees the sky, the black of the night and the blue of the day, the endless horizon of hope and desire…” The quieter second half of The Palace Guards shows off Lowery at his best – none of this will set the world afire, but it’s all pretty enjoyable.

Do you need this record? As much as you need anything Lowery’s done, which is to say, not really. It’s hard for me to say Lowery’s unjustifiably obscure. But he seems perfectly happy to keep making little records like this one, and I hope he does. Word is he’s resurrecting Camper Van Beethoven shortly, and working on new Cracker material, and I’ll keep on buying his stuff, even though none of it knocks me out. Lowery is the very definition of a middling artist, doing just enough to keep me interested. So far, it’s worked, and The Palace Guards is no exception.

* * * * *

Corinne Bailey Rae, The Love EP.

I adore Corinne Bailey Rae. The English singer’s second album, the massively underrated The Sea, pulled in an honorable mention from me last year, although it sank without a trace over here. Rae has an incredible, soulful voice, and on The Sea, she used it to get down into the pain of her husband’s death, and thoroughly break your heart. Seriously, the album’s fantastic, and you should buy it now.

But Rae’s not all sadness and shadow, as evidenced by The Love EP, a five-song romp that fully restores her sense of wonder and joy. It’s all covers, but it’s all fascinating covers. It opens with an awesome hip-shaking take on Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” then slams into a loudloudLOUD version of Belly’s “Low Red Moon.” (Yes, Corinne Bailey Rae sings a Tanya Donnelly song, and she doesn’t strip it down or jazz it up. It’s raw and crackling.)

Those are not my favorites. They’re the warm-up acts. When Rae and her crack band dig into a stunning, soul-anthem take on Bob Marley’s “Is This Love,” the EP really gets going. Sweet piano, terrific drums, unstoppable bass, and a choir of backing vocalists take this to extraordinary heights. And then she performs a minor miracle: she gets me to like Paul McCartney’s “My Love,” one of the sappiest ballads ever written. In Rae’s hands, the song sounds like an old standard. Her angelic voice dances atop a nimble acoustic guitar, and brings more authenticity and weight to this song than it probably deserves. It’s gorgeous.

The finale is a 13-minute live jam on another song I hate, “Que Sera Sera.” Once again, Rae makes me eat my words. This is astonishing stuff, Rae inviting John McCallum on stage to share vocal duties, and leading her fantastic band through one jazzy twist after another. The coda alone is worth the price of admission. If you steered clear of Rae’s last album because it sounded too morose, too depressing, then you owe it to yourself to buy this EP. It’s a terrific taster from an artist worth watching.

* * * * *

Pearl Jam, Live on Ten Legs.

I give Pearl Jam a lot of credit. They exploded onto the charts with album number one 20 years ago, and quickly became one of the most famous bands in the world. Since then, they’ve done absolutely nothing to retain that position. Nine studio albums, no hits to match “Alive” and “Even Flow” and “Jeremy.” Just five guys who want to be in a rock band, making frankly rough-and-tumble music that hasn’t changed much in two decades. They could have gotten all pretentious on us, making concept records and going electronic and turning into Billy Corgan, but they didn’t. They’re like a classic rock band now, soldiering on to the beat of their own drummer, making the music they want to make, without worrying about who’s listening.

Oh, and they positively smoke live. Just check out Live on Ten Legs, their latest concert document. This is a rock band at the height of its powers. Stone Gossard and Mike McCready lock into a powerhouse groove on every song, Eddie Vedder sings and screams his little heart out, and Jeff Ament and Matt Cameron make up a rock-solid rhythm section. This is meat-and-potatoes stuff, with riffs aplenty and very few jammy moments. Just a great band doing what they do.

That said, is another Pearl Jam live album necessary? Probably not, no matter how good it is. Don’t get me wrong, this one’s very good. The band trots out some old workhorses, like “Animal” and “Yellow Ledbetter,” but hits on a few surprises as well, like “Spin the Black Circle” and “State of Love and Trust.” They rip through four songs from their latest, the quick-as-a-bullet Backspacer, and take on a pair of fascinating covers: “Arms Aloft,” originally by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, and “Public Image,” the signature track from John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd.

And when they do stretch out, the results are wonderful. “Rearviewmirror” will never be my favorite Pearl Jam song, but the seven-minute version here is terrific, and concert staple “Porch” justifies its inclusion with a stunning extended rendition. I’ve heard “Alive” and “Jeremy” more times than I want to count, but those are the only black marks on a swell live collection. Necessary? Not in the slightest, but it’s pretty great nonetheless, and further proof that Pearl Jam is one of the few bands to make it out of the ‘90s intact. They did it by sticking to their guns – listening to this, you’d never know these guys were once impossibly famous, and that’s a very good thing.

* * * * *

Next week, a strange brew, with Cut Copy, And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, and Amanda Palmer. Those three have nothing in common, and I have seven days to come up with a theme. Wish me luck.

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The Record Industry is Dead.

Lately I’ve been all about embracing change. But here’s one I’m still having a lot of trouble with: the impending death of the music industry as I know it.

I still enjoy going to my local record store every week, and picking up physical copies of new releases. But my breed is slowly dying out. Tuesdays at a record store used to be a spiritual, communal experience. Now it’s deader than the eight-track in there every week. The die-hards, clinging to a time when albums weren’t leaked to the Internet weeks before release date, and not paying for music was called “stealing,” are all like me: older, obsessive fans looking back with nostalgia at a simpler time.

But that time is all but gone. I’m thankful for my record store, still soldiering on (and surviving on sales of vinyl, a format also deemed dead some years ago). I’m grateful I still have a place to go and talk with fellow music fans – personal interaction remains an essential part of my process, taking recommendations from people and listening to their thoughts on the new stuff. But I don’t know how much longer this little world will survive.

What has me shaking my head like this? The news that for the past two weeks, Billboard’s charts saw a pair of consecutive records: the two lowest-selling number one albums in SoundScan history. First Taylor Swift’s Speak Now notched up 52,000 sales in its sixth week, which isn’t bad for an album that has been out for a month and a half. But then Cake’s Showroom of Compassion topped the chart with just 44,000 copies in its debut week. Cage the Elephant ended up at number two with 39,000 copies.

A year ago the same week, Hope for Haiti Now debuted in the number-one spot with 171,000 copies sold. We’ve sunk this far in a year. It’s not surprising to me that Cake’s album (seven years in the making, mediocre as all get-out) didn’t sell well. But that it still topped the charts with 44,000 sales… that’s astonishing. And it’s hard to ignore the big problem at the center here: everyone who wanted Showroom of Compassion, but didn’t want to pay for it, could have had it weeks before its release. Same goes for every album on Billboard’s list.

I had a revealing conversation with a younger friend recently. He’s a member of several online music-sharing communities, ones that are set up in other countries to avoid copyright laws. He takes whatever he wants without paying for it, and in fact will download popular albums he doesn’t want, just to seed them back to the community. He gets points, you see, for sharing things that more people want to download. He has every album I’ve bought this year, and every album I plan to buy for the next few weeks, sitting on his hard drive.

This is the future, ladies and gentlemen. Recorded music is worth nothing. It’s shared and traded without payment, without context, and without thought. The collateral damage is not just to the record companies, who have been slow to react to this new world. It’s to small record stores, and therefore to communities. I don’t mean to stand on a soapbox here – I’m certainly skirting the law when I make mix CDs for friends. But I will miss local record stores. I will miss physical CDs. I will miss the interconnected experience of buying a disc, tearing off the shrink wrap, reading the liner notes, and talking about it with other music fans, all of whom have come to our local store to experience the same thing.

This is why I love Record Store Day and other attempts to save the local stores. This is why I keep shelling out for compact discs, a format that has already been passed by. Musicians are starting to think of recordings as loss leaders, as free samples to generate interest in the live shows. As an old fart who loves recorded music, and who loves the communities that spring up around it, this scares and saddens me.

But the change is coming. The change is here. Like the newspaper industry, the music industry will likely not survive this, at least in its current form. The old will be swept away in a digital tide. I don’t know what the next world will look like, but I hope I can find a place in it. I just doubt that place will be as nice as my local record store.

Iron and Wine is Dead.

I admit, I have a hard time with change.

Musically speaking, I’m a paradox. I say I love it when artists flip their own scripts, bringing in different styles and influences. But whenever a musician I love does this, I’m honestly scared. I can only imagine how I would have reacted to pre-release news of Revolver in 1966. Sitars? Backwards recording? Songs about singing birds and yellow submarines? What happened to my lovable, singable Beatles? I’d have been sweating that record.

I can’t say Iron and Wine is one of my favorite artists. But I can say this: Sam Beam has been all about embracing change, and it’s been fascinating to watch him evolve. The problem with his rapid development is that he’s off to new places so quickly that he rarely leaves time to enjoy the places he’s been. Every Iron and Wine album has been different from the last, and the new one, Kiss Each Other Clean, is so different from the other three that it almost sounds like the work of a different act entirely.

The thing is, I liked the places Sam Beam has been. Okay, 2002’s The Creek Drank the Cradle is no masterpiece – it’s a home-recorded slab of folksy, woodsy ditties, played on acoustic guitar and little else. Beam’s voice, weak at the best of times, is layered atop itself to give the illusion of strength. It’s a strange album, and it gives up all it has to offer within its first few tracks.

But its follow-up, Our Endless Numbered Days, is absolutely gorgeous. Beam sticks with the acoustic, but records it cleanly this time, and adds subtle percussion. It is here that you can really hear Beam’s gift for lyrics, and pick up on his fascination with spirituality: “She’s chosen to believe in the hymns her mother sings, Sunday pulls its children from their piles of fallen leaves…” It’s a remarkable album that just gets better as I get older.

And Beam will probably never make another one like it. Four years ago, he released The Shepherd’s Dog, a deliriously-produced, noisy, hypnotic, blues-inflected soundscape of an album. It was as bold a statement of intent as any artist has ever laid down: I’m not going back, Beam was saying. Enjoy this, because it’s where I’m headed. Though I liked The Shepherd’s Dog, more for its sound than its songs, I found myself missing the painful beauty of Our Endless Numbered Days. This was a new beast.

I almost feel like Sam Beam has been influenced here by Mark Hollis, who took Talk Talk from a fine synth-pop act into deeper, more challenging waters, without caring what anyone thought. Sam Beam is clearly a restless artist, moving forward without holding anyone’s hand. As idiosyncratic as The Shepherd’s Dog is, his new music sounds nothing like it. He’s left it behind again, and by the sound of things, he’s never coming back.

Long Live Iron and Wine.

So was it worth it? Mostly, yes.

Kiss Each Other Clean (love that title) is a gigantic-sounding record that still manages to be intimate and powerful. Before hearing it, I was worried that Beam’s concepts had grown beyond his relatively simple songs, and the album doesn’t fully alleviate these fears. But I think Beam understands his strengths, and uses the massive production at his disposal here to paper over his weaknesses.

Take the leadoff track, for example. If you were to play “Walking Far From Home” on piano or guitar, it would be terribly boring – four chords, the same melody repeated over and over. But Beam uses synthesizers, electronic drums, chimes and an arresting vocal arrangement to keep things interesting. It is, at once, his smallest and hugest song, and it sets the tone for this fascinating record right off the bat. But even with all that, it doesn’t stop me from noticing how thin the actual melody is.

Beam described Kiss Each Other Clean as 1970s AM radio fodder, and he’s not kidding. I’ll be very surprised if the indie cognoscenti embrace the lite-funk of “Me and Lazarus,” with its squonking saxophone solos, or the Still Crazy-era Paul Simon vibe of “Tree By the River,” all electric pianos and sweet harmonies. Neither of these songs sound like anything Sam Beam has done – in fact, you have to go to track five, “Half Moon,” to hear anything that resembles the Iron and Wine of old.

But once you get past how jarring it all is, this record is quite lovely. “Tree By the River” is a low-key pop delight, the kind of thing Neil Diamond may have sung in his heyday, right on down to the restrained guitar break. “Time isn’t kind or unkind, you liked to say, but I wonder to who, and what you’re saying today,” Beam sings, in a voice that has never been stronger. In fact, Beam’s newfound vocal prowess is one of the first things you’ll notice about this record. It’s like he took years of lessons between albums, and they did him wonders.

From first note to last, Beam piles on the sound. “Monkeys Uptown” does The Shepherd’s Dog several better, taking a dirge that would have fit on that record and dressing it up in robot drums and piercing electric guitars. Listen closely for the Stevie Wonder-style clavinet adding to the din before the end. “Rabbit Will Run” slathers synths over a repetitive marimba line, as Beam sings through an effects board. And then the whistles come in. The song is no great shakes, but the sound is astonishing. After that, it’s refreshing to fall into the quiet beauty of “Godless Brother in Love,” a song that truly shows off how far Beam’s voice has come.

But I often found myself wishing that the melodies were strong enough to match the sheer amount of work spent on the sonics. The lyrics are, as always, fantastic, Beam upping both the spiritual content and the profanity. (My favorite convergence of the two: “When the curtain rose, the crowd was blown away while the lion and the lamb kept fucking in the back row…”) The songs, however, are simple things. They get more complex as the album goes along – “Godless Brother” really is heartbreakingly beautiful, and the funkadelic “Big Burned Hand” is superb – but never soar like the production does.

