I’m in a really good mood this week.

On Saturday, I got to see local band Kid, You’ll Move Mountains play for the first time. They debuted six new songs from their upcoming record, and they were all great. Drummer Nate Lanthrum, in particular, made my jaw drop more than once with his tricky, constantly shifting rhythms. (“I’m just trying not to be boring,” he said after the show.) KYMM opened for Chicago’s Gold Motel and Milwaukee’s Maritime, both of whom put on really good shows. I left smiling.

Tonight (Nov. 17), I’m seeing the Dresden Dolls play at the Vic Theatre in Chicago. Everything I’ve heard about every Dresden Dolls show has me excited for this. As a special treat, the opening act is Chicago-based punk marching band Mucca Pazza, which counts among its members Vanessa Valliere, a woman I went to high school with. Small, small world.

So yeah, things are pretty good right now, musically speaking. I’ve also been finding a lot of good recorded stuff to listen to lately, despite my earlier moaning about the end of the year doldrums. This week’s column is brought to you by the letter M, and it features music that has invaded my CD player of late and won’t give it back. I mean that in a good way.

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1. Metal

It’s true confessions time.

You know how we all have these phases we go through, where we passionately and completely love something others find questionable, but we don’t care? And later, when we look back, we can’t quite understand what it was about that thing that drew us to it? You know, the way some people fell head over heels for the New Kids on the Block, and hung their posters on their walls and obsessed over which one was their favorite and screamed their lungs out for them at concerts? And now they feel a little embarrassed for having done so?

For some people, that phase was teeny-bopper pop music. For me, it was Christian heavy metal.

From about 14 until about 17, I consumed all the Christian metal I could get my hands on. I don’t mean glammy metal like Stryper, although I did like some of that. I mean real, brutal, thrashing metal, with face-melting solos and drums that would give you whiplash. I mean metal that could stand up proudly next to the stuff I loved as a teenager, like Anthrax and Slayer and early Queensryche. Only, you know, about Jesus.

I suppose it isn’t much of a stretch to understand why I liked this stuff. I was a church-going lad, raised in a church-going family, and I embraced a very simple religious message early on. This music is essentially based on that message: accept Jesus or your soul will burn in Hell. It’s an uncomfortable idea for me now, and the so-called Christian music I listen to these days (Terry Taylor, the Choir, even Sufjan Stevens) offers a more complex worldview, a more complicated morality. But the metal bands of my youth matched my childlike faith with their own black-and-white preaching, and I responded.

So there was this label called Intense Records, a subsidiary of Christian music giant Frontline, and they were the first and the best at this Christian metal thing. I bought everything they put out, and they covered a pretty wide range. I have very close to the entire Intense catalog on cassette, and I loved all of these ridiculous bands. They had a huge impact on my formative years as a music fan, even though almost no one I know has any idea who they were. I’ve caught up with a couple – Deliverance, for example, is still putting out albums, and Australian metal monster Mortification keeps soldiering on.

But I figured the rest of the Intense lineup would be lost to the sands of time. I didn’t count on Intense Millennium Records, a new label that has taken on the task of remastering and re-releasing these old albums in spiffed-up new versions. It’s like someone went back in time and brought me a piece of my childhood, all gift-wrapped. And since I’m the only person I know who likes this stuff, it feels like a personal gift to me. So thanks, Intense Millennium.

The label’s first set of reissues consists of five albums by three bands, all of which I obsessed over as a kid. I remember when fellow metalhead Chris Callaway brought Human Sacrifice, the debut from Vengeance (later Vengeance Rising), in to church one Sunday. The front cover was a graphic shot of a hand nailed to a cross, the songs had titles like “Fill This Place With Blood” and “Beheaded,” and the whole thing looked really foreboding to a sheltered kid from the suburbs. That impression didn’t go away when I heard the music. It was punishing, explosive, heavy stuff, with a vocalist who sounded like he’d gargled with razor blades before stepping up to the mic.

That was my gateway drug, and soon, I was listening to everything with an Intense logo. It was a phase, one I don’t understand, but still look back on fondly. So now here I am with wonderful remastered versions of Vengeance Rising’s Human Sacrifice and Once Dead, Sacred Warrior’s Rebellion, and Bloodgood’s self-titled debut and its follow-up, Detonation. I’m finding I still know every song by heart, even though I haven’t heard some of them in nearly 20 years.

Human Sacrifice is still stunning, even 22 years after its release. It’s uncommonly brutal, and the newly remastered sound is thick and dense. It obviously wasn’t made with a lot of care – there are two glaring vocal mistakes that stayed in – but it moves with a ferocity that’s still startling. Some songs are mere seconds long, like “Salvation,” but others, like the instrumental “Ascension,” stretch to more than five minutes, winding down detours and showing off the band’s chops. And they had chops aplenty.

Once Dead, the 1989 follow-up, is simultaneously cheaper and more epic. The original cover showed the band members in cheesy zombie makeup rising from their own graves, and the production is similarly threadbare, hissy and ragged. But the songs grew more punishing, and more interesting. The eight-minute “Into the Abyss” is my favorite Vengeance song, a slow-motion jackhammer powerhouse. Roger Martinez’ voice is somehow in worse shape here than on the debut, vacillating between a growl and a whine, but it works well with the music. And there’s a hilarious cover of “Space Truckin” here too. I may not be making this record sound awesome, but it is.

Chicago’s Sacred Warrior played (and still plays) a brooding form of mid-tempo metal that takes from Queensryche and Iron Maiden. In Rey Parra they have a powerful, operatic singer, and his voice is at the forefront of the band’s 1988 debut, Rebellion. I liked subsequent Sacred Warrior albums more, but this one is very good, despite the awful ballad “He Died.” Quick burners like “Stay Away From Evil” and “Children of the Light” still crank, and the closer, “Sword of Victory,” remains the album’s best.

And then there is Seattle’s Bloodgood, named after their bass player, Michael Bloodgood. They were one of the first Christian metal bands – their self-titled debut preceded Human Sacrifice by two years, and at the time, no one could have imagined a heavier Christian album. Bloodgood is more blues-based and less thrashy than their contemporaries, although Bloodgood does contain the absolute scorcher “Black Snake.” The majority of the album’s fare is guitar-heavy rock like “Stand in the Light” and “Anguish and Pain.”

Their second record, 1987’s Detonation, turned the intensity up. It opens with “Battle of the Flesh,” a massive workout for drummer Mark Welling and singer Les Carlsen, and though it includes the slower “Alone in Suicide,” it also contains the two-part Easter drama “Crucify” and “The Messiah,” the songs for which Bloodgood is best known. “Crucify” in particular is awesomely ridiculous. Over hyperspeed drums and riffing, Carlsen plays the part of Pontius Pilate, acting out Jesus’ trial. It could be comical, but they sell it, and “The Messiah” is suitably reverent and memorable.

Of course, the lyrics on all of these records are straightforward, straight-up religious. I was okay with them as a churchgoing teen, but these days, I find some of the moral absolutes here questionable. The Vengeance albums in particular made me queasy more than once. There’s a violence to them that seems to preclude rational thought: “I want my head chopped off, you’ll see my body rot, and then I’ll reign with Christ and then you’ll fry,” for example. It’s almost like Martinez went from the Old Testament to Revelations, skipping all that “love everybody” stuff in the middle.

How do I feel listening to this stuff now, after more than 20 years? A little conflicted, but these albums are permanently etched onto my life, and there’s no reversing that process. Seeing what’s happened to Roger Martinez has been disillusioning – he’s still preaching with the same intensity, but from the opposite perspective now. He’s on Facebook, swearing up a storm and daring anyone who will listen to defend the atrocities depicted in the book of Numbers. It’s like watching a childhood friend die.

I try not to think about any of that when listening to these albums. When it comes right down to it, reflexive theology aside, Vengeance was a superb metal band, and Sacred Warrior and Bloodgood are still at it, and still very good. The lyrics don’t ring as true to me anymore, but these songs are still favorites, still important to me. I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of Intense Millennium’s reissues too – the second Sacred Warrior and third Bloodgood are on tap for January, with the third Vengeance and an album by Deliverance set for February.

The remastering, by the way, is amazing. Full and rich and lush, even in the case of Once Dead, which no longer sounds like it was recorded on a boom box. Each remaster has new artwork by James Heru, with the original cover art on the other side of the booklet. I like the new art better in nearly every case (it’s hard to beat that iconic Human Sacrifice cover), and the packaging is well-designed. The Vengeance and Bloodgood albums came with bonus discs, full of demos and bootleg-quality live tracks, and while I won’t be listening to them very often, they’re nice to have.

In all, Intense Millennium has done a bang-up job with this chapter of my childhood, and I’m excited to hear more. If you are too, check them out here.

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2. Mumble

My friend Jeff Elbel owns a recording studio in Wheaton. He does lots of work for lots of people for very little money, and has an ear that I would kill for. He’s great at this, is what I’m saying, and if you want proof, check out the new album from Michigan band Mumble, called Happy Living. Jeff produced it over the past several years, and it sounds like the band paid a million bucks for his work.

I’d never heard Mumble before Jeff played me their stuff, but over the last week, as I’ve spun Happy Living again and again, I’ve grown to really like them. They play complex, progressive pop with a keen sense of melody, and the 13 songs on this record all go places you won’t expect. And then there’s the sound itself, dense and lush and full of surprises. There are very few moments here that sound like a band playing on a stage, but as a studio creation, Happy Living is impressive stuff. It’s rare to hear a local album that sounds this good.

The record opens slowly, with a minute-long intro segueing into the grandiose, mid-tempo “In It Now.” But when that chorus hits, you’ll know why they put it first. “Mad Drivers” is a tricky, proggy thing, with some nifty organ lines and hidden, almost inaudible percussion tricks. (It took three listens for me to really hear what the woodblocks are doing. It’s that kind of record.) I think “Claire” is the single, with its lovely acoustic guitar parts and glorious harmonies. The band thinks “I Got a Woman” is the more likely hit, and though I disagree, I can’t fault that song either. Its chorus is soaring and memorable.

“Child Giant” is also a winner, and its repetitive yet endearing chorus will get stuck in your head. (It certainly has in mine.) But my favorites on this album are in the more experimental second half. “Bloodletters’ Town Hall” is a terrific parable set to dark music, “My Fighting Weight” reminds me of Minus the Bear, and the lovely “Daffodil” is a low-key gem. Closer “Big Blue Ball” is the album’s one disappointment – it should rock more than it does, and it comes off a little flat. But overall, this is one fine pop album.

My one quibble is with leader John Hawthorne’s voice. He has a nice tone, but I wish it were a little stronger in places. The man writes all the songs, and he should get to sing them if he wants to, but some of these songs (“Big Blue Ball” especially) could have used a more forceful vocal. But it’s clear Happy Living has been a labor of love. At times this record is so full of sound, so generous and overflowing with joy, that you wonder whether it can sustain it. The fact that it does, and that it packs so many well-written, well-made songs into fewer than 50 minutes, is a testament to all involved. This is really good stuff.

Hear Mumble here. Order Happy Living here.

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3. Mae

And finally, we come to a band I’ve loved for years. I just got the word that Mae is breaking up. They’re embarking on one last tour with all five original members, and probably making a live album, and then calling it quits. Those who don’t know Mae probably don’t realize it, but this is a real shame. They’re a superb band, and I’ll miss them.

But they’re going out on a high note. Over the past two years, they’ve been recording and releasing songs online, letting people download them for a small donation, and putting that money into service projects around the globe. They worked with Habitat for Humanity and DonorsChoose, donating thousands of dollars. It was an impressive thing to watch.

The music is equally impressive. Spread out over three EPs entitled (M)orning, (A)fternoon and (E)vening, Mae delivered 23 tracks that expanded their horizons while remaining as punchy and melodic as anything they’d done. The just-released (E)vening brings the project to a close gracefully – where the first two EPs were often fiery workouts, the final chapter is quieter and more reflective. It’s also, I think, my favorite of the lot.

(E)vening brings Jacob Marshall’s piano to the fore once again. That was the element I first responded to – Mae’s first two albums combined pop-punk force and melody with a nice leavening of pretty keys, and it stood out as unique. The new EP opens with a short piano piece, then segues into “Bloom,” a gentle tune with a great piano line. David Elkins’ high, even voice is in fine form again, and I can’t help thinking that this, this is the sound I’m going to miss.

Not that the rest of the EP misses the mark in any way. Both “I Just Needed You to Know” and “My Favorite Dream” are classic Mae songs, mid-tempo pop numbers with complex twists, fine playing and lovely harmonies. But the real surprise of the EP is “Seasons,” a 14-minute solo piano piece subdivided into 18 movements. It describes, in music, the passing of a year. It’s lovely. On a personal note, I like this because when I sit down to play the piano, this is what it sounds like.

The full band returns for “Sleep Well,” but the tone remains gentle and quiet. I love the chorus to this one – it sounds like Elkins and company putting the band to bed with a song. It builds and builds, finally segueing into the dramatic closer, “Good (E)vening,” strings flailing in the background while the band plays as if they’ll never have the chance again. It’s simply marvelous, a grand capstone to a career that went unheralded, but produced some terrific music. Rest in peace, goodbye, good night.

Hear Mae’s stuff and get their EP trilogy here.

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And that’s what I’ve been listening to. How about you? Next week, Kanye and Kid Cudi and Cee-Lo. 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.

That’ll teach me to open my mouth.

After waxing lyrical for two weeks straight about how there just isn’t anything interesting happening in the last two months of the year, I get to eat those words this week. A couple of potentially fascinating projects have been announced in the last few days, and I expect they’ll fill the empty weeks until 2011 nicely.

First up is the Choir, perhaps my favorite band. After taking five years off, they’re about to release their second album of 2010. (It’s shipping now, in fact, from www.thechoir.net.) It’s called De-plumed; Exposed, Laid Bare, Featherless, and it’s a collection of new acoustic takes on songs from their long history. Twelve songs, in fact, one from each of their albums. They picked some I might not have (“Hey Gene,” “Enough to Love”), but they also selected a few of my favorites, including “To Bid Farewell” and “A Sentimental Song.” Two Choir albums in one year? Pinch me.

And on December 14, the first posthumous Michael Jackson album hits stores. Simply called Michael, it is purportedly made up of recordings he was working on at the time of his death last year. This will be interesting for me on a musical level, certainly, but also on a sociological one. Will the general public embrace this project more than they did Jackson’s last couple of records? Is dying the best thing one can do for one’s career? Or will this be considered disturbing the self-styled King of Pop’s grave? Most important of all, will this be any good?

In between those two is Eric Johnson’s sixth album, Up Close. Johnson’s one of those guitar players who doesn’t get a lot of press, but should. He’s fantastic, and I’m looking forward to this. And of course, there’s the three-CD monstrosity The Story of Our Lives by the Violet Burning, expected to ship sometime in December. And Live at Cadogan Hall, an acoustic document from Marillion. Turns out all is not as bleak as I thought. The moral of this story: don’t ever listen to me. I have no idea what I’m talking about.

And now, more of my opinions.

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I listen to a lot of music, much more than the average person. I know this. Because I listen to a lot of music, people ask me all the time how I discover the bands I write about here. They often pose this question as if I have some kind of super-power, or inside track. What I usually want to say is this: I’m so behind the curve it’s not even funny. There’s new music coming out every week that I will never hear, and some of it is bound to be life-changingly good. I feel like I’m in slow motion a lot of the time.

But I don’t say that. My standard answer is that I keep my ears open, searching out new stuff (and keeping track of established bands that have fallen out of favor) at a rate some might call obsessive. Even though this casts a pretty wide net, I still rely on other music fans to point me in the direction of good stuff I’ve missed. I’m blessed to have an entire network of similarly-obsessive music lovers looking out for me, and I return the favor as often as I can.

