So I’m old.

Next Thursday, I will be 34. I sort of set milestones in my life by the famous people I’ve outlived, and on Tuesday, I will have outlived Jesus. (At least, in his human incarnation, and depending on who you ask.) It was strange enough passing Jimi Hendrix, but now I’ve outlived the son of God, apparently.

If not for my big-kid lifestyle – I write for a living, I eat sugary cereals, I still spend an unhealthy percentage of my annual income on music and comic books – I would feel creaky and ancient. Some days I do anyway, and it takes longer to dust the cobwebs off and get rolling in the morning. You certainly won’t find me staying up too late, and it’s been a while since I slept in a train station, or got kicked out of Denny’s. I have a semi-respectable, semi-adult life, and I’m not sure how it happened.

But every once in a while, I try to convince myself I’m not quite mummified just yet by taking on an adventure. Granted, these are small-scale adventures, nothing like the ones the withered corpse of Indiana Jones tackles in that godawful new movie. But they’re adventures nonetheless, and I’m happy that occasionally, I still have the impulsive nature and energy of my younger self.

Twice in the last two weeks, I’ve driven long distances to see concerts in cities I’ve never been to. And since both involve music, I figure they’re fair game for this column. So let me tell you about them.

First, I trekked four hours or so to see Jandek in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At some point, I’m going to have to devote a column or two to Jandek, who has been the most fascinating enigma in music for the last 30 years. I first got into him by watching the amazing Jandek on Corwood documentary. Jandek released his first album in 1978, and the documentary came out in 2004. Between those two dates, the man never played live, and only gave one confirmable interview, while releasing about 40 albums.

That’s right, 40 albums. Four years later, he’s up to 53.

This appeals to my collector’s nature something fierce, and to my sense of the bizarre in music. I’m always looking for a good story, and for a sound I’ve never heard before, and Jandek provides both. His music, such as it is, will also make all but the most tolerant and open-minded music fans run for the door, and even those people will have a hard time explaining or justifying what he does as any kind of art. Nothing in his 53-album catalog adequately answers the question of whether he’s just putting everyone on, playing a massive art-school prank. Only the sheer size of the catalog and the 30-year commitment to this sound and vision make an effective counter-argument.

Here is how I describe Jandek to people. Imagine you are six years old. Your mom gives you an acoustic guitar for Christmas, and you pick it up for the first time, failing to tune it, and strum a few non-chords. Do that for a while, randomly, and atonally moan some lyrics over it, and if you’re the average six-year-old, you’ll think you’ve written a song.

Now imagine you’re 65 years old, angry and bitter about your life. You’re still playing guitar and moaning over it, but you haven’t gotten any better at it since you were six. You’ve just learned how to randomly pluck strings a little more adeptly. That’s Jandek. He plays ghostly, improvised death-blues about how terrible his life has become, and he does it over and over and over again.

Of course, no one would listen to Jandek if that were all he offered, but that’s only part of the story. Here’s the thing – I don’t know how he does it, but Jandek’s music most often strikes me as the loneliest sound in the world. It’s a gaping black hole of despair, the soundtrack for the minutes before death, a chilling existential vacuum with no light, no joy whatsoever. And for me, that’s captivating. I’ve talked before about the inverse relationship between musical skill and emotional impact. Jandek is all impact, because he has no skill. In the absence of any melody, any structure, any real music, what you get is a direct line to the man’s black soul.

In 1978, the Representative from Corwood Industries, as he likes to be known, released Ready for the House under the name The Units. From all indications, the man who would soon be Jandek had not quite figured out yet that he could use his left hand to change the pitch of the strings on his guitar. It’s atonal, untuned open chord strumming for 45 minutes, with spectral moaning on top. And it’s mesmerizing, if you have the patience for it. Jandek then released another six albums of the same stuff before diverging off into random garage-punk for a while, finally returning to his acoustic meanderings with 1993’s Twelfth Apostle.

The twists and turns of the Jandek catalog are many, although each is intangibly identifiable as the work of the Corwood rep. (Every one of the man’s 53 records so far has been self-released, on his own Corwood label.) He’s done spoken-word records, he’s played the electric guitar, the bass, the fretless bass, and the piano, all of them pretty much the same way – a searching, plunking, random quest for feeling and vibe, not notes or chords. Each album is its own endurance test, but taken as a whole, the pre-2004 catalog is a marathon of frayed nerves and tested patience. It’s also kind of awesome.

Then, in 2004, Jandek did something his (small) legion of fans never expected – he played live. He showed up at the Instal Festival in Glasgow, unannounced, and tore through a 60-minute set of new (meaning made up on the spot) material with a bassist and a drummer. Many couldn’t believe it was actually Jandek, but soon Corwood released the Glasgow Sunday CD and DVD, proving it. Since then, he’s played live about 35 times, in random places around the world, and seven of those shows so far are available to buy.

They’re all strikingly different, both from each other and from the catalog as a whole. On Glasgow Monday, Jandek plays piano while that same bassist and drummer provide coloring – the concert is a single piece called “The Cell,” with a running lyrical theme. He does the same on Manhattan Tuesday, playing an electric keyboard while a guitarist, a drummer and a bassist add atmosphere. That 90-minute piece is called “Afternoon of Insensitivity,” and is my favorite Jandek album right now.

So you never know what to expect from a Jandek show. Sometimes he plays the guitar, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes there are other musicians, and sometimes he goes it alone. In fact, sometimes there are lyrics, and sometimes there aren’t. Every show is made up on the night, so it’s all new material. Jandek has continued to release studio albums, solo recordings with him on guitar or bass, but these pale in comparison to the live records – they’re in monochrome, while the live records are in full, surprising color.

I had no idea what I would get from my first Jandek live experience. The concert took place at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater on the University of Michigan campus – it holds about 600 people, and it was full at the start of the show. The curtain rose, and there was the Rep himself, thin and gaunt, dressed all in black with his trademark black hat, and playing a fretless bass. He was accompanied by a harpsichord player, a trumpeter, and an interpretive dancer, who really only added an air of bullshit pretentiousness to the whole thing. The show was two hours long, and the band played 10 new songs.

So, okay, I have to start here. In the history of bass playing, no one in the world has ever played bass like Jandek does. His right hand is perpetually curled into a claw shape, and he just… whacks at it. Randomly, with no rhyme or reason. Just hits the strings with his curled fingers, while his left hand moves as if possessed up and down the neck. He wasn’t playing anything in particular, just looking for a vibe, and the other musicians had to keep up – the only way they knew a song had ended, for instance, was to listen for when Jandek stopped playing.

The other musicians were terrific. The harpsichord player went for random accents, mostly on the low end, to keep the eerie atmosphere, while the trumpeter played long, mournful notes, as if accompanying a funeral at sea. The dancer occasionally added wordless backing vocals, and they truly added to the feel of the show. The songs were about loneliness, alcohol and death, of course – Jandek’s first line was, “I’m just a piece of trash,” delivered in his guttural, atonal moan. He kept his vocals low and spooky throughout, and the overall effect was hypnotic.

Not for everyone, of course. Between every song, 20 or 30 people would get up and leave – the show was free, after all, and many attended out of curiosity, only to be met by turgid, difficult, lengthy music with seemingly no purpose behind it. I had to laugh when, in the ninth song or so, Jandek came out with this line: “You’ve all been bamboozled. It doesn’t mean anything.” He could have been talking right to the audience, and I think just about everyone missed it.

Does it mean anything? Is Jandek playing the longest, most sustained practical joke in music history? Or is this just how music sounds to him? The man can’t play, in the traditional sense, and he can’t sing either. But in the world of Jandek, these things don’t matter – in fact, skill is an impediment, a drawback. One of my favorite moments of the Jandek on Corwood documentary is when music critic Gary “Pig” Gold compares Jandek’s playing to Eric Clapton’s. He concludes by saying Clapton couldn’t play the way Jandek does.

“I love Eric Clapton,” he says. “But he’s no Jandek.”

I have come to think that this is no prank, no put-on. What you hear when you listen to Jandek is a distillation of how music sounds to him. I think this partially because 30 years is an awfully long time to pretend to be anything you’re not. But I also think this because his sound has remained oddly consistent. If you do anything for 30 years, you’re bound to get better at it, but for all appearances, Jandek hasn’t. I think a lot of what people take as ineptness is actually on purpose, a carefully defined yet chaotic noise.

I could be dead wrong, of course, but there was one small detail of the Ann Arbor show that convinced me I’m not. As Jandek played his rumbling, random bass lines, beholden to no key or time signature, his right foot tapped along in perfect 4/4 time, as if he were counting it out. The tapping had nothing to do with what was coming out of his amp, but there it was, and this small detail has convinced me that the noise he creates makes perfect sense to his ears. That makes it worth the effort to make it make sense to mine.

In about two years, give or take, I’ll be able to experience this show again when it comes out on CD and DVD. I’m sure there will be more than a dozen other Jandek albums in between, and many more afterwards. I’m on board as long as he wants to keep pumping them out. Would I recommend his work to anyone else? Probably not, unless you have a strong stomach for atonality and black, inky despair. But I’m hooked. Baffled, puzzled and flabbergasted, but hooked.

Should you want to try Jandek’s stuff, the best place to start is Seth Tisue’s site here. The Rep has no site of his own, and you can only get his work from him through the mail, by writing the same Houston post office box he’s maintained for 30 years. Some stores carry Jandek albums, but not many.

I owe a special thanks to longtime correspondent and friend Erin Kennedy, whom I finally met on my Ann Arbor trip. She graciously offered her floor for me to sleep on, so I wouldn’t have to drive back four hours in the rain. Her apartment is just a little bit smaller than this room I’m in now, typing this, so I’m grateful she offered the small amount of space she has. Thanks, E. Meeting you was fun.

Next week is my birthday week, but instead of taking a hiatus, I’m going to give you the second of my two adventure stories, involving an old friend and a band who hadn’t played in 10 years. After that, we’ll have reviews of Weezer, Aimee Mann, Sloan, Supergrass, Coldplay and many others. Thanks for sticking around and indulging an old man.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’ve been a King’s X fan since junior high school.

I have my old bass-playing buddy Chris Callaway to thank for getting me into them. Callaway and I were in a couple of amazingly bad bands together, and when we weren’t talking about how our four-track recordings would land us on the cover of Rolling Stone within the year, we were talking about other people’s music. And while I stayed more on the soft end of the spectrum – Invisible Touch was rock to me then, before my teenage metalhead days – Chris gravitated towards the hard stuff.

King’s X was certainly heavy. Their 1988 debut album, the C.S. Lewis-inspired Out of the Silent Planet, was a tough, raw record – the Texas trio had obviously grown up listening to Rush, but they had thunderous, explosive grooves, and in Doug Pinnick, they had a bassist with a down-tuned, subterranean tone and a soulful metal voice like Corey Glover of Living Colour.

I liked the heavy, of course, but what really drew me to King’s X was the sense of atmosphere. Guitarist Ty Tabor painted landscapes with his delay and reverb pedals, when he wasn’t smashing things to bits, and all three members harmonized like the Beatles, adding an ethereal shimmer without sacrificing the “power” part of “power trio.” On two subsequent records, Gretchen Goes to Nebraska and Faith Hope Love, they worked more Rush into their sound, becoming almost prog-metalers, but even when they stripped that back on the self-titled fourth album, it was still indisputably King’s X.

I thought they were one of the best bands in the world. When “Over My Head” and “It’s Love” became minor hits, I was overjoyed. I would pimp out my battered King’s X tapes to anyone who would give them a chance. I would listen to the repetitive, excruciatingly long title track of Faith Hope Love and try to convince myself it was genius, not a misstep. I was disappointed by the fourth album, although I still love songs like “Prisoner” and “Lost in Germany.” But I knew they’d rebound and get back to knocking me out soon.

But a funny thing happened – they didn’t. I don’t know who Sam Taylor is, other than the producer of the first four King’s X albums, but when the band split with him, Taylor seemed to take a lot of their focus and direction with him. I love Dogman, their fifth album – it was laid down by Brendan O’Brien, and the sound is deep and heavy and dry. The atmospheres are missing, the harmonies are scaled back, but the grooves are immense. It’s a real power trio metal album.

From there, though, the band fell apart. They left Atlantic Records after the lackluster Ear Candy, signed with Metal Blade, and seemingly stopped caring about what went out with their name on it. I’m a King’s X fan, so I stuck with them, even through the dismal Manic Moonlight. I bought every half-assed, tossed-off side project and solo album. I saw the band live – they were amazing. I went home and listened to the albums, and they sucked. I couldn’t reconcile it.

The problem, in retrospect, was a complete lack of focus. The trio produced the four albums between 1998 and 2003 by themselves, with no one to tell them that their ideas were half-baked. Want proof? Pick up 2005’s Ogre Tones, their comeback record on Inside Out. For the first time in nearly a decade, King’s X picked a producer – old-school metal guy Michael Wagener – to work with, and the result was a tight, driven, groovy record of near-classic King’s X songs.

I can’t even describe how much I enjoyed Ogre Tones – after wandering in the wilderness for years, my band was back, and if they hadn’t quite ascended the same peaks they scaled in their younger days, they were at least trying to make the climb. Here was Tabor’s dark/light guitar sound, here were the glorious harmonies, and here was Doug Pinnick singing his little heart out, instead of mumbling like a bored narcoleptic. It was good. It was very good.

But the first comeback album is easy. It’s all about the second one – that’s the one that cements the turnaround. There’s a lot of pressure around an album like that, especially for a band like King’s X. They had to prove their first knockout punch in 10 years wasn’t a fluke. You can see why it took them three years to get the follow-up together.

And here it is. It’s called XV, for no good reason – it’s their 12th studio album, and the only way you can count their catalog and get to 15 is if you include their 1997 best-of. The good news right out of the gate is that they worked with Wagener again – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The good news seemed to keep on coming with the single, “Alright” – it’s a monster, a riff-laden call-and-response singalong that’s just right at 2:59.

Well, the album as a whole doesn’t quite pack the same punch. In fact, the first time through, I felt a bit let down. Ogre Tones was the sound of the band coming alive again, and XV is the sound of them settling in. The tone is still thick and powerful, and the three members still sound like they’re enjoying working together again. But XV layers in a level of mid-tempo introspection that blunts its initial attack. It’s a grower of an album, and I’m liking it more and more each time I hear it, but it sounds more like the album they should have done next year, after one more full-throttle winner.