That is, until the final track. “Your Fake Name is Good Enough for Me” is a seven-minute tour de force that, all by itself, justifies Beam’s restlessness. Beginning with an afrobeat foundation and a swinging horn section, Beam takes us on a progressive-jazz-funk ride, before abruptly switching gears a few minutes in. The second half of the song is a slow build of electric guitars and harmonies, Beam telling the future over and over: “We will become the rising sun, we will become the damage done, we will become the river’s sway, we will become the love we made…” It’s simply perfect.

Like all major changes, Kiss Each Other Clean will take some getting used to. It is, at minimum, a bold and brash step forward for a guy becoming known for them. Sam Beam rarely stays in the same place for very long, so it remains to be seen if this newly-funky tone-color explosion will be his default mode for a while, or if he’s already off to other pastures. But the record he’s left us this time is an often-mesmerizing, strangely-danceable affair, full of piercing lyrics and surprising choices. At times, it’s transcendent, and it all but makes me forget where he’s been.

That’s the best compliment I can give an artist like Beam: I want to listen to this, instead of his old stuff. I want to embrace the change. Iron and Wine is dead. Long live Iron and Wine.

Next week, a few things I didn’t get to yet, like Amanda Palmer, Corinne Bailey Rae and Pearl Jam. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Apologies in advance – this is going to be a quick one. I’m neck-deep into getting my Patch.com site ready for launch next week, and the sheer amount of busy work involved isn’t leaving a lot of time for anything else. I’m starting to feel a little more on top of things, but I’m really only giving myself a couple of hours to write this before heading back to work. This’ll be good news for those of you who think I’m too long-winded, though.

It’s appropriate that this column will be kind of short and slight, because the album I want to discuss is both of those things. And yet, I’ve started to like it quite a bit. I’m talking about The King is Dead, the sixth album from Portland, Oregon’s The Decemberists. In fact, this is such a small, lightweight effort that I almost feel funny calling it what it is: the first major release of 2011.

It’s also the follow-up to my favorite album of 2009, The Hazards of Love. The culmination of years of ambitious folk-prog explorations, Hazards is an hour-long suite, a dark fairly tale told in one continuous burst. The band performed it live exactly as it appeared on record, the whole twisty hour. It’s a cerebral, difficult, insanely ambitious work, rooted equally in centuries-old folk music and Jethro Tull-style theatrics, and it must have been exhausting to put together.

So it’s no surprise that the band has scaled back for the follow-up, but even I didn’t expect them to go this far. The King is Dead is 40 minutes of the simplest, breeziest music Colin Meloy has ever written. Even the earliest Decemberists albums had a hint of the epic about them, songs taking on the feel of ancient ballads and seafaring sagas. But not here. Here we have 10 little folk tunes, some with harder edges, some that just twinkle along prettily. It is completely devoid of ambition – this is an album that simply wants to be liked.

And ironically, that’s why it’s been so hard for me to like it. Meloy’s voice remains arresting and unique, but here that voice is gracing songs that its owner could knock out in a weekend. If you’ve heard the single, “Down By the Water,” you’ve heard perhaps the most complex and driving tune on the album. For most of this effort, the Decemberists are content merely to be pretty – see “Rise to Me,” a country-ish ballad that floats along on a gentle wind, or “Rox in the Box,” a folksy shuffle with a complacent chorus.

None of these songs grab you by the lapels and force you to listen, the way Hazards or The Crane Wife did. But there’s something of a joyous freedom to this album, even in its saddest moments, like the sweet “January Hymn.” It’s almost like Meloy is happy to be free of the weight of what the Decemberists have been – scholarly, verbose, thoughtful. Here he just delights in spinning out simple tales, tiny songs with succinct messages. Opener “Don’t Carry It All” is perhaps the most obvious example, since it’s literally about dropping a burden: “Let the yoke fall from our shoulders, don’t carry it all, don’t carry it all…” You can hear in Meloy’s voice just how glad he is to follow his own advice.

The King is Dead also offers Meloy and company the chance to jam with some genuine icons. R.E.M.’s Peter Buck plays guitar on three tracks, adding to this album’s IRS Records-era feel – if you can’t spot his playing on “Calamity Song,” you don’t know your early R.E.M. – and Gillian Welch graces seven songs with her amazing voice. The album doesn’t exactly have a party feel, and it’s in no way ramshackle, but I can see Meloy calling up his famous friends and putting the whole thing down on tape in a couple of days. It’s that kind of record.

And is that a bad thing? I don’t know. I certainly have a taste for the epic. Hazards soared to the top of my list nearly on ambition alone, and my favorite album of last year (The Age of Adz, by Sufjan Stevens) contains a 25-minute-long song. Simplicity usually just passes me by, even elegant simplicity. So it’s been a struggle for me to appreciate what’s here without lamenting what’s missing. The last couple of songs (the dusky “This is Why We Fight” and the sad, lovely “Dear Avery”) go a long way toward earning my love. But I can’t help thinking that The King is Dead just isn’t trying very hard.

And yet… and yet. I’ve found myself smiling uncontrollably when I press play on “Don’t Carry It All” lately, and the gentle beauty of these songs is beginning to reveal itself. Ordinarily, if an album takes several listens to sink in, it’s because it’s too complex to grasp in one go. This is the exact opposite, an album too easy, too lightweight to stick. But the uncomplicated directness of songs like “January Hymn” has started to resonate.

This may not be what you want in a Decemberists album. It’s certainly not what I wanted, after The Hazards of Love. But it’s clearly what the band needed – a break from their own myth. I expect, years from now, that The King is Dead will be seen as a quick pitstop between destinations, a layover while they decide where to fly next. But even so, there’s gold in them thar hills, if you’re willing to let it reveal itself. I like this album for its winsome qualities, its simple smile, its willingness just to be liked for being itself. The King is Dead is not a great album, but it’s a sweet one, the sound of a grandiose, theatrical band figuring out how to just be. It’ll make you smile back.

* * * * *

A couple of quick takes:

Dr. Tony Shore really likes White Lies. He’s the reason I listen, to be honest, since the Joy Division-style mope-pop of their debut To Lose My Life didn’t grab me much at all. But second album Ritual is a definite improvement. Buoyed by sweeping single “Bigger Than Us,” the album adds a depth to the band’s synth-heavy sound, and manages to outdo similar bands, like Interpol. In places, this record sounds like Julian Cope’s Krautrock work, and in many others, you can hear the ghost of Ian Curtis knocking. There’s nothing original here, but if this is a sound you like, White Lies have turned in maybe the best pastiche of it I’ve ever heard.

And here’s one from the Portland, Maine files. Spencer Albee, until recently the keyboard player with the great Rustic Overtones, has a new project. It’s called Space vs. Speed, and it’s pretty much awesome.

This thing struts out of the gate immediately with “Tea and Cocaine,” a robotic rocker with a Stone Temple Pilots-esque chorus, which is nothing when compared with the monster hook of second track “Set It Off.” (Seriously, if there’s a better “na-na-na” this year, I’ll be surprised and elated.) Albee’s synths are the bedrock of this record, but Lost on Liftoff guitarist Walt Craven adds some edge. Best of all, these songs are terrific, even in the slower, slightly proggier second half. Seriously, check this out at www.spaceversusspeed.com. It’s great stuff.

Next week, the new releases keep on rolling out, with Iron and Wine and Corinne Bailey Rae. Apologies again for the short column. Back to work…

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that (apparently) never ends.

As many of you know, I had originally intended to write Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. for 10 years, and see how it went. Well, it’s gone very well, I think. I’ve met a lot of terrific people, turned people on to great music, and got turned on to some amazing stuff myself. As an experiment in musical diary entry, I’ve been happy with the way this has turned out.

So here we are, kicking off Year Eleven. I plan to do some new things this year, including semi-regular podcasts, for those of you who are just dying to hear me babble on about music. I enjoyed the live Twitter reviews last year, so I’m game for more of them this year. I really fell off the blogging train last year, so I’m hoping to climb back aboard. And I would really like to expand the reach of this column, and get it in the (metaphorical, digital) hands of more people, so I’m exploring a couple of avenues in that direction too.

But the core of this thing will always be the weekly column, my chance to talk to you directly about the music I’ve loved, loathed and stumbled upon in the preceding seven days. Even a decade in, I still love writing this column, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving music, or trying to hear as much of it as I can. So why stop now? The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades, baby.

And yeah, there’s a lot of terrible music out there, but there’s also a lot of great stuff if you know where to look. I’m happy to be the guy who nudges you toward the unseen, unsung musicians I’ve found, and I’m more than glad to hear about it when you find some as well. You can always get me through the email link to your left (or sourcil74@hotmail.com), and connect with me on Facebook (www.facebook.com/asalles) and Twitter (@tm3am).

Longtime readers know this, but if you’re looking for pessimism and anger over the state of music, you’re (usually) in the wrong place. TM3AM is meant to be a chronicle of musical enjoyment, and the best ones, in my opinion, are the ones written with breathless excitement, like I just had to tell everyone I know about this amazing, life-changing experience I’ve just had. Good music does that to me, still, and TM3AM is my way of trying to convey that feeling in words. It won’t always be like that, but when it can, it will.

So I’m always looking forward, always optimistic about what’s to come. 2010 was a year that rewarded my faith – so many good records by artists new and old. Will 2011 be the same way? I don’t know, but there are plenty of reasons to believe it will. Here, as a way of welcoming in the new year, are 11 of them, 11 musical reasons to love 2011:

1. The Decemberists, The King is Dead.

Two years ago, the Decemberists made their best record, a continuous hour-long fable called The Hazards of Love. But you can only commit yourself to progressive suites for so long (unless you’re Dream Theater). That’s why Portland, Oregon’s favorite sons have stripped back for their new one, writing 10 short, folksy songs and playing them with straightforward grace. It’s tempting to consider The King is Dead a backslide after the majesty of Hazards, but there’s power in these simple songs, and it’s an album that I expect will grow in stature with each new play. It’s out January 18, but you can hear the whole thing now at NPR here.

2. Iron and Wine, Kiss Each Other Clean.

Listening to the first few snatches of Iron and Wine’s fourth album, it’s hard to believe this project started out with just Sam Beam and a guitar. The new songs are huge, layered affairs, some reportedly featuring blaring saxophones and DJ scratching. Is there a point where the concept grows too large? Has Beam rocketed past that point? Will this album be another winner, or a classic case of too much sound and fury? I’m excited to find out. Kiss Each Other Clean hits stores one week after the Decemberists, on January 25.

3. Teddy Thompson, Bella.

Richard Thompson’s son is a fine songwriter in his own right, and unless his fifth solo album is an ode to the main character of Twilight, I expect it will continue the tradition. This album was supposed to come out last year, and has bounced around the schedule (it’s currently slated for February 8), but Thompson’s country-tinged folk is usually worth the wait.

4. Bright Eyes, The People’s Key.

Even for longtime fans, the evolution of Conor Oberst has been something to behold. Once a too-precious bedroom-folk emoting machine, Oberst has grown into a songwriter and record-maker of remarkable force. After a pair of terrific, shambling solo records and a collaboration with the Monsters of Folk, Oberst has resurrected his Bright Eyes moniker for 10 more songs. Given his rapid growth rate, they should be songs worth hearing, again and again. The People’s Key is out February 15.

5. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake.

Every time Polly Jean Harvey releases something, it ought to be an event. She’s an artist with a stunning breadth, as she showed last time out with 2007’s skin-crawling White Chalk. (She also collaborated with John Parish on A Woman a Man Walked By in 2009, with great success.) Let England Shake is supposedly a return to the raw, melodic power of earlier records, and that alone has me excited to hear it. That’s out the same day as Bright Eyes, making February 15 a banner day in my book. (Also out that day: The Dears, Drive-By Truckers, Telekinesis, and Mogwai, who have come up with my favorite album title of the year so far: Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will.)

6. Eisley, The Valley.

It’s been a rough road for the family DuPree. This, their third album, was meant to be out some time ago, but has been caught up in record label red tape. After hearing Eisley play some of the songs from this at Cornerstone last year, I’m itching to hear this record. Their penchant for driving, melodic singalongs with outstanding harmonies has not failed them. The Valley is supposed to be out on March 1. I’ll believe it when I hear it, which I hope I do very soon.

7. Bruce Cockburn, Small Sense of Comfort.

A new Bruce Cockburn is always cause for celebration. It’s been five years since Life Short Call Now, which was a mediocre effort. (Well, mediocre for Cockburn. It would have been the best album many other artists had ever made.) I don’t yet know anything about Small Sense of Comfort. Well, I know two things. It’s a new album by Bruce Cockburn, and it’s out on March 8. And after Bruce has spent more than 40 years producing some of my favorite music ever, I don’t think I need to know anything else.

8. R.E.M., Collapse Into Now.

I spent a decade dutifully buying less-than-stellar R.E.M. albums, just because I’m a fan. (Remember Around the Sun? Yeah, I’m trying to forget, too.) But with 2008’s Accelerate, the Georgia trio revived my love for them. Here was the band I remember from my youth, the band that could breathe fire at a moment’s notice, the band that wrote some of the best songs of the 1980s. Collapse Into Now is the second album of the rebirth, in a way, and it has a lot riding on it. I confess I haven’t been bowled over by the three songs I’ve heard, and that guest list (including Eddie Vedder, Peaches and Patti Smith) has me concerned. But I still have hope. Collapse Into Now is out March 8 as well.