This week is all about those people. I’ve mentioned several of them before, like Dr. Tony Shore and Jeff Elbel. I owe a lot of what I do to fellow fans who get just as excited about new music as I do, and can’t wait to share it. I’m grateful that they’ve shared it with me.

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Somewhere in the dark recesses of the United Kingdom lives a man named Nick Martin. I’ve never met him, I’ve never spoken to him. But anything he suggests I buy, I will buy.

Granted, he doesn’t do it often. Nick’s an occasional correspondent, and his recommendations, usually of UK bands that haven’t found their way across the pond, are becoming an annual tradition. Last year he turned me on to the sweet, glittering pop of the Yeah You’s, and their debut album Looking Through You scored an honorable mention in 2009’s top 10 list. (It topped Tony Shore’s list, after I shared Nick’s suggestion.)

This year, Nick got me hooked on Everything Everything, a virtually unknown British band with a sound that knocks me out. It’s part modern Brit-pop (singer Jonathan Higgs has that high, wavery, Thom Yorke/Chris Martin tone), but part ballsy prog, taking a lot from Drums and Wires-era XTC. Rhythms are constantly shifting and moving, melodies collapse in on themselves, nothing remains in one place for any length of time, and yet these songs are catchy and unforgettable.

Everything Everything’s debut is called Man Alive. Its 12 songs never sit still. Opener “My Kz, Ur Bf” rises above its text-speak title, delivering a trippy mix of herky-jerky rhythms, swelling keyboards and a dynamite chorus. “Qwerty Finger” is even better, mainly because it’s faster, but even when this band slows it down, as on “Leave the Engine Room,” they can’t resist making something complex and consistently engaging.

And then there is “Photoshop Handsome,” a whirlwind of vocals, marching band drums and clean guitars. It’ll knock you flat. They follow that up with “Two for Nero,” a modern “Scarborough Fair,” all harpsichords and intertwining voices. I haven’t heard anything like this on a new pop album in years. Amazingly, the quality of Man Alive never dips, mainly because Higgs and his cohorts never settle. Every song here takes off in a million directions you won’t expect.

The only stumbling block here is Higgs’ voice, which sometimes stretches past its capabilities. But it does provide an interesting counterbalance – the songs are very precise, and his singing is loose and slippery. Some of these melodies, like the cascading craziness of “Come Alive Diana,” are out of his grasp. It adds a touch of humanity, but a stronger, less watery voice might have fit this music better.

That’s it, though. It’s my only quibble with this very fine debut from a band hopefully destined for greatness. Nick Martin has done it again, and I can’t wait to hear what he recommends next year. Hear Everything Everything here.

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Steve Warrenfeltz is an old hippie.

It’s okay, I can say that. I spend thousands of dollars a year in his record store, Kiss the Sky, a little piece of heaven right in my home town. Part of the charm of Kiss the Sky is that it’s run by two guys who bucked the establishment – both Steve and his business partner Mike Messerschmidt left cushy corporate jobs to open the store, because they were sick of working for the man. It’s a very child-of-the’60s (and very admirable) thing to do.

So Steve’s an old hippie, and he likes old hippie music, like Dylan and Jimi Hendrix and old blues guys. When he’s in the store, that’s what you’ll hear. So imagine my surprise when I wandered in last week and heard, coming from the speakers, this lovely, rootsy, completely unfamiliar music. I listened to two songs, loved them both, and asked Steve just what he was playing. And he said, “It’s a local guy.”

And I said, “What?” Because the production on this stuff was just incredible. Huge and clear and full and dense, like the product of the finest Nashville studio. Turns out, he was spinning the debut from Miles Nielsen, and while he lives in the western Chicago suburbs, he’s not just a local guy. Illinois residents certainly recognize that last name – Miles is the son of Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen, and he pulled in some top-notch backup and production help for his self-titled record.

Which explains the sterling sound, but even the best production couldn’t disguise lousy songs. Miles Nielsen writes really good songs. Some of them sound like old standards, some like Ryan Adams on a good day, but all of them are heartfelt and well-crafted. I’m particularly fond of the shuffling “Good Heart Sway” – that one has a chorus that won’t quit, and a clarinet part to top it off. But all 12 of these songs are worthwhile, and the end result is 37 minutes of history-conscious rock and roll.

Nielsen pulled in Bun E. Carlos to play drums, and former Black Crowe Marc Ford to play guitar, but the dominant voice here is his. Man, just listen to “Sugarfree.” I haven’t heard a country-rock song this good in a long time. “Wine” is dark and powerful (“Been drinkin’ all the poisonous berries”), its shambling percussion adding a new dimension, while “Lost My Mind” is a hit single waiting to happen, like the best of the Old 97’s. It all ends with “The Crown,” a lovely little tune built on acoustic guitars, piano, vibes and some subtle mellotron.

Miles Nielsen has once again proven that the famous progeny theory is just plain wrong. His songs deserve to stand on their own, and they deserve a much wider audience. It’s telling that every time Steve plays this album in the store, someone asks about it. This is just a superb little album, and I thank Steve for turning me on to it. You can hear Miles here.

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Rob Hale’s another guy who works at Kiss the Sky, but he’s not an old hippie. In fact, he’s my age, and his favorite thing to play in the store is Porcupine Tree. That’s in fact how we met – I complimented him for treating customers to The Incident, the latest PT album, and we hit it off from there.

Of course, we soon found out that we disagree more than we agree. But that just comes with the territory when you’re an obsessive music fan. I already trust Rob’s taste, so when he called the new Oceansize album his record of the year, I had to hear it. It’s called Self-Preserved While the Bodies Float Up, and while I’m more lukewarm about it than he is, it is an impressive disc.

Oceansize is an English quintet with three prior albums and a host of EPs. They’ve flown entirely under my radar, and I’m working feverishly to correct that oversight now. They play a heavy version of shoegaze prog, their songs sometimes stretching to 10 minutes or more without a lot of apparent movement, but lots of energy. I’d never call them metal, but they do get very, very loud, as heard on the opening track of the new one, “Part Cardiac.” It’s a sludgy, melody-free nightmare that almost kept me from pushing on, and I still think it was an odd choice for the album’s leadoff slot, but I’m glad I kept going. Self-Preserved gets a lot better from there.

I like how many different tones the album takes on, from the bullets-from-above monster “Build Us a Rocket Then…” to the expansive nine-minute “Oscar Acceptance Speech,” which ends with two full minutes of keyboard orchestration. Singer Mike Vennart never screams, but his voice is powerful and melodic, and suits the songs. This is the kind of band that will go from the atmospheric “Ransoms,” with its subtle organ parts, to the almost psychedelic “A Penny’s Weight,” to the damn near apocalyptic “It’s My Tail and I’ll Chase It if I Want To.” Along the way, they prove their worth as players, handling all of the tricky material with ease.

So yeah, this is certainly remarkable stuff, even if it doesn’t leave much of a mark. This record is definitely a grower, and I like it more each time I listen, but I sometimes wish the band would grab hold of a killer melody and run with it. I’ve heard most of their previous album, Frames, and it seems that this turn towards the more hypnotic is new. I think Frames is the better record, but I’m growing to appreciate and enjoy Self-Preserved as well. I’m certainly not ready to name it the album of the year, as Rob did, but I’m glad I listened to him and picked it up.

Hear Oceansize here.

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Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – people will contact me to recommend their own work. I’m always curious about it when they do. I try to hear everything I can get my hands on, and chances are I’d never have otherwise found many of the independent artists who reach out to me.

The latest to do so is Andy B. White, a Chicago native whose new album is called The Road to Here. Andy sent me this record months ago, and I’ve been trying to find the time and space to work in a review. I’m very glad I lived with it for a while, though, because this is a really good album, and its charms were not immediately apparent to me. On the first couple of listens, I thought The Road to Here was nice, but unremarkable. But soon it became part of my regular rotation, and it worked its way into my life with subtle persistence. Now I like it a lot.

Andy B. White is a former member of the band Favorite, but for his debut solo album, he stripped things down almost completely. The Road to Here is performed primarily on acoustic guitar, and none of its 11 songs feature drums. Acoustic records are difficult to pull off – there’s no hiding behind walls of sound, and if the songs don’t work, there’s nothing else to catch the ear. White doesn’t have any of these problems. His songs are simple, but effective, and his voice is clear and strong. Many of these tunes have string arrangements, but they’re quiet, in supporting roles, and they work beautifully.

I’m a big fan of “I’m Not Giving Up on You and Me,” with duet vocals by Cate Kanell. Even though it’s sequenced second, it sets the tone for the album. It’s sweet and bright and hopeful, and doesn’t mind wearing its heart on its sleeve. “First Grade Letter” is the same, its lyrics telling a delightful tale of young love remembered. “In a world full of split hearts, I still believe in a love that’s so pure, in a hope so unwavering,” White sings, and seriously, you can’t make a line like that work unless you mean it.

The gently swaying “Wake” is about as intense as this record gets, its insistent guitar figure (in seven-four time) supporting a dark and sweet string section. “The Hungry Deep” is another favorite, its very form mimicking the sea voyage the lyrics describe. “We still row on,” White repeats, the cellos cascading like waves upon the rolling guitar line. It’s a very cool arrangement. The album ends with a pair of grace notes, “Peace of Mind” and “Moving On,” capping off a record about looking through life’s painful moments and finding the love that’s all around.

I have two quibbles with this record. First, the songs are generally pretty simple, and I know that’s intentional, but my mind wanders sometimes while listening. Second, the sound and tone of the album is consistent, all acoustics and quiet meditations, and by the end, it blends together. Next time, I’d like to hear some variety in White’s songwriting and arrangement choices. But overall, The Road to Here is a quietly hopeful work that, given time, will become like an old friend, whispering encouraging words and sharing your burden. It’s that kind of record, and those are deceptively hard to make.

You can (and should) hear Andy B. White here.

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Thanks to everyone I mentioned this week, and everyone who sends me tips and recommendations. Keep them coming. I’m always grateful. Next week, I think, a trip back to an embarrassing time in my past. 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.

And here we are: the last great new music week of 2010.

Trust me, I’ve seen the future. Or at least the release schedule, as I noted last week. Jimi Hendrix fans have a good week coming up on November 16, with re-releases of Live at Woodstock, Blues, BBC Sessions, a Christmas single and a new four-CD, one-DVD box set called West Coast Seattle Boy. Some of that is unreleased, none of it is new. (For obvious reasons.) After this week, it’s Cee-Lo, Kid Cudi, Kanye West, My Chemical Romance and maybe The Violet Burning. And that’s it.

So this week is the last celebration, the final hurrah for what was, in retrospect, a pretty great year. This week we got three highly-anticipated new records, and I like them all. Now, I don’t know how many of you have seen my blog. I think of it as a supplement to the main column, although I haven’t made much use of it lately. (I’m busy!) One of the main things I do there is first-listen reviews, posting my immediate impressions of records after only hearing them once.

Well, this week’s column is like that. I’m going to listen to each of these new records only once before reviewing them. Don’t expect any kind of in-depth analysis this time, particularly since one of them was written by one of our best lyricists, and no doubt rewards repeated listens. (You’ll know which one. No, not the Weezer.) This is going to be like a fly-by, a quick-hit series of instant thoughts. At least, that’s how I’m envisioning it. Let’s see how I do.

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It’s sometimes easy to forget that Elvis Costello isn’t American.

I say that because he has a deep, abiding love for American music. He’s made country records and southern folk records and jazz records and records inspired by ‘50s California rock. He’s recently collaborated with New Orleans great Allen Toussaint, and he’s in the midst of a fruitful partnership with T-Bone Burnett and a terrific group of old-school Nashville musicians. One of his career goals seems to be to get an entry in the Great American Songbook next to some of his idols, like Cole Porter and George Gershwin.

Looking over his body of work, that doesn’t seem like an outsize ambition. I consider Costello one of the world’s greatest living songwriters, and he’s shown a remarkable ability to hit balls out of the park in a head-spinning array of styles. And yet, there are some who still want to pigeonhole him as an angry, twitchy rocker, referring to everything that doesn’t sound like My Aim is True as a “genre exercise.” I think this misses the fact that the rockabilly and organ-fueled punk of his early efforts are just as much about genre as anything else he’s done.

Costello believes in the album, a trait I admire, and everything he’s done for some time has centered around a sonic concept. The orchestral maneuvers of North and Il Sogno, for example, or the smash-and-grab rock of Momofuku. His latest forays have been populated by a stunning set of Nashville session players, like Jerry Douglas and Stuart Duncan and Dennis Crouch. Google a couple of those names, and you’ll find a curriculum vitae that could only have been assembled by the very best.

On last year’s Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, those players joined Costello, his Impostors, and producer Burnett to add bluegrass and country flavoring to some older originals. Now here’s the companion volume, in a sense: National Ransom, a collection of 16 new Costello songs performed with the same lineup. Everything about the way this one’s being marketed screams, “If you liked the last one, you’ll like this one too!” It even sports another cover illustration by comics artist Tony Millionaire.

And it’s true, except for a couple of things. For one, National Ransom is miles better than its predecessor. While Secret, Profane cast old songs in new settings, these tunes were clearly written for Costello’s hand-picked backing band, and they sound more comfortable and confident. For another, these songs are largely terrific, even on first blush.

You’ll find a lot of reviewers calling this a country album, and this is incorrect. There are a few solidly country songs on here, like the rowdy “I Lost You.” But this album pulls from jazz balladry, bayou music, a little Motown, and some plain ol’ rock and roll. It’s as diverse as the previous album, and while it doesn’t have as many hooks as I’d like (Costello, when he wants to, can write hooks), the result is a thoughtful, complex record that tours a dozen American musical forms.

Highlights? After one listen, I would point to the jaunty “A Slow Drag with Josephine,” the rough-and-tumble “Five Small Words,” the gorgeous “Bullets for the New-Born King,” the haunting “One Bell Ringing” and the unendingly lyrical “All These Strangers” as clear favorites. I would say this, though: the overall quality of the songs is consistent, if not extraordinary. This is Elvis Costello proving his mettle 16 more times, and doing it with some of the best players he’s ever had on record.

Lyrically, this record is a series of vignettes set in different periods of history, each about man’s inhumanity to man. The thumping title track sets the tone, taking aim at the fatcats: “They’re running wild just like some childish tantrum, meanwhile we’re working every day paying off the national ransom…” (This one’s setting is listed as “1929 to the present day.”) “Stations of the Cross” is another burst of anger at the government’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina, among other things, while the deceptively tender “You Hung the Moon” eavesdrops on families awaiting their loved ones’ return from World War I: “The shore is a parchment, the sea has no tide since he was taken from my side…”

I don’t even feel like I need to qualify this next statement: Costello is, without a doubt, one of the best lyricists working today. National Ransom is a typically dense piece of work, the songs sometimes working as delivery mechanisms for the words. The six-minute “All These Strangers,” near the end of the album, is a perfect example. Over a honey-rich folk backdrop, Costello spins a tale of paranoia and infidelity: “I saw my baby talking with another man today, speaking softly in a confidential way, I saw a shadow pull his glove off as a bluebird flew over, life’s no pleasure when you doubt the one you love…” By the time it finishes up, it’s surprisingly intense, and it’s undercut somewhat by the sing-song finale, “A Voice in the Dark.”

But all together, National Ransom is yet another splendid Elvis Costello album. Essential? Probably not, but that’s just because he’s so good so often that this album is somewhat typical. It’s going to take me several more listens to absorb everything Costello’s laid down here, and unravel his finely-woven themes. But Costello is an artist that has never made me regret following him down every highway and byway he travels. His catalog covers a lot of ground, and National Ransom annexes some new territory (a remarkable statement on its own, 32 albums in), but his grasp has never exceeded his talent. He’s one of the very best, and National Ransom is further proof.

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If it seems like just a few weeks ago we were discussing Weezer’s eighth album, Hurley, well, you’re not insane. Hurley hit stores on September 14, and here we are, a month and a half later, with the band’s ninth effort, Death to False Metal.