The album opens with a couple of these not-quite-slow pieces. The bluesy “Pray” kicks things off with the clearest statement of lost faith yet from these guys – they used to be unfairly lumped in with the Christian rock scene, but in 1998, Pinnick came out, and since then, his lyrics have been about struggle, identity and a loss of trust in God. “If you think that Jesus has saved you, Mother Mary is waiting there for you, if you think that God has spoke to you, then don’t forget to pray for me,” Pinnick sings over a swaying groove. After a decade of writing songs like this, I think Pinnick’s finally hit upon the right way to say what he’s been feeling.

Second track “Blue” loses momentum, though, with its loping beat and not-quite-there chorus. “Repeating Myself” is a full-on Ty Tabor ballad, and while I love his trademark clean tone, it doesn’t exactly move the album forward like a bullet. At this point, you’ll have to reconcile yourself to the idea that King’s X has delivered a slower, deeper-sounding record, and once you do, you’ll start to enjoy XV. In fact, on later listens, I’m finding I don’t like the rave-ups like “Rocket Ship” and “Go Tell Somebody” as much as the more considered pieces, like the Gaskill-sung “Julie” and “I Just Want to Live.”

The lyrics are straightforward, almost to a fault – “Move” is an entire song about not overusing your credit cards, and “Go Tell Somebody” is literally an exhortation to spread the word about the band. But sometimes it works, as when Pinnick repeats “They force their ethical standards on the world” over the most atmospheric part of “Move.”

And if we’re picking favorites, I have to go with a Tabor ballad this time – “I Don’t Know” is a sweet apology and a statement of bewilderment, with a lovely solo. I can see this as Tabor’s response to Pinnick’s “Pray,” his way of telling his friend he understands, and isn’t judging him. The song is the album’s heart and soul.

XV ends with a pair of bonus tracks that are just as good as anything on the album proper, particularly the mini-epic “Love and Rockets (Hell’s Screaming).” The album is nothing if not consistent, especially for a band that seemed so inconsistent for years. But is it good enough to solidify their triumphant return? Can we say with confidence that King’s X is back? I’m still not sure. XV is certainly leagues better than anything between Dogman and Ogre Tones, but it doesn’t quite match those twin pillars, and I’m torn between thinking that they’ve crafted a grower on purpose, or that they’re just old and tired.

But you know what? I honestly never thought we’d get a King’s X album as good as XV again, let alone Ogre Tones. This resurgence is an unlikely blessing, and I should count it. “If you like what you hear, then go tell somebody,” Pinnick sings in the waning moments of the album, and I think that’s what I’m going to do. With minor reservations, I like what I hear. And I’m telling somebody.

Next week, two stories about two concerts in two different states. And maybe the new Joy Electric.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

According to Billboard.com, Death Cab for Cutie’s Narrow Stairs is on track to debut at number one next week. So I guess it’s time to stop pretending they’re a scrappy little indie band.

God knows the band has moved on from its lo-fi days on Barsuk Records. Back then, they soared on sweet melodies and Ben Gibbard’s pure-as-the-driven-snow voice, and they needed little else. Their albums were never toiled over, but sounded effortless… and, I must say, kind of cute. They were the sweetest, most poetic band of the 1990s with the word “death” in their name.

They were also on a steady climb towards greatness, and they achieved it in 2005 with Plans, their Atlantic Records debut. This isn’t to dismiss their previous efforts, particularly the ambitious Transatlanticism, but everything clicked on Plans. It was an album-length meditation on growing old and dying, and on what we cling to and what we leave behind.

It was also heart-rendingly gorgeous, and deceptively small – one of the album’s best moments, “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” contained nothing but Gibbard’s voice and guitar. And it could make a grown man weep. (Not that I know first-hand or anything…) Even the bigger moments, like the epic “What Sarah Said,” concentrated on small points in time – in that case, the chilling moments before death, from the point of view of a friend stuck in the hospital waiting room.

By now, most of you have heard “I Will Possess Your Heart,” the eight-and-a-half-minute first single from Narrow Stairs, and you know not to expect Plans II. “Heart” is, at its core, a very simple song about stalking, but it’s preceded by nearly five minutes of repetitive, bass-driven instrumental buildup, a striking artistic excess for a band whose middle name has always been restraint. It’s a song that wouldn’t fit on any of Death Cab’s previous albums.

And oddly enough, it doesn’t fit on this one either. But then, none of the songs fit together, or at least, not nearly as well as Plans might lead you to expect. Narrow Stairs isn’t an album-length statement, it’s 11 unrelated songs sequenced next to each other, often uncomfortably. It’s a record for the iTunes age – each song is exquisitely crafted, using oodles of that major label money, so that whichever one the casual listener decides to download, he’ll get a complete experience. But none of the songs sound anything like one another, and as an album, it suffers from attention deficit disorder.

The first time through, Narrow Stairs is a jarring listen. But give it time, and it will sink in. These may be 11 unrelated songs, but they are 11 of the best unrelated songs Gibbard and company have ever written. And the physical sound of this album is unlike anything they’ve ever done – just the first song, “Bixby Canyon Bridge,” sports half a dozen sounds never heard on a Death Cab album before, from the Jonny Greenwood guitars in the opening moments to the explosive static near the end. In five minutes, it jumps from a sweet 6/8 ballad to a staccato rocker, to a furious instrumental workout, to white noise, to a sweet coda.

The album never gets quite that adventurous again, but for its 44-minute running time, it flits back and forth between old-school melodic pop and fascinating sonic experiments. “I Will Possess Your Heart,” obviously, belongs to the second category, and it’s equal parts maddening and mesmerizing. (When Gibbard sings “You’ve got to spend some time with me,” I always want to reply, “What do you think I’ve been doing for the last five and a half minutes?”) To counter that, the band sequenced two catchy, classic Death Cab tunes right after it – “No Sunlight” is delightful, perhaps the happiest song about losing one’s ideals I’ve heard, and “Cath…” is among the band’s finest straight-ahead pop songs.

The first half of the album is schizophrenic, but once you’re past the orchestrated interlude “You Can Do Better Than Me,” it takes flight – the second half is practically flawless. Gibbard is in fine lyrical form on “Grapevine Fires,” a beautiful electric piano ballad about watching your life burn. He sticks with some pretty thin metaphors on this album, especially on “Your New Twin-Sized Bed,” but that song is so sweet that it hardly matters. It’s the only one here that would have fit nicely on Plans, and guitarist Chris Walla (who has produced every Death Cab album to date) lays down some snaky lines and then stays out of the way.

My favorite here is “Long Division,” which kicks off with an almost Krautrock beat and some slippery bass, but then evolves into the most hummable chorus on the record. The metaphor here is strong as well – “He’d sworn not to be what he’d been before, to be the remainder…” It’s fascinating, though, that just as Death Cab has made its most complex and musically rewarding album, Gibbard has resorted to his most on-the-nose lyrics, needing almost no interpretation.

“Pity and Fear” takes the band’s sound to its farthest-out place, slipping in some exotic percussion and an almost Eastern melody, and its final minutes rock harder than anything else in Death Cab’s catalog. As if to counterbalance that, they conclude this strange and wonderful album with “The Ice is Getting Thinner,” a simple, sad song floating on Gibbard’s voice and a brittle electric guitar, and nothing else. It’s the mark of a band that doesn’t know quite where they want to go next, so they’ve chosen to go everywhere.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. But while Narrow Stairs is leagues beyond Plans musically, and Chris Walla has turned in his finest production work to date, the album just doesn’t carry the emotional weight of its predecessor. It’s like a collection of short stories rather than a novel, and while each story is satisfying, the book as a whole feels like a grab bag.

Of course, that all boils down to this: all the songs on Narrow Stairs are terrific. Gibbard, Walla and company strike out for undiscovered countries more than once here, and it’s impressive how little of this album sounds like Death Cab for Cutie to these ears. And yet, there’s that indefinable element, that signature stamp – all of this album sounds like Death Cab for Cutie somehow. This is Death Cab choosing a new direction by choosing 11 of them, but as superb as this story collection is, I’m looking forward to digging into their next novel.

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Sometimes, I listen to CDs on my own schedule. And sometimes, those CDs take over my stereo system, blocking out all else as my obsession with them plays out. I’m in the middle of an obsession with The Golden Hour, the new album from Firewater.

As a journalist, I always like it when my subjects provide me with a hook to hang a story on. The Golden Hour has a monster hook, and here it is. Firewater is Tod Ashley, who goes by Tod A. He used to be in a great melodic-industrial band called Cop Shoot Cop, but for the past 13 years, he’s been exploring the one-world-music philosophy under his new name. Over five previous albums, Firewater brought together disparate musical forms under one umbrella – jazz, klezmer, gypsy, Eastern music, anything you could think of.

But for all that time, Ashley had been bringing those musical cultures to him in the good ol’ U.S.A. For The Golden Hour, he went to them – he spent three years traveling Israel, India, Pakistan and Turkey, working with local musicians. And when I say working, I don’t mean he assembled bands in each country and jammed. I mean he found local musicians and recorded their parts on his laptop, then edited them all together into a cohesive whole.

There are a number of interesting effects of this working method. For one, it means that musicians from countries that hate each other will find their musical contributions sitting next to each other on the same song. It’s not uncommon here for an Indian percussionist and a Pakistani guitarist to play on the same tune, having never met one another. It’s the one-world-music philosophy at its finest.

For another, though, it means these songs do not ape the musical traditions of the countries Ashley visited. The songs on The Golden Hour blend everything together, and then build a rock record out of the resulting mixture. Take “This Is My Life,” one of my favorites – the instrumentation here includes a tumba, a chimta, a dholki, a harmonium and something called “cannibal drums,” but man, the whole thing just rocks. It’s a song Cop Shoot Cop could have done, with electronic beats and heavy guitars, but the high stringed instruments and furious percussion sound somehow heavier.

The whole album is like this. I can’t even pick out single styles – there’s some reggae, some jazz, some Middle Eastern flavors, some surf guitar, some ramshackle organ, a few horn sections, some dancehall drum loops, and on and on. Holding it together is Ashley’s rough and tumble voice, always in English, always sounding somewhat disgusted with what he sees going on around him. Ashley has said he originally left America because he was sick of looking at George W. Bush’s face, and the lyrics here certainly bear him out – it’s like hearing representatives from five countries come together to flip off the White House.

“Hey Clown” is the most obvious example. “These are the worst times that I ever knew, and all my troubles are because of you,” Ashley spits over a carnival-esque background, before threatening to “put you in the ground” and “piss on your parade.” (The only thing keeping him from being arrested here is that he doesn’t mention Bush by name.) It’s the angriest piece here, but elsewhere, Ashley inhabits characters searching the world for kindness, and a place to call home.

Mostly, though, The Golden Hour is about Ashley’s trip halfway around the world, and the emotions it stirred up. “Borneo” is a song about stepping away, a perfect kickoff to this album, and the concluding trilogy is about returning. “Weird to Be Back” is exactly what it sounds like, and the finale, “Three Legged Dog,” includes the lines, “I’m still looking for that something to make my life complete.” Ashley left restless and angry, and he returned the same way, although he’s full of new insights. “A Place Not So Unkind” is the album’s emotional center, Ashley’s observations sympathetic and crystalline: “Faces melting like wax in the heat, people dying like dogs in the street, and love is a word in the sand that a wave wipes away with her hand…”

The Golden Hour is Tod Ashley’s masterpiece, and one of the finest proofs I’ve ever heard that all music is one music. It’s also one of the best albums of 2008 so far, and it still hasn’t released its hold on my CD player – whenever I’m not reviewing something new, this album finds its way back into rotation. It’s addictive, fascinating, brilliant, and joyfully pissed off, but above all, it flat-out rocks. Here, try it for yourself. Start with “This Is My Life,” and go from there.

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Next week, King’s X, and the last of Peter Davison’s Doctor Who stories.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

There will probably be better album titles this year than Elvis Costello’s Momofuku. But I doubt any of them will be as much fun to say.

Momofuku. Momo. Fuku.

Apparently, the album is named after Momofuku Ando, the inventor of the Ramen noodle. Here’s what I don’t understand: you have a great name like Momofuku, and you saddle your enduring creation with a pedestrian name like Ramen. That’s just a shame. I bet college kids would eat even more of the stuff if it were called Momofuku. Can you see that? Momofuku, 10 for a dollar. “What are you eating?” “Chicken-flavored Momofuku.”

Thankfully, Costello knows a good name when he hears it. His solemn dedication to Ando in the liner notes is priceless: “Remembering Momofuku Ando (1910-2007). He fed those who study.”

So the title is awesome. But what’s the music like? Costello is one of the few long-running musicians about whom that question can honestly be asked each time out. I’m one of those freaks who likes everything he’s released – I don’t think Costello has made a bad record, and considering that Momofuku is his 27th or so, that’s saying something. I enjoy being surprised, and I like not knowing just what Costello is going to give me until I press play. Will this be another orchestral affair? Will we get chamber-pop, or country-rock, or jazz, or something completely different?

That diversity annoys some of Costello’s critics, and I can’t figure that out. I like tuneful, punky rock as much as anyone – honest, I do, especially when it’s as literate and thoughtful as Costello’s rock usually is. But if the man turns out a soulful New Orleans pop record with Allen Toussaint, or a song cycle with the Brodsky Quartet, and he can pull it off, more power to him, I say. There’s a contingent of Costello fans that believes his first three albums with the Attractions (My Aim is True, This Year’s Model and Armed Forces) are his apex, and with every record, they wish he’d return to that angry, energetic, we-did-this-in-a-weekend sound.

For the most part, those people will get their wish on Momofuku. It’s raucous, loud, bitter, sneering, and full of depressing, angry stories. It’s also very good – some have called it his best album in 25 years, and while I won’t go that far, it’s certainly the best “classic” Costello album since Brutal Youth. That’s 14 years, so, you know, not bad.

Momofuku is Costello’s fourth album with his new backing band, the Imposters – basically the Attractions, but with Davey Faragher on bass instead of Bruce Thomas. The other three have been varying shades of uncomfortable, as if Costello, now 54, had tried to fit into a younger man’s suit with little success. That’s not the case here – Momofuku is warm and comfy, as if Elvis had never stopped making this kind of music. The recording sounds quick and dirty, and mostly live, and there’s a loose party feel to the whole thing, helped along by a bevy of guest stars, including Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis, Jonathan Rice, and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos.