9. Paul Simon, So Beautiful or So What.

Like Cockburn, Paul Simon’s been away for five years. His last record, Surprise, was a startling and delightful collaboration with Brian Eno that found him rapping (at age 60) and trying out all manner of electronic beats and textures. Simon is one of the very few artists who manages to flip his story each time out, and I never know what he’s going to try next. The goofy leadoff track from So Beautiful, “Ready for Christmas Day,” isn’t a knockout, but the record is expected to sport a bluegrass influence, something Simon’s never dabbled in. His gift for lyrics, I expect, will remain undiminished as well. This is the most distant point on my new release calendar – it’s scheduled for April 12.

10. Quiet Company’s third album.

And now we’re into the albums without firm release dates, and there’s none I’m more jazzed to hear than this one. Taylor Muse is, to my mind, the best new songwriter I’ve heard in many years, and he promises an epic monster of an album. The two songs I’ve heard (with the suitably epic titles “Preaching to the Choir Invisible Part One” and “…Part Two”) bear him out. QuietCo is a band everyone should hear, and in my experience, everyone who does hear them ends up falling in love. I expect greatness, and you can expect to hear a lot from me about this album in 2011. Go here. Update from Muse: the album is called We Are All Where We Belong.

11. David Mead, Dudes.

And this is the most speculative of the bunch, since I don’t know whether it’ll be out in 2011, but I hope so. David Mead is one of the best songwriters no one knows, and he’s made album after album of superb, shimmering pop music. He’s gone direct to the fans for Dudes, funding it through Kickstarter.com – he raised 20,000 through donations, and is in the midst of laying down tracks now. Kickstarter is the best thing to happen to independent music in years, and I’m glad Mead made it work for him. And I’m very excited to hear Dudes, an album that reportedly includes songs with titles like “The Smile of Rachael Ray” and “The National Conference for Sales Managers.” David Mead lightens up? That’d be awesome.

And there you have it. There’s more, much more, including the potential return of Daniel Amos, a triple-disc album from the Violet Burning, and new things from Cut Copy, Trail of Dead, Danger Mouse, Corinne Bailey Rae, Danielson and Ray Davies, all in the first three months. It’s a great time to be a music fan.

Next week, we dive in with the Decemberists, White Lies and Amanda Palmer. Year Eleven, everyone. Strap in, here we go.

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This is Fifty Second Week.

And this is the end of 2010, one of the most tumultuous years of my life. When 2011 starts up, I’ll be in a new job, covering a new place. My life will look very different. But I think I’m ready for the change. The last weeks at the Beacon were hectic and harried and difficult, and I’m thankful to everyone who helped me through them. And the last week and a half, which I have spent on vacation in Massachusetts, has been exactly what I needed.

So yes, as much as I enjoyed 2010, I’m ready to put it behind me. But I can’t do that until I do this. Because as I said, this is Fifty Second Week.

A brief explanation for newbies: a couple of years ago, I realized that I was buying and listening to more music than I could effectively review in this column. I’ve since started a blog to allow me ancillary reviews, but it hasn’t solved the problem. I still end most years with 50 or 60 more albums than I’ve had time to review. And some of them really deserve mentions here.

So I came up with Fifty Second Week. For the next hour or so, I will review 52 albums that didn’t get their due in Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. I’ll do this by giving myself 50 seconds to get down my thoughts about each one. No editing, no takebacks, and if I’m in the middle of a sentence (or a word), I still have to stop when the timer buzzes.

This is the sixth year I’ve been doing this, and it’s a lot of fun for me. Some of you have let me know that it’s fun to read, too, which is always the hope. So here we go again. Timer’s up on my screen, we’re ready to roll, alphabetical style. Aw yeah.

This is Fifty Second Week.

* * * * *

Avi Buffalo

Sloppy, yet satisfying debut album from a band with a fine grasp of melody and some really sick lyrics. This probably should have been reviewed in full on the site, and I can only claim time constraints. It’s fun stuff, and the instrumentation is

The Black Crowes, Croweology

A two-disc acoustic studio creation from the Crowes, designed as a capper on the second phase of their career. This is excellent, marvelous stuff – every song you’d expect is here, plus a bunch you’d never dream would end up on an acoustic collection. It’s excellent, highly recommended, if bittersweet.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Beat the Devil’s Tattoo

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Jesus and Mary Chain guys must be really flattered. BMRC do this riff-and-roll dark material very well, though, and this album is just another reason to like them.

The Books, The Way Out

Unless you’ve heard another album by the Books, you’ve never heard anything quite like this. It’s all assembled from samples, from recordings of speeches and other things, and while you’d think that would make for some bizarre and boring music, you’d be surprised just how enjoyable this thing is. Aside from a puerile joke at the end of one track

Jamie Cullum, The Pursuit

Don’t hate, haters. I actually love this record from the piano playing jazz singer. It’s much more pop oriented than his others, more willing to tear down genre barriers. And “Don’t Stop the Music” just rules.

Justin Currie, The Great War

Second solo album from the former Del Amitri singer isn’t quite as hopeless as his first, but it’s still bleak stuff. The melodies aren’t quite as sharp this time around, but with “The Fight to Be Human,” an eight-minute diatribe of epic proportions, he’s written his masterpiece.

Drive-By Truckers, The Big To-Do

There’s nothing here that these prolific southern rockers haven’t done before. But even if they’re not seeking out new avenues, Patterson Hood and company are still writing some kickass rockers and fine country-pop songs. If you have the others, you don’t need this, but it’s still fun.

The Drums

Another overly-hyped band, the Drums play catchy pop, but don’t do anything remarkable with it. I think this is a fun, diverting little record, but not worth the attention it received. For fun indie-pop, in fact, I’d recommend Best Coast over this.

Eclipse Soundtrack

Once again, the promise of new tracks from some of my favorite new artists – Vampire Weekend, the Black Keys, Band of Horses, Muse – compels me to buy the soundtrack to a movie I wouldn’t be caught dead watching. Good soundtrack, though.

Brian Eno, Small Craft on a Milk Sea

This is classic Eno, all atmospheres and twinkles. It’s very nice stuff, and Jon Hopkins (the man behind “Light Through the Veins,” which Coldplay pinched) adds a lot, but you’ll forget this album 10 minutes after it’s finished. Nice while it’s playing, though.

Extreme, Take Us Alive

Finally, a live album from a loudloudloud band that remains best known for a weepy ballad. Extreme is a killer semi-progressive rock outfit, and always has been, and this double disc set, which focuses mainly on their diverse new album Saudades de Rock, is the proof.

Brandon Flowers, Flamingo

Solo album from the Killers frontman focuses on his Springsteen side, and delivers one epic rocker after another. It all gets wearying after a while, especially considering how many songs use the same chords. But if you like Flowers, and Sam’s Town does it for you, this might too.

Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma

This is… fucking nuts. The most insane electronic album of the year, Cosmogramma sounds at first like a random collage of sounds, and even Thom Yorke is considered just another ingredient in the stew. But after a few listens, it comes together. It’s kind of amazing, if utterly off-putting.

Foals, Total Life Forever

I should have reviewed this one. After going all jittery and kinetic for their debut album Antidotes, Foals slow things down and space them out here. The result is a fine, atmospheric rock album unlike any other I heard this year. I quite like it.

Gin Blossoms, No Chocolate Cake

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…. Yeah, it’s like that.

John Grant, Queen of Denmark

Bought this on a recommendation from Steve and Luke Beeley, and wasn’t overly thrilled with it. It’s the solo album from the frontman for the Czars, and the backing band is Midlake, and it’s full of interesting piano-pop tunes, but for some reason, it just fell flat for me.

Harvey Milk, A Small Turn of Human Kindness

Wow. This is an unrelenting, slow-as-death, punishing show of force. And I love it. This album is a single song, broken into tracks for no real reason, and should be listened to as such. The piano section was a real surprise the first time though, but now it fits brilliantly. This is a great record, if not for everyone.

Chris Isaak, Live at the Fillmore

If you think you know what this sounds like, you’re right. Isaak has been plying his ‘50s-influenced trade for more than 20 years, and it still works for him. Some of these songs sound like classics now, and his voice is, as ever, in fine form. I’ve always liked Isaak, and this live document reminds me why.

Freedy Johnston, Rain on the City

Reportedly, this album took years to make. I can’t understand why. It sounds just like every other Freedy Johnston album – rootsy guitar-pop, songs that almost get there but don’t quite, and Freedy’s voice, an instrument just this side of bland.

King’s X, Live Love in London

The Texas trio can still bring it. This two-disc set, recorded on their most recent tour, is just awesome. They are loud, they are tight, they are living proof that no band needs to be more than three pieces. Just listen to “We Were Born to Be Loved.” Amazing.

KMFDM, Krieg

Remix album of tracks from last year’s Blitz, this just sounds like KMFDM. That’s either a good or a bad thing, depending on whether you like them. They’re never gonna change, so you might as well enjoy what they are.

Matt Pond PA, The Dark Leaves

Immensely appealing guitar-pop from this songwriter’s fourth album. Nothing remarkable about it, really, but these songs are nice and sweet, and Pond plays and sings them well. Inessential, but still enjoyable.

Nellie McKay, Home Sweet Mobile Home

McKay is delightfully daffy, and her fourth original album ramps down the Doris Day and ramps up the screwball, with sojourns in reggae town and loungeville. She’s always been the

Megadeth, Rust in Peace Live

There was a time when I considered Rust in Peace the greatest album ever made. This live record reminds me why. It’s just an unrelenting thrash monster, one impossible riff after another, one great song after another. And Mustaine and his new Megadeth are great live.

John Mellencamp, No Better Than This

I like that Mellencamp’s spending his golden years exploring his dusty folk side. This album was recorded in sacred places across the U.S., including Sun Studios, and it sounds deep and dark and woodsy and like the work of an old master. Good stuff.

Minus the Bear, Omni

A departure for this magnificent band, Omni finds them exploring synthesizers and pop music structures a lot more. The record is difficult at first, but I ended up liking it quite a bit. It’s not a patch on Planet of Ice, though.

Motion City Soundtrack, My Dinosaur Life

Hugely enjoyable sugary pop-punk. Not much different from everything they’ve done. But how can you not want to hear a song called “Her Words Destroyed My Planet”?

The Ocean, Heliocentric

Loud, long, slow, complex metal from this German outfit. This record takes a long time to digest, as it doesn’t seem to follow any pattern at first. It’s slower than the Ocean usually is, and the vocals are more melodic, but occasionally they just scream. This is the first half…

The Ocean, Anthropocentric

And this is the second of a double record. This one is more of the same. It likely took a long time to compose and record this material, but only the hardiest of progressive metalheads need apply. It’s pretty cool stuff.

Pain of Salvation, Road Salt One

Speaking of departures, here is Swedish metal band Pain of Salvation’s left turn into gritty ‘70s rock. It’s not all like “Linoleum,” but enough of it is that it counts as a real change of direction. Daniel Gildenlow still writes some melodic stunners, though. Worth a listen.

Pet Shop Boys, Pandemonium

The Boys’ first live album is pretty superb, including tracks new and old. Granted, there isn’t much of this music that’s really played live, but Neil Tenant proves he’s a singular singer even on stage, and it’s just cool to hear these songs played in front of thousands.

Photoside Café, The Beauty of Innocence Remains

Saw these guys at Cornerstone, on the main stage, and was blown away. They play an aggressive, Levellers-esque style of fiddle-rock… at least, live they do. The album sands away all the rough edges, and just sounds flat and boring. Definitely a band to check out if they come to your town, though.

Ra Ra Riot, The Orchard

Another band with a violin, Ra Ra Riot’s second album isn’t quite as good as their first, and de-emphasizes some of the things that made them special. But it’s still an enjoyable effort, and hopefully points to better things to come. I wish “Massachusetts” were a better song, for obvious reasons.

The Rocket Summer, Of Men and Angels

Bryce Avary’s project has always been pretty interesting to me, but this album just loses it. These songs are all over the top, and while they’re melodic and hummable, they’re also all the same. After 15 of them, it’s just a wearying, exhausting experience.

Philip Selway, Familial

A solo album by Radiohead’s drummer? Ooo-kaaay. But this is pretty wonderful. It’s all low-key acoustic material, and Selway’s voice, small and thin, works well with this stuff. I didn’t know what to expect from Familial, but I ended up liking it.

The Brian Setzer Orchestra, Don’t Mess With a Big Band Live

Oh hell yes. I love Brian Setzer, and I love big, brassy horns. His Orchestra has been plying the same trade for two decades, rockabilly with a big horn section, but it still works beautifully. I’ll never get tired of this version of “Rock This Town.”

Sky Sailing, An Airplane Carried Me to Bed

This is a side project from Owl City’s Adam Young, and it’s essentially the same, but played on acoustic guitars instead of synths. This is adorable stuff, but I think he’s right to stick with the keys on his main project.

Sleigh Bells, Treats

Still not sure what to make of this. Sleigh Bells is essentially booming electronic drums, wailing electric guitar, and the monotone vocals of Alexis Krauss. The effect is like being in a stadium while thousands stomp their feet. No good songs, alas.