I’m going to repeat that title, because it’s 40 kinds of awesome: Death to False Metal.

So okay, technically this isn’t a brand new Weezer album. These 10 songs were written and recorded at various points in the band’s career, and were excluded from their proper releases for reasons unknown. The newest is opener “Turning Up the Radio,” written in 2008 (and we’ll get to the origin of this song in a bit), and the oldest are “Everyone” and “Trampoline,” which date back to the post-Pinkerton hiatus, around 1998. The songs were rescued from obscurity and re-worked in the studio, polished up to sound like modern Weezer.

The result is inconsistent, of course, but so is every Weezer album since Make Believe. The record mostly sticks to the thick, guitar-heavy pop Rivers Cuomo and company do so well, and though you’ll have to wade your way through some Cuomo-rific lyrical disasters (“It feels good to be a jerk, I’m just a loser on his way to work…”), the melodic sweetness the band lays down is, more often than not, worth it. Admittedly, it’s a little less worth it this time, but if you’re a Weezer fan, there are still some good tunes on here.

Take “Blowin’ My Stack,” written during the Make Believe sessions. This song is idiotic – the above lyrical snippet calls this track home – but the riffs are convincing, Cuomo bellows his way through it with a newfound energy, and Brian Bell whips out a flailing guitar solo that’ll make you smile. It’s stupid, dumb, moronic, completely un-smart. But it is fun, like most of this album. The one real speed bump is “Losing My Mind,” another Make Believe relic, which finds Rivers plumbing the depths of his soul to come up with lyrics like this: “I’m running out of energy and I have to lie down, right here on the sidewalk next to the Shoe Town.” I’m serious, he really sings this line like he means it.

Those of you who believe Pinkerton was the last Weezer album worth a damn will probably expect “Everyone” and “Trampoline” to be highlights. You’d be half right. “Trampoline” is a bouncy delight, but “Everyone” has nothing but rawness on its side. (“Everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone suck a thumb, suck a thumb, suck a thumb…”) You’d probably also expect “Radio” to be a disaster – it’s the finished product of Cuomo’s “Let’s Write a Sawng” project, for which he enlisted fans to submit ideas at every stage of the composition. In the end, 16 people are credited as writers, on what is essentially a typical melodic-pop ditty. But it’s fun.

Things I quite like: “I’m a Robot,” a piano-fueled surprise that rips modern life in the most obvious way possible, but has a super-swell beat and gang vocals; “I Don’t Want Your Loving,” a Maladroit-era track that could easily have fit on Hurley; and most bizarrely, a full-rawk cover of Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart.” (Yes, that’s real.) At the very least, I hope Death to False Metal puts lie to the idea that Cuomo’s just been getting worse – the latter stuff is, on the whole, better than the earlier stuff here.

But the album is disjointed, and in the final analysis, seems inconsequential. Some of these songs are definitely worthy of rescue, and while the spit-shining might irk some, I’m all right with it. It’s fluffy nothing, just like everything Weezer’s done, and if you’re looking for some hidden depth in the band’s cast-offs, you won’t find it here. Death to False Metal is silly, hummable fun, and if you don’t expect anything more from Weezer, you’ll dig it.

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Consistency is one thing, but there’s little I like more as a music fan than a good ol’ redemption story.

Last year, William James McAuley, better known as Bleu, released his third record, A Watched Pot. The album was tangled up in record label red tape for ages, and it took years for Bleu to get the rights back. And if you ask me, it wasn’t worth it. A Watched Pot is a maudlin and overproduced collection of ballads, belying the sheer songwriting talent of the man behind it. His voice was still in good form, but that was about it.

Which is a shame, because I think McAuley is a terrific artist. Both Headroom and Redhead are power pop gems that too few have heard, and his work as L.E.O. is amazing. I criticized A Watched Pot for not playing to Bleu’s strengths, for going for the pop radio hit instead of aiming for the best music he could make. I got some shit for that, but I told everyone who lambasted me that if Bleu decided to make an album worthy of him again, I’d praise it to the skies.

The time has come.

Bleu’s new record is called Four, and he’s releasing it independently on his own The Major Label. He used Kickstarter to fund it – he asked fans for $8,000, and got more than $39,000. That had to be a nice dose of confidence, and the album reflects that. Four is a return to form in every way possible, the best record Bleu has made, and one of the coolest pop albums of 2010. It’s superb, and if you like well-written pop music, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I like all of these songs, but I have a definite weakness for “B.O.S.T.O.N.,” the best song about my former home town I’ve heard in years. It’s autobiographical – McAuley was born in Green Bay, and now lives in Los Angeles, but he’s known as a Boston songwriter, and here he reaffirms his love for Beantown: “If you ask me where I’m from, Boston,” he shouts, as the backing vocalists launch into an absolutely exultant na-na-na-na refrain. This song makes me want to punch the air.

“Dead in the Morning” is a full-on gospel party, choirs of vocalists chiming in over pounding piano. “I’ll Know It When I See It” breaks out the vintage synthesizers, draping them over a dynamite acoustic guitar rhythm and some well-placed percussive exhales. The song takes off at the bridge: “Absolutely positively definitely yes, or maybe in the end it’s just anybody’s guess…” “I’m in Love With My Lover” is Bleu’s one foray into romantic balladry this time, but its sparse production gives it a spectral quality, the opposite of the glossy strings of A Watched Pot. And the closer, “Everything is Fine,” is a sweet ditty with a big heart..

Bleu gets some help on that song from Jellyfish’s Roger Joseph Manning Jr., who knows a thing or two about great power pop. And really, that’s what you’ll get here, almost without exception – great, melodic, catchy, quirky, utterly terrific power pop. Bleu is back in the game, and as I promised, I’ll be the first in line to say so. I love this little record, and I hope it’s just a sign of great things to come from a guy who should be much more famous than he is.

You can hear eight songs from Four here. Bleu’s home page is here.

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Next week, some recommendations from some swell people. 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’m not really sure where 2010 went. But I’ve just bought my tickets back home for the holidays, the temperature is threatening to dip below 35 degrees, and the torrent of great new records has slowed to a trickle. So we must be at the end of the year.

Here’s a complete list of the new albums I’m excited about for the remainder of 2010: Elvis Costello’s National Ransom, Weezer’s Death to False Metal, Bleu’s Four, Cee-Lo Green’s The Ladykiller, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. And that’d be it. I’m buying the official release of Mr. Mister’s Pull, and re-releases from Jimi Hendrix and the Church, and I may check out the new My Chemical Romance, because that “Na Na Na” song gets stuck in my head. But after Kanye on November 23, it’s a long, dark tunnel of emptiness until Cake’s new one, Showroom of Compassion, on January 11.

There is one bright light, however. Sometime in December, the Violet Burning is set to release a three-CD set of 33 new songs. I can only go by the videos posted to www.thevioletburning.com, but it seems to be called The Story of Our Lives, and subdivided into three parts: Liebe Uber Alles, Black as Death and The Fantastic Machine. As part of my pre-order, I got to hear rough mixes of six of the new songs, and they’re pretty good, even in this early form.

Unfortunately, it’s probably going to come out too late to make my top 10 list. And if it comes out before January 1, 2011, it’s ineligible for next year’s list. Oh, deadlines, you make my life so complicated. I promise, whenever this thing hits, I’ll do an extensive review of it. The Violet Burning is a criminally undervalued band, and the fact that they even have the chutzpah to create and release a 33-song box set independently is worth praising. If this is as good as their last record, Drop-Dead, the music will be worth fawning over, too.

We shall see. For now, let’s start talking about the final releases of 2010.

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So, for those of you keeping score in the Great Barenaked Ladies Breakup Wars, the score is now Steven Page one, BNL zero.

I honestly didn’t think that would be the case. In breakups like these, where one person walks away from four, my money’s always on the band left behind. In general, all they have to do is pick a new singer and keep on keeping on, and in BNL’s case, they already have Ed Robertson, who sang about half the songs in their catalog anyway. The Ladies will be fine, I thought. Steven Page is going to have some trouble, and will probably be at the mercy of whatever collaborators he chooses.

And then came All in Good Time, the first post-breakup Ladies album, and lo, it was terrible. Maudlin, self-serious, boring, and seemingly obsessed with striking out at Page, it was the lowest point of a long, slow decline. Even the cover photos were depressing, all black and white, their eyes full of melodramatic pain. I liked probably three out of the 14 songs, and finger-pointing diatribes like “You Run Away” and “Golden Boy” got old really quickly.

Those of you dreading the same he-said he-said lameness from Page’s solo debut are in for a treat. The wittily-titled Page One is splendid – Page deftly avoids all the traps his former band fell into, crafting a diverse, delightful romp of a record that never once mentions his old band, and remembers to bring the fun. You remember the Barenaked Ladies at their peak, right? They were fun. This album is like that, but with fewer songs about chimpanzees.

All right, this is actually a remarkably mature pop record, but not in that stuffy, all-work-and-no-play kind of way. Lyrically it takes on life and love and crazy sex and hellish self-loathing, but it does so with wit and verve. The protagonist of “Entourage,” for example, is so empty inside he’s willing to sleep with any famous person, and whoever is hanging around that famous person, and he does so with a cruelty that’s almost art. But the song is joyous, celebrating that emptiness. When Page smirks “Now we’re through with morality, can I sleep with your wife,” it’s chillingly awesome.

The string quartet wonder “All the Young Monogamists” is a terrific piece of work, detailing an illicit relationship between two people who know better than to believe in fidelity as a way of life: “Some of them will just grow tired, some of them will flee, some of them will sleep around, just like you and me.” It ends with beautiful blinders on: “But here we are, monogamists, a-swearing it will last, I know it seems ridiculous considering our pasts, but I will always be true to you…”

“She’s Trying to Save Me” is about the futility of attempting to fix your mate like you fix your house. “Over Joy” is about watching a relationship collapse and being too depressed to stop it. Closer “The Chorus Girl” has a brilliant lyric – whenever Page says the title phrase, he’s talking about the chorus of his own song, as in, “Wait until you hear the chorus, girl.” The song’s about waiting forever for something that never comes, and the beauty is, there is no chorus. “All night alone with my microphone, I never come close to the chorus, girl…”

Given all that, you might think the album is as fun as a term paper, but you’d be wrong. Every song here is a pop gem, and the great thing is, most of them are in very different styles. Single “Indecision” is a classic 1970s-style power pop tune, “Clifton Springs” is a waltz, the aforementioned “Entourage” is an electro-flavored dark dance-a-thon, “Over Joy” sounds like Jeff Lynne, and the great “Leave Her Alone” is a send-up of lounge music. Every song is lushly produced and polished by Page and John Fields, who played most of the instruments themselves. But it doesn’t sound canned. This record’s alive, in ways the BNL album simply isn’t.

This is how you do it. While his old band wallowed in their feelings of betrayal, Steven Page just got on with making great music again. Page One is a triumph, proof that Page is going to be just fine on his own. I wasn’t expecting to like this as much as I do (or even at all), so the fact that this record is so well-made, so vibrant, and above all, so much fun is a welcome surprise.

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While we’re on the subject of solo albums…

As far as I know, the Scottish brit-pop quartet Travis is still a going concern. Their last album, Ode to J. Smith, came out in 2008, but they’ve been working on new music since then. So Wreckorder, the debut project from singer Fran Healy, isn’t really an attempt to launch a solo career. Given that, and given the fact that the album sounds exactly like Healy’s work with Travis, one has to ask: what is this for?

And I guess it’s just here to give us another 30 minutes of sweet, echo-laden acoustic pop. Wreckorder is a nice little record, one that could have come out under the Travis name without skipping a beat. (This would have been one of the ones with the band on the cover, photographed from far away. Fans know what I’m talking about.) Healy’s soaring voice is in fine form, his minor-key melodies as lovely as always. “Anything,” the second track, is even something of a Healy classic, its spooky cello melody standing out from the crowd.

Healy pulls in a couple of big-name guest stars, but the record doesn’t really call attention to them. Neko Case graces “Sing Me to Sleep” with her wonderful voice, and the pair intertwines beautifully. And Paul McCartney plays the unobtrusive bass on “As It Comes,” I guess to remind everyone that he used to play bass full time. You’d never know it’s him just by listening. Most of this album, however, is Healy himself, and he acquits himself as a writer and multi-instrumentalist well.

I don’t want this to sound like I don’t enjoy Wreckorder. It’s quite a good little record. I just don’t understand its reason for existing. Healy does nothing here we haven’t heard him do before, and doesn’t lay the groundwork for anything new. It sounds like the product of an experiment: can Fran Healy make a Travis album all by himself? The answer is yes, although I’m not absolutely sure why he tried. Don’t let my confusion keep you from enjoying this, though. When I shut my brain off and just listen, I quite like it.

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Rounding off our trio of solo debuts is Mark Chadwick, lead singer of the Levellers.

Chadwick is easily the least well-known of the three artists on tap this week, but his album is the one I was most interested to hear. The Levellers are an English fiddle-rock outfit, like the Waterboys with a punk edge. I’ve been into them since high school, thanks to my good friend Chris L’Etoile. Two years ago, they released Letters From the Underground, a sustained burst of flailing anger that stands as one of their best records. They’d rediscovered their fire, and their political edge.

So of course, Chadwick’s album, All the Pieces, runs the other direction. It’s almost entirely performed on acoustic guitar, its tempos range from slow to shambling, and without a band around him, Chadwick is frustratingly boring. This is an album content to shuffle back and forth in place, never really hitting on anything special. I like “Satellite” somewhat, and the time-signature shifts in “Indians” and “Elephant Fayre” are interesting. But I can’t remember much else about this album. Which is a shame, really, because Chadwick’s voice is endlessly appealing, and I want to like the songs he’s singing.

This is another solo album that isn’t meant to launch a career. In every way, this is a side project, and it plays like it’s made up of Levellers reject songs. It feels like something Chadwick just had to get out of his system, which is fine, but means I won’t be pulling this off the shelf to play it too often. My fervent hope, now that Chadwick’s done with All the Pieces, is that the Levellers get back into the studio and make the exact opposite of this record.

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Downer ending, sorry about that. Next week, we’ve got Elvis Costello, Bleu and Weezer hitting stores, and what I’ve heard of all three has been terrific. After that, we’re gonna play catch-up as we wind things down for 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.

John Lennon would have been 70 years old this month.

I was six years old when Lennon was gunned down. I have no memories of him at all. My love affair with the Beatles didn’t start until nine years later, when I heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the first time. Lennon has always been something of a mystery to me. I’ve never had the chance to buy a new John Lennon album, or see him interviewed, or hear him play live. He’s a guy who made some of my favorite music of all time, and he died when I was a kid, before I could appreciate him.

In a very real sense, all I have is the music. I didn’t live through the social and political climate that shaped much of Lennon’s work. By the time I was walking, Lennon had essentially decided to disappear from public life, building a home with Yoko Ono and their son Sean. I turned six only a few months before the release of his final album, Double Fantasy. I’m an outsider gazing in on this remarkable time, and as much as I can read up on it, I’ll never have the experience of feeling what Lennon was singing so passionately about.

But that’s okay. He’s John Lennon, so he routinely paired his political statements with brilliant, tuneful music. And I love brilliant, tuneful music. Of all of the Beatles, I think Lennon’s solo career was the best. This isn’t a particularly high bar, you understand. Paul McCartney’s vast catalog is stunningly inconsistent and often too cutesy for words, George Harrison made one incredible record (All Things Must Pass) and then slipped into mediocrity for most of the rest of his life, and Ringo Starr, well, no one expected much from him, and he certainly didn’t disappoint.

In its own way, Lennon’s solo catalog is also pretty inconsistent, but it is fascinating, and above all, utterly real. He was never able to recapture the magic he had with McCartney, and I think he spent a long time consciously avoiding that magic. Lennon always toughened up the twee McCartney, who in turn sweetened Lennon’s rebellious nature. When the Beatles split, the two ran away from each other in opposite directions. McCartney made several albums in a row that any right-thinking critic simply has to call featherweight and inconsequential, while Lennon stripped back to basics and made Grand Statements out of simplicity and honesty.

