I’m trying to decide what to pay for the new Radiohead album.

For those of you who somehow missed the onslaught of press regarding Britain’s favorite sons this week, here’s the rundown. Radiohead has finished their seventh album, called In Rainbows. What they don’t have, at the moment, is a contract with a record label – their long-running association with EMI expired after 2003’s Hail to the Thief. But rather than sign up with another label, they’ve decided to give the music industry a kick in the bollocks.

The 10-song In Rainbows will be available to download starting Wednesday from their website. It’s the first time a band of Radiohead’s stature has decided to digitally self-distribute a new record, and that alone would send shockwaves through the corporate music landscape, but they’ve gone one better: the price for downloading In Rainbows is whatever you want to pay.

Seriously. The price field on the order form is blank, and you can fill in nothing, or a penny, or a million dollars. Whatever you think the record’s worth. If you click on the question mark next to the price field, you get a message that reads, “It’s up to you.” Click on the question mark next to that, and you get a second message: “No really, it’s up to you.”

I know I haven’t had a kind word to say about Radiohead yet this century, but this is an incredible idea. Below-the-radar artists like Jane Siberry (who now calls herself Issa, for some reason) have been working on the variable pricing method for years now, but Radiohead’s worldwide fame and sharp critical divide make this a whole new ballgame. This way, the band gets to see just what their fans will pay for new work – surely some will swipe it for nothing, but I’m sure just as many will pay what they think is a fair price.

Of course, this is also a sweeping broadside in the war between my beloved CDs and downloads. In Rainbows is available in a physical format, but it’s so extravagant and expensive that it looks like rigging the bet – the “discbox,” as they call it, contains the album on CD, a bonus disc with eight other songs, both of those collections on vinyl records, and a hardcover book, all wrapped up in a massive slipcase for $81, plus shipping. If the band had made the album available in a standard CD format, with a standard price, alongside the variable price download, that would have been an interesting comparison. But only the hardcore (and the rich) will buy the discbox.

I’m neither of those, although if you’d asked me in 1998, I would have gladly shelled out for the big package. The thing is, everyone’s talking about the format of this record, and no one’s talking about the music that will be on it, which I think is probably the way Radiohead wants it. Since Kid A in 1999, Thom Yorke and company have been tunneling up their own asses, treading the same formless, song-less ground, and what I’ve heard of In Rainbows is no different. (In fact, if you go to NME’s site, you can hear live recordings of nearly every song on the new album. I hated just about all of them. Is this really the same band that made OK Computer? Really?)

Still, I want to hear the finished product, and I’ll most likely buy the standard CD release, for which the band is currently negotiating terms. As much as this variable pricing download thing is an assault on the way I like to buy music, I want to be part of the experiment. Given my distaste for just about everything the band has done since 1999, I am tempted to pay nothing. I’m sure many have done the same thing. But I know that’s not fair, and I want a say in setting a reasonable price for what even I can see is the future of music distribution.

So I’m thinking that $10 should be about right. It costs less to make music available this way, I know, but I’m not thinking about Radiohead here, I’m thinking about the thousands of other bands that will be looking to this grand experiment as a sign of what people are willing to pay to download new music. This also brings up an interesting conundrum: if the download is available this year, and the CD doesn’t hit shops until next year, is the album eligible for the 2007 top 10 list, or the 2008 one? (Luckily, it’s Radiohead, so this shouldn’t even be a concern.)

Anyway, I’ll let you know what I decide, and have my review of In Rainbows here next week.

* * * * *

I’ve been doing a top 10 list for so many years now that I just know when I’ve heard the number one record. It’s an indefinable, intangible thing – more of a feeling than anything else. I heard Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, and I just knew. I heard Joanna Newsom’s Ys, and I just knew.

I’m starting to get that feeling about PJ Harvey’s new one, White Chalk, though I’m not quite sure why. If you were to go on what I say I like, then this album shouldn’t be anywhere near the top – it’s not poppy, it has no catchy melodies, its production is odd and off-kilter, and it’s a barely-eligible 33 minutes long. But I can’t stop listening to it. White Chalk is nothing short of 2007’s most compelling and unsettling album thus far, an amazing feat of fearlessness that gets under your skin like little else out there.