Spock’s Beard, X

The Beard continues to prove they’ll be all right without Neal Morse. This is the best album since the split, both on the epic tracks and the shorter songs. Plus it contains “Their Names Escape Me,” a song that includes all the names of people who pre-ordered. That’s cool.

Squeeze, Spot the Difference

I get why they made this. This album is note-for-note re-recordings of old Squeeze songs, so that Difford and Tilbrook will own these masters and can make some money. But it’s redundant, and now that I’ve supported them with my cash, I’ll never listen to it again.

Sting, Symphonicities

This could have been cool. Sting with an orchestra, reinventing some old classics? “Next to You” is wonderful. The rest is just…. blah. You really don’t want to hear what he did to “Roxanne,” or to “I Burn For You.” Feh.

Street Sweeper Social Club, The Ghetto Blaster EP

Tom Morello’s new project finds him paired with a real rapper, Boots Riley, and delivering the same riff-rap he did with Rage Against the Machine. This is worth it to hear his takes on “Paper Planes” and the immortal “Mama Said Knock You Out.”

Surfer Blood, Astro Coast

Another very overhyped, very young band. There’s nothing really wrong with this debut, which combines surf rock with an indie edge, but nothing amazing about it either. I like “Swim” and the two “Jabroni” songs. But you don’t need this. Wait a few albums and see how they evolve.

Swans, My Father Will Guide Us Up a Rope to the Sky

Swans’ comeback album is classic stuff. The opening dirge, “No Words/No Thoughts,” belies the relatively compact, dark songs that come after. If you missed them, they’re back, and they sound refreshed and energized.

The Sword, Warp Riders

OK, so they’re talking about science fiction concepts instead of goblins and elves this time, but this is still the Sword. Despite the concept album trappings, they still play unadorned, kick-ass stoner metal, and they still play it very well. Closer “Tears of Fire” is awesome stuff.

Timbre, Little Flowers

Another Cornerstone discovery. Timbre Cierpke plays the harp, and composes long, long songs for her band to play. The resulting record is magical in all the best ways, and her high, strong voice complements it all very well. And she takes on Radiohead’s “Like Spinning Plates.”

Tonic

Reunion album from this meat-and-potatoes rock band is more of the same, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I like Emerson Hart’s voice, I just wish he would write more interesting songs. There’s precious little of the tight riffing the band used to do here.

Trampled By Turtles, Palomino

This was recommended by Mike Messerschmidt, who may be on the band’s payroll, for all he talks about them. Trampled is a bluegrass band that is clearly hooked on caffeine. Try out “Wait So Long.” It’ll make your fingers hurt just listening to it.

KT Tunstall, Tiger Suit

Not sure why I never reviewed this. Excellent third album from this British songstress. It incorporates more electronic touches, but keeps focus on the melodies and songs. This may be her best work, although it won’t sell like it.

The Wayside, Spiritual Songs

Absolutely lovely collection of hymns from John and Michelle Thompson. They worked hard on this record, and you can tell. Some may be put off by the deeply religious subject matter, but if that’s all right with you, this is a terrific piece of work.

Dweezil Zappa, Return of the Son Of…

More recordings from Dweezil’s Zappa Plays Zappa tour, and more faithful and fun renditions of his father’s songs. Dweezil has really learned how to play guitar like Frank, and his versions of songs like “The Deathless Horsie” and “Inca Roads” can stand next to the originals.

Frank Zappa, Congress Shall Make No Law…

I know I’m a Zappa junkie, but I think this is essential listening. It’s basically Frank’s testimony before the PMRC hearings in the ‘80s, matched with some other spoken word pieces on censorship and the American way. I like hearing Frank talk almost as much as I like hearing him play, and it’s great to have this.

* * * * *

And that’s it. This brings the 10th year of Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. to a close. Thanks to everyone who has taken this trip with me. I appreciate your emails, your recommendations, your friendship. I’ll be taking next week off to recuperate, and then launching into Year Eleven, hopefully with renewed vigor. I’ll talk to you all then.

And thank you. Sincerely.

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

What a crazy year.

I’m writing this at my mother’s house in Massachusetts, while eating fried rice from the greatest Chinese takeout place on earth, Franklin’s own Wah Sing. Technically, I am unemployed right now. After five years of being “Andre from the Beacon,” my last day at the newspaper was Friday the 17th. My first day at my new job, as local editor for Patch.com, is Jan. 10.

In between those dates, I plan to relax, see as many people as I can, and get my mind straight. After a year full of surprises, some pleasant and some shocking, I’m ready for three weeks of not thinking about much at all. This, my annual top 10 list column, represents pretty much the full extent of intellectual exercise I plan to get. (And I probably won’t get too much physical exercise either…) 2010 has been a whirlwind, and it’s only now, at the end, that I get a chance to look back and reflect on it.

One thing I can tell you, though, is 2010 was an incredible year for new music. If these things go in cycles, as I think they do, then we were definitely at the top this year, and it can only go down. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if, this time next year, I’m bitching about the dearth of good stuff. 2010 gave us more than its fair share, and below you’ll find my subjective ranking of the best of it.

So, the rules, a rant, and then the list.

As longtime readers know, I have very specific regulations set up to govern this list. Simply put, only new, full-length studio albums of (predominantly) original material may apply. No EPs, no live albums, no compilations, no remixes, no covers albums. And I try to hear everything I can during the course of the year. Of course, there’s plenty I will miss (one of the top 10, in fact, nearly got by me this year), but I give it my best effort. The list is the 10 best new, full-length, original studio records I heard in 2010.

I tend to write my list later than a lot of critics, mainly because I want to be sure I’ve heard as much as possible before setting my choices down in (digital) ink. That means I’ve already read what most critics and websites have chosen for their top picks before I write this column. And this year, that means I know what a thorough clean sweep Kanye West has pulled off with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It topped lists in Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork, and numerous other publications, and several bloggers have jumped on the bandwagon too.

Not me, though. Granted, Fantasy wasn’t anywhere near my list to begin with, but after the tidal waves of hype, I’m ready to never hear it again. I like the record, I think it’s probably West’s best, and I admire the interesting production and clever samples. But I don’t like it that much, and I really don’t care about the “Taylor Swift Incident,” or the “crazy” Twitter posts, or Kanye’s very public attempts to get people to just love him, man. No. Don’t care. Cultural phenomenon aside, Fantasy is an album of 11 songs, and that’s what it must be judged as. And they’re, you know, not bad songs. But not incredible ones either.

So no Kanye. What is on the list? How about some great new records from some old favorites, a couple of phenomenal discoveries, a genuine surprise and a half at number 10, and in the top spot, the greatest and most ambitious musical left turn I’ve heard in years. I’m pretty excited to tell you about them, so let’s get started, shall we?

#10. Linkin Park, A Thousand Suns.

Yes, really. Even as late as last year, the notion that Linkin Park might one day make this list was worthy of a belly laugh, but they bowled me over with this intense, mature, diverse, conceptually amazing effort. It is their Dark Side of the Moon, a single piece meant to be heard as a whole, a sonic statement of purpose so complete that it sounds like the work of a different band entirely. And yet, there isn’t another band on the planet that would make some of these choices, not another conglomeration of specific musical skills that would turn out a record like this one. From the danceable screamathon anthem that is “Blackout” to the space-rock of “Robot Boy” to the jack-booted chant “When They Come For Me” to the beautiful “Iridescent,” A Thousand Suns is a true journey, spiked with political rage (and samples from Martin Luther King Jr., J. Robert Oppenheimer and Mario Savio). And it culminates in “The Catalyst,” a single that stands on its own, but works best as the capper to this extraordinary record. Laugh if you must, but hear this thing first. A Thousand Suns is better than Linkin Park’s history would ever lead you to believe.

#9. Ben Folds and Nick Hornby, Lonely Avenue.

Once upon a time, Ben Folds was a master storyteller. He populated his songs with charming, sad, compelling characters, and made us feel what they feel. And then, somehow, he lost that bard-like quality, drifting away into first-person diatribes and jokes. Which is why I was so glad to hear of his team-up with novelist Nick Hornby, the man behind High Fidelity and About a Boy and A Long Way Down. On Lonely Avenue, Hornby does exactly what I hoped he would – he brings back the stories. Here is “Claire’s Ninth,” about a young girl whose divorced parents ruin her birthday party. Here is “Picture Window,” a crushingly sad tale of two people checking into the hospital on New Year’s Eve. And here is “Belinda,” a masterpiece about an aging singer forced to relive a relationship every time he croons his signature hit. Folds stepped up with some of his best melodies in ages, and even though it’s a collaboration (and has a couple of dead spots), Lonely Avenue sounds to me like a return to form, a classic Ben Folds album. I forgot how much I missed those.

#8. Janelle Monae, The ArchAndroid.

I’ve heard this album probably 25 times, and I still don’t know how to adequately describe it. I asked readers of my original review to imagine that Prince and Erykah Badu had a kid, and that kid really liked Blade Runner. That’s still accurate, but doesn’t tell the whole story. The ArchAndroid is parts two and three of a sci-fi epic in progress about robots in love, and even though you’ll find it under R&B at the record store, it deftly leaps from one style to the next for its entire running time. Monae has the voice of a pop star, but her ambitions are much greater than that. The ArchAndroid leaps from the neo-soul of “Faster” and “Locked Inside” to the funk of “Tightrope” to the explosive rock of “Cold War” to the orchestral whatever-it-is of “BabopbyeYa” with confidence and grace. How many albums do you know that could comfortably fit in guest spots from Big Boi, Saul Williams and Of Montreal? Yeah, it’s that kind of album, the kind that turns your head around every few seconds, and leaves you slightly stunned when it’s over.

#7. The Lost Dogs, Old Angel.

When I heard that the Lost Dogs were going to rent a bus and travel across the country on Route 66, making an album and a movie along the way, well, you’ll forgive me for expecting a novelty project. Instead, the Dogs – a spiritual pop supergroup featuring Mike Roe, Terry Taylor, and Steve Hindalong and Derri Daugherty of the Choir – turned in what may be their best album ever. On these 15 songs, the Dogs fully recapture the fire they lost when Gene Eugene died 10 years ago. They take us on a journey to find God and America, and as clichéd as that sounds, the album itself is like a dusty old book that keeps getting better the more you turn its worn, faded pages. There are dust bowl anthems and depression laments here that can stand with the best American music you’ll find anywhere, and in “Carry Me,” the album’s most graceful moment, they have written one of the prettiest songs of 2010. Old Angel is not just a great record, it’s a creative rebirth for a band that truly needed and deserved one. Everyone should hear this record. Go here.

#6. Jukebox the Ghost, Everything Under the Sun.

Or, the one that nearly got away. I can’t even count the number of people who recommended Jukebox the Ghost since this, their second album, was released in June. Dr. Tony Shore and Dave Danglis are two of them, and their persistence finally cracked me a few weeks ago. I feel ashamed for missing it for as long as I did. Everything Under the Sun is the year’s most perfect power pop album. In its first half, the Jukebox trio unfurls one impossibly great single after another, from “Half Crazy” into “Empire” into “Summer Sun.” In its second half, the band deepens what they do, opening up dazzling melodic doorways every few moments. (I have had the repeated piano figure of “Carrying” stuck in my head more than anything else these past few weeks.) The result is a piano-pounding festival of song, an optimistic, feel-good cornucopia of boundless joy. If you haven’t heard this yet, you’re going to do what I did – kick yourself for not finding Jukebox the Ghost sooner.

#5. Joanna Newsom, Have One on Me.

In which the harp-playing pixie gets real. Newsom’s last opus, Ys, was my favorite album of 2006 for its outsize ambition and its dogged belief in its own fairy tales. But Have One on Me, a triple album that runs 124 minutes, finds Newsom with her feet firmly on the ground. Here she traffics in simplicity, in heart-on-sleeve love songs, in lullabies. Her voice has been honed into a much sharper instrument, and her playing and arranging has been dialed back – there are long moments of silence on this album, moments in which you can almost hear Newsom’s heart breaking. It’s a very different kind of album, and it sounds like the work of someone older, someone with half a century of experience behind her. It is simultaneously bigger than anything she’s done, and smaller and more intimate. Have One on Me is, in short, the full flowering of a remarkable artist, an album of simple truths, simply and compellingly told.

#4. Mumford and Sons, Sigh No More.

Mumford and Sons is the discovery of the year, and I have Mike Cetera to thank for it. I didn’t quite know what to expect from this four-piece sorta-bluegrass band, but the passion and force of this album knocked me to the floor. Flailing banjos, wrist-breaking acoustic guitars, thumping bass drums, and Marcus Mumford’s powerful voice all combine to create music that will have you jumping up and shouting along. There’s a little Fleet Foxes to this, a little Levellers, but the end result is all Mumford. Just about every song is an anthem, particularly “The Cave” and “Little Lion Man,” but I’m a big fan of “I Gave You All,” a song that starts with a whisper and ends up with a full-on emotional catharsis. Sigh No More is top-to-bottom excellent, the calling card of a band I hope stays with us for many years to come.

#3. The Choir, Burning Like the Midnight Sun.