If you’re just dipping into Lennon’s solo music, this is a great time to do it. As a 70th birthday present, Yoko Ono has overseen a full remastering of Lennon’s catalog, and re-released it in a variety of interesting (and frustrating) incarnations. The eight albums have been released on their own, and in a massive Signature Box. You can also pick up Power to the People, a one-disc hits collection, or Gimme Some Truth, a four-disc mix-and-match anthology. All of these different options contain material not present on the others, which is kind of maddening.

Your best option, if you’re a completist like me, is the Signature Box. It’s a hefty thing, simply designed, and it includes a well-made hardcover book with photos and essays, a cardboard insert with personal reflections from Ono, Sean Lennon and Julian Lennon, and (in a secret compartment) a print of a drawing by John. It’s a lovely set, even though I expect I will take the individual albums out and shelve them separately. They’re all packaged exactly like the Beatles remasters from last year, in cardboard sleeves that mirror the original vinyl art. Needless to say, they’re beautiful.

I said this is your best bet if you’re a completist, but that’s not exactly true. Let’s quickly go over what isn’t in this set. Most glaringly, there’s the first four experimental Lennon/Ono albums (Two Virgins, The Wedding Album, Life With the Lions and Live Peace in Toronto 1969). One expects those will come out in a separate set before long, since they weren’t part of the remastering project either. You also do not get the new remix of Double Fantasy, called Stripped Down. But you do get the original version, and the new one is only available with the original on a second disc, meaning if you want Stripped Down, you’ll have to buy Double Fantasy twice. That’s just silliness.

You also don’t get any of the material that ended up on Menlove Ave. in 1986. Granted, the only essential track there is “Here We Go Again,” but that’s not in the box. It is, however, on Gimme Some Truth, in remastered form. As far as I know, that’s the only place to get this new master. Live in New York City isn’t in the box either, but one of its tracks, “Hound Dog,” appears on Gimme Some Truth too.

Want to hear something else infuriating? During his solo career, Lennon released five popular singles that didn’t appear on his albums. These are some of his most well-known tunes: “Instant Karma,” “Give Peace a Chance,” “Happy X-Mas (War is Over),” “Power to the People” and “Cold Turkey.” These songs are in the box, on a separate disc called Singles. That disc is not available separately. If you want Lennon’s solo singles, you have to buy Power to the People, a collection of the hits. If you decided to splurge on the albums separately, that means you’re going to buy 10 songs twice, just to get the five you don’t have. The box is your best bet, but then you need the stripped-down Double Fantasy as well, and there’s just no way to do this without overlap.

The box set, of course, contains a bevy of material not available elsewhere, including a remastered version of b-side “Move Over Ms. L” and an entire disc of home demos. But there are numerous other Lennon tracks (such as “Do the Oz”) that make no appearances in any version of this project.

Those frustrations aside, it’s great to have Lennon’s solo work all looking uniform, and sounding fantastic. Ono and her team made an interesting choice – they went with John’s original mixes, instead of the remixes done last decade. This means the sound is accurate to the times, but might strike more modern ears as less crisp and clear. This is not a reinvention of the sound, like the Beatles remasters were. In many cases, the new versions don’t sound as “good” as the remixed ones, but I think they sound more right, if that makes any sense.

I took a full tour through the box set over the last week. In some cases, it’s been years since I’ve heard these records, and in some cases, I have ‘em memorized. While Lennon’s solo material never quite hit the same heights as his Beatles songs, he did manage one stone classic, and three other excellent albums, and even the lesser stuff here is worth hearing. Plus, over 11 CDs, you can trace the arc of his final decade. Lennon was 30 when the Beatles broke up, and 40 when he was killed, and in that time, he went from activist and icon to husband and father, and found peace and happiness along the way.

How you feel about Lennon’s solo material will depend on two things. The first is your willingness to let one of the world’s greatest songwriters just relax and play fun, simple pop-rock tunes. John loved simple blues and rock ‘n’ roll, and there’s a lot of it in his catalog.

The second, of course, is Yoko Ono, who is credited equally with Lennon on three of these eight albums. I always say that Ono is better than you remember, but she’s not in Lennon’s class, and her contributions often tend toward the annoying. Still, they’re a package deal, and much of this catalog is about her, even if she doesn’t appear. If you still blame Yoko for breaking up the Beatles (an unjustified charge, in my opinion), much of Lennon’s material will rub you the wrong way.

If you’re good with those two things, though, there’s a lot to like in this box set. Let me take you down:

Plastic Ono Band, 1970.

I mentioned before that Lennon managed one classic in his solo career, and this is it. It appeared one year after the Beatles split, and in many ways, it’s the anti-Abbey Road. Stark nearly to the point of emptiness, stripped of anything fanciful or joyous, this is the bleakest record ever made by any Beatle. It is Lennon coming to terms with his life outside the band, tearing down his old image with solemn force. Even 40 years on, this record hurts.

It’s also incredibly good. You’re just going to want to steel yourself before you listen to it. This is an album that opens with the lines “Mother, you had me, but I never had you, I wanted you but you didn’t want me.” It moves on from there, Lennon taking on religion (“There ain’t no Jesus coming down from the sky, now that I found out I know I can cry…”), modern life (“When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years, then they expect you to pick a career”), and his own confusion (“Look at me, who am I supposed to be?”). “Working Class Hero” is a jaw-dropper, still, just Lennon and his guitar, taking apart the world in which he lives with some well-placed profanities and razor-sharp lyrics. It’s a masterpiece.

There are shafts of light here, certainly. “Hold On” is an island in the stormy sea, Lennon telling himself and Yoko that it’s all gonna be all right. “Love” is one of Lennon’s prettiest pieces, a simple poem (“Love is real, real is love”) played on piano. And despite its snarling blues backdrop, “Well Well Well” is hopeful: “We sat and talked of revolution just like two liberals in the sun, we talked of women’s liberation and how the hell we could get things done…”

But no one remembers those, and for good reason: the rest of Plastic Ono Band is dark and difficult and compelling. The album climaxes with “God,” still one of the boldest pieces of music I’ve ever heard. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to hear this in 1970, with memories of Beatle John still fresh. After dismissing God as “a concept by which we measure our pain,” Lennon begins a litany of things he no longer believes in: Jesus, Kennedy, Elvis, Buddha, Zimmerman (also known as Dylan). And then he drops the bomb: “I don’t believe in Beatles,” he spits, as the music evaporates behind him. Later he sings, “I was the walrus, but now I’m John, and so dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on, the dream is over…”

I know, unbelievable. It’s also fantastic. Like most of Plastic Ono Band, “God” is performed on very few instruments (piano, guitar, bass and drum, and that’s it), and the voice, full of anguish and anger, is front and center. You won’t soon forget hearing Lennon’s screams at the end of “Mother” and “Well Well Well,” or listening closely as he mutters his way through the chilling closer, “My Mummy’s Dead.” Even stripped of its context, this is a raw, seething disc of really great tunes, a stunning and remarkable album. John Lennon never bettered it.

Imagine, 1971.

All right, it’s no Plastic Ono Band, but Lennon’s second proper solo album starts with “Imagine” and ends with “Oh Yoko,” and it includes “Jealous Guy” and “Gimme Some Truth.” So how bad could it possibly be?

Truthfully, it’s not bad at all, though the quality does drop somewhat. Imagine finds Lennon mellowing out, especially on the gentle title track. I’m constantly surprised at this song’s near-universal acceptance as an anthem for peace, given the anti-religion sentiments at its core. But Lennon’s very clever about it, saying “imagine there’s no heaven” instead of out-and-out denying it, like he did on “I Found Out.” It’s no wonder, though, that the song’s iconic piano part and gorgeous vocal have stood the test of time.

About half of Imagine’s songs are of similar quality. I don’t need to tell you how good “Jealous Guy” is, despite an overstuffed arrangement. This is a heart-on-your-sleeve confession that nearly makes me cry every time. “Gimme Some Truth” is great, as is Lennon’s swipe at McCartney, “How Do You Sleep?” “Oh My Love” is strikingly lovely. And “Oh Yoko” is the most rollicking, joyous piece of music ever to bear Lennon’s name. Man, I love this song, and when Wes Anderson made terrific use of it in Rushmore, I cheered.

So that’s the really good stuff, and the rest is sort of… there. Many of the other songs, like “Crippled Inside” and “It’s So Hard,” fall back on the blues, and from a guy with such a prodigious gift for melody, these songs are disappointing. And “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don’t Wanna Die” is repetitive and nearly unlistenable, its anti-war sentiments notwithstanding. The remaster preserves John’s original mix, all tape hiss included, but sounds wonderful. I just wish I liked every song on here as much as I like “Oh Yoko.”

But really, Imagine is a fine album, particularly when compared with some of the later stuff. To many people, it’s his last true classic. (I think there are a couple more to come.) It is, perhaps, his most fully realized pop effort, the flip side of Plastic Ono Band, and an album that is virtually impossible to dislike.

Some Time in New York City, 1972.

And then there’s this, the only one of these albums I genuinely dislike. Recorded at the height of John and Yoko’s anti-war protests, this album takes on every societal ill the Lennons could think of, with all the subtlety of a brick to the face. Then the songs were recorded with Springsteen-esque flair by bar band Elephant’s Memory, and the whole thing lands with a thud. It’s graceless, it’s often tuneless, and it was roundly rejected by the buying public at the time.

Okay, there are a few songs I like. None of them are by Ono, who doesn’t exactly suck the life out of things (there’s not much life to suck), but drags the record down each time she appears. I always get a little chuckle out of “The Luck of the Irish,” a much snarkier take on McCartney’s “Give Ireland Back to the Irish.” I also like “John Sinclair,” with its folksy stomp and its repeated “gotta.” But there is literally nothing here worthy of John Lennon.

And then there’s the second disc, a bonus “live jam LP” that no one really needs to hear. When John is singing “Cold Turkey” and “Well,” it’s fine. When Yoko is warbling atonally over squalling feedback, it’s hideous. It’s like someone said, “What could make this oscillating, teeth-grinding guitar noise even worse? Wait, I know!” The second half of the disc features Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and Frank’s mixes of those tracks appear on his Playground Psychotics album, with different titles. One of them, a six-minute banshee wail called “Au,” was re-named “A Small Eternity with Yoko Ono.”

‘Nuff said. This record is the only one of these I might never listen to again.

Mind Games, 1973.

A beautifully-produced piece of mediocrity, Mind Games is the very definition of an average pop-rock album. There’s nothing wrong with it as it’s playing, but it doesn’t stick. The hooks are few and far between, the songs basic and sweet without being extraordinary. The first of these songs that really struck me was “One Day at a Time,” and that one wouldn’t have stood out on Imagine. It’s nice pop music, but you can hear Lennon turning soft before your ears.

Is that such a bad thing? I don’t know. Like I said, Mind Games is beautifully produced, a cornucopia of sounds. There’s that iconic slide guitar on “Bring On the Lucie (Freda People),” the organs on “Intuition,” Michael Brecker’s saxophone on numerous tracks. And there is one song I love here, the underrated “Out the Blue,” a paean to Yoko with some nice turns. The remaster is terrific, bringing out the colors of the sound. And John sounds happier here, more content than he ever has.

I just find the whole thing underwhelming. If this album hadn’t been made by John Lennon, it would have disappeared without a trace, and no one would miss it.

Walls and Bridges, 1974.

Now this one I like. Released just a few months after I was born, Walls and Bridges is the quintessential mid-period John Lennon album. In contrast to Mind Games, the songs on this record sparkle, and the production, again by Lennon himself, is marvelous. This is the album that contains his first solo number one single, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” which features piano and organ by Elton John (back when Elton John was cool). That tune’s an invigorating shuffle, one that pulses with more life than anything on its predecessor.

But that’s just the tip of the proverbial. “What You Got” is his one convincing stab at whipping out the funk, Stevie Wonder style, and it works. Walls and Bridges was recorded during Lennon’s famous “lost weekend,” his year of separation from Ono, and her specter appears throughout. “You don’t know what you got until you lose it, oh baby baby baby give me one more chance,” Lennon shouts, and in the next song, the tender “Bless You,” he addresses the man he imagines she’s shacked up with: “Bless you, whoever you are, holding her now, be warm and kind-hearted.” As he says on “Scared,” “Hatred and jealousy gonna be the death of me…”

Walls and Bridges also contains one of Lennon’s very best solo songs, “#9 Dream.” Over lush strings and soaring guitar, Lennon whips out a multi-part little pop suite of sweeping grace. “Ah bowakawa pousse pousse” doesn’t really mean anything, and reportedly came to Lennon in a dream, but you’ll be singing along with it anyway. “#9 Dream” is the highlight of this album, but the whole thing is pretty great. And 10-year-old Julian Lennon makes his musical debut on the closing track, a snippet of oldie “Ya Ya” on which he plays the snare drum. It’s a sweet way to end this very sweet record, one that practically cries out for the reconciliation that was right around the corner.

Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1975.

If any of these records could be considered inessential, it’s this one, but I quite like it.

It was born out of a lawsuit – “Come Together” was judged to be a little too close to a Chuck Berry song called “You Can’t Catch Me,” and as part of the settlement, Lennon agreed to record a few oldies to give the copyright holders some royalties. Since those old songs probably wouldn’t sit well on a typical Lennon record, he decided to create a tribute album to the music of his youth.

Nothing about Rock ‘n’ Roll betrays its contractual origins, though. These are delightful old songs, including “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” “Stand By Me,” “Peggy Sue,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Ain’t That a Shame” and others. (Yes, including “You Can’t Catch Me,” which does sound pretty close to “Come Together.”) And John sings his little heart out. If you want to hear one of rock’s all-time greatest singers in his absolute prime, give this one a listen. It’s fun, if a little inconsequential, and his band just slams through this thing. It’s a fine reminder of Lennon’s roots as a rocker in Liverpool, and an interesting way for him to enter middle age.

Double Fantasy, 1980.

And enter it he did, taking five years off to be a husband to Yoko and a father to their son, Sean. He’d retired from the world. It’s unclear whether he considered Double Fantasy, his return to recording, as a one-off or the kickoff of the next phase of his career. Either way, it’s a remarkable record, the last one released during his lifetime, and contains several of his very best solo songs.

It’s also credited to Yoko Ono equally, and it’s designed like a dialogue between the lovers – seven John songs, seven Yoko songs, alternating back and forth. Some were, no doubt, miffed by this. They waited five years to hear new John Lennon, and they were forced to buy new Yoko Ono at the same time. But the Lennons saw it as the perfect statement of their union. Yoko even called John brave for sticking with her throughout this process.

Let me say this right up front: I like the Yoko Ono songs here, a lot. For the first time in their partnership, Ono steps up here and writes songs to complement Lennon’s. “Kiss Kiss Kiss,” “I’m Moving On,” “Yes, I’m Your Angel,” “Beautiful Boys” – these are all fine tunes, melodic and catchy and sonically interesting. I never feel the urge to skip Ono’s songs on this record, and I never have.

But Lennon’s songs are the attraction here, and they’re wonderful. His seven songs are a miniature suite about settling into domesticity, about growing old gracefully, and they’re his most comfortable, most tuneful songs since Imagine. “(Just Like) Starting Over” was a hit, and is a fine pastiche of ‘50s soul. But I am in love with “Watching the Wheels,” and “Beautiful Boy,” and “Woman,” and “Dear Yoko,” numbers about calmly and contentedly disappearing into family and home life. Even the incongruous “I’m Losing You” is terrific.