Polly Jean Harvey’s career has been marked by sweeping change, from the raw guitar bursts of her first few albums (Dry, Rid of Me) to the more sinister To Bring You My Love, to the extraordinary pop of Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. But she’s never done anything like this. For White Chalk, she ditched everything that sounds like PJ Harvey, setting aside the six-string for a piano, and singing everything in a high-pitched voice that sounds octaves out of her comfortable range. The fact that Harvey can’t really play the piano only adds to the fragility of this record – more accomplished playing would ruin the whole thing.

The result is, frankly, otherworldly. It sounds like cobbled-together radio transmissions from a planet where music evolved in completely different ways than it did here. But once you get past its ghostly exterior, it is uncommonly beautiful, much like the spectral cover photo. It’s also an album that will not leave you alone. One listen through will leave you unnerved and shaken, but you’ll want to listen again. This is something that goes beyond my usual concerns about song structure and melody, and heads straight for the emotional center of things – I didn’t even try to deconstruct these songs until my third time through the album.

Surprisingly, the songs themselves are simple things, tiny sketches given grand shape by the shivery production. Opener “The Devil” is haunting, its refrain of “come here at once” both comforting and unhinged. Throughout, Harvey pounds the piano, giving the songs basic shapes, but nothing more – they sound like they could float off and discorporate at any time. She layers her voice atop these fragile pianos and acoustic guitars like a choir of ghosts, often allowing one vocal line to fight against the others. Her impossibly high lead vocal on “To Talk to You” sounds like she can barely keep it together, which only adds to the atmosphere.

The subject matter is just as unsettling as the music. This album is about brokenness, about unwanted lives and loves. “Silence” tells the tale: “I freed myself from my family, I freed myself from work, I freed myself… and remained alone.” “When Under Ether” is simultaneously the most accessible and most horrifying thing here, a first-person account of a woman having an abortion. That’s the only song here that makes any reference to modern times – otherwise, this is a record without an era, one that could have been written 100 years ago, or yesterday.

You may think that an album consisting of little more than piano and voice would be peaceful and relaxing, but you’d be wrong. This album is almost unbearably tense, until the final 30 seconds. “The Mountain” starts like most of the other songs here, a simple piano line and that nearly whispered voice, but it concludes with a series of blood-curdling, orgasmic screams (melodic screams, mind you, in key), that sound like our narrator finally achieving catharsis. Naturally, the record abruptly ends two seconds later, giving you no time to join in that moment of release.

White Chalk is the kind of album that makes it nearly impossible to just go on with your day after listening to it. It weaves a skin-crawling spell, and cocoons you in it – you’ll be glad that this album is only 33 minutes long, because much longer would feel like suffocation. But the very weaving of that spell is a tremendous achievement – music that can make you feel anything is rare enough, but music that can make you feel this unstable, this unsafe, this unsure of the ground beneath your feet is akin to magic.

White Chalk is, in its own way, a masterpiece. Some will see it as just a fascinating diversion for PJ Harvey, but it captures something inexplicable, something without form or definition, something that goes beyond notes on a page, or sound from a speaker. This is an amazing album, and while it may not make it to number one, I can’t stop spinning it, and succumbing to its ghastly, ghostly charms.

* * * * *

And now, The Three Doctors.

There are some fans who have this bizarre notion of Doctor Who as a serious science-fiction drama. To be fair, occasionally it does try to spin tales with weight to them, like this year’s superb “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood.” But above all, this show is supposed to be fun, and my favorite stories are the ones that realize how much fun it can be.

The Aztecs, for example, is a romp, a morality play that keeps things light and funny. Patrick Troughton’s Doctor was always poking fun – witness the scene in The Invasion where, after the UNIT troops chase the Cybermen down the street past the Doctor, Isobel begins snapping pictures of him, and he fixes his hair and poses. Doctor Who is, at its heart, an adventure serial, the kind you used to be able to see for a dime at the theaters on the weekends, and too much gravitas just stretches the concept, never mind the budget.