Choir fans have come to terms with the sad reality that every time the band puts out a new album, it may be the last one. They’ve been together for more than 25 years, they’ve made a dozen records, and despite having written some of the best songs of the last two decades, they’ve sold very few copies of those records. That they don’t throw in the towel, that they keep plugging along and making amazing albums, is a minor miracle. And so is Burning Like the Midnight Sun, the Choir’s most consistent and best album since Circle Slide in 1990. Everything came together on this one, from Steve Hindalong’s lovely lyrics and inventive percussion to Derri Daugherty’s golden voice and blissful, atmospheric guitar playing. Midnight Sun sounds like old-school Choir all grown up, youthful men playing and singing songs of experience. And with “Say Goodbye to Neverland,” a stunning piano-and-float-guitar ode to pushing onward, they’ve written what may be the best closing song of their lives. If this is the last one, it’s a fantastic way to go out. The Choir has been very good for a very long time, and on Midnight Sun, they’re at their very best. Go here.

#2. Arcade Fire, The Suburbs.

Six years ago, when everyone was going nuts over Arcade Fire’s debut album Funeral, I sat back on my cynical haunches and said, “Wait until their third album, then we’ll talk.” Well, here is that third album, and I’ve rarely enjoyed eating my words more. The Suburbs is a masterpiece, an extended exploration of what it takes to escape the world you’ve always known, set to music so grand, so towering that no other band playing right now can match it for sheer mass. The Suburbs pummels you, yet gracefully picks you up and dusts you off and sets you running again. No band found the intimate inside the dramatic like Arcade Fire did here, and they did it over and over again: “Rococo,” “Suburban War,” “Sprawl II: Mountains Beyond Mountains,” “Deep Blue,” and the absolutely monolithic “We Used to Wait.” The Suburbs is about suburban angst, but it is also about how hard it is to break free from what you are and imagine something new. But with music this impressive, this forceful behind it, imagining those wide-open horizons is easy.

Which brings us to my top choice for the year. I’m pretty sure I liked this more than anyone else I know, but after even one listen, it was clear there could be no other choice. No other album spun me around and kept my jaw on the floor like this one did. It’s difficult, but it’s dazzling, and it just had to be number one.

#1. Sufjan Stevens, The Age of Adz.

At this point, even people who don’t like Sufjan Stevens acknowledge that he’s a genius. Back in 2005, he released Illinois, which I subsequently named the best record of the decade. It’s a carefully-crafted, dense album that used my adopted home state as a springboard to discuss relationships, self-doubt, God and man’s capacity for evil. I’ve rarely heard an album that attempted so much, and accomplished it all so well. Illinois was something of a rustic folk album, with banjos and piccolos and sweet horns and tenderly-plucked acoustic guitars, but its overriding characteristic was one of every hair in place, every element painstakingly sculpted, every insight pored over for years before uttering.

So what else would Stevens do for a follow-up except smash all that to bits?

The Age of Adz is a shocking, messy, sprawling album that many have found off-putting. Almost every second of it is coated in electronic noise, oscillating from one speaker to the other and burbling up at odd times. Stevens’ voice is cracked and breaking, far from the plaintive and breathy folk singer he was just five years ago. His songs are now unkempt whirlwinds, building and breaking and meandering and rising into melodic bliss just to crash down into maelstroms of clatter. And if you get through the first 10 head-exploding numbers, there’s “Impossible Soul” waiting at the end – 25 minutes long, a suite that flirts with trainwreck for most of its running time, and includes Stevens’ first foray into the dubious world of Auto-Tune.

Very little of this should work, and yet it all does. For the second time in a row, Sufjan Stevens has made an album unlike any I have ever heard. The chaos is the point of this one – the lyrics are about self-destruction and dissolving relationships, about falling apart and trying to come back together. None of them feel like they were worked out over years. They all feel like emotional vomits, particularly the astounding “I Want to Be Well,” which paints an off-center musical and lyrical portrait of a mental breakdown. This is not the Stevens we knew. This is the beast underneath the Stevens we knew, the secret under his floorboards.

And it’s positively riveting. The Age of Adz is ambitious like nothing else I heard in 2010, but it is also intensely personal and darkly emotional. Stevens even addresses himself by name in “Vesuvius,” and he foregoes metaphors and poetic insights almost entirely. The music here comes at you in a rushing torrent, but he’s smart enough to sequence a few interludes, like the haunting “Now That I’m Older,” in between the more complex material. In fact, The Age of Adz is a perfectly-ordered album. It eases you in with the soft folk of “Futile Devices” and the minimalist melody of the first half of “Too Much,” and by the time you’re listening to the cacophony of the title track, you’re sucked in.

Why is this in the top spot? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, no one else even tried to make music this wholly original this year. The Age of Adz sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard, and demanded more of me than any other album I listened to in 2010. Second, it is not what anyone expected from the follow-up to Illinois, and it represents a wide left turn from an artist whose old style still seems magical to me. And yet, Stevens pulled it off brilliantly, making an honest document of his state of mind and getting me to love this Sufjan too.

And third, there is “Impossible Soul.” It is, perhaps, my favorite song of the year. From its quiet beginnings to its round-robin midsection to its pit-of-hell breakdown to its Prince-like cheerleader singalong, and even to its acoustic coda, “Impossible Soul” takes a dozen ridiculous ideas and makes gold from them. After hearing this, I am certain Sufjan Stevens can do anything.

For five years, I’ve been wondering how Stevens can possibly follow Illinois. The best thing I can say about The Age of Adz is that I’m now wondering the same thing about this one. How can he follow this up? What will he do next? This is the sign of a restless and impossibly talented artist. The Age of Adz is brilliant, absurd, astounding, messy, delightful, and absolutely the best album I heard this year. I don’t know how he’ll top it, but I’m pretty sure he’ll find a way, and that’s an exciting thought.

So, that’s that. Join me in seven days for Fifty Second Week. And if you don’t know what that is, you better tune in and find out.

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Fittingly enough, I was in a music store when I heard Michael Jackson had died.

It was Hix Brothers in Aurora, and I was there to interview some kids who’d had the chance to jam with Los Lobos. The clerk behind the desk was watching television, and he suddenly froze and said, “Holy shit. Michael Jackson died.”

I was stunned, and grateful that I’d finished my interview before I heard the news. I really couldn’t speak for about 10 minutes. It’s no secret that I think Michael Jackson was one of the most important figures in pop history, beginning with his time in the Jackson 5, a group which harmonized over some of the finest singles ever made. Michael’s first few solo albums were tepid affairs, but Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad are simply tremendous. Not only are they some of the most popular and iconic pop records ever released, but they’re amazingly good ones too.

And then it all started to go wrong. Everyone’s familiar with the downward spiral Jackson’s personal and public life took, starting in the ‘90s, and everyone has their own opinion on it. The music suffered as well, though. I quite like History, still – it’s a raw and angry little record, perhaps the most honest and unguarded the self-styled King of Pop ever made. But it still pales in comparison to the Holy Trilogy, and overcooked efforts like Invincible just turned Jackson into a run of the mill pop singer. Just another money-maker for the big labels, a product of the radio-ready blah machine.

Whether you think Jackson ever meant more than that to the world will probably determine what you think of Michael, the first posthumous release under his name. Jackson was reportedly working on these songs when he died, and had recorded vocal tracks for them, but none of them were in any shape to release. So his estate handed those vocal tracks over to a handful of producers with instructions to finish them.

The result, as you might imagine, is a Frankenstein’s monster of a record, one that I suppose was intended as a tribute to the man, but ended up just another sort of lame pop album with Jackson’s name on it. There’s nothing on here that sounds like it came from one of the most influential pop musicians of all time. And there’s very little I will revisit once I’m done typing this review.

You know you’re in trouble when the first song, “Hold My Hand,” opens with a shout-out from its guest artist, Akon. Here’s a guy who could only hope to have one-tenth the career Jackson has had, a guy who will be less than a footnote in pop history, a guy who should feel honored beyond all reason that Michael Fucking Jackson is working with him, and he starts the song off by announcing, through Auto-Tune, that it features “Akon and M.J., oh yeah.” All kinds of nauseating. And the song isn’t very good either.

Speaking of, here’s a tip for the producers of Michael: I know you guys like Auto-Tune, but Michael Jackson never needed it. Hearing his vocals processed and mutilated like this isn’t a tribute, it’s an insult. The only thing I can think of is that the vocal tracks used on Michael are even rougher than we’ve been led to believe. And it makes me wonder just how digitally-assembled this whole thing is.

Are there songs I like? Sure. Some of them are not bad. I enjoy “(I Like) The Way You Love Me” for its breezy, Beach Boys feel. “Best of Joy” is pure Jackson, child-like and innocent, and it’s followed up by “Breaking News,” another in a long line of backhanded swipes at the media. It’s an interesting contrast. But neither song is terrific. The Lenny Kravitz-penned “(I Can’t Make It) Another Day” is a highlight, which is sad. And the last two songs, the frenetic “Behind the Mask” and the brief, pretty “Much Too Soon,” are the best things here.

And they’re pretty mediocre, but they don’t sink to the depths of “Monster,” featuring a useless rap by 50 Cent, or “Hollywood Tonight.” The stink of money is on this whole affair. It’s nice to hear Jackson’s voice again (and would have been nicer to hear it without the Auto-Tune), but this is by no means a new Michael Jackson album. It’s a stitched-together cash grab released just in time for Christmas, a payday posing as a tribute, a piper leading you into the mountains. Mostly, though, it’s just a shame.

* * * * *

In a moment, I’ll start listing my favorite albums of 2010. But first, I’ve already got an early fave for 2011.

Every time I hear a new Over the Rhine album, I think to myself, “This is the one. This is the one that will bring them the acclaim and attention they deserve. This is the one that will get Karin Bergquist rightfully lauded as one of the best singers of our time.” And it never happens.

But it should, each time. Over the Rhine has been releasing great records for 20 years, detailing an ongoing conversation between Bergquist and her husband, pianist Linford Detwiler. The new one, The Long Surrender, is the band’s 11th, and will be officially released on 1/1/11. (See how that works?) But you can get it right now at www.overtherhine.com. It’s their first one funded through pre-orders, and the band got so much financial support for the project that they hired Joe Henry, a guitarist and producer with a golden ear. The result is one of their oddest, but one of their best.

Let’s get this out of the way up front: Karin Bergquist can sing. It’s no exaggeration to call her one of the best singers I’m aware of. She can belt it out when she needs to, she can rein it in and kill you with subtlety, and she’s not afraid to take interesting risks with her tone and phrasing. The Long Surrender is perhaps her finest showcase yet – Henry leaves a lot of Bergquist’s rough edges in, giving her smoky vocals on “Rave On” an appealing grime, and allowing her to really take a torch song like “There’s a Bluebird In My Heart” and run with it.

Musically, The Long Surrender touches on several of OtR’s bases, but with Henry behind the boards, it sounds like a reinvention. The tone is somehow earthier, somehow spookier and older. They bravely sequence the weirder tracks first – once you get past “The Laugh of Recognition,” which sounds like a cousin to older tune “Born,” you get five interesting experiments in a row. “Soon” is probably my favorite of these, its Tom Waits-style rhythm proving a perfect foil for Bergquist’s voice. Lucinda Williams adds her rough-hewn voice to “Undamned,” and “Infamous Love Song” is like a piano-soul tribute to Bob Dylan.

The Long Surrender is endearingly off-kilter until you get to track seven, the transcendent “Only God Can Save Us Now.” It consists of scenes from a mental hospital (“Maggie struck Geneva with her baby doll, Barb knocked off the medcart coming down the hall…”) set to an absolutely glorious melody. From there, the album is just beautiful. “Oh Yeah By the Way” finds Bergquist and Detwiler singing a low-moan love song together, while “The King Knows How” taps into Bergquist’s sultry side. (When the gospel singers join in on “slide on over,” it may be my favorite moment on the record.)

When I heard Over the Rhine play the closing track, “All My Favorite People,” at Cornerstone this year, I was underwhelmed. It’s a long and repetitive number, one that, on stage, never seemed to become something interesting. But on The Long Surrender, it caps the album perfectly. It’s a triumphant ode to flawed perfection, a rousing final summation of the record’s themes. “Some prayers are better left unspoken, I just wanna hold you and let the rest go,” Bergquist sings, and the joy bursting through pain in her voice is remarkable.

Every time I hear a new Over the Rhine, I think this will be the one. I know I’m wrong, though. Bergquist and Detwiler are destined to keep making wonderful records like this one for a small yet devoted fanbase to enjoy. I feel lucky that I’m part of that fanbase, and I get to hear this music, because it’s enriched my life beyond measure. The Long Surrender is another step in a journey I have treasured. May it continue for 20 years more.

* * * * *

So it’s time for the honorable mentions, the records that didn’t quite make the 2010 Top 10 List.

First off, I don’t want to hear anyone say this was a lousy year for music. I have 17 honorables this year, and all of them are strong, solid, worthy records. They all might have made the list in years past. They didn’t this time because 2010 was just a banner year, with marvelous music from old favorites and new discoveries. (And some genuine surprises, too.)

Some of my fellow critics felt compelled to make a top 25 list this year, and I can’t disagree with that course of action. If you combine my top 10 list and my honorable mentions, you get a good sense of just how terrific this year was.

There is one I want to mention before we dive in: my favorite ineligible record of the year. As you know (from last week’s column, if nothing else), only new studio recordings of original songs can make the top 10 list, which leaves out some gems each year. This time, there’s no album I wish I could include more than Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back. It’s all covers, you see, but breathtaking covers, Peter singing his heart out over orchestral takes on Elbow and Radiohead and Arcade Fire and other stunning choices. This record is captivating from start to finish, one of my favorite things from 2010.