But as you can see, this album came out in 1980, and it sounds like it. The production is bright to the point of blinding, the drums have that ‘80s hollowness to them, and the whole thing is somewhat over-polished. That’s why, even though it’ll cost you more money, you absolutely have to hear the Stripped Down version. It’s a beautiful thing. The voices are front and center, the arrangements uncluttered, the drums brought back in the mix, the songs emphasized. The new takes of “Beautiful Boy” and “Watching the Wheels” should be considered definitive. The whole thing is breathtaking.

And finally, finally, the Stripped Down mix reveals what a splendid little album Double Fantasy is. In every note, you can hear just how happy Lennon and Ono are to be with each other, and recording together. It’s exactly the kind of happiness Lennon’s been yearning for since Plastic Ono Band, and it’s so sweet to hear him express it. I’ve always loved this album, and now, in this unfussy, pristine form, I love it more.

Double Fantasy was released in November of 1980. Less than one month later, John Lennon was dead, killed by an obsessive man named Mark Chapman.

Milk and Honey, 1984.

And four years later, Ono released this, the second half of the Double Fantasy sessions. It’s designed the same way, as a dialogue between Lennon and Ono, who each get six songs. It treads the same ground as its predecessor, but isn’t nearly as good, and by the end of the record, it’s clear many of these songs were unfinished at the time of Lennon’s death.

Given that, there are a few classics here. Opener “I’m Stepping Out” is one of them, a fully fleshed-out rocker about rejoining the human race. It contains what might be Lennon’s late-life mantra: “After all is said and done, you can’t go pleasing everyone, so screw it.” The biggest and best reason to hear Milk and Honey, though, is “Nobody Told Me,” his final masterpiece. Originally written for Ringo Starr, this tune is eminently singable, and its lyric is a nice contrast to “I’m Stepping Out”: “Everybody’s smoking, no one’s getting high, everybody’s flying and never touch the sky, there’s UFOs over New York and I ain’t too surprised…”

The other landmark here is “Grow Old With Me,” an enduring love song that stands as Lennon’s final number here. The version on Milk and Honey is clearly a demo, but the sweet tune shines clearly even through the murk. Since its release, this has gone on to be a favorite at weddings, and it’s easy to see why: “Grow old along with me, whatever fate decrees, we will see it through, for our love is true.” Trite? Maybe, but it’s heartfelt, and it’s a lovely sentiment for Lennon to go out on.

I haven’t mentioned Ono’s songs, mainly because, like a lot of Lennon’s here, they’re mediocre and forgettable. It’s nice to have a final visit with John and Yoko, but I wish Milk and Honey were a stronger record. As the capper to Lennon’s official discography, it should have been better.

Singles and Home Tapes.

Which brings us to the pair of bonus discs. The first is positively essential, as it contains Lennon’s five non-album singles. Included here are his protest anthem trilogy (“Power to the People,” “Happy X-Mas” and the immortal “Give Peace a Chance”), the absurdly good “Instant Karma,” and the rollicking “Cold Turkey.” The b-side “Move Over Ms. L” is here as well, for some reason. All of them sound great in their remastered forms.

But the second disc is revelatory. In the spirit of 2004’s Acoustic collection, Home Tapes collects 13 raw versions of Lennon songs, recorded mainly solo. The quality isn’t great, as you’d expect, but the performances… damn. It opens with four songs from Plastic Ono Band, and amazingly, the versions of “Mother,” “God” and “I Found Out” are even more vitriolic than those on the album proper. This take of “Nobody Told Me” is marvelous, and the solo acoustic read of “Beautiful Boy” is lovely. Home Tapes also includes embryonic versions of three songs I’d never heard: “One of the Boys,” “India, India” and “Serve Yourself.” If there’s no other reason to buy this box set, it’s this disc.

And there you have it. The frustrating, inconsistent, brilliant and bold solo career of John Lennon. He started it angry and full of dread, and ended it content and blissful. Lennon died too soon, but his solo catalog is just the right length, tracing an arc that is all too human. Buy the box set, pick up the Stripped Down version of Double Fantasy, and listen. You’ll never hear its like again.

Next week, catching up with some great new music. 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 I was having a discussion with Jeremy Keen about music.

We do this a lot. I’ve still never met Jeremy, but our semi-regular Facebook chats usually revolve around music – he writes and plays it, I review it, so we have similar interests, but very different perspectives. Anyway, Jeremy asked me to come up with some artists from the past decade or so who will be remembered as important, as musicians who exhibited not just brilliance and craftsmanship, but real staying power and influence.

I’m not sure if I said Sufjan Stevens, but if not, I should have.

In fact, I’m coming to think of Stevens as the most important artist of the past 10 years, even if he may not be universally hailed as such. Stevens seemed to come out of nowhere in 2005 with Illinois, an album I named the best of that year, and of the decade. But those who were paying better attention (a list which, sadly, does not include this reviewer) knew that Sufjan’s body of work to that point was diverse, challenging and brilliant. From the electronic frippery of Enjoy Your Rabbit to the sparse acoustics of Seven Swans to the template-setting modern folk masterwork Michigan, the road to Illinois was paved with smaller, yet still dazzling works.

But Illinois stands apart. I’ve been collecting music since I was 14 years old, and I own very few albums that can match it for scope, craft and sheer magic. It’s 74 minutes long, contains 22 tracks, and never puts a foot wrong. More than that, it uses its fascinating conceit – it was announced as part of the now-aborted 50 States Project, and uses landmarks and historical events as touchstones – to delve deep and tell intensely personal stories. “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” is about the state’s most famous serial killer, but it is also about the secrets we keep, and the reasons we hide them. Illinois is about Stevens’ own redemption as often as it’s about Casimir Pulaski, or Mary Todd Lincoln.

I have listened to Illinois front to back more times than I can count. I have bought it for several people, and copied it for several others, and generally pushed it like a dealer giving samples of his best stuff. It is my go-to example when people claim that no one makes ambitious, perfectly-realized albums anymore. It is the kind of album that makes people quit music, certain they’re never going to hear anything better.

And for a while, it looked like Sufjan himself might have done the same. Before this year, his post-Illinois output consisted of an outtakes collection, a boxed set of Christmas music, and an orchestral piece about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The man also started giving interviews in which he sounded bewildered and defeated, like he simply couldn’t fashion his thoughts into music anymore. He’d given up on the album as an art form, he said. His orchestral work messed him up, and now he can’t find his way back to the song, he said.

A month ago, he finally returned from exile, giving us the marvelous hour-long EP All Delighted People. It sounded like Sufjan, but headed in new directions at the same time. It contained a 17-minute jam session with a lengthy, flailing, fractured guitar solo. It sported two versions of the title song, one of which seemed to slam together every bizarre bit of orchestration that swam through Stevens’ mind. But still, it sounded like our boy. And when he announced that All Delighted People was merely the table setting for the real follow-up to Illinois, well, let’s just say I haven’t been able to get this grin off my face for about a month now.

And now that I’ve heard that follow-up? Not just once, but seven times?

Ah. Wow.

Okay, let me start with this. Nothing you have heard from Sufjan Stevens will prepare you for The Age of Adz. (Pronounced “odds,” apparently.) Musically, lyrically, emotionally, it’s like nothing he’s done before. Sonically, it’s closest to “You Are the Blood,” his 10-minute track from the Dark Was the Night compilation a few years ago. But it’s way, way beyond that. For the second time in his career, Sufjan has given me an album unlike any other I own. It’s intense, it’s over the top, it’s beyond ambitious, and what initially sounds like an explosion of noise coalesces over time into, ironically, the most naked and personal work of the man’s career. It is either the album of the year, or 2010’s most phenomenal flameout, and I’m not sure which.

So let’s start at the beginning.

The Age of Adz has no real conceptual underpinning, save Sufjan himself, but it’s based on the artwork of Royal Robertson. A native of Louisiana, Robertson suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and started drawing and painting after his wife left him for another man. He referred to himself as a prophet, and filled his work with allusions to the apocalypse and numerology. The work itself is cartoony and rooted in science fiction, but contains little screeds against his ex-wife, whom he names. It’s fascinating, even if it clearly is the product of a disturbed mind.

Stevens draws on Robertson as a metaphor for his own mind-state throughout this record. Put simply, The Age of Adz finds our sometimes twee storyteller going off the cliff, singing from the heart about his own despair and inability to cope with the world. The lyrics are, on the whole, straightforward, and full of declarations of love and pain. This is exactly the kind of lyric book Stevens might have set to sparse acoustic guitars and strings, for maximum impact. Instead, he went the other direction entirely.

Virtually every track on The Age of Adz is stuffed full of sound. And not just sound, but chaotic, layered, massed sound. It’s so big, has so much going on, that you’ll need to listen four or five times to catch everything. In some cases, you’ll need to hear songs multiple times before the melodies jump out. (And there are melodies, and they are gorgeous.) With the exception of the fragile acoustic fake-out opener “Futile Devices,” every song here is awash in electronic beats and noise, atop which Stevens stacks strings, horns, choirs, piccolos, and whatever else he feels like throwing in.

The effect is of a man desperately trying to keep control of the mess he’s created. I think he does, but only just. This is the first album since Bjork’s Homogenic to pick up the technorchestral baton and run with it, but this goes so far beyond what Bjork tried. These are symphonies more often than they are songs. In context, “Too Much” serves as your introduction to this sound, beginning with three minutes of crunching-through-ice drums and synth blips, but building and building in dramatic grandeur. By the end of its 6:43, it sounds like an orchestra trying to keep its bearings in a whirlwind. It’s unbelievable.

The title track is even bigger. It initially sounds like robots marching on Mordor, like music for the oddest techno-fantasy movie you’ve ever seen. Strings flail, horns blat, armies of vocalists sing (“Whoa-oh-oh-oh…”), everything is more massive than everything else. Until it isn’t. Proving he has control over this melee, Stevens drops out everything but his voice and guitar at key moments, and even ends the song that way. “Now my intentions were good intentions, I could have loved you, I could have changed you, I wouldn’t be so, I wouldn’t feel so consumed by selfish thoughts,” he sings, over what is, in contrast, no musical backdrop. The Age of Adz is full of these moments, but it takes a few listens to really hear them.

Trip-hop beats announce the arrival of “I Walked,” perhaps the closest to a pop single Stevens has given us here. A crawling breakup song, this one remains entirely electronic, the first one to do so. Stevens counters this with “Now That I’m Older,” a song built on nothing but massed choral vocals. It’s unearthly and haunting, and when Stevens steps in with that once-fragile, now supple voice, it’s astonishing. It’s like a low-moaning hymn. “I wanted so much to be at rest, now that I’m older, so be it…” The chilling piano plinks out a melody as the voices, those trapped and anguished voices, keep on wailing.

I could talk about every one of these songs, because they’re all integral to this record. The way Stevens reconciles his misery with his faith on the bouncy “Get Real Get Right,” the way he name-checks himself in the remarkable “Vesuvius,” the way he lays down a Wu-Tang-style backdrop, then turns it into a heart-rending lament on “All For Myself.” Everything fits, everything works, even when it doesn’t. The chaos is deliberate, the sense that we’ve gone off a cliff every few seconds is all part of the design. Had the album ended at track nine, it would have been a curious, yet mostly successful experiment.

But then…

Track 10 is called “I Want to Be Well,” and if you thought the earlier songs were a tornado of sound, wait until you hear this. It jumps time signatures, marries kinetic beats with piccolo runs and two hundred voices crying out. When everything backs away, leaving Sufjan muttering the title phrase over his guitar like a mantra, it’s frankly shocking. When he switches to a new mantra, “I’m not fucking around,” it’s jaw-dropping. Not just because this is Sufjan Stevens, who has always been a timid and faithful personality, swearing his head off, but because the song reaches levels of anger and intensity and turmoil unheard of in his catalog. This one is inspired, and I’m not sure I want to know what inspired it.

But even that won’t get you ready for the closing song, “Impossible Soul.” This thing is 25 minutes long, and I think I expected a repetitive jam-fest like “Djohariah,” which closed out All Delighted People. I was dead wrong. “Impossible Soul” is a multi-part epic suite, and it’s either Sufjan’s masterpiece or his greatest and most interesting failure. It begins like a pop song, with an almost Beatlesque rhythm and a fine melody, but before long, we’re in much more interesting (and much weirder) territory. And we never come back.

“Impossible Soul” is designed like a journey, following our singer through determination, despair and euphoria. The second section finds strings laying down a foundation while backing vocalists chant “No, I don’t want to be afraid” and Sufjan’s glorious choirs urge him not to be distracted. This is followed by a musical sinkhole, and a season in hell, trumpets mournfully calling out through the blackness. We’ve been through three songs’ worth of crazy, and we’re only at the 10-minute mark.

And then comes the auto-tune. Seriously. It’s like T-Pain in hell, Sufjan flagellating himself lyrically for about three minutes through a vocoder. And you know what? It really, really works. It’s unlike any use of the technique I’ve heard, and the blipping synths and massed backing vocals help things along nicely. But if you told me four years ago I’d one day be listening to Sufjan Stevens using Auto-Tune, I’d have laughed and laughed.

That’s not even the weirdest part of “Impossible Soul.” From here, it turns into a Prince track recorded on Mars. As the electronic beats pound out a dance rhythm, the army of vocalists starts chanting the song’s mantras: “It’s a long life, better pinch yourself, get your face together, better stand up straight…” The strings come in, the horns flail away, the electronic noise leaks in from the sides, and when the choir reaches the hook line (“It’s not so impossible”), it’s like a positivity party. The synths here remind me of “The Final Countdown,” but otherwise, this is like nothing else I know.

And it stays that way, an off-kilter, sunny booty-shaker, until about the 22-minute mark. There’s more vocoder, there’s a whispered “Do you wanna dance,” and there’s an overall sense of triumph, one that feels earned after an album of isolation and pain. The only problem with this section is you’ll be done with it before Sufjan is. He ends “Impossible Soul” with a fluttery acoustic guitar coda – you’ll think it’s a bonus track, until he starts singing the lyrics you’ve just heard in earlier sections. The coda is about how men and women don’t connect (“Boy, we can do much more together,” “Girl, I want nothing less than pleasure”) and ends by remarking at the mess they’ve made.

It’s a strange conclusion, to be sure, but thematically, I think it’s Sufjan finally climbing out of his romantic despair and surveying the damage. It counterpoints “Futile Devices” nicely, and after nearly 75 minutes of electronic madness, The Age of Adz ends with old-school Sufjan, acoustic guitars and vocals. Like he’s a whole person again, the one we remember. “Impossible Soul” is every idea Stevens has ever had ramming up against each other, the clearest example here of the artist trying to ride out his ambition and still remain in control. I’m still not sure if it all works, but it’s the year’s most original piece of work by a country mile.

I’m still processing The Age of Adz. Every time I listen to it, I hear something different. Here’s what I can tell you now. As a follow-up to Illinois, this album is maddening and magnificent. It is deliberately messier, deliberately more difficult, and yet, when it all clicks, it’s unlike any musical experience I have ever had. Stevens is working on a level none of his peers can match, or would try to match. In every way, this is the year’s most ambitious and astonishing album.

But is it the best? I don’t know yet. I’m working on it. The Age of Adz takes some figuring out. In many ways, the record does everything it can to keep you at arm’s length, while baring its soul. It’s a fascinating contradiction, but one that’s going to take some time to work through. That by itself is a remarkable thing – I haven’t needed more than one or two listens to fully absorb an album in years, and even Illinois was an immediate thing with me. This one? Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I merely admire it. Sometimes it makes me dizzy. In some ways, it would be wonderful to have such different reactions to it each time I hear it, for the rest of my life.

The Age of Adz is so unlike Illinois that it could be the work of a different artist entirely. But at its core, it could really only be Sufjan Stevens behind it. I can think of no other contemporary artist with the imagination to dream up this record, the skill to realize it, and the courage to release it. I stand by my earlier statement: he’s the most important artist of the past 10 years, if not more. The Age of Adz is a work of insane, fucked-up genius, and whatever I end up thinking about it, I’m stunned and amazed and oh so glad that it and its author both exist.