Which may be why I love The Three Doctors so much, especially since many others seem to hate it. This story, which began airing in 1972, is the first multi-Doctor tale – the Time Lords are under attack, and for some reason not fully explained, their only hope of survival is to bring the Doctor’s three incarnations together. So we get Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell sharing a screen for the first and, sadly, only time.

This could have been boring – if Doctor Who were a straight sci-fi drama, no doubt the three incarnations would have seen the looming threat and immediately decided to work together for the common good. Thank God that isn’t what happens here. It’s an essential part of the Doctor’s personality that he’s always the smartest person in the room, so of course his various incarnations can’t get along – they’re always trying to one-up each other. And it’s hysterical. Patrick Troughton is a comic genius, of course, but this is one of the few opportunities Jon Pertwee has to show how damn funny he is, too, and the pair simply crackles on screen together.

William Hartnell, the original Doctor, was supposed to have a bigger part in this story, but sadly, his health was in such poor shape that all he could do was sit and read lines. The writers came up with a clever solution – the first Doc gets trapped in a time eddy, but can communicate with the others through the Tardis scanner. Unfortunately, this means that Hartnell’s last performance as the Doctor is confined to a few moments on a TV monitor. He’s excellent anyway, famously dismissing Docs two and three: “So, you’re my replacements. A dandy and a clown!”

The story is delightfully silly. It introduces Omega (pronounced OH-meh-gah, for no good reason), the Time Lord who discovered time travel. Omega is stuck in a black hole, but he’s learned to harness the power therein to take his revenge on the Time Lords. This revenge is wonderfully ill-defined, and it seems to involve snaring the Doctor with a special effect that looks like someone drew on the frame with crayon, and attacking UNIT with walking hunks of Jell-O called Gellguards. These are the stupidest monsters I’ve yet seen in Doctor Who, and as such, they’re awesome to behold.

But the real story is the interaction between the Docs and the rest of the cast. This is a UNIT story, so we get Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, and this may well be his finest performance. He plays the Brig as a stubborn empiricist, and the scene where he refuses to believe that UNIT headquarters has been transported into the black hole is laugh-out-loud funny. He’s a great foil for both Troughton and Pertwee, and Courtney plays the straight man to both Doctors brilliantly.

The Three Doctors was the kickoff to Doctor Who’s monumental 10th season, and serves as a warm look back at the show’s history. The plot of the story also finds the Doctor regaining the use of his Tardis, freeing him up to travel in time and space again. Two further stories from the 10th season are out on DVD, and I’ll talk about those next week. But I highly recommend The Three Doctors – it’s exactly what Doctor Who should be, to me, and watching it was the most fun I’ve had since I started this silly obsession.

The Three Doctors does one other thing that I wanted to mention, though – it serves as a final goodbye to William Hartnell. The immortal first Doctor died shortly after filming his part in the story, and even though I’ve only recently gotten to know his work on this show, it was touching to get one last visit with him. And the writers treat him perfectly here – his Doctor is the classy one, sighing heavily over the argumentative and childish natures of his other selves. He’s the Doc the other Docs look up to, and as the originator of the role, that’s a fine, final tribute to Hartnell and his work.

Next week, the last two Pertwees on DVD: Carnival of Monsters and The Green Death. I’ve just received Robot, the first Tom Baker story, and I’m anxious to dive into episodes I can remember watching when I was a kid. More to come, of course.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So I promised my friend Mike that when I got around to reviewing Inferno, I’d do it spoiler-free.

Mike is responsible for rekindling my irrational obsession with Doctor Who. He has an admiration for Tom Baker, the fourth and most famous Doctor, but hasn’t seen much before Baker’s run. I’ve been keeping him up to speed on my travels through the early years of Who, and Inferno is one he wants to watch. So I’ll try to keep my promise, but it’ll be tough.