Opening track “No Hiding Place” is just awesome, a rant about anonymity with a killer melody and some sharp-as-knives lyrics. In fact, Costello’s lyrics here are better than they’ve been in some time, full of wizened cynicism – I’d say it’s a product of his age, but it’s really a throwback to bitter classics like Armed Forces and Spike. “Harry Worth” is vintage Costello, a sad yet judgmental tale of wasted romance, with great lines like this one: “She wishes he was mute instead of just dumb.”

The songs are similarly solid – there’s none of the meandering formlessness of The Delivery Man here, and none of the strained rage of When I Was Cruel. Just listen to the Imposters slam through the deceptively simple “Stella Hurt,” complete with some awesome electric guitar work by the man himself. Check out Steve Nieve’s old-school organ bits on “American Gangster Time.” Dig the too-short acoustic whirlygig that is “Drum and Bone.” And marvel at how well Jenny Lewis harmonizes with Costello on most of the tracks here.

Even when Momofuku veers from straight-ahead melodic rock, it’s very good. “Mr. Feathers” could have fit nicely on Mighty Like a Rose, with its thudding piano and soaring melody, and the two songs co-written with country luminaries (Roseanne Cash on “Song With Rose” and Loretta Lynn on “Pardon Me, Madam, My Name is Eve”) are sweet and sour delights. But Costello wisely returns to the garage-rock for the closer, “Go Away” – this song, and most of the album, has such an organic feel to it that it’s little wonder Costello chose to release this album on vinyl first.

So, best album in 25 years? Not quite – I like a lot of his stylistic diversions better than this. But Momofuku is certainly up there. If it’s not a return to form, it’s certainly a return to a certain kind of form – this is the best rock and roll record Costello has made in a long, long time. This is no tired attempt to recapture his youth. Costello has genuinely made a rock record on par with some of his younger-days classics, and if you’re one of those fans pining for another This Year’s Model, this is probably the closest you’re ever going to get.

Plus, how can you resist that title? Momofuku!

* * * * *

Another week, another Nine Inch Nails album.

It certainly seems that way, at least. No sooner do I receive my CD copy of Ghosts I-IV in the mail, here’s Trent Reznor back with another full-length record. It’s called The Slip, and the hook this time is that it’s available for free, right now, here.

Again, I’ll say more about this when I have a hard copy in hand – the CD will be released in July. But if you’re afraid this is another lengthy instrumental excursion, or a similar left turn, let me ease your mind: The Slip is an honest-to-God new Nine Inch Nails album. It’s loud, complex, difficult, angry and sexy, and it features Reznor in his familiar guitars-and-screaming mode for most of it.

In fact, this may be the loudest NIN record since Broken, all told. There’s a live band feel to songs like “1,000,000” and the single, “Discipline,” and “Letting You” is skull-splittingly heavy – the fastest and heaviest thing Reznor’s done since probably “Gave Up.” He gets more complicated on guitar epics like “Echoplex” and “Head Down,” which actually sound like Sonic Youth in places. For six tracks, The Slip is excellent.

Sadly, it falls apart somewhat from there. “Lights in the Sky” is lovely, a piano-vocal dirge that resists the temptation to go bigger. But the two instrumentals in a row don’t do much for the record’s momentum – “Corona Radiata” is overly long, and to follow it up with another wordless wonder is just wearying. (Adding to my disappointment is the great title of that second instrumental: “The Four of Us Are Dying.” I really wanted lyrics to go with that.) And “Demon Seed” is a bit of a weak closer, returning to the guitars-and-beats mania, but failing to cohere.

But hell, for the low, low price of free, this is a pretty good NIN record. And it’s been released under a Creative Commons license, which means anyone who wants to can remix it, re-post it, shoot video to accompany it, and distribute it any way they like, as long as they a) make no money and b) give full credit. I think Reznor is the highest-profile artist to embrace both free digital distribution of new work, and full listener interactivity with that new work. I’m excited to see where this goes.

More later.

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The producers of Doctor Who kicked off their show’s 20th season the same way they kicked off the 10th – with a story about Omega and the Time Lords. And like The Three Doctors before it, Arc of Infinity divides fan opinion to this day.

As the new series, now in its fourth season, continues to tease out little hints about the Doctor’s past, I’m struck at just how long it took the original series to give viewers anything on that score. By now it’s accepted that the Doctor is a Time Lord from Gallifrey, but in the beginning, he was a complete mystery, and the writers and producers kept that mystery alive for a long, long time.

Consider this: William Hartnell’s Doctor never once uttered the phrase “Time Lord.” Neither did Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, until his very last story – The War Games, which closed the sixth season. Even though we glimpsed it in that tale, it would be another five years before we heard the name of the Doctor’s home planet – not until The Time Warrior, the first story of season 11. We visited the still-unnamed Gallifrey in The Three Doctors, but we didn’t get a really good look at it until The Deadly Assassin, in season 13. That’s an awfully long wait for details about your central character.

The interesting thing is that when we finally do see Gallifreyan society, and meet the Time Lords, they’re… well, wankers.

The first time we meet them, in The War Games, they force the Doctor to regenerate and exile him to Earth for three seasons. They’re shadowy figures in The War Games, not at all what you’d expect of a society that produced the Doctor. They’re even worse in The Three Doctors – they’re weak and lazy and haughty. As the story opens, the Time Lords are under attack from Omega, who lives on the other side of a black hole and seems to be shooting crayon drawings of lightning bolts at Gallifrey. This somehow completely incapacitates the whole society, forcing them to break their own laws of time to bring the three incarnations of the Doctor together. Are they humble about it? Of course not, though they do free the Doc from exile at the end of the story.

I haven’t seen the next two Gallifrey stories, The Deadly Assassin and The Invasion of Time, for more than 20 years. But I remember the Time Lords leaving me with a bad impression – their society is corrupt and stupid, and they wear ridiculous robes and stand on ceremony way too much. They accuse the Doctor of murder in the first story, and rely on him to repel a Sontaran invasion in the second – I wonder just how Gallifrey has survived this long without the Doc there. They do make him Lord President, I guess, but that seems to be an honorary title, as the Doc doesn’t appear to acquire any new duties after his coronation.

That impression is confirmed by Arc of Infinity, which portrays the Time Lords as a stuffy, inefficient ruling class, quick to judge and riddled with corruption. In the first episode, a being made of anti-matter tries to merge with the Doctor. The process is unsuccessful, but the Time Lords can think of no other solution but to bring the Doc to Gallifrey and kill him before the creature tries again. (Anti-matter and matter together would make a pretty big bang – it’d wipe out everything, apparently.)

Arc of Infinity is a tale of political intrigue, as the Doctor and Nyssa try to discover which of the high council of Time Lords has betrayed him. The big bad is Omega, the forgotten Time Lord who discovered the secret of time travel, and was trapped in an anti-matter universe because of it. And the story also involves Tegan and her cousin’s friend running around Amsterdam for a while, finally crossing paths with the Doctor in the third episode.

For a while, it’s kind of a mess, but when it all comes together, it’s a good little story, and as usual, Peter Davison sells even the most ridiculous aspects of it. At various points, he’s disintegrated by a smoke machine and chased by a giant chicken, and he does so with a wonderful sense of bravery and fear. I would watch him in anything.

Arc is notable for a couple of things. First, there is Colin Baker, playing Commander Maxil. Baker, you may know, would go on to take over as the Doctor once Peter Davison left the role. Maxil is a complete prick – he shoots the Doctor at the end of the first episode, sneers through the rest of the story, and even when he turns out to be a good guy, you don’t quite trust or believe him. The same can be said for his Doctor, especially at the start of his tenure, so this story gives you an idea of what you’re in for.

The other is the finale, which finds the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan chasing Omega through the streets of Amsterdam. Most fans think this sequence goes on too long, and they may have a point. But for a story with such a grand scale, Arc of Infinity ends on a small, human, heartbreaking note. Omega has finally escaped the anti-matter universe, by growing himself a body made of matter – that body looks just like Peter Davison’s Doctor. And for a while, everything’s okay – he walks around Amsterdam, taking in the sunlight and the scenery, a free man.

But then it all goes wrong, and his body starts deteriorating, reverting to anti-matter. And you remember what happens when anti-matter meets matter, right? It sounds silly, but the chase through Amsterdam and the final scenes on the waterfront are genuinely moving, and when Omega is finally killed by the Doctor, the moment isn’t a victorious one. Davison, whose Doctor will not really show the weight of his run’s tragedies until the next season, conveys just what a sad waste Omega’s life has become, and gives the scene emotional heft.

All of you are going to go watch this now, and you’re going to think I’ve lost my little mind. But I like Arc of Infinity. Yes, it’s cheap-looking, and yes, the acting (by everyone not named Davison or Fielding) is atrocious, and yes, the music is godawful. But the story works for me, and it further demonstrates what a sad bunch of idiots the Time Lords are – we’ll see more of Gallifrey’s corruption in the epic Trial of a Time Lord in season 23, and then we never see them again, as far as I know.

I’m still plowing through my DVDs, but you’ll be happy to know my collection is officially up to date – I received Survival, the 159th and final Doctor Who story, in the mail last week. I have everything that’s available now, and I’m waiting for the other 82 stories to come out, just like all the other fans. (Next up is Beneath the Surface, a three-story box set with two Pertwees and a Davison.) Strangely, my fascination with this show hasn’t waned, even a year after I started collecting it. Here’s hoping it never does.

* * * * *

Next week, Death Cab for Cutie.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

“Singled Out” Department

So much music to talk about this time. Deep breath.

Let’s start with “Violet Hill,” the new Coldplay single. Haven’t heard it? You can get it for free right now here. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ready? Okay, I think what I like best about this single is it just isn’t a single at all. It starts with about 40 seconds of droning ambience, the signature of producer Brian Eno, before Chris Martin and his piano come marching in. Sounds like Coldplay, but the end result is anything but “Speed of Sound” – the song has a dirty, loose feel to it, and its very Coldplay hook (“If you love me, won’t you let me know”) is understated. Then the song ends with a lovely piano-vocal coda.

I think it’s a brilliant move to give this song away for free. It shows off just how different and cool Coldplay’s fourth album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends, is likely to be – it’s one of those cases in which the best ad for the album is probably going to be the album itself. I was interested in the record before hearing “Violet Hill,” but now I’m excited for it. And one thing I like best about the single is it sounds like part of a whole, an excerpt of a complete album statement. I can’t wait to hear the rest of it on June 17.

Other singles I’m excited about:

Joy Electric has released the title track from their new one, My Grandfather, the Cubist. It’s minimal and dance-y and memorable, just the way I like my Joy E. Go here.

And if you haven’t yet heard the eight-and-a-half-minute “I Will Possess Your Heart” from Death Cab for Cutie’s new record, Narrow Stairs, you really should: clicky. I’m back and forth on it – on the one hand, there’s no reason for this thing to be eight and a half minutes long, but on the other, it’s mesmerizing.

Okay, enough singles, on with the albums.

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“I Waited 11 Years for This?” Department

Most weeks, I kind of saunter down to the local record store. I’m often excited about the week’s new releases, but not enough to quicken my pace – I’ll get there eventually, you know? But there are some new albums that send me into a sprint, ones I have to have yesterday if not sooner.

Portishead’s Third was like that for me. I nearly pulled a muscle getting to the store this week. And now that I have it, and I’ve heard it a few times… well…

Let’s back up. First of all, it’s kind of odd that this thing exists at all. Portishead’s trio of Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley came out of nowhere in 1994 with a unique sound. I know it’s difficult to imagine, but back then, no one sounded like Portishead – by now the sparse, slow beats, samples and female vocals of their debut album, Dummy, have permeated pop music. They were sultry and spooky at the same time, when no one else was either one.

My initial reaction to Dummy was a sustained head-scratch. I felt like they just hadn’t finished it – like they’d sketched out these songs, and started to record them, and then got distracted by something else. A song like “Wandering Star” is just drums, one synth line and Gibbons’ smoky voice, and nothing else, and I found it empty instead of hypnotic. But I came around, especially after comparing Dummy to the 1997 self-titled follow-up, a fuller and stranger work that was even more off-putting.

I eventually got used to that record as well, so maybe, after a couple of years, I’ll know what to make of Third. It’s been 11 years since Portishead pretty much disappeared, refusing to reap the benefits of their revolutionary sound. Their absence has drawn deafening apathy – no one was clamoring for Third, and many were okay with the idea that the band had burned brightly and briefly. A new album was a complete surprise… but not as much as that album’s content.

As I said, I’ve heard Third a few times now. And I’m still perplexed by it.

To start with, there are no hooks. At all. Now, I don’t necessarily need singalongs to be a happy music fan, but I get the sense that everything on Third is deliberately obtuse and difficult, and par for the course with that mentality is a lack of memorable melodies. The album opener, “Silence,” starts with two minutes of abrasive acid jazz before coalescing around a couple of chords and Gibbons’ wandering vocal. And it repeats until the end – the sound is thick, full, almost live in places, and the song just stops mid-phrase at the five minute mark.

Next is “Hunter,” which starts off like Portishead – a loping jazz ballad, a smoky Gibbons vocal, a shadow of a chorus – but everything about it is off-kilter. Especially the pair of “On the Run”-style synth breaks that deliberately spoil the mood. The sound of this record is superb and unsettling, instruments panning in and out, reverb treatments giving those instruments unearthly auras, creepy multi-tracking on Gibbons’ voice. This is meticulously made – it’s exactly what they want, for some reason.

That reason is why I keep listening. I’m not sure what would possess Portishead to make an album like this. Multiple runs through it have put a few more pieces in place for me – the vocal line in “Nylon Smile,” for instance, just made my ears hurt the first time I heard it, but now I can sort of sense what Gibbons was going for. Likewise, “The Rip” now sounds ethereally beautiful, whereas at first I found it patchy and meandering, especially when the overpowering synths burst in halfway through.

But a lot of Third still confuses me. Take “Machine Gun,” a determinedly noisy headache that repeats its jackhammer drum beat into your skull for five minutes. Or try “Plastic,” which could have been a classic Portishead song if not for the what-the-fuck arrangement – elements of it keep spinning past your head, while the rug is pulled out from under your feet again and again. It’s a cacophony of crazy, like much of Third, and I find it equal parts dazzling and alienating.

Clearly, the Portishead trio wanted to make something that knocked their old sound on its ass, and they’ve done it. Like Dummy in 1994, this record is beholden to no current trend, and sounds like the work of no one else. In this case, I’m not sure that’s a good thing – you get through the entire 6:27 of the sandpaper-and-splinters “We Carry On,” and you tell me. I’ll keep plugging away at it, but by the end of the year, I predict that I’ll either put this in the top 10 list, or donate it to a library.