* * * * *

Wow, haven’t done a single in-depth review column in a while. Next week, a look at the newly-remastered John Lennon catalog. John would have been 70 this week, and even though I was only six when he was shot, I miss him. We’ll talk about how much next week. 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’m feeling lousy this week, so this will probably be a lot shorter than I want it to be.

I’ve been sick since Thursday (and hopefully I’m back at full strength by the time you read this), but I haven’t exactly been taking care of myself. I saw the Eels in Chicago (they were great), and waited outside in the cold and the rain for autographs. Then I attended a picnic party for two friends who were recently married, and went to the debut of Kevin Trudo’s new band Debbie Does Covers. (More on Kevin later in this column.) Lots of fun, but not much rest.

So first, let me tell you about something I’m doing in a couple of days.

I am not the world’s most adept Twitter user. For one thing, I hate the word “Twitter,” and I hate having to refer to my 140-character missives as “tweets,” so that revulsion keeps me away more often than not. But I am fascinated by the social media culture that’s grown up around this thing, and I think it’s an interesting tool. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to naturally work my Twitter page into what I do, and I think I’ve come up with something interesting: live first-listen reviews of records I just can’t wait to hear.

How does this work? Easy. At a pre-determined time, I will press play on a new album I’ve never heard. As it unspools, I’ll type up my immediate first reactions, and post them. It’s a little like a live performance, since I’m reviewing on the fly, and responding to tweets from those following along as well. It’s a great mental exercise, and I enjoy doing it. I’ve been told it’s fun to read, too, but I’ve been trying to come up with ways to make it more interactive and more interesting for those following along.

I have two of these live reviews scheduled for the coming days. On Friday, Oct. 8 at 8 p.m., I’ll be reviewing Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz. This is my most anticipated album of 2010. I’ve steadfastly avoided listening to the stream of this album that NPR posted, but I’m glad it’s there, because that means anyone who wants to can listen along as I review it. But I expect this will be more like the live review events I’ve conducted in the past, with not a lot of interaction from my Twitter legion. (It is Friday night, after all.)

But on Wednesday, Oct. 13 at 8 p.m., I’ll live-review Belle and Sebastian Write About Love, the new one from (you guessed it) Belle and Sebastian. I’ve chosen Wednesday for a number of reasons. First, the album will be available in stores and online the day before, so anyone who wants to can certainly listen along with me. But second, more people are home on Wednesday nights, and I’m hoping for many more comments and questions. It’s my hope that Wednesday’s review will be exhausting for me, as I juggle the music, my own thoughts and yours.

So what do you think? I like this idea for a few reasons, but the big one is that it falls in line with the original mission statement of Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. I envisioned this site as a sort of running diary of musical obsession, and these first-listen reviews allow me to get my initial excitement (or disappointment) about music out there unfiltered. You’ll be reading pure emotional reaction, mainly because the format doesn’t allow me any time for anything else. My thoughts on the music I live-review will change over time, as I listen further and develop more considered opinions. But the live reviews are the closest I can offer to what it’s like to be inside my head as I’m hearing new stuff.

I hope you all can join me. Follow me at www.twitter.com/tm3am, and be there at 8 p.m. on the 8th and the 13th. And then please, let me know what you think of the experience.

* * * * *

Okay, let me tell you a bit about Kevin Trudo.

I’ve only recently gotten to know Kevin, but I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone so obviously born to be a musician. He lives and breathes music. He teaches it, he plays it, he writes and records it, he’s in three bands, and when he’s not doing all that, he talks about music and how much he loves it. One part of his multimedia musical empire I love is The Tuesday Project. Every Tuesday, Kevin releases another song, normally written and recorded within the last seven days. They’re always free, and they’re up at tuesdays.thekevintrudo.com.

Kevin’s a guy who loves music as much as I do, if not more. But here’s the thing: we’re on nearly opposite sides of the spectrum. I like big, ornate, complex pieces that take my brain on unexpected journeys. Kevin likes simple, direct, emotional songs that aim for honesty above all. He’s very lyrically-driven, whereas it sometimes takes me four or five listens to a song before I pay much attention to the words. I like melodies above everything, he’s looking for imagery and tone, no matter if the chords never change.

You all know me, and you know I’m allergic to simplicity, most of the time. Talking with Kevin has given me the chance to understand what he hears in songs I dismiss for being too easy, too much like other songs I’ve heard before. This doesn’t mean I’ve turned over a new leaf – my preferences are pretty well ingrained – but it does offer me a new perspective. Kevin really likes music that bores me silly, and I really like music that strikes him as too cluttered, too pretentious. It’s made for some interesting discussions.

That said, I have a couple of records on tap this week that Kevin will like a lot more than I do.

First up is Guster, who hail from my home state of Massachusetts. I’ve liked this band since I first heard them, more than 10 years ago. Then, they had an appealing Toad the Wet Sprocket-style college rock feel to them, but augmented it with an array of hand percussion instead of traditional drums. Sure, it was a gimmick, but it was a good one, and their third album, Lost and Gone Forever, which features no drum kits at all, remains their best. I know Kevin digs them too, because I’ve heard his band Meathawk cover “Amsterdam,” which is to my mind the last extraordinary song they’ve written.

Now, look, I don’t want to come off as one of those people whining about the hand percussion. Yes, the band has dropped the thing that made them special, and replaced it with a more standard drum kit sound. But do I think bringing back the bongos would help at this point? I don’t. Guster’s last album, 2006’s Ganging Up on the Sun, was unremittingly boring, the quartet failing to write any spectacular songs. Only “Satellite” rises above the murk. It’s not a good album, and the lack of energy is obvious in every track.

Now, four years later, here’s Easy Wonderful, and while it’s a clear step up from the woeful Ganging, it’s still pretty boring to my ears. This new record is largely acoustic, mainly folksy, and maintains a breezy, almost side project feel for the whole running time. There are some interesting bits of instrumentation, and the hand percussion does make a comeback here and there, most notably on “This Is How it Feels to Have a Broken Heart.” But the songs are just as lackluster as they’ve been for some time.

I knew I was in for a rough ride when the first track, “Architects and Engineers,” ran out of ideas less than a minute in. A couple of these tunes spark – “Do You Love Me” has the record’s best chorus, Ryan Miller soaring into a sweet falsetto, while “Bad Bad World” ambles ahead briskly, its refrain a sort of singalong. I like the “hallelujah” bit on “Stay With Me Jesus,” and I dig all of the banjo-laden “Hercules,” but more for the atmosphere than the song itself. The other songs all slide by, leaving no sign of their passing.

I wish I liked this record more. Guster is still a really good band, and they perform these wispy little tunes with commitment. Easy Wonderful is an album they obviously cared about – the energy level here is ten times that of Ganging Up on the Sun. But it’s all in service of songs that do very little for me. I like the ukulele and the harmonies and the mariachi band on “What You Call Love,” for instance, but I don’t remember the song five minutes after it’s finished. Also, the synth-y “Do What You Want” is a fun closer, but fades from memory quickly.

This album makes me wonder whether the band has really changed, or I have. I’m almost scared to go back and listen to Lost and Gone Forever, an album I still hold dear, but haven’t heard in years. As for Easy Wonderful, though it’s certainly better and more engaging than the band’s last effort, it just doesn’t do it for me. It’s too simple, too traditional in its songwriting for me. But that’s why I’d bet Kevin Trudo will like it. I’m interested to hear his thoughts, and see whether they change my outlook. Because I really want to like this record, and as of now, I don’t.

* * * * *

I’m pretty sure Kevin will like Easy Wonderful. I’m absolutely certain he will adore The Place We Ran From, the debut album from Tired Pony.

Why? Well, for starters, this is a supergroup, and I know he digs some of the musicians involved. Tired Pony includes Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol, Peter Buck of R.E.M., Richard Colburn of Belle and Sebastian, Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows, singer/songwriter Iain Archer and producer Jacknife Lee. Oh, and M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel pop up here and there too. That’s seriously quite a pedigree.

With all of that, though, Lightbody dominates. The Place We Ran From resembles a Snow Patrol album more than anything else, although it’s a more mellow ride this time. The songs have that insistent quarter-note repetition Lightbody loves, and they’re all very simple pieces, relying more on the spell they cast than anything particularly musical. The opening track, “Northwestern Skies,” is just three chords repeated over and over, with an uncomplicated melody that also repeats endlessly. Of all 10 songs, only “Dead American Writers” grabbed me on first listen. But then, I was listening for melody and complexity, two things Lightbody has never really offered.

So on second listen, I tried to hear this thing the way Kevin might. Because Kevin? He’s going to love this. He’s going to love everything about this.

My first step was to pay particular attention to the lyrics. They are uniformly wonderful, full of haunting imagery. Check out the first lines on the record: “It’s not like it was before, there’s a beauty in slamming doors, and the lightning plays in your eyes as it cracks through northwestern skies…” That’s just great, and it probably would have taken me three or four spins to even notice. “Get on the Road” is the kind of song I can imagine playing over that scene in the movie where the guy realizes what a jackass he’s been and comes back to the woman we all know he loves, and the lyrics match that idea perfectly: “Kiss like a fight that no one wins, a tender payment for our sins, you are the drug that I can’t quit, your perfect chaos a perfect fit, so I get on the road and ride to you…”

Really, everywhere you look on this lyric sheet, you’ll find a great line. Here, let me pull a few at random:

“In this light you are framed classically, just like a painting that hangs in my head, that I know like the back of my hand…”

“All the troubles that I know look to me like great and heavy stones, and all I want to do is slowly push and pull, ‘til they rock, ‘til they roll…”

“You were saved by the good book, I was saved by the half-full glass, so come on take a good look, ‘cause this party will be our last…”

Seriously, good stuff. So what kept me from realizing it at first? To me, a good melody emphasizes the words, but there are very few stick-in-your-head moments on The Place We Ran From. But I’ve come to realize that isn’t the point of this record. These songs are slow and easy, but heavy with emotion, and while my brain is screaming at me that they’re just repeating chords over and over, I’m missing the resonance.

“Held in the Arms of Your Words,” for example, is literally four chords repeated for its entire running time. But if I let it wash over me, I can hear what’s amazing about it. “You’re effortless, you know you are, and all I want to do is let you lead me off into the dust,” Lightbody sings, while M. Ward adds gorgeous guitar accents behind him, and pianist Troy Stewart does the bare minimum necessary to set the tone. Archer’s “I Am a Landslide” is just as simple as Lightbody’s songs, but his high, aching voice adds another dimension to it.

On repeat listens, my favorite thing here is the closer, “Pieces.” This song kind of drifted by me the first time, because I was internally criticizing its simplistic structure. But I missed what a remarkable web it weaves. There’s almost nothing to it, but it spins out over seven minutes, constantly building and never arriving. Buck and Archer paint guitar pictures in the background, Lee plays a dark, simple organ line. If you close your eyes and let go, it all works. Plus, it contains this line: “You’re married to her in your mind and she loves you like a son.” So much there.

This is not a record made for me, nor is it one I’m ever going to love. But I’m trying to hear it in new ways. and let it reveal itself to me. I’m listening for things I may have missed before, and I understand what Lightbody and company were aiming for a bit more now. Kevin’s definitely going to like this more than I do, but in trying to hear it the way I imagine he will, I’ve come to admire it more. I still like what I like – and the same trick hasn’t worked on Guster yet – but I feel like I’m learning a few things.

* * * * *

Thanks to Kevin Trudo for being my literary device this week. Check him out at www.thekevintrudo.com. If you listen to nothing else on his site, hear “Gemini,” an absolute stunner of a tune, recorded for the Tuesday Project with nothing but Kevin and his acoustic guitar. That song is a compelling argument for simplicity and directness all by itself, and Kevin sings the hell out of it. Seriously, go and hear it.

Next week, Sufjan. 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.

Speaking as a music collector, the ampersand is a tricky thing.

At the best of times, it signifies an expansion of one’s musical world. At the worst, it’s a way of bringing an unwanted intruder into what was, until then, an intimate experience. You’re doing just fine with John Lennon, and then all of a sudden, it’s John Lennon & Yoko Ono. But, on the flipside, you’ve spent enough time with Wilco to be bored by them, and then along comes Wilco & Billy Bragg. And here’s somebody new to catch up with, and obsess over.

It’s unpredictable, but then, so is collaboration. The ampersand indicates an artist’s willingness to bring new people into the fold, and share ideas. I think that’s a marvelous concept, regardless of the outcome. Music should be all about melding different perspectives, opening new doors. Even if that particular melding never happens again, it’s always interesting to me to hear what different artists can do together. It makes me want to sing “We Are the World.”

The thing is, most of these collaborations are one-offs, your only chance to hear what the meeting of two minds can produce. If they don’t catch lightning in a bottle, there’s usually no opportunity to do it again. That’s why these things are so hard to predict. So many other factors can creep in and ruin what should be a successful one-time partnership. Not only do the artists usually have one try at getting it right, you as a music fan usually have only one shot at hearing what may be a dream-come-true moment.

For months, my most anticipated ampersand project has been Lonely Avenue, by Ben Folds & Nick Hornby. There’s a number of reasons for this. Piano man Folds has long been one of my favorite songwriters, but his last album, the guffawing Way to Normal, left me cold. Folds used to be one of the best storytellers in popular music, filling his tunes with fascinating characters. (A few examples: Zak and Sara, Fred Jones, Alice Childress, even the nameless prizefighter in “Boxing.”) But his last two records have found him turning inward, writing sad songs and little joking ditties about things that really happened to him. And his work has suffered, somehow.

Novelist Nick Hornby, as I’m sure most of you know, is one of the best storytellers working today. He’s the author of High Fidelity, and About a Boy, and How to be Good, and A Long Way Down, and the new Juliet, Naked. His work is completely free of pretension, his characters talk like real people, and his stories are full of sweet and sad details that make you laugh while they rip your heart out. If there’s any prose author who would be a perfect match for Ben Folds, it’s Hornby, and on Lonely Avenue, they joined forces. Hornby wrote his first-ever song lyrics, and Folds composed the music for them.

The result is like a musical short story collection. There’s no reason, beyond their shared authorship, for these 11 songs to be on the same record. They veer wildly from one style to another, from 1970s Elvis Costello stomping to massively orchestrated balladry to white-boy blues to Devo-esque synth frippery. But the obvious mutual respect shines through here, and ties this all together. It’s obvious Folds and Hornby have sparked off each other, each leading the other to new heights, and that shared energy makes this album a unified work.

What’s surprising (although maybe it shouldn’t be) is how often Hornby’s lyrics sound like Ben Folds in his prime. Every song spins a tale, mostly through perceptive details. The divorced parents in “Claire’s Ninth” arrive in separate cars for their daughter’s birthday party, and pay for the meal with separate credit cards “as if they’ve never met.” In “Picture Window,” a mother checks her ailing son into the hospital on New Year’s Eve 2008, watches the fireworks, and refuses to hope: “Another mum gives her some sparkling wine, she nearly gives into the moment, but he’ll still be sick in 2009…”

For the most part here, Folds has stepped up with some wonderful tunes. His biggest mistake – and he makes it more than once – is hanging back too far, out of respect for Hornby’s words. The melody of “Practical Amanda” is so slight as to be almost nonexistent, and even comparative winners like “From Above” could have used more hooks, more sweep. But when he gets it right, as he does on most of the tracks here, Folds sounds back on form. This is the songwriter I fell in love with in the late ‘90s.

Much of Lonely Avenue is about the art of creation. Brief opener “A Working Day” runs through the emotional rise and fall of pulling art out of the air – it travels from “I’m a genius” to “everything I write is shit” in 1:51. (I got a special charge out of this line: “Some guy on the net thinks I suck, and he should know, he’s got his own blog…”) “Doc Pomus” pictures the wheelchair-bound songwriter in his cranky last days at a nursing home, listening to his old hits: “He never could be one of those happy cripples, the kind that smile and tell you life’s OK, he was mad as hell, frightened and bitter, he found a way to make his isolation pay…” (The album is named after Alex Halberstadt’s Pomus biography, and it’s clear that Hornby’s foray into lyrics has led to a kinship of sorts.)