Inferno is Jon Pertwee’s fourth story as the Doctor, and though he got off to a shaky start with Spearhead from Space, this story is proof that the new team found their footing quickly. Pertwee’s first season was dominated by seven-part stories, each lasting nearly three hours, and while you’d think a seven-parter would be intolerably padded, Inferno moves like a bullet. Sure, the cliffhangers are largely manufactured – you have to end each episode with a shock, after all – but this story has a mood of inescapable doom that I’ve never seen on this show before, and it’s marvelously effective.

Of course, I’m grading on a sliding scale – this is Doctor Who, after all. The effects are cheesy, the monster makeup is lousy, the dialogue is nowhere near as good as you’d expect nowadays, and compared to an episode of Lost, the whole thing looks remarkably cheap and staged. If you’re going to be a Doctor Who fan, you just have to deal with all of that. And if you’re able to look past it, Inferno is a splendid, foreboding story, one of the best I’ve seen since I started collecting these DVDs.

What’s it about? Well, scratching the surface, the Doctor is called in as a scientific advisor on a radical project to find new energy sources – a team of scientists is trying to drill past the Earth’s crust and tap into the superheated gases below. The Doc is still trapped on Earth, exiled there by the Time Lords at the end of Patrick Troughton’s run, so our hero is also hoping to use the project’s power source to juice up his time-and-space machine and get the hell out of there.

Things start to go wrong, of course. There’s a green slime that turns people into werewolves, and there’s a madman in charge of the project who ignores safety warnings. All pretty standard stuff for this show, with the Doctor dispensing sage-like advice and the idiot humans refusing to listen until it’s too late. This could have made for a dreadful seven-parter, had it continued down that path.

But then, at the end of the second episode, something happens that sets the story on its ear. And from then on, it’s awesome. I wish I could tell you more. Let’s just say that there’s a sense of palpable danger in the middle four episodes, and the writers take it all the way. It’s a showcase for Nicholas Courtney, as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and for Caroline John, in her final appearance as Liz Shaw.

Inferno is really just a dynamite, crackling story, one of the finest Doctor Who tales I’ve seen. It’s so gripping that I don’t mind how crappy it looks – the original videotapes are gone, and though it exists on black-and-white film, the restoration team rightly decided to go with color videotape recovered from Canada. Unfortunately, after standards conversion and decades of decay, the tapes weren’t in great shape, and the final DVD result is much less sharp than your average Doctor Who release. It’s not a lot better than a VHS tape, frankly, but it’s still clear, and the sound is crisp, and it’s better to have it in this condition than not have it at all.

There are four subsequent Pertwee stories available on DVD in America. (Those lucky Brits already have The Time Warrior too.) I think I may skip the next one, The Claws of Axos, simply because I’m itching to review The Three Doctors, and Axos just isn’t very good. But it is the only appearance on DVD so far of Roger Delgado as the Master, and so it bears a mention, if not a full review.

The Master is a renegade Time Lord introduced in season eight (in every story of season eight, in fact), and he would return to plague the Doctor throughout the series. Roger Delgado played the part first, with a devilish mix of style and cunning, and in Axos, he steals every scene he’s in. Delgado was killed in a car accident in June of 1973, but the Master lived on, later played by Geoffrey Beevers and the late Anthony Ainley. A new Master, played by John Simm, showed up at the end of the third season of the new series as well, continuing the legacy.

The rest of The Claws of Axos is a bit of a mess, sadly, with a poorly-thought-out plot and even poorer effects. But it’s the last bump in the road, as far as the six available Pertwee stories. We’ll get to The Three Doctors next week, but let me just say in advance that it’s a riot, a warm and funny tribute to the show’s first 10 years, with the added bittersweet tinge of William Hartnell’s final performance. It may be my favorite Doctor Who story so far, and I can’t wait to write about it.

* * * * *

I honestly didn’t expect to hear The Last Sucker so soon.

I knew it was coming. Shortly after releasing last year’s incendiary Rio Grande Blood, Ministry mastermind Al Jourgensen announced there would be one more album, and that would be it. The final record would complete Jourgensen’s “George Bush is an insane, dangerous bastard” trilogy, and then, in Big Al’s words, Ministry and Bush would “ride off into the sunset together.”