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“Stuff People Can’t Believe I Like” Department

I listen to a lot of music. No one style or artist does it for me completely, and while sometimes I’m in the mood for complex, cerebral head music, sometimes I’m ready to shut the ol’ brain off and just enjoy some dumb fun tunes. Particularly if they’re well-made and unpretentious.

You can see where I’d like Def Leppard, then. In many ways, the Sheffield quintet has been an essential part of the soundtrack to my life. I’m sure I heard “Rock of Ages” first, but Hysteria was the first album I bought. (I know, I know, just like everyone.) I remember the comic book video for “Women,” which naturally hooked me. And I remember loving the computerized, processed sound of much of the album – they sounded to me like the future of music, back when I was 13.

Here’s a funny story. My family was visiting my Uncle Bunky in Philadelphia around the time of the album’s release. Now, Bunky was a crusty old fellow, set in his ways, and liable to snap at you for the slightest thing. So my sister and I are listening to Def Leppard in his kitchen, and he walks in, listens for a second, and says this (I kid you not): “You call that music? Back in my day, we’d call that hysteria!” I took great joy in showing him the album cover.

Anyway, I’ve stuck with them ever since. The Hysteria-lite of Adrenalize didn’t quite measure up, but Retroactive was good. The Leps swung with the times on Slang, and as I was just nurturing my Nine Inch Nails fandom, I dug it. But I also loved the return to the classic sound, Euphoria. I’d never call Def Leppard one of the best bands on the planet, but they’ve never made an album I don’t like on some level.

The streak remains unbroken with Songs from the Sparkle Lounge, their 11th album. This one is pitched halfway between the classic rock sound of their covers album Yeah and the more metallic thud of Slang, and is the most live-band studio record they’ve made since… probably High and Dry. What does that all mean to you? Absolutely nothing. Sparkle Lounge is a 35-minute slab of enjoyable, melodic rock and roll, and if you like Leppard, you’ll like this.

The highlights include the singalong “Only the Good Die Young,” the fiery “Bad Actress,” and the ridiculous Queen-style epic ballad “Love.” The unquestionable lowlight is Tim McGraw’s vocal cameo on first single “Nine Lives,” but it’s over pretty quickly, so don’t fret. Otherwise, Sparkle Lounge is a long-haired dance of joy. I had fun listening to Leppard 20 years ago, and I have fun listening to them today. I’m not ashamed.

I’m usually not ashamed to be a Madonna fan, either, but have you seen the cover of her new one, Hard Candy? I bought it with a sense of furtive embarrassment, as if I had to get it under cover before anyone saw it.

Madonna’s a guilty pleasure, I’ll grant you, but I’ve rarely felt as guilty as I did buying Hard Candy, mostly because I knew it would suck. It’s a contractual obligation record, Madge’s last for Warner Bros. before her all-encompassing LiveNation deal kicks in. That means she probably didn’t try very hard, and a cursory glance at the contributors list confirms it.

The particular genius of Madonna has always been her ability to surround herself with cutting-edge talent. She has very little musical skill of her own, but she has an uncanny sense of the next thing in pop music, the next bend in the road, and she molds those innovations to her own style. She can make anything into pop music, and when she’s really on – see her work with William Orbit on Ray of Light, and with Mirwais Ahmadzai on Music – she offers more pleasure than guilt.

So what to make of her collaborations here with Timbaland, Justin Timberlake and the Neptunes? Here’s a who’s-who of current pop royalty, a crass attempt to grab hold of trendy radio sounds and ride them to the bank – Madonna was knocking radio-pop on its ass before some of these guys could even read. This isn’t an art project, it’s a stab at commercial success, a credibility grab that’s so sad because it’s so unnecessary.

The music, of course, just isn’t very good. I like “4 Minutes,” the Timbaland-by-the-numbers single, but that sound grows old over the course of an hour-long dance record. Some of these tunes, like the ass-achingly long “Incredible,” stretch their flimsy melodies to the breaking point, and some of them, like “Beat Goes On,” don’t have any melodies at all. It’s a plastic record about sex and dancing, and it doesn’t melt in your mouth as much as stick in your throat.

As a longtime Madonna fan (honest), I can only hope this is a one-time collapse, a symptom of the ticking clock on her contract. Listening to Hard Candy, an album as creatively dry and musically dull as Madonna’s critics mistakenly expect each time out, is like coming down off a sugar buzz. I like fizzy, disposable pop, but this just isn’t very good, and is much more disposable than most of Madonna’s work.

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“God, This Year is Shaping Up Nicely” Department

So about three years ago, I got turned on to this band called Waking Ashland. They were on Tooth and Nail Records at the time, and their debut album, Composure, was produced by Lou Giordano, who has worked with Paul Westerberg, Husker Du and Sunny Day Real Estate, to name a few. What sold me, though, was this recommendation: “It’s piano-pop. You like piano-pop!”

I do, indeed, like me some piano-pop. Waking Ashland was the project of pianist-singer Jonathan Jones, and Composure was pretty good stuff. Subsequent releases Telescopes and The Well were also pretty good stuff. And yet, somehow I failed to review any of them, bar a couple of mentions in my annual Fifty Second Week roundup. (I must have been having a bad day when I reviewed The Well, too – it’s much better than I remembered.)

I’m not sure why, but Waking Ashland is a band I just didn’t keep up with. It was always a surprise when I saw new albums from them in the record store, and I was equally surprised to find out just last week that they’d called it quits. My indifference is strange – I like the band well enough, and I think Jones is a competent songwriter with a sweet voice and a way with the piano keys. Yet once a year or so, I found myself catching up with developments in their career.

Like now. With Waking Ashland a thing of the past, Jones has gone on to form a new band called We Shot the Moon. As always, I was taken by surprise when I saw the record on the shelf, complete with a little sticker informing me of Jones’ participation. And I vowed, this time, I’d give Jones his due with a full review.

We Shot the Moon’s debut is called Fear and Love. You may be expecting a continuation of the piano-pop sound of Waking Ashland, and you’ll get some of that, but where that band was a pop outfit with guitars, We Shot the Moon is a rock band with a piano. The songs are simpler, the choruses more energetic, the amps cranked up, and the overall vibe more aggressive. Imagine Ben Folds fronting Weezer and you have the idea.

We Shot the Moon is a more direct band than Ashland – just check the 2:33 opening track, “The Waters Edge.” It starts with a driving rock beat and a bog-simple chord progression, but then the piano comes in for the “whoa-oh” chorus, and it takes off. There are no orchestrated epics here like “Sing Me to Sleep” – the closest is “Tunnel Vision,” a bedroom-studio ballad that almost sounds out of place.

Jones has kept his penchant for sweet hooks. “Sway Your Head” makes a nice first single, its breezy chord pattern driven forward by the pounding piano before the radio-ready chorus. (And another “woah-oh.” Has Jones been listening to the Alarm?) “On Your Way” whips out the vocoder, but doesn’t embarrass itself – the song has a nice refrain. While there are fewer grab-your-ear hooks with this new band, Fear and Love is another good record from Jonathan Jones, one that sounds tailor-made to get him some wider exposure. I hope it works.

We go from fewer hooks to no hooks at all, and that’s not a bad thing – the new Hammock album arrived in my mailbox the other day. It’s called Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow, and it’s ridiculously beautiful.

Hammock is Marc Byrd (of the Choir) and Andrew Thompson, and over three albums and an EP, they’ve revived, refined and perfected the instrumental shoegazer sound. What does that mean? It means dense clouds of otherworldly guitar, floating all around you, while other noises waft in and out, as if from someone else’s dream. It means music that surrounds you and lifts you from the ground effortlessly, music that uses formlessness as a virtue, music that spills out over the lines and colors in your entire world.

Okay, here’s the most practical description I can give you. You know how some bands fill in the spaces between their songs with ambient interludes, little drones or pretty reverbed guitar bits? (Like the first 40 seconds of the new Coldplay single, for example.) Imagine an entire album of those, only ten times more gorgeous, and you’ve got the idea.

Most Hammock albums use drums or drum patterns to move the music forward. Not this one. Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow is a recording of a live performance composed for an art show – unless I’m mistaken, it was Hammock’s first live appearance – and it’s all crashing waves of ambience. Byrd’s guitar tones are amazing as always, sounding like something played in an alien atmosphere, and there are contributions by his wife Christine Glass Byrd on angelic vocals, and Matt Slocum (of Sixpence None the Richer) on cello. You won’t notice them unless you’re looking for them, though – the whole album is a warm blanket of sound that covers you from first note to last.

I know what you’re thinking. There are no words, there are no melodies to speak of, there are no hooks. Why would I listen to this for an hour? And I’ll tell you, it’s because you won’t hear anything this consistently beautiful again this year, unless Hammock puts out something new. Head on over here and listen for yourself. I like them all, but if I had to recommend one, it would be this new one. Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow is Hammock’s most unearthly, most soul-filling album, and I can’t praise it highly enough.

* * * * *

“The Next Best Thing to Being There” Department

Two years ago, I saw one of the best concerts of my life.

Dweezil Zappa had put together this traveling tribute to his late father, the brilliant Frank Zappa, and he’d called up some of the luminaries from Frank’s old bands to join him. He called it Zappa Plays Zappa, and while my expectations were low – Dweezil has never been his father’s equal, and most of Frank’s music is nearly impossible to play – I was knocked out of my seat. The show lasted three and a half hours, the setlist was full of incredibly difficult songs, and the band was perfect. Plus, I got to hang out with Dr. Tony Shore, who’s a bigger Zappa nut than I am.

I know, you missed it – you should have been there. But now you can see and hear what it was like with the Zappa Plays Zappa CD and DVD releases. Let me just say this up front – once again, the Zappa family has done a number on fans with the options. You’ll find a single-CD edit of the show and a double-DVD full presentation, but don’t settle for just buying both – get the five-disc “Fan Pak” instead. For less than $40, you get the full concert on two DVDs and three CDs. It’s well worth it.

I can’t even tell you how great this band is. Seeing some of these musical acrobatics in person was amazing – it was my first real proof that something like “Echidna’s Arf (Of You)” could be played live on stage by actual people. The guitar wankery goes a little overboard by the end, Dweezil trading endless licks with Steve Vai, but to see drummer Terry Bozzio play and sing “Punky’s Whips,” then take on “The Black Page,” is revelatory. And to hear the band come together for fantastic versions of “Peaches En Regalia,” “Re-Gyptian Strut” and a bring-the-house-down “Sofa,” well… it’s magic.

Sadly, I will never see Frank Zappa play live. But this is the next best thing – a fine, fitting tribute to the man’s music, played by his adoring son. (Dweezil even changed up his guitar playing, finding tones and phrases his father may have used – you have to hear his take on “Black Napkins.”) Zappa Plays Zappa was a high point in my concert-going life, and now it’s a high point in my DVD collection. Fans of either Zappa should check it out.

* * * * *

“Man Oh Man, Look at All the Words Up There!” Department

Yeah, yeah. Okay. I’m done. This was a chattier column than I expected, but after last week’s cop-out, I figured I owed you. Next week, Elvis Costello’s Momofuku, which has already been described to me as his best album in 20 years. (Sure it is…) And maybe a few others, and maybe another Doctor Who review. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

For some reason, I’m sick again, hacking up a lung as I type this.

So I apologize in advance, but I’m going to try to be as brief as possible. And then I’m going to crawl back into bed. I was originally going to write a pair of in-depth reviews this week, but I think I’ll just give you capsules instead. But please don’t mistake my lack of concentration this week for lack of enthusiasm about the albums in question. They are both excellent, and worth your time and attention.

Elbow’s fourth album, The Seldom-Seen Kid, is magnificent, in fact. Guy Garvey and his band have often been accused of meandering through their records, bringing the pretty but little else, which may explain why they haven’t had the success of their contemporaries (Coldplay, Travis, Keane). Their last album, Leaders of the Free World, went some distance towards remedying that – it was louder, for one thing – but it’s with this album that Garvey and company have learned that pretty and propulsive don’t need to be mutually exclusive.

“Starlings” is a fascinating opener, with its lounge beat punctuated by out-of-nowhere synth blasts. But it’s Garvey’s hangdog voice that captures the attention – his melody floats above the wispy background, grounding it. Elsewhere, though, Elbow turn up the amps and bring it. The best of these tracks is “Grounds for Divorce,” which brings in a healthy Zeppelin influence. Through it all, Elbow keeps the atmosphere of their earlier records, and when they slow it down (on the string-laden “One Day Like Today,” for example) they shine. This is Elbow’s finest hour, and if they’re serious about bowing out after this one, they’ve made a swell swan song.

Unwed Sailor has also learned the same lesson. Their last album, The White Ox, was so ambient and atmospheric that it barely called attention to itself. The brand new Little Wars finds them returning to the live-band feel of their earlier records, but keeping the focus on beautiful little melodies. Unwed Sailor is the instrumental project of bassist Jonathan Ford, and this one features a cast of thousands in support – it was recorded in three different sessions over seven years.

Remarkably, though, you’d never know it – Little Wars feels like a complete work. For the first time since The Faithful Anchor, most of these instrumental songs have thumping, explosive beats behind them, but Ford and his co-conspirators use them as a foil, spinning webs of gossamer around the snare drum pylons. I love every album these guys have done, but if you had to pick just one to tell you what they’re all about, I’d suggest this one. Little Wars is dazzling.

* * * * *

And now, a look ahead at new music winging your way in the next few months. (Yes, this is my way of filling out a column quickly, so I can have a nap. Deal with it.)

There are some landmark albums set to hit stores this spring and summer, and one of them is slated for next week. It’s been 11 interminable years since Portishead put out their self-titled second album, and the musical landscape has changed dramatically while they’ve been away. Thankfully, Portishead themselves don’t seem to have changed very much – they’ve cleverly titled their third album Third, and what I’ve heard sounds like the same ghostly trip-hop they delivered in the ‘90s. It’s going to be nice to have them back.

April 29 has a few more blasts from the past, with new albums from Madonna, Def Leppard, Tom Petty’s pre-Heartbreakers band Mudcrutch, and Sarah McLachlan. Also, Dweezil Zappa releases a CD/DVD document of his Zappa Plays Zappa tour. I attended one of those shows, in St. Paul, Minnesota, and it was one of the finest concerts I’ve ever been to.