There are missteps here. “Levi Johnston’s Blues” is possibly the worst of them, a drippy funk number that imagines what Bristol Palin’s baby daddy must have gone through during the campaign. The chorus is taken right from Johnston’s infamous Facebook profile (“I’m a fuckin’ redneck…”), and ceases to be funny after one repetition. “Password” is also an interesting idea, that of believing you know someone because you know their internet passwords, but it drags on too long. All is forgiven, though, when you hear a stunner like “Saskia Hamilton,” an ‘80s-style synth romp about falling for someone just because of her name. “She’s got more assonance than she knows what to do with, she’s got two sibilants, no bilabial plosives…” The English nerds in the audience are punching the air right now.

If there is a classic here, though, it’s the closing song, “Belinda.” This tune is a marvel of lyrical and melodic construction. It’s about an aging singer who, every night, must perform his one hit, called (you guessed it) “Belinda.” It was written for a woman he still loves, for a relationship that ended when he cheated on her with a stewardess he met on a plane. And so every night, he relives the memory. He can’t stop singing the song, because without it, “a one-hit wonder with no hits is what he is.”

Now here’s the incredible part. We never actually hear what this guy’s song “Belinda” sounds like. The closest hint we get is in the second line of the first verse (“Belinda, I love you, don’t leave me, I need you”). The chorus we hear is the music from his hit, but the lyrics are the dialogue running through the singer’s mind as he sings it. He relives his weak justifications for cheating (“She gave me complimentary champagne”) in the place of whatever lyric his audience is singing along with.

In the second verse, he laments that “no one ever wants to hear the song he wrote for Cindy,” and yet that song has the same words and melody as “Belinda,” pointing out the pattern in this sad man’s life. The final verse is just beautiful: “So every night about this time, he feels the old self-loathing, while the old folks in the audience sing along, and he smiles and waves the mike at them so they can do the chorus, he’s not there, he’s somewhere else, he’s with Belinda in the days before he made it all go wrong…” Folds sets all this to a classic pop melody, one that might have even been a hit once upon a time, and Paul Buckmaster gives it an astonishingly good string and horn arrangement.

“Belinda” is the kind of thing Ben Folds used to do. He used to spin stories like this all the time. My fervent hope is that this collaboration with Hornby has recharged that battery, because I miss that side of his work. Ideally, however, Lonely Avenue will be merely the first of many joint ventures from Folds and Hornby. It’s so good so often that it would be a shame to stop here. Lonely Avenue is a smashing success, the best Ben Folds album in years, and a terrific first foray into lyrics for Nick Hornby. It’s exactly what an ampersand project should be.

* * * * *

And here’s another. Now, really, I don’t have to tell you that Wake Up, a collaborative effort by John Legend and the Roots, is great, do I? Let’s recap here. John Legend. The Roots. Doing old soul covers. My only job here is to tell you just how great it is. So let me put it this way: on a scale of one to ten, it’s pretty fucking great.

This is one of those pairings that just makes sense when you hear it. Legend has a deep love for old soul music – Curtis Mayfield, Teddy Pendergrass, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye – and even though his albums often drift into adult-contemporary pop, his voice is one of those old-school wonders. It’s smooth without needing to be acrobatic, and gritty without becoming unappealing. The Roots, of course, are one of the finest, funkiest, most supple bands on the planet, and even if you don’t like hip-hop (which I usually don’t), you have to respect their musicality. They are tight and deep and just plain awesome.

I can think of no better band to accompany Legend on this trip through soul’s back pages. There are no familiar hits reprised on Wake Up. Rather, Legend and the Roots unearthed some true gems and breathed new life into them. The record opens with the slamming “Hard Times,” written by Mayfield and originally performed by Baby Huey. The energy here is just extraordinary, the staccato horns hitting like bullets. It’s nothing, however, when compared with the explosive take on Eugene McDaniels’ “Compared to What.” Legend just knocks this out of the park. When he hits the dirty high note in the chorus (“Tryin’ to keep it real”), it’s amazing.

These updates of old soul numbers make room for some new hip-hop verses, courtesy of the Roots’ own Black Thought, and guests Common, CL Smooth and Malik Yusef. They fit in well, but I found myself wanting to hear Legend again each time they started up. The album’s more sedate second half is all singing, and includes a powerful run through Gaye’s spiritual “Wholly Holy” and a stunning little version of the Nina Simone great “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to Be Free.” (It also contains the one original song, a sleeper called “Shine.” You can skip it.)

The album’s highlight, for me anyway, is the absolutely gob-smacking 12-minute treatment of Bill Withers’ “I Can’t Write Left-Handed.” The story of a soldier with a bullet in his shoulder, this song builds and builds over one repeated, incredible piano-bass lick. When guitarist Captain Kirk Douglas steps in with an extended, incendiary solo, the song hits new heights. This is just extraordinary stuff.

Should Legend and the Roots do this again? I think so, but more for Legend’s sake than anything. The Roots are the Roots, but they elevated Legend’s game immeasurably on this record. He shines as one of the best soul singers we have right now, and I wouldn’t mind hearing more from this team-up, if it brings this kind of performance out of him. Wake Up is a wonderful record, the fruit of an inspired collaboration, and I hope there’s more in the wings.

* * * * *

One last ampersand before we call it a week.

Some time ago, I gave I’m Having Fun Now, the debut from Jenny & Johnny, a dismissive first-listen review on my blog. In the weeks since, however, I’ve spun this thing a few more times, and now I’m ready to declare it a big ball of fun. Jenny, of course, is Jenny Lewis, of Rilo Kiley fame, and Johnny is her significant other, songwriter Jonathan Rice. And this is the sound of the two of them having a blast in the studio.

I never quite understood Rilo Kiley’s acclaim, although Under the Blacklight made me smile. But I like Lewis on her own. She has one of those powerful, classic voices that works well singing just about anything. On I’m Having Fun Now, she and Rice spin out one simple, catchy ditty after another, their voices intertwining atop sloppy guitars, thumping bass, pounding drums and little else. They take turns playing different instruments – Lewis kicks it on the drums three times – and their easy familiarity lends this record a ramshackle charm.

Good songs? Glad you asked. “Big Wave” is my favorite, a clomping mass of melody with a distinctive synth line. Opener “Scissor Runner” is groovy, “Animal” makes me dance, and “New Yorker Cartoon” brings Rice to the fore for a man-out-of-place lament. There are lesser lights, like too-simple “My Pet Snakes,” but for the most part, these ditties do their jobs well. And closer “Committed” doesn’t feel like a conclusion so much as just the 11th song. When the record ends, it’s kind of a surprise.

Don’t expect anything that will stick with you, or will change your life. I’m Having Fun Now gives you exactly what the title promises. It’s what I usually expect from an ampersand project: a lighthearted side effort, a detour, an enjoyable little pitstop. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

* * * * *

All right, before we close this thing out, it’s time for the Third Quarter Report.

This one was very tough. The last three months have brought us some amazing albums (including a couple I mentioned this week), and slotting them into place this time was nearly an impossible task. I don’t know what the next three months will bring – the only thing I’m excited beyond words for is the new Sufjan Stevens, out October 12 – but I would bet most of the albums listed below will be in my final list in December. If I were forced to release that list-in-progress right now, though, this is what it would look like:

10. Yeasayer, Odd Blood
9. Sufjan Stevens, All Delighted People
8. Janelle Monae, The ArchAndroid
7. Linkin Park, A Thousand Suns
6. Ben Folds & Nick Hornby, Lonely Avenue
5. The Lost Dogs, Old Angel
4. Joanna Newsom, Have One on Me
3. The Choir, Burning Like the Midnight Sun
2. Mumford and Sons, Sigh No More
1. Arcade Fire, The Suburbs.

Joanna has relinquished her crown, but could easily regain it. The Choir and Arcade Fire albums really are that good, though, and Mumford and Sons is my favorite new band of the year. And yes, Linkin Park. I promise you, it’s great. Listen to it. Honorable mentions this time go to Beach House, Hanson, Rufus Wainwright, Devo, Sia and the Dead Weather. (John Legend & the Roots are ineligible under my rules, but they’d get one too, if I could.)

All right, that’ll do for this time. Next week, we dive into October with Guster and Fran Healy, as well as a look at that comprehensive John Lennon box set. 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 know people who hate to be surprised.

To me, that’s a really interesting way to go through life. I’m the exact opposite. I live for each new day to throw something unexpected at me. That’s part of the reason I love my reporting job – I never know what I’ll be covering from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour. It’s just unpredictable enough to hold my attention. I’ve covered the same city for five years, and it keeps spinning my head around.

I’m the same way with music. I know to some, music is comfort food. They want to hear the same chords played the same way, with the same sentiments sung atop them. There’s nothing wrong with falling back into the familiar, but I love the feeling of the floor dropping away. I live for those moments when an artist does something I didn’t expect, pulls off something I didn’t see coming. Each new CD I buy is the promise of the unknown, and I want surprises. Nothing is more dispiriting to me than hearing a band go through the same old motions again and again.

When I find one of these vertigo-inducing records, I feel the need to tell everyone I know about it. This leads to some interesting conversations, because my favorite musical surprises often come from bands you wouldn’t expect. This week’s biggest shocker is one of those. It was recommended by several people, including the reliable Dr. Tony Shore, but even so, I hesitated. And for the same reason, I expect, my efforts to spread this music around have met with some resistance. (Almost, but not quite, the same level of resistance I got for that Hanson album I love.)

The record is A Thousand Suns, by Linkin Park.

Now look, I know this column hasn’t had a lot of time (okay, any time) for Linkin Park. For three albums, they’ve basically been Limp Bizkit’s more polite cousin, delivering rap-rock with hooks, but little imagination. If you’ve heard the singles (“In the End,” “One Step Closer,” “What I’ve Done,” “Breaking the Habit,” etc.) you’ve heard the best parts of the band’s first three albums. They sell truckloads of records, pack houses wherever they go, and up until now, they’ve done their level best to stay exactly as they are, and rake in the cash.

The fact that A Thousand Suns is the first Linkin Park album I’ve felt compelled to include here should tell you something about it. The six members of the band have all joined hands and leapt off a cliff here, making a record their hardcore fans will probably reject as too arty, too experimental. This is exactly why I like it so much. Over 15 tracks, Linkin Park invade all kinds of new territory, and rarely sound like you think they will.

Being the best Linkin Park album is one thing, but even divorced from expectations, A Thousand Suns is really good. It plays best as a single piece – themes restate themselves, bits of lyrics resurface, and the cumulative effect (particularly on late-game tracks like “Iridescent” and “The Catalyst”) is impressive. Only nine of these tracks are full songs, the rest being segues, interludes and atmospheres, but these little pieces are integral to the flow and power of the record.

A Thousand Suns is an angry thing, certainly, only this time, instead of essentially masturbating with their rage, the band directs it. This is a political work – Mike Shinoda samples J. Robert Oppenheimer and Martin Luther King, and Mario Savio’s famous “put your bodies upon the gears and break the machine” speech – that also manages to be intensely personal. The theme is fairly cliched – change the world by changing yourself – but it works, and by the end, they’ve earned the transcendence this album seeks.

It’s the music that sets this record apart, however. Until you get used to it, you won’t believe you’re listening to Linkin Park. The first half is remarkably atmospheric. “Burning in the Skies” lets Chester Bennington belt out a chorus (one of the few on here that could sound at home in a more typical Linkin Park track), but he does so over subtle electronic drums and piano. “Robot Boy” is all orchestral magnificence, the harmonies adding a Flaming Lips feel to things. Between those is “When They Come For Me,” which finds Shinoda rapping over one of the most fascinating beat complexes I’ve heard in some time. Oh, and then the middle-Eastern-style wordless chorus comes in.

Over and over, the band makes surprising production choices. “Waiting for the End” includes a Jamaican-style chant over a massive beat and some piano-guitar interplay. “Blackout” should be a disaster – it finds Bennington screaming (SCREAMING) over danceable music that just doesn’t call for it – but it really works. It helps that the song takes off halfway through, turning into a sublime anthem.

As far as I’m concerned, they only made two mistakes with this album. The first is “Wretches and Kings,” which sounds the most like bog-standard Linkin Park, all scratches and rapping. Despite having been built around the Savio sample, this song could have been excised, and the album would have been better for it. The second is the closing track, “The Messenger,” a simple acoustic ditty which Bennington over-sings to death. His emo-tastic vocals send this into a nearly comic realm that a more subdued approach would have avoided.

But that’s it. The final third of A Thousand Suns is largely transcendent, starting with the King-sampling “Wisdom, Justice and Love.” King’s words of peace, spoken in 1967 about the Vietnam War, resound over subtle piano chords, and lead into “Iridescent,” a simple yet effective ballad that builds and builds over five minutes. Here is where Bennington shines, delivering these lines beautifully: “Remember all the sadness and frustration, and let it go…” This is nothing new, but coming near the end of this album, it takes on a surprising gravity.

And then comes “The Catalyst.” You may have heard this on the radio, but separating it from the context of the album is like shearing it of all meaning. It is the call to action at the end of a litany of woes – lead-in track “Fallout” even reprises the chorus of “Burning in the Skies,” just to hammer the point home – and as the climax of the record, it’s riveting. The discordant synth line, the chanted chorus, the tricky beat, the delirious melodic breakdown, the piano lines, the song’s transformation into massive anthem, it all works so well for me. It segues nicely into “The Messenger,” which, despite Bennington’s vocals, has a sweet album-ending sentiment: “When life leaves us blind, love keeps us kind.”

I don’t want to overstate things. A Thousand Suns isn’t a masterpiece, and it probably won’t rank among my favorites of 2010. (But it might – I like it more each time I hear it.) It is, however, an enormous leap forward for a band that had given me few reasons to hope for one. Each time this album finishes up, I can scarcely believe it’s Linkin Park I’ve just been listening to. A Thousand Suns is a remarkably well-made, experimental piece that’s full of surprises, and I have to take my hat off to the band for even attempting it. Here’s hoping it does well for them. I’d like to hear them travel farther down this path.

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A couple more surprises from the last couple of weeks:

Serj Tankian is mental. This is not news. As the frontman for Armenian rock band System of a Down, he added a madman’s flair to some of the craziest downtuned metal insanity I’ve heard. System songs flew off on unexpected tangents every couple of seconds, and right at the forefront was Tankian, using his odd, operatic voice to snarl and scream bracingly political lyrics. His solo debut, Elect the Dead, was a similar affair, but Tankian’s experience creating symphonic arrangements for this year’s live album (Elect the Dead Symphony) must have affected him more than anyone could have expected.

Why do I say that? Because here’s Imperfect Harmonies, Tankian’s second solo effort, and it’s… well, astonishing. You won’t find a lot of distorted electric guitars on here, but these songs are LOUD, so much so that my speakers often strained in protest. Every song here has been performed with a full orchestra, but that’s just the set dressing – there are disco-fied electronic drums, jazz-style bass lines, pianos, synths, armies of vocals, flutes, violin solos, and all manner of production craziness. When you’ve credited someone with “additional operatic vocals” in the liner notes, you’ve made a gigantic piece of work.

The songs, however, are all of modest lengths, and contain direct melodies. Tankian’s distinctive voice is front and center in this maelstrom of a mix, guiding us through it. Tankian composed and arranged these orchestral parts himself, and while it takes a minute to get used to the sheer density of Imperfect Harmonies’ sound, it’s never overcooked. Check out “Electron,” a basic stomper of a song – the string lines work perfectly with Tankian’s vocals, and the fascinating breakdown, which includes pianos and whispers, doesn’t distract from the song’s directness.