So it would seem that The Last Sucker is about a year too early to offer any kind of definitive summary of Junior’s time in office. It’s also clearly not designed to influence the 2008 elections – it is, like the previous two albums, fixated on Bush and his administration, and thanks to the merciful gods of term limits, the Texas twit can’t run again. This isn’t an album about 2008, it’s about 2007, and what it feels like to live in King Bush’s America right now.

Of course, the idea that Bush is an insane, dangerous bastard has become much more accepted since Jourgensen began his trilogy with Houses of the Mole in 2004. So this time, Jourgensen has focused on the Iraq war, painting Bush as a bloodthirsty religious nut, determined to bring about Armageddon. The Last Sucker is an angry, violent, nearly relentless album, but given this is supposed to be the final Ministry disc, what else would you expect? Jourgensen unloads with both barrels, offering no analysis, only unfiltered rage at the state of the world.

In some ways, it’s the perfect last Ministry album. The front cover is a masterpiece, a shifting hologram that superimposes a slithering reptile over the face of King Bush II. Open up the sleeve, and you’ll find a pop-up parody of DaVinci’s The Last Supper, with Jourgensen as Jesus and half the members of Bush’s cabinet as the apostles. (I didn’t get the title pun until I saw the pop-up artwork. I’m slow.) The lyrics are vengeful, yet at times surprisingly powerful: the tale of a haunted soldier destroyed by Iraq in “Life is Good” is, at least for Ministry, somewhat deep.

Of course, one song later, he’s calling Dick Cheney the son of Satan, and meaning it. So take all previous claims of lyrical depth with a grain of salt.

But perhaps it’s just me – I was expecting the final album from a band known for high-speed industrial metal noise to be, well… faster and noisier. The first five tracks are all mid-tempo crushers, and while the words are apocalyptically angry, the music just kind of chugs along without matching their fury. It’s good stuff, and certainly leagues better than the last time Jourgensen tried to slow things down (Filth Pig and Dark Side of the Spoon, two of the worst Ministry albums), but it’s not the venomous explosion I was hoping for.

Thankfully, things pick up with “No Glory,” the sixth track. It starts off all sleaze-metal, but before too long it’s rocketing forward, drum machine set on “liquefy.” The mechanical-sounding guitars are amazing here, as always – it’s incredibly difficult to play organic instruments along with a computer, since the machine will never screw up. The furious tempo thankfully doesn’t come back down – “Death and Destruction” is a whirlwind of shrapnel, framing one of Bush’s arrogant giggles as the most satanic sound on Earth, and even a cover of “Roadhouse Blues” doesn’t derail the proceedings, as it’s almost entirely unrecognizable.

The record ends with a two-part, 15-minute powerhouse called “End of Days,” bringing to a close Ministry’s 25-year career. (Or so Jourgensen says…) How do you close out your life’s work? Jourgensen does it by stepping aside, and letting the final words on the final Ministry album come from President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The second part of “End of Days” includes a lengthy sample from Eisenhower’s last speech as president, delivered on January 17, 1961, in which he warned against the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” – basically, the machines and money of war.

For three albums now, Al’s been trying to make this point, connecting Cheney and Halliburton to the war in Iraq and charging Bush with profiteering and empire-building. But in the end, Eisenhower’s speech drives the point home better than anything Jourgensen could have written. The former president explains the uneasy relationship of war and profit, uses his famous phrase, and then says this:

“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

If there’s a better note for Ministry to go out on, I can’t think of it. We have not been an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, and the military-industrial complex has trampled all over our peaceful methods and goals. Security and liberty have not prospered together. For at least the last five years, Ministry has been all about telling us this. And I hope, in 2008 and beyond, that we finally listen.

Now, of course, I don’t believe that The Last Sucker will be the final Ministry album. This shitty world will no doubt piss off Al Jourgensen again before too long, and we’ll get another righteous blast of intense, precise, explosive rage. And thank God for that, because we need artists like Jourgensen to spit bile all over us every once in a while. But if he’s true to his word, and The Last Sucker is the finale, then it does the job well. It gets off to a slow start, but by the end, it’s a perfect way to bow out, and a strong capper to a quarter-century of venom.