Okay, let’s kick off the honorable mentions with one that, it seems to me, has been roundly forgotten. Corinne Bailey Rae’s The Sea is a minor soul masterpiece, an emotionally wrenching and beautiful work. It just had the misfortune of coming out in February. I hope it isn’t four years before we hear from Rae again. Also delivering a kickass soul record was Cee Lo Green, whose The Lady Killer never quite eclipsed its advance single, the delirious and perfect “Fuck You,” but was solid and entertaining all the way through.

Eminem made a Recovery, and it was riveting. Sia’s electrifying We Are Born showed that there is much more to this Aussie songstress than the ballads she’s become known for. Jack White’s new band The Dead Weather vaulted over the sophomore slump with the grimy, kick-your-teeth-in Sea of Cowards. Devo roared back with the compact, angry Something for Everybody, as if the two decades since we’ve heard from them hadn’t happened at all. And Jonathan Meiburg’s Shearwater finished an unofficial trilogy with the marvelous The Golden Archipelago.

Everything Everything was the brit-pop discovery of the year (thanks to reader Nick Martin), and their Man Alive took liberally from early XTC to great effect. Jonsi, singer of Sigur Ros, struck out on his own with the expansive pop wonder Go. Brian Transeau, better known as BT, delivered a double album of genre-hopping, jaw-dropping electro-pop called These Hopeful Machines, and even got Rob Dickinson of Catherine Wheel to join in. And Boston rocker Bleu overcame a lousy third album with Four, a consistent power pop wonder.

You’ll hear more from Sufjan Stevens next week, but his All Delighted People EP took the first tentative steps away from his trademark sound, like a funeral party for his banjo-driven folk. (It’s also, despite the title, an hour long, so it counts.) Beach House didn’t so much expand their sound as refine it on Teen Dream, their finest record so far. And Rufus Wainwright seemed to draw the ire of fans by sitting down at a piano and letting All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu come pouring out. I think it’s terrific stuff.

For the third time in a row, Aqualung’s Matt Hales wrote the year’s prettiest song: “Thin Air” is one for the ages. The album it’s on, Magnetic North, isn’t quite to the standard he’s set before, but it’s still wonderful piano pop from a guy more people should be paying attention to. And Hanson (yes, Hanson) made one of my favorite delirious pop records this year with Shout it Out, their tribute to old-school Stax and Motown records. These songs are the ones I found myself singing along with most often in 2010.

But Shout it Out doesn’t get the coveted #11 spot. This year, that honor goes to Yeasayer, who took all that indie-cred hype they’d built up and came back with a wondrous, off-kilter album called Odd Blood. They pulled from Toto and the Thompson Twins, wrote songs with titles like “Love Me Girl,” and just had tons of fun making this thing. In so doing, they carved out a unique space in the landscape, and as a bonus, they made the folks at Pitchfork, who had championed their more straight-faced debut, feel embarrassed. Hopefully they’ve come around by now, since Odd Blood is one of the best funhouse rides of 2010.

All right, next week, the top 10 list. I’m looking forward to seeing all of your lists too. Send them along to sourcil74@hotmail.com. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Some of you may be aware of this, but now I’m telling everybody: I quit my job this week. And in fact, what I expect I’ve done is quit newspapers entirely.

But I’m not getting out of journalism. In fact, I love reporting and writing more than ever, a fact that’s truly crystallized for me in my last weeks at the Beacon-News. But as dwindling circulation numbers and layoffs across the country show, the newspaper model is broken, and I’m not sure there’s a way to fix it. The New York Times is rolling out an interesting online subscription model, one that sends files that read like a newspaper to readers’ inboxes, but they’re still giving their content away for free on the web, so who knows if that will work. It’s a crazy time in newspaper-land, and a while ago, I started looking for What’s Next.

So I’m going to work for AOL’s new creation, Patch.com. It’s a hyper-local, online-only news model that sets up journalists with the tools they need, and lets them cover communities the way they choose. I’ll be in Montgomery, Illinois, acting as a one-man news machine. I get more money and more freedom, but more than that, I get to participate in something that looks, to me, like what might be next. Patch is the first serious attempt I’ve seen to move local news coverage online, with full corporate backing. And even if it evaporates sometime in the next couple of years, whatever comes after it will likely resemble it in important ways, and I’ll have a head start.

I’ll miss covering Aurora. In fact, I already do. But I think this is a good move for me. Don’t worry, I’ll still be writing and posting this column once a week. For those who don’t know me, you won’t notice anything has changed. For those who do, though, I expect I’ll be happier next time you see me. The Beacon was the best job I’ve ever had, and the people there are forever woven into my life. But I’m excited for the future.

* * * * *

So it’s that time of year: time for me to explain the rules of my top 10 list, and talk about some great, worthy albums those rules disqualify. Some have suggested that my list should be a free-for-all, that I simply include the best albums I heard that year, whether they be live records or EPs or compilations, or even from prior years. I have honestly considered doing that – it would be a lot easier – but then the list wouldn’t mean very much, I think.

I honestly believe the limitations I place on this list keep it focused on the best new studio albums of the year. That’s what I’m interested in ranking, after all – if I were to allow compilations, for example, that would give an unfair advantage to bands with solid singles, but weak albums. If I were to allow albums from other years, the 2010 list would be topped by the remastered version of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. No contest whatsoever.

No, I think what I’m doing keeps this list honest. I only allow new, full-length studio albums from the current year. No live documents, no re-releases, no EPs, no projects that revisit old songs. In the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve relaxed only one rule – albums released digitally are now eligible. Used to be, an artist would have to put out a CD to get on the list, but the changing music business is poised to leave CDs behind entirely.

But every year, I reconsider my rules, and every year so far, I stick with them. Which inevitably leads to this column each year, collecting the cast-offs, the extraordinary albums that you won’t see on the top 10 list. We’ll start with this: every year, there’s at least one live album that knocks me to the floor, and outdoes the majority of studio records I hear.

But I can’t include live albums. It’s just not fair. Live, a band with a huge back catalog can draw from decades of songs, while relatively new bands will only have their current stuff. I’m ranking the songs as well as the performances, so it’s important that I only include songs released for the first time that year. And that way, every band has a fair chance of writing 10 or 12 killers and making the list.

Still, those amazing live albums always make me reconsider. This year’s stunner is Go Live, the first concert document by Jonsi, lead singer of Sigur Ros. And it is one of the most glorious things I heard all year. Earlier in 2010, Jonsi released Go, his first solo album, and it was sort of his idea of a pop record. While Sigur Ros specializes in atmospheres and extended pieces, Jonsi’s album was full of three-minute wonders, little songs with big melodies, English lyrics and vibrant instrumentation.

Live, he brings us the best of both worlds. Go Live is a lovingly-packaged CD and DVD set, containing a film of the first show of his Go tour, and a 78-minute CD with highlights from two later shows. Jonsi and his band play all of Go, and debut five new songs. They arrange the show like a rising wave – slower, prettier pieces are at the beginning, and it builds and builds, culminating in a 10-minute take on “Grow Till Tall.” Percussive stunners like “Animal Arithmetic” and “Boy Lilikoi” are saved until late in the set, and the overall effect carries you along.

I really wish I’d seen this show. The disc starts with one of the new songs, “Stars in Still Water,” and it contains little more than an acoustic guitar and Jonsi’s high, unmistakable voice. Pianos and xylophones come in for the next few tracks, but things stay gentle, almost airy. The extended run through “Tornado” is remarkable, and new song “Icicle Sleeves” took my breath away.

The show takes off with “Go Do,” the lead track from Go, and builds in intensity from there. The drumming on “Animal Arithmetic” is superb, and even when Jonsi takes it down several notches for a new piano song (called, um, “New Piano Song”) and the lovely “Around Us,” you can feel him rearing back for a final roar. “Around Us” explodes halfway through, and Go Live never comes back down. Jonsi then takes on “Sticks and Stones,” the propulsive song he wrote for How to Train Your Dragon, and it’s awesome.

But it’s the finale, the aforementioned “Grow Till Tall,” that blows things open. It starts at a whisper, but blooms into a howl, drums flailing and Jonsi reaching for those alien high notes. It’s captivating, all the way through, and when it ends and the audience goes nuts, you’ll be tempted to clap and cheer right along with them.

I’ve often said it’s impossible to describe just what Sigur Ros does, and even though Jonsi’s solo work is more compact and more accessible, the same problem applies. He uses typical instruments – drums, pianos, bass, guitar, percussion – but his music is unlike any other, and his unearthly voice just drives that home. In the studio, Jonsi is a singular craftsman, but on stage, he taps into the emotional heart of this music, and it’s a wonder to behold. Go Live is my favorite live record of the year, and if I could, I’d put it in the top 10 list.

* * * * *

I mentioned that older albums just can’t make the cut. But when it comes to long-lost records, ones just getting their full, official release, I’m often torn. I made an exception once, for Brian Wilson’s SMiLE in 2005, but that was an extraordinary case – the songs were all written in the early ‘60s, but the recordings were new, and the album was presented as a finished suite for the first time in ’05. Still, it’s a gray area, and I probably wouldn’t make the same decision now.

Certainly, new renditions of old songs are not eligible, which is why the Choir’s second album of 2010, De-Plumed: Laid Bare; Exposed; Featherless, will not appear in the top 10 list. The Choir, longtime readers know, is perhaps my favorite band on the planet. They famously take five years between records, and each one appears with a silent threat that it may be the last. So the fact that they put out two studio albums this year is just miraculous.

De-Plumed is something of a retrospective of the band’s 26-year recording career – they picked 12 songs, one from each of their studio records, and recast them with acoustic guitars, hand percussion and weeping cellos from Matt Slocum. They’ve sequenced these songs in chronological order, so you can trace the Choir’s evolution. Obviously, for longtime fans, this is a lovely trip down memory lane. But it also means the really good stuff is hidden a few tracks in.

This record sounds amazing. In fact, I’d call it the most beautiful thing I’ve heard this year, but that’s at least partially because these songs mean so much to me. I know every note and every word of these 12 tunes, and hearing them in these brand new ways was both nostalgic and revelatory.

Derri Daugherty’s voice is in fine form, and his acoustic guitar playing is lovely – Daugherty sometimes hides behind racks of effects, and I love that sound, but here he’s out in the open, and his playing is fragile and graceful. And Steve Hindalong remains one of the most inventive percussionists on the planet. On “Black Cloud,” a minor-key wonder from the band’s second full-length, Diamonds and Rain, Hindalong adds immeasurable depth with some well-placed accents.

It’s difficult to pick favorites, but the stretch in the middle is hard to beat. “To Bid Farewell” has long been one of my favorite Choir songs, and here it is handled reverently, delicately picked and sung. “A Sentimental Song” is amazing here, particularly the bridge section, in which Hindalong rings out the guitar melody on xylophone and Slocum plays his heart out. And I’ve always liked “Love Your Mind,” one of the band’s most romantic tunes, but never more than here, Daugherty singing like a bird over some of his most gorgeous playing.

Other favorites: the band runs through the best song from their early days, “15 Doors,” and completely reinvents it. They slow down “Spring,” a song that was covered in distorted guitar on Speckled Bird, and accentuate its wonderful melody. And they put a Bob Dylan twist on “Leprechaun,” harmonicas and all. I probably would have chosen different songs from their last two records (the best they’ve done since 1990), but both “Enough to Love” and “A Friend So Kind” are played so beautifully that I can’t really quibble.

As I said before, these songs mean a lot to me. I’ve been a Choir fan for 20 years now, and they continue to enrich my life beyond measure. I wish I could include De-Plumed in the top 10 list – if not for the rules I’ve set, it would probably be there. (The fact that their other 2010 album, Burning Like the Midnight Sun, has a place reserved is some consolation.) This album is for long-time fans, it’s true, but it’s hard to imagine that even newbies won’t find something that moves them here. Check it out here.

* * * * *

But how about true long-lost albums? This year’s example is Mr. Mister’s Pull, recorded in 1990 and finally (finally!) given an official release last month, on singer Richard Page’s Little Dume Recordings. Bootleg copies of this record have been circulating for years, and I reviewed one earlier this year. But now the real deal is here.

Yes, I get made fun of for liking Mr. Mister. No, I don’t care. Go On… remains a very important record to me. What many forget is that all of these guys can play, and play well. Drummer Pat Mastelotto went on to pound the skins for King Crimson. Page started prog-pop band Third Matinee. All of the Misters had years of session experience before they started the band. They had hits, but they also had real chops, and songs that should have kept them going for decades.

Instead, RCA Records just didn’t know what to do with Go On…, a defiantly serious record that stopped Mr. Mister’s career in its tracks. And they must have had a conniption when they heard Pull, a darker and weirder effort that delves even further into the progressive. RCA never released it, and dropped the band for being too artsy. (As Mastelotto says in his new liner notes: “WTF? Music that has too much art?”) Speaking as a fan, I’m angry that it took 20 years for this record to come out. In the short time I’ve had it, it’s become like an old friend. I think it may be the Misters’ best.