Lyrically, Tankian is still bringing the politics, raging against war and the machinations that bring it about. “Fear is the cause of separation, backed with illicit conversations, procured by constant condemnations, national blood-painted persuasions,” he spits in “Borders Are…,” and songs with titles like “Yes, It’s Genocide” and “Peace Be Revenged” are what you expect them to be. (The former references the Armenian genocide that began in 1915, and is sung in his native language.) It’s a dark and nearly hopeless album, lyrically speaking, which stands in contrast to the exploding colors of the music.

Tankian’s probably going to alienate a few of his old fans with this one, but hopefully he’ll entice a few of them to follow him down this rabbit hole. By exploring so many different styles and tones on this record, he’s come alive here like he rarely has before. Imperfect Harmonies is a crazy album, for certain, but it’s also daring, riveting stuff. I don’t know who the audience for this is, but Tankian shouldn’t let that stop him.

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Some albums surprise me simply by existing at all.

For example, I never would have thought that in 2010, we’d be hearing the second album from the Vaselines. Their first, Dum Dum, was released 20 years ago. You read that right. 20 years. Two decades. The Scottish duo has made plenty of music in the interim, with other bands and on their own, but they haven’t worked together since 1990. Listening to that second album, Sex With an X, I can only wonder what the hell took them so long.

The Vaselines are Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly, two Scots who share a whimsical, randy sense of humor. They never really achieved any measure of fame on their own, but when Kurt Cobain proclaimed them his favorite songwriters, and covered three of their tunes on Nirvana records, they kind of won the lottery. Too bad by that time they’d already broken up.

But in 2006, bygones were bygones, and Kelly and McKee started jamming again. Sex With an X is the result, a fun and blissful collection of simple, simply rockin’ songs. Their voices sound untouched by the ravages of time, their penchant for basic yet memorable hooks undiminished. If this album had come out in 1991 as the follow-up to Dum Dum, it would have carried on their sound admirably. Sonically, this one’s a little fuller, a little richer. But that’s it. Otherwise, it’s classic Vaselines.

Highlights? I love “The Devil Inside Me,” a dark, almost bluesy track with some great intertwined vocals. “I’ve got the devil in me,” Kelly intones, and McKee responds, “And he won’t let go” in her angelic voice. “Overweight But Over You” is my favorite song title of 2010 so far, its chorus (“Hey fat mama, I’m a fat man”) a shout-along delight. “I Hate the ‘80s” is perfect, a rollicking backhand to a decade that keeps reasserting itself: “What do you know? You weren’t there, it wasn’t all Duran Duran, you want the truth, well this is it, I hate the ‘80s ‘cause the ‘80s were shit…”

“Mouth to Mouth” continues the Vaselines’ dirty-romantic tradition. It’s sung from the point of view of a woman dying – literally, dying – to be kissed. The title track is about ignoring regret, Kelly and McKee joyously singing the refrain: “Feels so good, it must be bad for me, let’s do it, do it again…” These songs are accompanied by jangly, almost cute pop backdrops, so innocent-sounding that you’d never guess their sexual preoccupations.

The album ends with the slow crawl “Exit the Vaselines,” which seems to indicate that this scrappy, fun little record is the last we’ll hear from these two. I hope that’s not the case. Sex With an X was a complete surprise, appearing as if out of nowhere, and it’s 41 minutes of grinning joy. If this is it, I guess I can live with that, but I’d love to see this reunion stick. What do you say, guys? Surprise me.

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Next week, Ben Folds makes an album with novelist Nick Hornby, and John Legend raises the roof with the Roots. Plus the 2010 Third Quarter Report. 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.

First things first: has everyone heard the new Sufjan Stevens songs?

I’ve looked ahead to the end of the year (hard to believe we’re in September already), and there are only two upcoming albums I’m out-of-my-skin excited for. The first is Lonely Avenue, by Ben Folds with novelist Nick Hornby, and that’s out on September 28. The second is The Age of Adz, by Sufjan Stevens, out October 12.

Even had I not heard a note of it, I’d still be fascinated by The Age of Adz, Sufjan’s official follow-up to my favorite album of the last decade, Illinois. But now that I have heard where he’s going with this, I’m practically shaking with anticipation. The two songs he’s released from this record are called “Too Much” and “I Walked,” and both are available on his Bandcamp site. Those who loved the quirky, warm, organic music Stevens made on Michigan and Illinois are in for a shock.

Stevens has embraced electronics here, but he’s done it in a way I’ve never heard. “Too Much” is my favorite of the two. It’s nearly seven minutes long, it’s in 7/4 time, and for the first three and a half minutes, there are no instruments that are not electronic. Blipping synths construct a leaning tower of interlocking parts while computer drums whirr and explode in the background. Stevens’ voice is still fragile and lovely, and it works really well in this setting.

But halfway through, the song erupts – the strings and horns come in, and this song does something I’ve been waiting for since 1997: it takes the technorchestral ball dropped by Bjork’s Homogenic and runs with it. I praised Stevens for not taking some radical and ill-advised leap with All Delighted People, his first album of the year, but this… this is a massive step forward, and I’m eating my words. It may be too much to hope for, but it sounds like one of our most ambitious and remarkable musicians has found new ground to explore, and has made a strange and beautiful masterpiece. We’ll see.

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I tried an interesting experiment this week, and I think it went well.

I got my copy of Weezer’s new album, Hurley, on Friday, and decided to live-tweet my first impressions of it. It was a surprising amount of fun, although my biggest mistake was doing it on the spur of the moment, on a night when most people weren’t home. I’ve had several people tell me they liked the idea, and wished they could have taken part. So I’m definitely going to do it again, most likely with the two records mentioned above, and I’ll give everyone plenty of advance warning. If you want to follow along and jump in, I’m at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

I like having those first impressions out there, though, because they often contrast with the more considered opinions that make their way into this column. When it came time to officially review Hurley, I found I’d changed my mind on a few of the songs, and on the overall tone of the record. One way or another, though, I think those of us who review music on a regular basis should get on our knees and thank Rivers Cuomo for being so damn interesting.

Too often, I’ll sit down to write about an album and find I have nothing to say about it, other than, “Here’s 10 songs I sort of like.” That never happens with Weezer, because Cuomo cannily gives us so many hooks to hang a review on. Observe: Weezer’s eighth album is called Hurley, and its cover is just a big picture of actor Jorge Garcia, who portrayed Hugo “Hurley” Reyes on Lost. It’s an album of collaborations, featuring songs co-written by Ryan Adams, Dan Wilson of Semisonic, Linda Perry, and Mac Davis, who penned “A Little Less Conversation” and “In the Ghetto” for Elvis Presley. And it features vocal contributions by Johnny Knoxville, Wee-Man and Steve-O, and a mandolin part played by Michael Cera.

See? You’re already fascinated, right? I haven’t even gotten to the part where Weezer ditched Geffen Records for punk stalwarts Epitaph (Really? Epitaph??), or the bit where Rivers wrote a song called “Where’s My Sex?” that turns out to be about socks. You haven’t listened to a single song and already I’d bet this album has more going for it, in terms of curiosity, than anything else you’ve heard this year. That’s the sign of a savvy marketing mind. Rivers knows you want to watch him self-destruct, to walk that tightrope between brilliant and idiotic, and he does it very well.

But at the end of the day, Hurley is 10 songs on a piece of plastic, and they have to be good, or all the other stuff means nothing. Are they? Well, some of them are.

Cuomo is billing Hurley as a return to the more honest and poignant songwriting of his Pinkerton days. He does this a lot, and it’s never true. Hurley is certainly a deeper record than last year’s Raditude, which I loved for its devil-may-care catchiness and goofy sense of fun. When Cuomo gets all sentimental and introspective, his work starts to suffer – see Make Believe and the worst parts of the Red Album. But Hurley largely avoids this trap. The majority of its songs are slam-bang pop tunes with memorable choruses and a sense of energy that, before Raditude, had been missing for a long time.

This is definitely a rawer and less polished effort. The guitars buzz, the analog keyboards slice through the din, and Cuomo sings like his life depends on it. That vitality saves even the worst offenders on Hurley, and there are several. I’m guessing that part of that newfound energy comes from Cuomo’s collaborations this time. Only two of these songs are solo Cuomo creations. On the others, he worked with a wide selection of songwriters – pro hit-makers like Perry and Desmond Child and Greg Wells, and also left-field artists like Adams, Wilson and No Doubt’s Tony Kanal.

This potpourri makes for a pretty diverse album, despite the overall rock vibe. The Dan Wilson track, “Ruling Me,” is my favorite, a spunky, catchy, classic Weezer tune. It’s simple, but you’ll remember it. Similarly, “Hang On,” co-written by Rick Nowels (he’s worked with Madonna and Jewel and Nelly Furtado), is a big, wonderful pop song, with some Levellers-esque touches. (Here’s Cera with his mandolin, and also Tony Berg with his hurdy-gurdy.)

These two tracks are probably the closest to what you expect from Weezer these days. But listen to Cuomo’s collaboration with Ryan Adams, “Run Away.” It starts with a muffled piano melody, then morphs into a mid-tempo piece that wouldn’t have been out of place on Adams’ Love is Hell album. Closer “Time Flies” pulls off a similar trick. This is the one co-written by Mac Davis, and it’s an acoustic stomp recorded cheaply, like an old folk tune. The bass drum distorts, the guitar strings buzz, and Cuomo’s voice drops in and out. Yet somehow, it really works.

The biggest problem, as always, is Cuomo’s lyrics. Somewhere around Make Believe, he decided to forego any complexity in his words, and since then, they’ve all been at around a fifth grade level. Here’s a quick test for you. At one point in “Ruling Me,” Cuomo sings, “We first met in the lunchroom, my ocular nerve went, Pop! Zoom!” If you think this is funny and charming, you’ll be okay with most of Hurley. I think it walks that clever/stupid line David St. Hubbins was talking about. If you think that lyric is retarded, you probably should stay away from “Smart Girls.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: “Where did all these smart girls come from? Someone tell me how to get me some!”

There’s no song here that better illustrates Rivers Cuomo’s tumble into inanity than “Where’s My Sex?” It’s an entire song inspired by his young daughter’s inability to say the word “socks,” and it wastes its kickass riff with lyrics like this: “I can’t go outside without my sex, it’s cold outside and my toes get wet…” I’m sure Cuomo giggled his way through this in the studio, but it’s just jaw-droppingly lame, especially on repeat listens.

But I have to say, like Raditude, this one definitely invites those repeat listens. It would be easy to think Cuomo is kidding, or wasting his potential, but I think he’s at that stage in his life where he just wants to have fun. Hurley finds him sharing that Weezer joy with as many people as he can – the whole Jackass crew shouts along to first single “Memories,” and appears in the video – and the resulting record, while it stumbles here and there, is a loose and limber ball of fun. On first listen, I liked about half of it, but after a few spins, I think Hurley is a perfectly imperfect modern Weezer record.

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While preparing to review the new self-titled album from Interpol, I went back and listened to their whole catalog. And I came to a startling conclusion, one I’m sure very few others share: their celebrated debut, Turn On the Bright Lights, is the worst Interpol album.

It’s muddy, it’s directionless, and it contains only a couple of songs. Not just good songs, but songs. Paul Banks sounds unmoored, given no melodies to work with, and the band in general sounds uninspired. For some reason, though, this album is considrerd the benchmark for Interpol, the height they never hit again. I don’t get it. I think they immediately improved, vastly, with Antics, and while Our Love to Admire isn’t quite as good, it does get more ambitious, and parts of it work very well. The accepted wisdom is that Bright Lights is the pinnacle, but I think even Banks’ solo album as Julian Plenti is better.

All that is my way of saying that my view on Interpol, the band’s return to shapeless, vibe-y semi-songs, is probably not going to jibe with the majority. Even so, I like it more than Bright Lights, still the winner and world champion worst Interpol record. This is the band’s first for Matador since their debut, and their last album with bassist Carlos Dengler, who left shortly after its completion. Perhaps it’s subconscious, but the bass work is right up front in the mix, and sounds excellent. The overall sound is crisp and clear, and when these songs work, they sound great.

Unfortunately, that’s not too often. Opener “Success” is the template, a mid-tempo dirge that stays in the same little box for its entire running time. With minor exceptions, these songs are a conscious return to the “classic” Interpol style – somewhat creepy, atmospheric, intertwining snaky guitar lines with agile bass runs, and few memorable melodies. Not only are they not doing anything new here, they’ve backslid, trying to erase the progress of the last two records. Sonically, that’s not the case – there are keyboards all over this thing, and big, big walls of sound. But when it comes to songwriting, they’re back where they started.

Only one of these songs is truly great, and you’ve probably already heard it. “Barricade” begins in a nondescript way, with a repeated guitar figure and a thumping bass line, but when it slams into the chorus, it’s one of those involuntary-fist-pump moments. Banks shifts that inimitable tenor into overdrive, and the band follows suit. “Barricade” is a tour de force, one of Interpol’s finest, which makes the more solemn second half all the more dispiriting. The final two songs just peter out, not making any impression at all.

As I said, though, my opinion probably isn’t going to match up with the majority. If you still think Turn On the Bright Lights is the brass ring for which Interpol should be reaching, you may like the self-titled album more than I did. Me, I liked hearing them write compelling choruses, songs with bite, songs with left turns and energy and verve. There are precious few of those on Interpol, and I think that’s a shame.

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Who woulda thunk it – Robert Plant has nicely transitioned into a dignified elder statesman.

Yes, the man who once yelped “squeeze my lemon until the juice runs down my leg” is now, at age 62, a calmer, almost regal interpreter of rock’s long history. It’s been an interesting thing to watch. Plant garnered some well-deserved respect with Raising Sand, his album of duets with Alison Krauss, and now seems determined to surround himself with collaborators who will treat his worn, yet still supple voice with an earthy respect.

So here’s Band of Joy, Plant’s ninth solo album, and he’s hooked up with venerated songwriter and Nashville legend Buddy Miller. You can’t get more earthy and respectful than that. Miller’s beautiful guitar is all over this album, and Plant’s voice matches it perfectly. You’d expect this pair to dig up some traditional songs and play them with dusty honesty, and they do – “Cindy, I’ll Marry You Some Day” and “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down” are etched into the pages of history, and Plant and Miller do them gorgeous justice.

But they take on some surprises here as well – songs by Los Lobos (“Angel Dance”), Richard Thompson (“House of Cards”) and the late, great Townes Van Zandt (“Harm’s Swift Way”). Every one is performed with reverence. Perhaps the biggest shock comes in the form of two songs from Low’s The Great Destroyer, “Silver Rider” and “Monkey.” They certainly stand out here amidst the folk songs and pretty laments, but they’re marvelous. “Silver Rider,” particularly, is a beautiful ocean of rippling guitar, over which Plant sings like an angel.

With all that, I think my favorite thing here is the stomping take on “You Can’t Buy My Love,” written by Bobby and Billy Babineaux and popularized by Barbara Lynn in 1965. Buddy Miller just tears the roof off, ripping through one snorting lead line after another. And yet, when Plant and Miller take it down, and tackle more ethereal pieces, the results are just as striking. “Harm’s Swift Way” is lovely, all acoustics and bendy pedal steels, and “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down” is a far cry from the original (and Michael Roe’s recent version), riding a minor-key banjo and a cavernous bass drum into folksy bliss.

There’s just nothing bad about Band of Joy. It’s taken Robert Plant a long time to get to the point where a record like this sounds authentic coming from him, but it does. He’s taken his voice down many a dusty road, and each of those experiences has shaped it into the fine, weathered instrument it is today. He’s ready for these songs now, in a way he wouldn’t have been 30, 20 or even 10 years ago. He’s earned the respect due him with Band of Joy, and I hope he stays on this path for a long time to come.

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Next week, some things I didn’t get to this week, like the Walkmen, the Vaselines and Brandon Flowers, along with some new stuff, like Serj Tankian. 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.