May 6 sees the new Elvis Costello, Momofuku, released on CD, three weeks after its vinyl-and-download-only debut. I admit, I’m mystified by this release strategy, but at least I get to hear it in my format of choice. Hammock’s new album Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow is scheduled for May 6 too, as is Barenaked Ladies’ children’s album, Snacktime. (Buy all three of those together and see what kind of strange looks you get at the record store.)

Another landmark release – May 13 will see Narrow Stairs, the seventh Death Cab for Cutie LP. I adored Plans, their 2006 album, but I felt it was about as far as they could go with the sound they’d been spinning for more than a decade. Narrow Stairs reportedly does the watusi all over that sound, exploring styles the Death Cabbers have never attempted before. The first single, the eight-minute, bass-heavy jam “I Will Possess Your Heart,” is streaming on their MySpace page now – check it out.

Also on May 13, new ones from Filter, Old 97s, No-Man and the Myriad. Then, on May 20, King’s X hopefully continues the serious roll they’ve been on with XV. Joy Electric returns on May 27 with My Grandfather, the Cubist (a more Joy Electric title Ronnie Martin could not have chosen), and Aimee Mann saunters back to store shelves on June 3 with the awesomely-titled @#%&*! Smilers.

June 10 is a big week, with the new Sloan, Parallel Play, leading the pack. My Morning Jacket comes back with Evil Urges, as does Robert Pollard with Robert Pollard is Off to Business. Supergrass returns, too, with the worst album title of the year: Diamond Hoo Ha. This is in direct contrast with Martha Wainwright’s second album, which sports probably my favorite title of 2008 so far: I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too.

Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends hits on June 17, as does Motley Crue’s reunion album Saints of Los Angeles, and Wolf Parade’s second, which may or may not be called Kissing the Beehive. But the what-the-fuck prize goes to Judas Priest and their two-disc concept album about Nostradamus. (Called, naturally, Nostradamus.) I’ll write more about this later, but it sounds like a shoo-in for the Spinal Tap Award of 2008.

Weezer comes back on June 24 with another self-titled effort, this one already nicknamed The Red Album. But I’m much more excited about a color on the opposite end of the spectrum: Peter Gabriel’s Big Blue Ball project should finally – finally – see the light that same day. More than 15 years in the making, Big Blue Ball is a distillation of Gabriel’s “one world, one music” aesthetic, featuring contributions from dozens of artists from all over the globe. Should be awesome.

Other things coming: John Mellencamp’s pretentiously-named Life, Death, Love and Freedom; Dr. Dog’s Fate; Soulfly’s Conquer; a self-titled solo album from Conor Oberst; and Holy Ghost Building, the long-awaited old-time gospel and blues album from the 77s. And somewhere in there will be Marillion’s 15th album, a double-disc opus entitled Happiness is the Road. And that’s all I know.

Next week, Portishead. Sorry for copping out this week, but I need to lie down for about a month now.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Before we start, I just want to mention that Saturday is Record Store Day. It’s a new thing this year, bringing together a couple hundred independent music stores to promote what is, sadly, a dying breed. But it’s one I think is worth celebrating.

I vividly remember the day I first discovered there were whole stores devoted to music. Our local mall had a Strawberries (once an independent chain, then a Sam Goody franchise, then phased out), and I’d managed to get a job at the supermarket located a few yards away. The process went like this: I’d work for a week, I’d get my paycheck, and I’d walk right down to the record store and spend half of it.

This continued for years, until I moved up to Maine for college. It was then that I discovered the wonders of the independent store. It was called Bull Moose Music (still is, in fact), and it carried… everything. What they didn’t have, they could order. And the employees knew their shit. Unlike the blank stares I got at Strawberries, the Bull Moose employees usually knew what I was talking about when I asked for something. It was a revelation.

See, the Bull Moose folks knew that the local music store can be so much more than a place to buy CDs. It can be a hub for a local music scene, a place for lovers of music to get together and trade recommendations, find new stuff, see bands (local and otherwise), start bands, and develop a healthy arts community. I know music these days is all about specialized entertainment from the comfort of your own home, but that brave new world misses out on the communal spirit of the local record store.

And as much as I am fascinated by where the music industry is going, I’m already in mourning for the independent record shop. Downloading (legal and illegal) is killing the mom and pop music store. They already find it difficult to compete with the big box stores, who buy in bulk and can charge less. They’re finding it impossible to compete with digital delivery and a pervasive mentality that music should be free.

I currently shop at Kiss the Sky in Geneva, Illinois. It costs me more than it would if I were to just go to Best Buy every week, but I’m paying for more than just new CDs. I’m paying to support an idea, a notion that a record store isn’t just about notes burned into bits of plastic. It’s about people, coming together over their shared love of this otherworldly, amazing, life-altering thing called music. When the people are removed from the equation, music loses something irreplaceable. If you want to find that thing, just start shopping at an independent record store. Hang around long enough and it will find you.

For more information on Record Store Day, check out this site.

* * * * *

If that isn’t enough for you, I’ve got five recently released reasons to stroll on down to your local record store right here. Of all of them, I’m most excited about the return of Ours, so we’ll start with that.

I will never forget the first time I heard Jimmy Gnecco sing. I caught the video for “Sometimes,” the striking first single from Ours’ first album, Distorted Lullabies. Here is what Jeff Buckley would have sounded like if he’d grown up listening to the Cure instead of Leonard Cohen. And when I say Gnecco sounds like Jeff Buckley, I mean he sounds exactly like Jeff Buckley – an incredible feat in itself. But Gnecco hasn’t pinched Buckley’s songwriting style – he writes heavy, intense music that showcases his incredible voice.

Gnecco basically is Ours, and his first album had me excited to hear what he’d come up with next. But he threw a curve ball – the second Ours album, Precious, was banged out too quickly, and suffered for it. And then Gnecco disappeared for six years.

You can hear all of those six years in the grooves of Mercy, Gnecco’s return from exile. In some ways, this is the first real Ours album, the one that fulfills its author’s potential. It’s not perfect, but it is the best thing Gnecco has done, and at least part of the thanks goes to Rick Rubin, the American Records mastermind who produced it. Rubin has an uncanny knack for bringing out an artist’s true sound, the one that fits them most naturally.

For Gnecco, that sound is massive, dramatic – almost epic. Rubin has flushed most of Gnecco’s unfortunate goth-rock tendencies, and pumped up the parts of his music that makes you want to shout from the mountaintops. Nowhere is that more evident than on “The Worst Things Beautiful,” which cribs from U2, but does it so authoritatively that you don’t care. And – here comes the heresy – Gnecco is a much better singer than Bono, and can really dig into these anthemic pieces.

There is much darkness to be had here – the record is subtitled Dancing for the Death of an Imaginary Enemy, after all. “Mercy” kicks off the album with a six-minute, constantly-building fever dream, Gnecco unveiling both his chilling falsetto and his jaw-dropping full-throated yell. And “Murder” is phenomenal, a pitch-black, creeping web of acoustic guitars, dissonant horns, ambient noise and thumping beats. Gnecco really lets it fly near the end – have I mentioned what an amazing singer he is?

If you need further proof of that, listen to “God Only Wants You,” a song that stretches Gnecco’s falsetto, then gives him the opportunity to carry the epic middle eight with his full vocal power. It’s just awesome, as is the screaming chorus of “Live Again,” and the memorable refrain of “Saint.” Oddly, the album ends by handing over vocal duties to someone else – Gnecco’s daughter provides the lovely coda to “Get Up.”

This is Gnecco’s best work, but it isn’t flawless – there are some tuneless numbers here, and some that go nowhere. But it’s a welcome return for an underrated artist with a singular talent. I was afraid we’d never see a third Ours album, so the very existence of Mercy makes me a happy music fan. The fact that it’s very good is just icing on the cake.

* * * * *

Also making a welcome return this week is Phantom Planet, one of the only bands to inspire a retraction on this site.

Here’s what happened. I absolutely loved this band’s second album, The Guest, when it came out in 2002. I called it the third-best album of that year, and I still consider it a near-perfect pop record. It’s sunny and sweet and features glorious production from Mitchell Froom. I love it when modern bands show a love and respect for the craft of classic pop songwriting – you just don’t hear much of that anymore.

And then I saw the band live, and came away bitterly disappointed. I’m kind of surprised by my reaction now – I guess I wanted them to replicate the scrubbed-clean sound of The Guest on stage, and they didn’t. They were LOUD and aggressive and sloppy and abrasive, and they played these glittering little pop ditties as if they were Stooges songs. I left with a ringing in my ears and a sadness in my heart.

I suppose I should have expected at that point that their next album would initially disappoint me. Phantom Planet, released in 2004, carried over that on-stage energy to the studio. It was 11 sharp, shambling rock tunes in 35 quick minutes, with feedback-laced guitars, pounding drums, Alex Greenwald’s unrestrained wail, and nothing else. And I hated it.

But then, something funny happened – I listened to Phantom Planet. I mean, really listened to it, separate and apart from The Guest and my expectations. And I ended up liking it a lot. I was originally distracted by the screaming noise, the steamroller approach to everything they used to be, and missed what they had become. I immediately wrote a new review, praising the record.

I’m glad I came around, otherwise I may not have bought Raise the Dead, the just-released fourth Phantom Planet record. I have to say, as much as I still love The Guest, and as much as I grew to admire the self-titled, this is the album where it all comes together for Greenwald and his crew. Raise the Dead retains the rough-and-tumble energy of its predecessor while bringing back the sunny melodies I loved, and for the first time, Phantom Planet sounds completely comfortable in its own skin.

Now, granted, they’ve forged the Arcade Fire’s signature on the opening title track, Greenwald doing a decent Win Butler impression on the throaty vocals. It’s a surging, constantly building mini-epic, but it doesn’t exactly set the tone for what follows. The record really starts with “Dropped,” a kickass pop tune, and then doesn’t let up until the end. “Leader” incorporates a children’s choir, and it doesn’t suck – it’s actually terrific.

Raise the Dead finally provides a proper home for “Do the Panic,” an absolute winner the band has been playing for years. (It first appeared in a live version as a bonus track on The Guest.) You won’t be able to listen to this without singing the “come on come on” refrain in your head for hours afterwards. Older versions of this tune played up the piano-pop aspects, but this one goes for the guitar-laden gusto, and it’s all the better for it. This is the definitive “Do the Panic.”

The album’s second half gets more aggressive, pumping up the garage band side of the band’s sound. “Geronimo” is an awesome two minutes, with a bass line to kill for, and “Too Much Too Often” finds Greenwald affecting a snotty Brit-punk vocal over charging guitars and drums. But with “Leave Yourself for Someone Else,” they bring back the power-pop, and they end things with the sweet “I Don’t Mind.” With all that back-and-forth, Raise the Dead oddly doesn’t sound disconnected – it flows like an album should.

Greenwald has said he would like to see Phantom Planet change things up every album, and sound totally different each time. With Raise the Dead, though, he’s tied all his previous sounds up in a neat bow. This is more of a refinement than a reinvention – it’s such a confident, comfortable record that I wouldn’t be surprised if Greenwald and company just continued on this path for years to come. And like the last song says, I don’t mind.

There. I did the whole review without mentioning “California,” The O.C., or Jason Schwartzman.

* * * * *

Every couple of months, there’s a new Next Big Thing. You know it’s the Next Big Thing because the indie cognoscenti at Pitchfork and other sites tells you so. Every 60 days or so, they find a new debut album and crown it the best album ever made. They fall all over themselves trying to out-superlative each other, to the point where you feel you have to have this album or your life will remain frustratingly incomplete.

Or, it would, if you weren’t already aware of the cycle of Next Big Things. Because every couple of months, there’s a new one, and the old ones are tossed aside. Should these bands have the gall to release a second album, that record will be called disappointing at best, and a betrayal at worst, no matter what’s on it. We don’t have time for career artists with evolving catalogs, we’re already on to the Next Big Thing.

This is a massive over-generalization, but I’m always bemused when it plays out. I talked a couple of weeks ago about how difficult it is to follow up an impressive and much-lauded debut, but sometimes it happens. Case in point – Tapes ‘n Tapes, who made a massive splash in indie-rock circles with their 2006 debut, The Loon. A rough-around-the-edges noise-o-rama, The Loon has some good grooves and an appealing looseness about it. But it sounded like it had been recorded in a weekend.

The follow-up, Walk It Off, doesn’t. It sounds worked-on, and lived-in. It sounds like a finished product, a crafted distillation of the band’s sound. I like it considerably more than the debut. And of course, I am almost entirely alone in that opinion, as the indie crowd has dismissed Walk It Off as a sophomore slump. All I can say is that this one doesn’t offer the same shabby charm as the first, but in its place you get much more complete songs, and sterling production by Dave Fridmann, taking a break from his work with the Flaming Lips.

This isn’t a brilliant record by any means, but it is an improvement, and it showcases just how tight this band is. I have to make special mention of bassist Erik Appelwick, who simply shines on almost every track. Leader Josh Grier turns in a diverse group of songs, with highlights including the sweeping “Demon Apple” and the closing stomper “The Dirty Dirty.” It’s a good album. Tapes ‘n Tapes are no longer the Next Big Thing, apparently, but Walk It Off is worth checking out.

* * * * *

I still read Pitchfork and other sites like it every day, though, because sometimes, if you can peer through the cloud of smugness, you can get turned on to some good new stuff. Without Pitchfork, I probably wouldn’t have picked up Antidotes, the debut album from Foals, which would have been a shame. It’s also a really good record.

Foals are an Oxford band that rose from the ashes of math-rock combo The Edmund Fitzgerald. With their first album, they’ve found an appealing mix of math and dance – everything is in thumping 4/4 time, but the actual riffs and arrangements are deceptively complex. Plus, they add trumpets and saxophones to their guitar-based sound, but they don’t use them as accents – they’re orchestration, not cues for the upbeats.

First track “The French Open” unveils the sound – it’s a little like Isaac Brock fronting Minus the Bear as they cover Bloc Party. But not really. Things lift off with “Cassius,” an absolute tornado of a song that makes great use of the horn section. My favorite, “Olympic Airways,” creates an ambient cushion using nothing but bass and muted harmonics on the guitar. “Electric Bloom” spins a denser web with droning synths and lovely clean six-string. Over it all, singer Yannis Philippakis shout-sings in his thick British accent, adding a streetwise punk edge to the studied music.