The official Pull differs from the bootlegs considerably. The sound is fuller and thicker, of course, and the mixing perfectly balanced. But the first six songs have been rearranged, too – where the record once opened with the swaying, poppy “Lifetime,” now it starts with one of its most difficult songs, “Learning to Crawl.” It’s a statement right off the bat that this is not the band you think you know, and the record bears that out.

I know I’ve already reviewed this record, but I’ve grown very attached to it recently. In fact, I can’t stop listening to it. “I Don’t Know Why” may be the Misters’ finest song, all slashing guitars and ride cymbals and amazing harmonies. “We Belong to No One” is a great song, dark synthesizers covering it in a thick fog. “No Words to Say” stands out in its new version – it has a terrific chorus, some dynamite guitar work, and those harmonies again. And closing instrumental “Awaya” is awesome – the six-string on that one is played by Trevor Rabin, of Yes and the Buggles.

The reliance on keyboard sounds is the only hint that Pull was recorded 20 years ago. It sounds fresh to my ears – if a new band released this very album, it would be hailed for taking pop in new directions. It’s taken two decades to get this album into my hands, and I’m so glad it’s here. Make fun of me all you like, Pull is a terrific record from an underrated band. I can’t put it in my top 10 list, but it’s still one of the things I love most about 2010. Check it out here.

* * * * *

And now I’ll end a column about albums that won’t make my top 10 list by talking about one that probably will.

For about six months, my fellow music junkies have been trying to get me to check out Jukebox the Ghost. I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long, but I’ve recently heard Everything Under the Sun, the Philly band’s second album. And ho-lee crap, is it excellent. Jukebox is a three-piece, keys and guitars and drums, and they write some astonishing, energetic pop songs, ones that keep surprising you again and again.

At least four of these songs rank among my favorites of the year. “Half Crazy” is a guitar-fueled party, “Empire” starts with a wonderful piano figure and moves into a chorus you’ll be singing for weeks, “Summer Sun” gets all ELO on your ass, and “Carrying” is just jaw-dropping, spinning its piano melody out over four ecstatic minutes. But every song here is superb, and the whole thing, while not a concept record, certainly carries a thematic thread. It’s a cohesive album of remarkable tunes.

I expect I’ll be writing more about this in a couple of weeks. Suffice it to say that everyone who recommended this was right, and I’m an idiot for waiting so long to hear it. Everything Under the Sun is easily one of the best pop records I’ve heard this year. Listen here.

* * * * *

Next week, the posthumous Michael Jackson album, a new one from Over the Rhine, and a list of honorable mentions from 2010.

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So you know how Bill Maher has that “New Rules” segment where he lays down the law? Like, “New rule: Cheetos bags have to come with their own Wet-Naps now,” or, “New rule: Sarah Palin has to pay me for all the brain cells I’ve lost listening to her,” or something like that? Well, I’ve got one for you this week.

New rule: Christmas music is only acceptable between the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas day. That’s it. I don’t want to hear “Deck the Halls” in my local mall before Halloween, and I don’t want to hear “Frosty the Snowman” in January, when the spirit has well and truly worn off. For those 30 or so days, have at it – bombard me with Christmas tunes all you like. But keep it confined to those 30 days.

Now, before you accuse me of having a heart two sizes too small, I should tell you I love Christmas music. I buy loads of it each year, and I’m always interested to hear my favorite artists take on these old chestnuts. (Marillion doing “Gabriel’s Message”? Magic.) But confining it to one month out of the year keeps it special for me. It’s like egg nog, perhaps my favorite beverage on earth. The fact that I can only get it for two months at the end of each year makes it a treat, and the longing, especially as the summer months wind on, is half the joy.

I will often buy Christmas albums before Thanksgiving, and not listen to them until after. Here’s a good case in point: the Indigo Girls released their first Christmas album, Holly Happy Days, on October 12. I bought it on October 12, and promptly filed it. And on November 26, the day after turkey genocide day, I pressed play and reveled in it.

Now, I’ve had issues with some of the more recent Indigo Girls records. I still think they’re marvelous singers, particularly when their voices intertwine, but lately they’ve been pretty lazy writers, content to spin out some major-key chords and winsome lyrics and call it good. Their last one, 2009’s Poseidon and the Bitter Bug, came in two versions – a full-band effort and an acoustic rendering – and I still don’t remember those songs. In some ways, they’re trying too hard, and in others, not hard enough.

But this? This is great. Holly Happy Days catches the Girls in a relaxed, yet exploratory mood, and I love every minute of it. Gone is the slick production of the past few albums, and in its place is a ramshackle, recorded-in-a-week feel that suits them. The album is made up of traditional songs like “O Holy Night” and “Angels We Have Heard on High,” but also contains three originals – two by Amy Ray, one from Emily Saliers – and some surprise covers.

It opens with a hoedown-style rip through Joe Isaacs’ “I Feel the Christmas Spirit,” with some bluegrass heavy hitters on board, like Victor Krauss and Luke Bulla. (The all-star band sticks around for the whole album, and they’re invaluable.) The Girls’ take on Chely Wright’s “It Really Is (A Wonderful Life)” sums up the spirit of the record – it’s sweet and genuine, sparse and yet as full as it needs to be. The Girls arrange “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” as if they’re recording it to wax cylinder in the early 1900s, and they lend a glorious reading of “Peace Child” some real spiritual heft.

The originals are wonderful too. Ray’s “The Wonder Song” is another bluegrass hootenanny, but her “Mistletoe” is classic Amy Ray, simple and heartbreaking. It’s a plea for love, no matter how fleeting: “While the yule fire burns on, please baby please, just let this love be.” Saliers’ “Your Holiday Song” is a call for tolerance and understanding (“No more one true right or wrong, when our faith calls our name, someone else’s does the same…”) set to a gorgeous melody.

For all that, my favorite thing here is “In the Bleak Midwinter.” The musical arrangement is traditional, but the Girls wrap their voices around one another, and even invite Brandi Carlisle in to provide a third harmony. By the end, the magic they’ve spun together will move and delight you. The Indigo Girls have been singing together for 25 years now, and they still find new ways to prove how perfect their voices are together.

Holly Happy Days fills my yearly quota of holiday records from artists I love all by itself. It’s not only a great Christmas disc, it’s a great Indigo Girls record. Just listen to Saliers and Ray wrap their wonderful voices around the closer, Beth Nielsen Chapman’s “There’s Still My Joy,” and tell me you’ve heard anything as beautiful all year. I really didn’t need to buy any other Christmas records.

But I did anyway. F’rinstance, here’s KT Tunstall’s six-song EP Have Yourself a Very KT Christmas. With a title like that, you’d be forgiven for thinking the Scottish songstress didn’t take this one very seriously, but you’d be wrong. Tunstall clearly worked on this with the same dedication she throws into everything she does. Here’s a list of instruments she played on these songs: guitar, bass, xylophone, harmonium, toy piano, glockenspiel, penny whistle, melodica. Oh, and at one point, she overdubs herself into a kazoo choir.

There are no originals on here, but her cover choices are fascinating. The disc opens with the Pretenders’ “2000 Miles,” from way back in 1983. Tunstall does it rave-up style, keeping her voice just on the safe side of Melissa Etheridge. She then turns in a rocking doo-wop take on Phil Spector’s immortal “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” and spins 180 degrees for a Hawaiian percussion party on R. Alex Anderson’s “Mele Kalikimaka (Christmas in Hawaii).” (That’s the one with the kazoo choir.)

The keeper here, however, is Tunstall’s reverent and committed run-through of the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.” The song first appeared in 1987, and was included on the band’s outstanding If I Should Fall From Grace With God album in 1988. Tunstall invites British singer Ed Harcourt to play piano and sing, and together, they do justice to an absolutely splendid song. Tunstall takes the parts originally sung by Kristy MacColl, and she plays a mean penny whistle to boot.

Tunstall tops everything off with a sparse version of Mud’s obscure ditty “Lonely This Christmas,” and it’s just great. Despite its silly title, Have Yourself a Very KT Christmas is a too-brief slice of joy. I liked it a lot.

Christmas just isn’t Christmas without a slapdash various artists compilation, though, and Warner Bros. has obliged this year with Gift Wrapped: A Change in Season. Now, Gift Wrapped actually started last year, with a 20-track download-only collection of Christmas tunes old and new. There’s a second volume out now, with an additional 23 tracks. But they’re only available online. A Change in Season is a sampler of those two compilations, available on CD in independent record stores. And that’s the one I picked up.

And let me tell you, this thing is strange. It starts with a new year’s song, “My Dear Acquaintance,” performed on piano by Regina Spektor, then slams into “Christmas in the City,” a synth-y, Pink Floyd-esque number by Everest. Nothing here is very Christmas until you get to Los Lobos’ “Rudolph the Manic Reindeer,” a too-brief instrumental jam played with the L.A. band’s typical verve. Then comes an original Throwing Muses song, “Santa Claus,” that sounds like… well, a Throwing Muses song.

Other bits of weirdness: Foxy Shazam presents a massive, overblown, kind of terrific take on “Walking in the Air,” from the 1982 animated film The Snowman. The Bodeans turn in a weak two-minute ditty called “Jinga Bell Rock,” with a children’s choir, while Soul Coughing’s old take on “Suzy Snowflake” is included, much to my delight. (I think this is the oldest recording here, dating back to the late ‘90s.) (Update: My friend Chris L’Etoile informs me that the Throwing Muses song is from 1989. Thanks!) Devo contributes an original that rips all religions, called “Merry Something to You,” and Stardeath and White Dwarfs take on (believe it or not) George Michael’s “Last Christmas,” and they do it seriously.

The record ends with the old Flaming Lips tune “A Change at Christmas (Say it Isn’t So),” originally released as a b-side in 2003, and it’s one of the best, most consistent things here. That says a lot. Perhaps I will throw down for the complete Gift Wrapped sets on iTunes, but based on what I’m hearing here, I may not bother. This is inconsistent and just plain bizarre stuff.

Faring much better is Quiet Company, one of my favorite bands around right now. A Merry Little Christmas is a three-song EP of traditionals done in the Austin quartet’s dramatic pop style. Taylor Muse and company take these songs seriously, and arrange them like original tunes. “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is delightful, the band raving up during the “here we are as in olden days” section and closing things out with a “na na na” refrain. “Angels We Have Heard on High” is also swell, done as a piano-pounding Beatlesque power pop workout. (And then there are the kazoos…)

But it’s “O Holy Night” that will knock you out. This has always been one of my favorite carols, with its endlessly building melody, and it’s perfect for the QuietCo treatment. Muse starts it out with just a piano and his voice, but before long Jeff Weathers’ drums are crashing in, and the harmonies start building. The ending is magnificent, Muse reaching for the high note on “divine,” the band exploding around him, and then dropping away, leaving nothing but the piano again. In many ways, they turn this century-and-a-half-old classic into a Quiet Company song, and that’s the greatest compliment I can give.

You can hear all of A Merry Little Christmas, and name your price to download it, at QuietCo’s Bandcamp site. Just remember to stop listening to it after December 25. New rule and all.

* * * * *

Okay, since I mentioned KT Tunstall and the Indigo Girls, I should probably say that Tunstall’s third album, Tiger Suit, is excellent, seamlessly blending new electronic flourishes with her more earthy songwriting, and the Indigos’ first release of the year, a double live record called Staring Down the Brilliant Dream, is terrific. There’s just too much music, and I can’t get to all of it.

And since Tunstall’s album and Gift Wrapped were both limited releases for Black Vinyl Friday (my favorite nickname for the mini-Record Store Day event on the day after Thanksgiving), I should probably mention the other things I bought. I don’t do the vinyl, but if I did, I would have bought a whole host of goodies. As it was, I picked up a teaser for Iron and Wine’s new album (dark and full and rich and very good), and Metallica’s Live at Grimey’s, which proves in nine songs that the band can still bring it. Yes, they can still play “Motorbreath,” and yes, they can play it well.

One more thing I ought to say before I go. I don’t want to make a big deal of this, since I went all out for the 500th, but the first ever online TM3AM column went out on November 29, 2000. Which means that as of two days ago, I’ve been doing this for 10 years. I often said during the early years that I’d do this for a decade and see how I feel. Well, I feel really good. So here’s to another 10, if I can do it. And thanks to all of you who have come along for the ride.

Next week, we start our end-of-the-year festivities, with a look at some worthy records rendered ineligible for the top 10 list. After that, the honorable mentions, the list itself, Fifty Second Week, and then it’ll be 2011. Time flies.

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t fully understand hip-hop.

Part of it is cultural, no doubt. So much of this music is dedicated to the experience of being black in America, and those are shoes I will never walk in. But then, I’ll never be a poor boy from a British mining town, or a working-class guy from New Jersey, or an evangelical Christian from the deep south, or a victim of Apartheid in South Africa. And yet, I own music from artists who express all of these points of view, and help me to understand them, the same way Chuck D. and Posdnous and Q-Tip and Eazy-E helped me understand theirs.

No, my stumbling block with hip-hop has always been musical. Here’s the thing: I like pop music so much because I get it. I know what goes into it. I know how a good pop song is constructed, and I understand when writers play with those rules. I’m well-versed in the history of pop music, and I can tell you when writers with a sense of history are pulling from certain styles.

I don’t have this same kind of knowledge of hip-hop. I’ve watched it grow and evolve from the early ‘80s, when I first started listening. (Admittedly, I was listening to DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, but whatever.) I know the landmark albums, I can tell you which records are responding to which, but I can’t exactly explain to you why, for example, Illmatic is awesome and Nastradamus isn’t. I know I like Illmatic more, but in a lot of ways, they’re very similar to me.

And the real difficulty I have is that I’m an old-fashioned melody addict. I need strong melodies to really engage with something, and lyrics are often less important to me on first listen. Hip-hop, particularly the more stripped-back beats-and-rhymes hip-hop, requires me to completely reorder my way of thinking. I usually end up in awe of the lyrical construction and vocal delivery, without ever really liking the songs very much. And I know that sentence by itself must seem odd to hip-hop fans, because in many ways, the lyrical construction and vocal delivery is the song.

So I don’t keep up with a lot of the lower-key rap releases during the year. (I definitely don’t keep up with the higher-profile ones either. My collection just doesn’t need any 50 Cent.) This year, for example, I bought Eminem’s album, which I really liked, and Big Boi’s, which I dug, but apparently not enough to write about. I’ll buy anything De La Soul puts out. I liked Mos Def’s last record, The Ecstatic. I like Sage Francis a lot, but haven’t picked up his latest for some reason. I feel like hip-hop is a world I know very little about.

And yet, I keep trying. I can only review rap albums the way I review any album: by talking about what strikes me and what doesn’t. My analogies are all going to be to rock and pop records, though, because that’s what I know best. All art comes from the same human desire for connection and expression anyway, it’s just the trappings that are different.

Case in point: Kanye West. Here’s a guy who wants to be loved, wants to be revered as an artist. But he wants that on his terms. When he started out, he was a pretty good rapper and a very good producer, making off-center pop hits like “Jesus Walks” and “Gold Digger.” He quickly earned a reputation as an artist who would collaborate with anyone – his second album, Late Registration, was co-produced by classic pop composer Jon Brion, and was in many ways the hip-hop Sgt. Pepper.

But lately, West has been making weird, weird music. This is to his credit. There’s practically no rapping at all on his fourth album, 808s and Heartbreak. Just the sound of a broken man singing through Auto-Tune over ancient synths. And now here is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, his longest, most self-indulgent, most profane, strangest, and quite possibly his best. It’s an album no one else on the planet would make, the product of complete creative freedom, and that’s both its blessing and its curse. It’s an album that isn’t quite sure of itself – like its creator, it works very hard to convince us of its genius, even if it doesn’t quite believe it.

Early word had West returning to hip-hop on this album, and that turns out to be correct. But he’s Kanye West, so you know it’s not that simple. This record pulls from a hundred different sources, and while it remains rooted in rap, it explodes those boundaries again and again. West collaborates with dozens of artists here, some you’d expect – Jay-Z, Kid Cudi, Nicki Minaj – and some you’d never guess, like Elton John and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. West uses programmed beats and synths, of course, but he also incorporates cellos and horns, and samples from some wild sources, like Aphex Twin and King Crimson.

Essentially, West does whatever the hell he wants on this album, and while there are moments when he falls on his face, the overall sense of unbridled creation here is worth it. Just the first single, “Power,” is unlike anything he’s done, with its hook ripped from “21st Century Schizoid Man,” its orchestral interlude, its beautifully arranged choral vocals, and its unstoppable beat. Everything clicks here. “All of the Lights” incorporates a massive number of guest vocalists, including Rihanna, The-Dream, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Elly Jackson of LaRoux, Elton John, Fergie and Drake, but doesn’t just mass them all together – they’ve got parts, and you can hear them intertwine.

For the first five tracks, in fact, West’s ambitions are perfectly realized. It’s the best opening shot he’s ever delivered, from the Mike Oldfield-sampling “Dark Fantasy” to “Gorgeous,” based on a lick from the Byrds’ “You Showed Me.” But in the back two-thirds, West gets into more self-indulgent waters, starting with a three-song stretch of straight beats and rhymes, loaded down with guest stars. Swizz Beatz, Pusha T, Prynce Cy Hi… I don’t even know who most of these people are, but they each get extended verses. The only must-hear moment is Nicki Minaj’s jaw-dropping turn on “Monster,” my favorite of these three tunes.

The final third, however, is music only West would and could make, and it’s brilliant and bizarre, tentative and bold. It’ll make you gasp in awe and roll your eyes in contempt, often in the same song, and in that way, it’s very much like its author, who inspires both frustrated sighs and fervent accolades. West takes on his own public image on “Runaway,” one of the best songs he’s ever penned. “Let’s have a toast for the douchebags, let’s have a toast for the assholes,” he sings, before advising the listener to “run away fast as you can.”

“Runaway” drew cheers from the crowd at the Video Music Awards, and I think some might have considered it penitent when he performed it. Not so. The lyrics are more probing and curious, West seemingly saying he just does what he does, and he has no idea why he acts like such a douche. He’s basically asking his fans to indulge him, and then he immediately takes advantage of that, stretching the song to nine minutes. The final third of “Runaway” finds West humming through Auto-Tune over a repetitive cello part. For three whole minutes. Another producer would have vetoed this, no doubt, but West gives it all to you, for what it’s worth.

“Blame Game” is a further eight minutes, and this one perfectly sums up the joy and exasperation I feel listening to this record. The song is amazing – West samples Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14,” wrapping up the piano parts in warm synths, and then gets John Legend to spin a tale of miscommunication: “I’ll call you bitch for short,” he sings, and later responds, “You call me motherfucker for long.” (It doesn’t sound pretty, but it is.) But then, West gives the last two minutes over to Chris Rock, for a repetitive, tedious gag that, tonally, just jars. On repeated listens, this bit is particularly useless.

Which brings up a good point: for all of West’s brilliant production techniques, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a lyrically confused and often ugly record. West presents himself as both self-aware and defiant, exploring his shortcomings, but then refusing to grow as a person. It’s an interesting paradox – he’s a guy who really wants to be liked, but still raps about dating porn stars. It’s like he’s showing us all of this ugliness while looking for our approval, and the extraordinary music makes rejecting it much more difficult.

His final sentiments make the point better than I ever could. The last track is called “Lost in the World,” and it’s West’s most complete collaboration with Justin Vernon. Vernon’s all over this record, in a supporting role, but “Lost in the World” is built off of Bon Iver’s Auto-Tune wonder “Woods.” West somehow makes this piece even more affecting than it was originally, and gives it a pulsing beat. It’s almost spectral, otherworldly, and over that, West raps this: “Let’s break out of this fake-ass party, and turn this into a classic night, if we die in each other’s arms, we’ll still get laid in the afterlife.” It’s like a dirty joke at a funeral.

And then? And then he layers in a sample of Gil Scott-Heron’s scathing revolutionary rant “Comment No. 1,” which adds more gravitas to this record’s closing moments than they deserve. As a poet, West isn’t working on Scott-Heron’s level. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a self-obsessed document of douchebaggery pretending to be a major statement. Musically, this is astonishing stuff, and it flows like wine. But when the author of the story reveals himself, he just doesn’t have anything important to say.

Still, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is probably West’s masterpiece. He’s working on a plane all by himself. Rather than abandon rap when other music interests him, West has grounded himself here, bringing all of his myriad influences to enrich his hip-hop roots. It’s phenomenally self-indulgent, sometimes ill-advised, but mostly off-the-charts creative, and unlike anything else you’re likely to hear. West is prodigiously talented, and when he’s on, he’s at least as good as he thinks he is. Which is pretty damn good.

* * * * *

And that guy, Kanye West, once said that Kid Cudi is his favorite living musician. That alone would make Cudi’s work worth checking out to me, but I’ve been reliably informed that the popular rapper is not held in high regard. This is probably one of those times where my unfamiliarity with the genre and its scenes trips me up, but I can only say what I feel: I like Cudi. And as much as I liked his first record, I like his second even more.

Kid Cudi (real name Scott Mescudi) made his name with mixtapes and guest spots, and I suppose people were expecting something more hardcore from his debut album, Man on the Moon: The End of Day. Instead, what they got was a low-key, almost somnambulant collection of paranoid, drug-obsessed dreams. The sequel, Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager, turns those dreams to nightmares. It remains slow and low – there are practically no beats on this thing, just little percussion patterns – and the whole thing is claustrophobic and dark.

That fits its subject matter. Mr. Rager is a concept album about dealing with the pressures of fame. Yes, it’s one of those, but there’s a conceptual weight to this thing that ties it all together well. It’s subdivided into five acts, and Mescudi starts off on relatively stable ground. But by act four, he’s drowning in his own addictions and pain, and turning into Mr. Rager, his violent and self-destructive alter ego. It’s just as self-obsessed as West’s work, but Cudi’s conceptual underpinning elevates it. You feel pulled in by Mescudi’s darkness.

The production is mostly minimal – ghostly beats, empty bass lines, droning keys. Cudi’s voice is hangdog, and when he sings he slips off the notes more often than not. But even that works with the record’s theme. Even a song called “Wild’n Cuz I’m Young” is a pitch-black shroud of music, like a death march. Only “Erase Me,” a guitar-fueled pop song with a verse by West, doesn’t quite fit, but it’s fun, so I let it slide.

This is the second installment in a trilogy, the back cover blurb informs us, and I think Cudi sees this as his The Empire Strikes Back, the middle movie that puts our hero in jeopardy. He ends the record trapped in his mind (on a song called, um, “Trapped in My Mind”), looking for a way out of the prison he’s built for himself. (But not very hard: being trapped is “not that bad,” he sings.) Cudi is very popular, and his records sell well, but listening to this, I’m at a loss to explain why. That’s a good thing, by the way – this album is so odd, so dark, so antithetical to anything you’d hear on pop radio that its popularity is a mystery.

But I like it. It’s moody, trippy music that never overstays its welcome, and though the album as a whole is oppressive, it’s also impressive. I have no idea how long Cudi can keep this up, but he’s carving out a space for himself, doing music no one else is doing. I guess I’m not supposed to like this, but I do, and I’m already waiting for Man on the Moon III.

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I’m on much sturdier ground when it comes to Cee Lo Green.

But wait, you say. Cee Lo’s a singer, not a rapper. Ah, but he used to rap, when he was one-fourth of Atlanta-based hip-hop group Goodie Mob. So he counts. And his album is terrific, and I want to tell you about it.

Cee Lo Green, as you probably know, is a golden-throated soul singer. He’s the voice of Gnarls Barkley, but earlier this year, he scored his first wildfire hit on his own with “Fuck You,” the song that launched a million YouTube views. In many ways, “Fuck You” is the perfect Cee Lo song – it coasts on a bed of old-school soul music, but Green uses the lyrics to say the things the old soul singers just couldn’t. It’s firmly rooted in the Motown sound, but fully and completely modern at the same time. It’s a little miracle of a song.

It’s also the best pop tune of the year, bar none. Even Green was surprised when “Fuck You,” released as a teaser for his third album The Lady Killer, went viral and turned into the biggest hit of his solo career. And I think he was caught flat-footed. For more than a week, while “Fuck You” made its way around the interwebs, Cee Lo offered no way to legally download the song, and no album to buy it on. The Lady Killer clearly wasn’t finished, and at the time of the single’s release, was still three months from hitting shelves.

The Green Team scrambled, and brought the release date forward about a month, and now The Lady Killer is here. It’s still two months too late, but it’s here, and it’s very, very good. The entire album maintains that perfect balance between the old soul sound and modern production, and somehow Cee Lo has mastered the art of writing this particular kind of song.

Just listen to “Bright Lights Bigger City,” the opening number. (After the awesomely badass intro. “My name is… not important.”) It comes dangerously close to taking the bass line of “Billie Jean,” and it’s performed almost entirely on synthesizers, but it’s such a classic-sounding tune. “Satisfied” is similar – I can really hear Al Green singing this one. “Love Gun” even uses the old hip-hop trick of substituting gunshots for snare drums, but its zippy James Bond-style surf-soul really works.

In fact, the whole album is excellent. I’m even warming up to Green’s cover of “No One’s Gonna Love You,” my favorite Band of Horses song. This version is missing the ghostly beauty of the original, but Green amps it up with strings and his from-the-heart vocals, and it works. Top to bottom, The Lady Killer is solid and entertaining stuff.

There’s only one problem, and its name is “Fuck You.” It’s far and away the best song on this record, as it would be on just about any record released this year, and its presence puts everything into sharp relief. Without “Fuck You,” The Lady Killer is a really good neo-soul album from a master of the form. With it, though, the album may as well be titled Fuck You and Some Other Songs That Aren’t As Good. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather have the song than not have it, but if there’s any case that cries out for a return of the ‘50s and ‘60s practice of non-album singles, it’s this one.

Green was wise to sequence the amazing “Wildflower” right after “Fuck You,” and it very nearly carries its momentum. But as you check out the spooky “Bodies” and the lovely “Cry Baby” and all the other very good tunes on The Lady Killer, you’re going to want to go back to track three and hear its best song again and again. Resist that temptation, and you’ll find that Cee Lo Green has delivered a really swell album here, one worthy of the praise it’s getting. Green may never again write a song as catchy or as perfectly-realized as “Fuck You,” but if he continues giving us albums like The Lady Killer, his place in pop history is assured.

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Next week, well, could be anything. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow my infrequent twitterings at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.