It would be hypocritical of me to bestow Next Big Thing status on Foals, but Antidotes is a very good debut. It’s complex yet hip-shaking, very well produced, and full of inventiveness. The CD includes their first two singles, “Hummer” and “Mathletics,” as bonus tracks, and it’s easy to see why they built up the buzz in the U.K. I’ll be watching to see where this band goes.

* * * * *

Which brings us to Nine Inch Nails. Or rather, back to Nine Inch Nails, as I promised a more in-depth look at Ghosts I-IV when I got my hands on it. And I’m looking at the monochromatic little bugger now, so…

Trent Reznor got a lot of ink for jumping on board the digital delivery train with Ghosts, but for me, it’s only now, with the physical disc in front of me, that I can get a handle on the scope and shape of this record. I do want to talk about the delivery, because I think Reznor had a good idea, but mucked up the execution somewhat.

You may recall that about a month and a half ago, Reznor released this album on his website, in a number of different formats. I decided to go for the standard 2-CD edition, with free and immediate download, but others chose to get the deluxe DVD and Blu-Ray edition, or the super-deluxe all-that-and-vinyl-too spectacular. My purchase was ten bucks, a bargain for two hours of new music. Unfortunately, I never got my download link to work, and numerous emails to the support staff were not returned.

I was fine with it, though – I procured the music from another source, and waited for my hard copy to show up. The release date was April 8, so I figured I’d get it around then. But no. My copy showed up a week later, leaving me seven days to stare at the thing on my record store’s shelf. Their price? $9.99. The folks who didn’t pre-order paid the same as I did, and got the album a week earlier.

I’m not truly upset about that, but I can see how some people might be. I might have been more miffed if I hadn’t found an alternate source for the music, and if that music had thrilled me. Ghosts I-IV is a 36-track instrumental collection, and I say “collection” rather than “album” there because it plays like a disjointed data dump. For a guy whose exclusive province is themed, cohesive records that pack a cumulative punch, Ghosts sounds like a clearing house of half-formed ideas.

They’re nice half-formed ideas, though. None of the tracks have names, and they’re broken up into three suites of nine songs each, but really, you could put this on shuffle and get the same effect. Some of the songs, like the opening two tracks, are piano-based. Some are made with thunderous beats and electronic noise. Some have the abrasive, processed guitars for which Reznor is best known, and some have the tinny, strummed acoustic he’s showcased in pieces like “The Downward Spiral.”

None of them have any real melodies, though. They’re all either chord-based or groove-based, and if you put Ghosts on in the background while you’re doing something else, you’ll find it pretty easy to ignore. The physical sound is wonderful – Reznor is a master producer, and he makes this dark ambient material pop out in 3-D. Strangely, though, that’s not enough to catch the ear. I quite like most of Ghosts I-IV as mood music, but few of the tracks feel like finished works, and over two hours, it gets wearying.

Admittedly, it’s not as wearying as two hours of With Teeth would have been, and I do hope Reznor carries back some of this experimentation with him to the next proper NIN album. But I’m afraid Ghosts I-IV will come to be seen as little more than a curiosity in Reznor’s catalog. I’m not knocking Ghosts – it is very good instrumental ambience, and it’s worth hearing. But next time he wants to shake up the music industry, I hope it’s with something everyone will be aching to experience. (And I hope he ships out the pre-orders well in advance of the release date.)

* * * * *

Next week, we get Billy Bragg, Elbow, South… hell, it’s the British Invasion all over again. Plus, I’ll talk about Unwed Sailor’s great Little Wars. And maybe a Doctor Who review or two. Happy Record Store Day!

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m about to disappoint some of you, and make a few of you very happy.

You may be aware that the 30th season of Doctor Who started up this week in Britain. It’ll be a couple of weeks before the new episodes start airing stateside, and being the geeky fanboy that I am, I can’t wait that long. So I’m downloading the episodes as they become available on torrent sites. (Don’t worry, I’ll buy the DVD box sets too. I always do.)

The 30th season kicked off with an episode called Partners in Crime, and I enjoyed it so much, I watched it three times. And it’s inspired me to finally get back on the horse and talk Doctor Who in this column. To make up for lost time, I’m devoting the lion’s share of this week’s missive to Peter Davison’s first season as the Doc.

Oh, be quiet. It’s a slow music week, and next week is pretty significant, with new ones by Ours and Phantom Planet. I haven’t forgotten I’m running a music column here, though, so before we get to cheap and wonderful British television, here are some capsule reviews of new CDs I like:

The Black Keys, Attack and Release. Much as I liked Magic Potion, the fourth Black Keys album, you could hear this guitars-drums blues-rock duo hitting the limits of their sound. They shake things up on their fifth, hiring Danger Mouse to produce it and incorporating loops, keyboards, and more soulful songwriting. The results are smashing, a great example of adding color to a black-and-white world. Dig the single, “Strange Times,” and the wonderful “So He Won’t Break.”

Moby, Last Night. A definite improvement over the dismal Hotel, Last Night finds Moby returning to his clubby roots, and thankfully keeping away from the mic. It’s still not quite up to the level of Everything is Wrong, and while some of the tracks are great (“257.zero”), some are less so (“Sweet Apocalypse”). I do love the comedown section of the record, especially the ambient title track. Good, but not great.

The Foxglove Hunt, Stop Heartbeat. I love this record. The Foxglove Hunt is Ronnie Martin of Joy Electric and Rob Withem of Fine China, and together they’ve made a kitschy, glorious ‘80s synth-pop revival record. Great melodies, watery clean guitars, cheesy programmed drums, burbling keyboards, and Withem’s oh-so-‘80s voice. It’s like having your own time machine. Get it here.

Colin Meloy, Colin Meloy Sings Live. The solo debut from the Decemberists’ frontman is an acoustic live record that finds him digging deep into his band’s catalog. The new arrangements truly shine, bringing out new details in songs like “Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect.” Meloy’s on-stage presence is warm and friendly, and he does a terrific solo version of my favorite Decemberists song, “The Engine Driver.” Even if, like me, you didn’t quite like The Crane Wife, this is well worth picking up.

Sun Kil Moon, April. Saving the best for last. Mark Kozelek has essentially sounded the same for his whole career – he doesn’t evolve as much as refine. Oddly, though, I don’t mind, because his work is so beautiful. April is his second album as Sun Kil Moon, full of long Neil Young-esque guitar workouts and equally long, sparse acoustic pieces. Kozelek’s even, warm voice is hypnotic, and though these songs sound exactly like ones he might have written for Red House Painters, they’re all gorgeous. If I had to pick a highlight, it would be the 10-minute “Tonight the Sky,” but everything here is excellent. Love it.

And now, the Doctor is in…

* * * * *

In the seven years and change I’ve been doing this column, I’ve discovered that there are some bands that strip me of my critical faculties. Mostly, they’re bands I’ve loved since my teen years, like the Alarm and the Choir – I will always treasure their old records, and will eat up anything new they release. I know, intellectually speaking, that the Alarm has been putting out the same kind of fist-pumping Clash-meets-U2 anthem-pop for as long as they’ve been around, but I don’t care – I will never dislike them.

I’m finding I feel the same way about Peter Davison’s Doctor. I see the flaws in his episodes, certainly, and in many ways there are more such flaws in his era than in that of any previous Doctor. But I don’t care. I love the Davison years. I remember the Tom Baker era, but I practically memorized the Peter Davison run. With each new DVD I buy and watch, I’m remembering what it was like to be 14 years old, watching these crazy adventures for the first time.

A big part of it is Davison himself. In some ways, his more reserved performance was a reaction to Tom Baker’s over-the-top silliness, but Davison carries an air of authority with him that simply convinces. Whereas Baker sometimes failed to take the silly aspects of the show seriously, Davison never poked fun – he followed the example of original Doctor William Hartnell, infusing the rubber monsters and rolling pepper shakers he faced with real menace, just by reacting to them as if they were frightening. His Doctor is vulnerable and brave, tetchy and protective, young and old at once, and unfailingly captivating.

I mostly remember Davison’s first two seasons. I recall the third – the last line of Warriors of the Deep has stayed with me, and I remember the stone face in The Awakening and the miniature Master in Planet of Fire. (I’ve also just watched Resurrection of the Daleks, so that one’s fresh in my mind.) But I don’t have too many of these stories on my old VHS tapes, labeled in pencil and degrading by the day. I do have the entirety of the first two seasons, and The Five Doctors, and watching the available episodes on DVD is like remembering a dream.

After Castrovalva, the opening story of Season 19, Davison and his very full Tardis (Adric, Nyssa and Tegan) wound up on a spaceship full of frogs in Four to Doomsday, and a primitive jungle inhabited by a snake god in Kinda. Neither of those have made it to DVD yet, but the fourth story of Davison’s first season, The Visitation, has. And it’s great.

In many ways, The Visitation is a classic Doctor Who story. Trying and failing to return Tegan to 1980s London, the Doc ends up in 17th Century England, during the plague. He soon stumbles on an alien plot to wipe out humanity with a virus, and confronts the dangerous Terileptils in an attempt to stop it. There’s some good old-fashioned running around, a wonderfully cheap-looking android dressed as the grim reaper, a couple of significant moments, and a nice tie-in to history at the end.

My problems with it are the same ones that (forgive me) plague the John Nathan-Turner era. First, there is the plastic, synthesized music, which sort of works for futuristic stories like Four to Doomsday, but doesn’t quite fit in a historical piece like this one. Everything looks sort of plastic, too – the lighting is bright and harsh, exposing the limitations of the sets. And then there is the Terileptil costume, an obviously rubber contraption that looks ridiculous, particularly when well-lit.

But I can’t fault Eric Saward’s writing here, or Davison’s performance. (He acts so well that you barely even notice he’s wearing a stick of celery the whole time, as he does throughout his run.) There’s an extended conversation between the Doctor and the Terileptil in part three, and it could have been laughable (well, more laughable), but Davison takes it so seriously that he carries the scene. It’s a guy in a cricket uniform talking to a guy in a rubber suit about morality, and it works. Honestly, it does.

The best performance, besides Davison’s, is given by Michael Robbins. He plays wandering rogue Richard Mace, an out-of-work actor and highwayman with a flair for the dramatic. His delightfully over-the-top line readings are a joy to watch, and he steals nearly every scene he’s in. (Admittedly, when his competition includes Matthew Waterhouse and Sarah Sutton as Adric and Nyssa, respectively, stealing scenes isn’t all that tough.)

There is a significant moment in The Visitation that affects the rest of the original series’ run – the sonic screwdriver is destroyed. Fans of the new series may be surprised to learn that the original screwdriver was used mainly just to open doors. The new model can apparently do anything, getting the Doc out of one scrape after another, and in fact that was the reason Nathan-Turner and Saward did away with it – after 15 years on the show, the screwdriver had become an all-purpose way out for the writers. So after the Terileptil blasts it in part three of this story, it never reappears again – until the new series.

So The Visitation is a lot of fun, an old-time classic Doctor Who story. But the fun starts to dissipate with Saward’s next script for the series, Earthshock. In many ways, Davison’s run as the Doctor is a crescendo of death and madness, the writers putting this nicest and most noble of Doctors through the wringer. (The climax of the run is arguably Resurrection of the Daleks, with a higher body count than most war movies.) It is misery and death, and Davison trying to keep faith as the bodies pile up.

And the first bodies come in Earthshock. The Doc and his companions find themselves underground, in a cave system on Earth hundreds of years from now. Little do they know, they’ve stumbled on a murder scene – an entire archeological expedition has been killed in a particularly grisly way. Military troops find the Doctor and, of course, blame him, until a pair of faceless androids attacks. The Doc defeats them, but their trail leads to a space freighter headed for Earth, and carrying an army of (wait for it…) Cybermen.

Earthshock was the first Cybermen story in seven years, and Nathan-Turner evidently kept their appearance a closely-guarded secret. Their reveal at the end of part one is pretty awesome – they’ve been redesigned again, but they still look like Cybermen. And they’re menacing as hell. Davison doesn’t even have to fake it this time – the Cybermen are genuinely frightening.

The rest of Earthshock is impressively dark and foreboding. Director Peter Grimwade turns in a feature-film-worthy effort (well, an ‘80s feature film), and he gives the final two episodes an unsettling mood of creeping doom. The Cybermen, it turns out, are planning to crash the freighter into Earth, killing a group of visiting interplanetary dignitaries and launching an invasion force. The ship is crawling with Cybermen, and there’s a lot of death as the military troops attempt to keep them from breaching the bridge.

But breach it they do. And for the first time in his run, Davison’s Doctor is frightened and out of control. It’s a pretty great few scenes. In the end, the crew members overpower the Cybermen, but the freighter is still headed for Earth, its controls locked by a logic puzzle device. (I know, I know…) The crew abandons ship, but Adric stays behind, certain he can solve the puzzle.

He can’t. In what was, honestly, one of the most jarring moments of my young TV-watching life, Adric becomes the first companion to die since the show’s third season. (And so far, the last to die in the program’s run.) As a young teen, I was stunned by this – until the last seconds of part four, it really seems like the Doc is going to be able to save Adric. But no. There’s a big explosion, and then credits, rolled silently over Adric’s smashed badge for mathematical excellence. (Okay, it’s silly, but it was moving when I was younger.)

Earthshock is, for my money, the finest story of Davison’s first season. Writer Saward was also the script editor at the time, and he used this story to begin exploring his recurring theme – the world (nay, the universe) is a cold, dark place, and sometimes horrible things happen to good people. How, then, do those good people keep going, when faced with the futility of their actions over and over? It’s heady stuff for a so-called children’s program.

Earthshock also shows Matthew Waterhouse the door, which wasn’t altogether a bad thing. He’s a pretty awful actor, although on the commentary tracks he seems like a very nice guy. But there were just too many companions in the Tardis at the time, and one had to go. Nathan-Turner and Saward gave Adric a terrific death, though – perhaps better than his character deserved.

So after Earthshock, you’d expect the bar to have been set for the season finale. You’d be wrong.

If Earthshock is the best story of Season 19, Time-Flight is easily the worst. In fact, Time-Flight may be the worst story of the program to this point. That’s a bold statement, but Time-Flight lives down to it.

There are some stories in which everything comes together. The script, the acting, the direction, the effects, the editing, all coalesce to create classic Doctor Who. And then there are some in which absolutely nothing works. Time-Flight is one of those. It’s such a complete failure on all levels that it’s nearly unwatchable, and tests even my affection for Davison’s Doctor. It is 100 minutes of sheer inexplicable awful.

It actually starts out promising. The Doctor finally gets Tegan to Heathrow Airport, and gets wrapped up in the investigation of a missing Concorde. He determines the plane vanished down a time contour, and rousts up another Concorde to follow it. The second plane, with the Tardis aboard, trails the first back to prehistoric Earth, where the Doc finds hypnotized passengers under the thrall of a cackling Arabian mystic.

Okay, maybe it isn’t all that promising. But it probably could have turned out better than it did, if not for the fact that the production office ran out of money. This is a story that required not one, but two Concorde jets to land in prehistoric Earth, and it was made almost entirely in the studio, on a shoestring. It’s so inept, it’s almost funny – like, The Web Planet funny. You have to see prehistoric Earth. Polystyrene rocks on a studio floor with a painted backdrop behind them. And some smoke. It’s hilarious.

So the Doc and his two remaining companions (and they certainly don’t seem to miss Adric at all) join the most wooden, boring, bland actors imaginable as the Concorde’s crew in tracking down Kalid, the sniggering, gibberish-spouting wizard at the heart of the mystery. And they beat him, pretty soundly, at the end of part two. Even as a teen, I was relieved – Time-Flight was shaping up to be a two-parter, and hence much easier to forgive.

But no. Kalid whips off his rubber mask at the end of part two, and turns out to be the Master. And, um, what? Why was he dressed as a fat Arab mystic? Why did he continue his chanting and cackling even when he was alone? This makes no sense, and the following two episodes make even less. There’s something about the Master’s Tardis, and something about a race of aliens that live in a box and fight with each other, and a bunch of technobabble I can’t be bothered to understand. It’s just terrible.

The budget clearly trickles to nothing by the end as well. In episode four, there is a dramatic shot of the second Concorde. Or, it would have been dramatic in any other production – the director would have hired a crane and shot the actual airplane from above. But not here. To create this shot, the model workers bought a plastic Concorde toy and painted British Airways logos onto it. And it looks like it.

Really, this thing is terrible. Astonishingly, it was written by Peter Grimwade, the director of Earthshock – here’s a guy who knows how tiny Doctor Who budgets often are, and he scripts a complex, incomprehensible epic requiring feature film money to pull off. That’s almost as difficult to understand as the plot of Time-Flight. And it’s really not worth trying to figure out.

So Davison’s first season ends with a whimper. (Well, more like a stink bomb.) His second, if I recall correctly, was much better – we get Omega’s return in Arc of Infinity, the Mara’s revenge in Snakedance, and the Black Guardian Trilogy, which I remember, but not vividly. I do remember thinking Enlightenment is genius, the best of the Davison stories, and when the Trilogy makes its way to DVD, I’m excited to find out if I was right.

Who knows when I’ll do another one of these, but when I do, I’ll have the last three Davison DVDs to discuss. And that’ll be five Doctors down, two to go for the original series. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to download The Fires of Pompeii, the second story of Season 30. Popcorn at the ready.

Next week in music, Ours, Phantom Planet, Nine Inch Nails, and maybe Unwed Sailor.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I swear, if I’m ever in a major label band, I will lobby to call our second album Sophomore Slump. You know, just to save the critics time.

Following up an artistically and commercially successful debut must be nerve-wracking. If you deliver the same album again, you’ll get slammed for it, and it won’t sell as well as the first one. If you deliver something that veers too far off course, you’ll get slammed for it, and it won’t sell as well as the first one. Your record company is breathing down your neck, the guys in the suits are expecting you to shift the same numbers again (even though it’s statistically improbable that you’ll do so), and you’re so sick of playing the songs on your beloved debut already that the idea of doing something that sounds the same just makes you ill.

As much as I like following bands with extensive catalogs, the early records are the ones that truly set the tone, and watching those come out one by one is exhilarating. A good debut album is actually pretty easy – you have your whole life to write that one. It’s the second album, the one made under pressure, that shows what you’re made of. Do you have the wherewithal to put your head down, concentrate and make the best album you can, regardless of the pressure you’re under? Or do you crack, try too hard and make something no one can be proud of?

In short, do you succumb to the sophomore slump or not?

The intense pressure that comes with crafting your first follow-up is exactly why I was so excited to hear Join With Us, the second album by the Feeling. It’s practically a textbook on how to avoid the sophomore slump – it’s bigger and more refined that the first album, but it retains the goofy-pop sensibility that made them famous (in Britain anyway), while simultaneously setting off on several new paths. Keane did the same thing with their fantastic second record, Under the Iron Sea.

But more often than not, that second album is a stumbling block – especially if the first one was an original, fresh sound. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that I’m glad I’m not any of the guys in Vampire Weekend right now.

But take heart, A-Punks, because the sophomore slump can absolutely be overcome. I’ve got three examples right here of follow-ups that dance the watusi all over their predecessors, and they’ve all come out in the last couple of weeks. There is hope!

First up is the Raconteurs. I’m not the world’s biggest White Stripes fan – I think the first two albums were appealingly raw and bluesy, and Get Behind Me Satan is still the best (and oddest) thing they’ve done. But otherwise, I can take or leave Jack White and his minimalist scratchings. What attracted me to the first Raconteurs album was White’s main partner in crime, pop songwriter Brendan Benson. I was hoping Broken Boy Soldiers would combine the best aspects of both – pop with a bluesy rock edge.

And it did, but not very well. In fact, Soldiers sounds to me like a recording of White and Benson’s first date, if you know what I mean. They were tentative around each other, they sometimes forgot to collaborate at all, and the resulting music was tepid. The album did very well, on the strength of the lead single “Steady, As She Goes,” which winningly pinched the signature bass line from Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him.” (Honestly, whenever I hear “Steady” on the radio, or in a bar, I’m fooled for a couple of seconds into thinking I’m about to hear the great Joe Jackson song. And I’m invariably disappointed.)

Most of the attention given to Consolers of the Lonely, the Raconteurs’ follow-up, has focused on the release strategy. Rather than announce the album months in advance and give the label time to build up advance hype, the band sprung the record on its audience. They issued a press release one week before the album hit stores, and one could be forgiven for thinking a rush release meant a rushed recording. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In many ways, Consolers of the Lonely is the first real Raconteurs record. Where the first one played like a loose, unkempt side project, this one’s an album, a fully realized effort. Finally, White and Benson have delivered that melding of their sounds that I wanted in the first place. Over 14 diverse tracks, the pair shows off just how much they’ve learned about each other in the ensuing year. They wrote all the songs together (except for a cover of “Rich Boy Blues”), and while some lean more in one direction or the other, the album is a whole new thing for both of them.

The opening title track shifts through three changing tempos, as White’s signature crunchy guitar cranks out a monster riff. White’s the dominant force in the early going – the first single, “Salute Your Solution,” rocks harder than anything on Icky Thump. But Benson makes himself heard on the superb piano gallop “You Don’t Understand Me,” a song that exemplifies this album – it’s fully produced, sharp and bright, as opposed to Soldiers’ murk, and with Benson on piano and White on guitar, it gives off a tight, live band feel.

Where Soldiers hinted at diversity, Consolers delivers it. “Old Enough” is a ‘70s folk-rock stomper, with dirty organ and soaring fiddle to boot. “The Switch and the Spur” is a slower cousin to the White Stripes’ take on “Conquest,” a dramatic Tex-Mex radio play complete with horn section. It was an interesting choice to give Benson the lead vocals on this one, and it shows just how well-meshed the styles are here.

On it goes like that, with nary a bad track to be found. “Top Yourself” is a Zeppelin-esque acoustic romp, “Hold Up” rocks like nobody’s business, and “Many Shades of Black” is a soulful monster, with an awesome horn section. “Pull This Blanket Off” is a down-home piano-blues ballad, and closer “Carolina Drama” ends the album well – it’s another story-song that slips through melodies and genres like water. Along the way, White and Benson include mandolins, fiddles and a spectral female choir.

I can’t fail to mention bassist Jack Lawrence and drummer Patrick Keeler, both from the Greenhornes. Consolers is the album that brings these two fully into the fold – whereas Soldiers sounded like a joint solo record in some places, this one is the work of a completely integrated band. Keeler, in particular, shines here – I know Stripes fans will crucify me for this, but it’s nice to hear Jack White accompanied by a very good drummer for once.

But this barely qualifies as a deftly avoided sophomore slump, since virtually nothing was riding on its release. White is all set with his main band – he’s basically just playing around with the Raconteurs, not setting up his retirement fund, and the other three guys have their own careers going as well. “Steady, As She Goes” was a hit, certainly, but nowhere near a nationwide smash.

Not like, say, “Crazy,” by our second contestant this week, Gnarls Barkley.

Two years ago, I picked up the first Gnarls Barkley album just based on how clever the band’s name was. Sometimes my process is just that silly. I had no idea Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green, two guys I’d barely heard of before, would soon be everywhere. It helped that their debut album, St. Elsewhere, was excellent, a seamless blending of modern beats and rhythms with Green’s timeless, soulful voice. But hell, the album could have been blank except for “Crazy” and they still would have been superstars.

So what to do for the follow-up? A second album of Motown-inspired party tracks would have been fine, of course – the sound is so original and ear-catching that a second helping probably wouldn’t have been stale. But that isn’t what Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo did. The second Gnarls album, The Odd Couple, shares an old-TV-shows title motif with the first, and still pairs Green’s wondrous voice with trippy beats and samples. But the similarities pretty much end there.

Try putting The Odd Couple on at your next party, and watch the room empty out. The album is slow, spacey, melancholy and eerie, with not a single smash pop single to be found. It’s also a richer, deeper and overall better record than the first one. It’s as if Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo knew that they’d never match the success of “Crazy,” no matter what they did, so they chose to explore other avenues. Opener “Charity Case” is danceable, and first single “Run” is something of a whirlwind, but it’s songs like “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul,” with its unearthly, mournful despair, that set the tone.

The Odd Couple is a lot darker than its predecessor. While that album found Cee-Lo poking fun at himself on “The Boogie Monster,” this one is doused in self-loathing. “Would Be Killer” is a frightening glimpse at a damaged psyche, and “Blind Mary” finds Green taking solace in the fact that his visually-impaired girlfriend can’t see how ugly he is. Only closer “A Little Better” shines a ray of hope into the proceedings – most of the rest is creepy, pitch-black and sad.

And it’s great. Those who came aboard with “Crazy” and skipped the back half of St. Elsewhere won’t be happy, of course, and The Odd Couple may get tagged with the sophomore slump label because of that. But artistically, it certainly doesn’t deserve it. Just listen to the extraordinary “Open Book,” a cathartic cry set to music that you just can’t pin down. Or the freaky Syd Barrett overtones of “Whatever,” or the acoustic graveyard whistling of “No Time Soon.” The Odd Couple offers experiences far more soul-searching than those on the debut, and if you’re looking for pop that is also art, you can’t get much better.

But for all their reinvention, Gnarls Barkley have kept the essential core of what they do – they still sound like Al Green produced by Fatboy Slim. Sometimes, though, the sophomore record sees such a drastic, dramatic change at every level from the debut that it’s almost difficult to think of it as a product of the same band. This can be a good or bad thing – if the band pulls it off, it can be the first step in a new direction, but if they don’t, it can come off as desperate. The last thing you want to do, as a new band, is let them see you sweat.

Which brings us to Panic at the Disco, and their second album, Pretty. Odd.

This thing came out just over a week ago, and already, the experience has been fascinating for me. It’s become pretty clear that Panic at the Disco (note the newly absent exclamation mark) is a band I’m not supposed to like. It doesn’t matter that their second album is literally nothing like their first – very few people I know will give it much of a chance. Panic is a band for emo kids and people with no musical taste, I’ve been told, and nothing they will ever do is worth paying attention to.

Now, admittedly, their hugely successful debut is an obstacle to get over. A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out combined all the cliches of modern crap-rock – it sounds just like Fall Out Boy and a dozen other bands. The members of Panic are all cute young men, and they played the kind of music that would get them cute young girls, and slots on major summer festival tours. They copied everything, right down to the too-clever song titles that have little to do with the songs themselves: “The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage,” for example.

I doubt anyone expected Panic to do anything but make their first album again (and again and again), which is one reason Pretty. Odd. is so great. I shit you not, this band has transformed from Fall Out Boy to Sloan in the space of one album. All traces of their former emo sound are gone – like, completely gone – and instead, they’ve made a terrific ‘60s pop album. I’m going to say that again, in case you thought you’d read it wrong: Panic at the Disco has made a terrific ‘60s pop album.

Now, here’s the thing. It’s clear that the Panic boys have just traded one stylistic ape for another, probably after watching Across the Universe. But I admit a certain bias here – I like ‘60s pop a lot more than I like ‘00s pop-punk. I actually think it’s harder to write a sterling pop song than people think, and the Beatles already wrote 90 percent of all possible pop songs anyway. So yeah, the band is pinching a style again, but this time, it’s a style I love.

And man, did they write some great pop songs for this one. Pretty. Odd. is Panic’s attempt to make their own Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as evidenced by the first track, “We’re So Starving.” Over a violin-fueled fanfare, singer Brandon Urie promises, “You don’t have to worry ‘cause we’re still the same band,” a nifty inversion of the “we’re a different band” conceit of Sgt. Pepper. The best part is, from that moment on, Panic proves they’re not the same band at all.

You’ve probably heard the piano-pounding “Nine in the Afternoon,” the most radio-ready song on the album. Here are the George Harrison guitars, the ringing bells, the chiming brass lines, the swelling harmonies, all in the service of a serviceable pop song. Still, I was worried – this one sounds tentative, like they were trying to graft their new ‘60s influence to their old emo sound. This type of stylistic transformation can only work if the band jumps in with both feet.

Not to worry. The rest of Pretty. Odd. is the work of a band committed to their newfound melodic love. “She’s a Handsome Woman” is a dirty psychedelic rock song, “Do You Know What I’m Seeing” provides me with my second opportunity to reference Syd Barrett in one week, and “That Green Gentleman” sports the album’s first knockout chorus, an acoustic start-stop wonder that will stick in your head for days. Throughout, you’ll notice a lack of punky guitars, disco beats, or anything recognizably this band – they’ve traded them for strings and horns and harpsichords, and an overall Brian Wilson-esque sound.

Some of these tunes are so insanely beautiful that if they’d come out under another band’s name, they’d be praised to the skies. “Northern Downpour” is a bit treacly, but its chorus is fantastic, and “Pas de Cheval” sounds like something Chris Murphy might come up with for Sloan. “The Piano Knows Something I Don’t Know” is Panic’s attempt at a stitched-together epic, combining two songs into one, and it works brilliantly.

My favorite here is “When the Day Met the Night,” a bright and bouncy Beach Boys anthem. It starts as an acoustic ballad, with subtle strings, but soon explodes like sunlight into a chorus that compels singalongs. I had to jump back and repeat this song my first time through the album, just to be sure I’d heard what I’d heard. By the end, I had to face facts: Panic at the Disco had written one of my favorite songs of the year so far.

The album isn’t perfect. “I Have Friends in Holy Spaces” is a clarinets-and-ukuleles interlude I could do without, and “Folkin’ Around,” nice as it is, doesn’t really belong here – it’s a country-folk piece, less than two minutes long, that sticks out like a sore thumb. Brandon Urie also still has that emo-boy quality to his voice that sometimes breaks the spell of the songs. And the stretch of opulent ballads near the end gets somewhat wearying.

Overall, though, Pretty. Odd. is the best kind of surprise – a complete re-think that actually works. I bet the executives at Atlantic shat themselves the first time they heard it, and I expect the sunny pop that bleeds out of every corner here is pissing off the band’s old fans something fierce. They’ve made an album that disregards those fans, and aims for more sophisticated listeners, who probably won’t give this a shot because of the band’s name. I know, because I’ve tried to get some of those people to listen to this with an open mind, and it’s no use.

But hell, I don’t care. Every time I listen to this album, I like it more, and I hope Panic continues in this vein. I put Pretty. Odd. into my first-quarter report last week at number seven, after only hearing it a couple of times. The more I spin it, though, the more I think I should have rated it higher. Sales might take a hit, but that’s the only part of this stunning sophomore record that will fall prey to the dreaded slump. The album itself is wonderful.

Next week, maybe the Black Keys, maybe Moby, maybe Sun Kil Moon, and maybe some damn Doctor Who already.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So this is my favorite story of the week. Apparently, if the ever-reclusive Axl Rose somehow finishes up and releases the 13-years-in-the-making Guns ‘n’ Roses opus Chinese Democracy, everyone in America will get a can of Dr. Pepper for free. (Well, everyone except original guitarist Slash, and one-time guitarist Buckethead, who left the band years ago.)

It’s pretty much a safe bet on Dr. Pepper’s part – Axl will never finish this thing, and the only way we’ll ever hear what he’s been working on for the past decade and a half is if he dies and someone else releases it. But it would be fun to imagine which would be the worse experience: listening to the no-doubt incredibly awful Democracy, or choking down the carbonated cough syrup that apparently would come with it. (Don’t you want to be a Pepper too? Yeah, not so much.)

I’ve said this before, but we’re more likely to see actual Chinese democracy than we are to see Chinese Democracy.

* * * * *

Below you will find my first quarter report, a look at the top 10 list for the year if I were forced to release it now. I said in January that I was keeping my expectations low for 2008, so as not to jinx anything. 2007 barreled out of the gate with some excellent records, then petered out by the end, leaving me to shake my head at my own breathless pronouncements in the first half of the year.

So yeah, no way was I doing that again. Thankfully, 2008’s lineup looked reasonably mediocre back in January, so I could safely adopt an air of indifference – this year isn’t going to be that great, and I’m happier that way, I said.

But now I find myself at the end of March, composing a top 10 list I already like quite a bit, and coming up with a couple of honorable mentions already to boot. I’m counting the number of albums I plan to buy in April, many of which I’m expecting will knock me out, and then I’m reading up and listening to snippets of other records set to come out in ’08, records by the likes of Aimee Mann, Ben Folds, the 77s, Portishead, Death Cab for Cutie… and all of a sudden, I feel like I have to come out and say that 2008 has been excellent so far.

Damn. Hope that doesn’t ruin it for the back half of the year.

This week and next, I’m going to be all positive all the time. My plan is to recommend five very good albums to you – two this week, three next. But a quick glance at the list below should give you a sneak preview of one of next week’s subjects, a record that surprised the living hell out of me. Stay tuned for the stunned-grin review of that one.

This week is all about comebacks, and we start with R.E.M.

Now, listen, I’ve been an R.E.M. fan since high school, and one thing I can tell you, their catalog has peaks and valleys. The boys from Athens have made some excellent records, like Murmur, Lifes Rich Pageant, and Automatic for the People. But they’ve made some real turds as well, like Green, Monster, and their last one, Around the Sun. There are few bands who put their audiences through endurance tests like R.E.M., and yet, there are few bands who also reward loyalty the way they do.

Sure, I’ve had my faith tested before. I rank Automatic for the People among the very best albums of the 1990s – its wispy beauty is unmatched in the band’s catalog, and it truly stood out among the rip-snorting noise polluting the airwaves when it was released in 1992. So imagine my dismay when I heard the follow-up, the determinedly noisy and almost entirely song-deficient Monster. My hatred for that record seeped over into my initial dislike for its successor, New Adventures in Hi-Fi – it took years for me to admit that one was pretty good.

But the past 10 years have proven the most difficult. First, drummer Bill Berry quit the band for health reasons, leaving them a three-legged beast. The remaining trio replaced Berry with a drum machine initially, for the icy, remote Up in 1999. They then papered over his absence with globs of production on 2001’s Reveal – I know that one made my top 10 list, but time has lessened my appreciation of it. And finally, they gave up trying all together on 2004’s Around the Sun, the lamest, saddest, worst R.E.M. album ever. I hoped at the time they were headed somewhere better, but I didn’t know when (or if) they’d get there.

Guess what – they’ve arrived. On Tuesday, R.E.M. will release Accelerate, their 14th album. But they’ve already uploaded it to iLike, a music networking tool that works with iTunes, and I’ve taken the opportunity to hear the whole thing. If the last decade has been their deepest valley, Accelerate is one of their highest peaks, a sterling return to form that has these elder statesmen of indie-pop rocking like a band half their age.

I kid you not, Accelerate is LOUD. But it’s not that annoying, processed, buzz-saw kind of loud that Monster was. This is the let’s-annoy-the-neighbors kind of loud you find with the best garage bands, married to tunes only experienced professionals know how to write. This is the kind of loud that comes with youthful energy, a reinvigoration of the soul, and a fuck-it-all attitude, and I can’t tell you how good it is to hear that kind of sound from R.E.M. again.

The most obvious change this time is that they’ve finally let touring drummer Bill Rieflin pound the skins for a whole record. Rieflin used to play with Ministry, so he’s used to loud, and he jump-starts R.E.M. into playing like a band again. Opener “Living Well’s the Best Revenge” is a snide nose-thumb to critics, and is the group’s most energetic starting gun since… well, maybe ever. Much of this record captures the spirit of my favorite R.E.M. song, the explosive “These Days,” from Pageant. Yeah, they sound that good again.

Here’s “Man Sized Wreath,” a takedown of King Bush II with an excellent chorus. Here’s the sharp-as-a-whip single “Supernatural Superserious,” which sees Mike Mills taking his rightful place as backing vocalist again – he soars behind Michael Stipe, giving the song a lift its chorus doesn’t quite deserve. (This is actually kind of a typical R.E.M. song, but since they haven’t written one of those in a decade, I’ll take this one.) Here’s “Hollow Man,” which begins with a deceptive piano part but quickly piles on the six-string heroics. That song is the perfect synthesis of where they are and where they were – without the fiery electric guitars, it could fit on Reveal. But it’s amazing what those fiery electric guitars do for a song like this.

There are slower moments, but far from dragging the album down, they provide its heart. “Until the Day is Done” is an Automatic-worthy acoustic piece, and “Sing for the Submarine” is a complex mid-tempo mini-epic. But before long, they’re back to rocking out – the amazing “Horse to Water” is a punked-up highlight, full of spit and bile. The album ends with a song I couldn’t stand in its live incarnation, “I’m Gonna DJ.” On the R.E.M. silliness scale, it’s somewhere between “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People,” but damn if it doesn’t do the job, closing out the album with a riotous racket. (And a shouted “Yeah!”)

Best of all, in direct contrast to Around the Sun’s seemingly endless hour, Accelerate is in and out in 35 minutes. That’s just enough time to make you want to hit play again, and not enough to screw up a good thing by over-thinking it. Eleven songs, most hovering around the two-to-three-minute range, all with great melodies and the best Peter Buck guitar work in many a moon. It steps up to the plate, knocks a couple skyward, and then goes home early, job done. Cut, print, and there you have the best R.E.M. album in a decade, hands down.

I know, I know. Next week’s albums are nice and all, but you want to hear about something you can walk into a store and buy right now. I just happen to have another band right here that’s made their best album in 10 years, a band a lot of people have written off. If R.E.M. are my high school years, then Counting Crows are my college years, and with Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, they sound better than they have since… well, my college years.

I’m sure by this point everyone believes they have Counting Crows figured out. By the time 2002’s Hard Candy came out, the band had fallen into a predictable routine. It was a routine I liked, so I didn’t care – Hard Candy sounded like a slightly smoother version of their first three albums, and I figured Adam Duritz, his dreadlocks and his band would continue on like that for the rest of their career.

Not that that would have been a bad thing – their first two albums, August and Everything After and Recovering the Satellites, were such era-defining works that matching them, let alone bettering them, was kind of a fool’s errand. This Desert Life was very good. Hard Candy was very good. Duritz and company wrote the same kind of emotional American pop song again and again, but it was a good kind of pop song, and Duritz’ aching, pleading voice is always a treat to hear.

In 2002, when reviewing Hard Candy, I finally hit upon my unique description of Counting Crows. They’re the band, I wrote, that writes the songs for the emotional montages at the end of episodes of long-running, character-driven dramas. So what do they do? They go ahead and put out an album without a single one of those montage songs on it. And it may be the best thing they’ve ever done.

Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings is two records on one disc. The first, Saturday Nights, is a six-song sequence of uptempo numbers, and some of these songs rock harder than anything since “Angels of the Silences.” Opener “1492” practically erupts, with layers and layers of electric guitar swamping just about everything else. Duritz all but spits out the lyrics on this one, an elliptical poem about disappearing into silence. It’s hook-free, it has no chorus to speak of, and it stomps all over your ideas of what Counting Crows sound like.

“Hanging Tree” is the same, but it has a killer chorus, one of the album’s best. “Los Angeles” is the weak link, a song co-written with Ryan Adams – the styles don’t exactly mesh, but the song is good anyway, and has a classic Duritz lyrical conceit: “If you see my picture in a magazine… I’m just trying to make some sense outta me…”

From there, it’s smooth sailing through choppy waters. “Sundays” starts off like a radio-rocker, but the chorus is fantastic. “Insignificant” is louder and better, Duritz whipping out a monster hook in the refrain. “I don’t want to feel so different,” he sings, “but I don’t want to be insignificant…” And “Cowboys” is the cousin of “1492,” another delirious, rocking ramble that finds Duritz making a list of “what I should’ve been but I’m not.” The last minute contains a ripping guitar solo and some unrestrained screams from the frontman.

Through it all, Duritz provides maybe the only unchanged link to the sound of Counting Crows albums past. The rest has been surrounded by electric guitars – much of it sounds like it could have been produced by Matthew Sweet. (It was actually produced by Gil Norton, who manned the boards for the Pixies’ last three albums.) I don’t want to give the impression that this is raw and rough – it isn’t, it’s fully produced – but it’s some of the loudest material the band has done.

That’s not the surprise, though. The second record, Sunday Mornings, strips away everything identifiably Counting Crows and recasts them as a country-folk band for much of the running time. And the results are beautiful. “Washington Square” sets the tone – it’s a spare, simple folk song performed on acoustic guitar, acoustic bass, banjo, piano and nothing else. Duritz takes the song’s simple framework and brings an astounding amount of depth to it. It’s a lovely little piece.

Sunday Mornings continues in that vein for the next two songs, both pretty tunes, and if it had gone on like that, it would still have been decent. But with “Anyone But You,” the band starts building the sound up, and taking some interesting left turns. The centerpiece of Sunday Mornings, “Anyone But You” starts out like an Aimee Mann song, all acoustics and Chamberlain strings, but by the end, Duritz is imitating an entire brass section with his voice.

“Le Ballet D’Or” is even cooler, a sinister acoustic piece that takes some fascinating melodic detours. But it’s all prelude for “On a Tuesday in Amsterdam Long Ago,” a piano-vocal piece that truly showcases Duritz’ voice. He sounds like he’s about to shatter here, and that’s the sound that initially gripped me – this is “Raining in Baltimore” and “Colorblind,” but even more naked and powerful. The album closes with “Come Around,” another Norton production (the rest of Sunday Mornings was produced by Brian Deck), and one that I bet was initially on the Saturday Nights half. But it brings things full circle by the end, like closing credits music.

Here’s the thing: Counting Crows is a band often accused of driving right down the middle of the road. The last two albums especially have been dismissed by many as tepid pop affairs. This one cannot be. It is an album of extremes, shifting from the explosive and torrential to the sparse and quivering. Pretty much none of this is what radio will expect, but long-time fans will find in this album the creative spark and emotional resonance they fell in love with. It is drastically different, yet unmistakably Counting Crows, and by shaking things up, they may have made their best record yet.

* * * * *

Okay, it’s time for the list. As mentioned, I have a pair of honorable mentions first, two records that are actually exceptional, but currently rank as #11 and #12. They are Distortion, by the Magnetic Fields, and Small-Time Machine, by Cassettes Won’t Listen.

As for the rest, I fully expect (and certainly hope) this list will change as the year rolls along. It includes one album that isn’t out yet, one that isn’t out in the U.S., and one that I haven’t reviewed. (Next week, next week!) But if I had to release the top 10 list right now, here’s what it would look like:

#10. Richard Julian, Sunday Morning in Saturday’s Shoes.
#9. American Music Club, The Golden Age.
#8. Nada Surf, Lucky.
#7. Panic at the Disco, Pretty. Odd.
#6. The Black Crowes, Warpaint.
#5. Vampire Weekend.
#4. R.E.M., Accelerate.
#3. Joe Jackson, Rain.
#2. Counting Crows, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings.
#1. The Feeling, Join With Us.

And there you have it. Next week, I hope to get some Doctor Who going – I’m really behind right now. And I’ll be talking about three sophomore records (including my current #7) that blow their respective predecessors out of the water.

See you in line Tuesday morning.