So thanks, Al. Take a bow.

* * * * *

And now it’s time for the third quarter report on my top 10 list.

It’s changed significantly from the second quarter, with new entries in half the slots, and a few stalwarts dropping off entirely after some reconsideration. And you’ll notice that the top two slots have flipped – Silverchair’s still-dazzling Young Modern hasn’t held up as well as I’d have liked on repeat play, while the Shins’ Wincing the Night Away recaptured my heart recently.

I still feel like I haven’t heard the number one album of the year yet, but if I were to finalize the list right now, here’s how it would look:

#10. Suzanne Vega, Beauty and Crime.
#9. Minus the Bear, Planet of Ice.
#8. The Swirling Eddies, The Midget, the Speck and the Molecule.
#7. Over the Rhine, The Trumpet Child.
#6. Bright Eyes, Cassadaga.
#5. Okkervil River, The Stage Names.
#4. Aqualung, Memory Man.
#3. The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible.
#2. Silverchair, Young Modern.
#1. The Shins, Wincing the Night Away.

There are still a few terrific-looking weeks coming up, and I still haven’t heard a number of new albums from September yet – I just can’t seem to find the time to stay ahead. So I hope this list changes, and I hope that, like last year, a fourth-quarter surprise will leap out at me and proclaim itself my number one choice. As it is, though, this list isn’t bad at all.

Next week, probably a long one with a bunch of September records I haven’t reviewed yet. And of course, a look at The Three Doctors.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So there’s this show called Doctor Who that I’ve been watching.

I know I’ve been promising to continue my semi-regular write-ups on old Doctor Who stories for a couple of weeks now. Last time, I was nearing the end of the Patrick Troughton run, with only The Seeds of Death to go. Since then, I’ve dived headlong into Jon Pertwee’s time as the third Doctor, so I thought I’d jump ahead a little bit and talk about that. But let me first say that The Seeds of Death is fun, if a little overlong and cheap-looking. Oh, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Oh yeah, and the Ice Warriors look stupid and walk way too slowly to be menacing. And the seeds never look like anything other than balloons full of powder. But other than that, it’s fun.

Two stories later, Troughton bid farewell to the role of the Doctor with a 10-part story called The War Games. People were probably used to this idea by then – this was the Doctor’s second on-screen regeneration, so viewers knew what to expect. But I doubt anyone could have guessed just how many other things would change between seasons six and seven.

Let’s list them off. There was a new Doctor, of course, played by Jon Pertwee. This incarnation of the Doc was an often pompous, arrogant dandy with boatloads of charm – in some ways, an older James Bond type of character. A new actor playing the main character is shakeup enough, but this time, the entire supporting cast changed, too. The William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton transition was eased by keeping the same companions, but both Frazer Hines (Jamie) and Wendy Padbury (Zoe) left at the same time Troughton did.

The solution was a radical one. At the end of The War Games, the Time Lords decided to exile the Doctor to Earth, disabling his Tardis and effectively taking away the premise of the show. Soon, the Doctor became part of UNIT, the task force run by his old friend Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadeer, was the only returning actor from Troughton’s time. The Doc’s new companion was Liz Shaw, a skeptical scientist played by Caroline John.

So, new cast, new setting, new main character. What else? Oh, right – the show started filming in color.

That ends up being the biggest problem with Pertwee’s first couple of stories. The Doctor Who team was clearly not prepared to shoot in color, because they made, essentially, the same show they were making in black and white. The problem is, the cheap sets and costumes are easier to overlook in monochrome, and they become unforgivable in color. I have seen quite a bit of Doctor Who and the Silurians, Pertwee’s second story, and man… it’s chock full of what Frank Zappa would call “cheepnis.”

But that’s skipping ahead to a story that’s not even out on DVD yet. (It’s set for January in the U.K., in a box with The Sea Devils and Warriors of the Deep.) Pertwee’s debut is a tale called Spearhead from Space, and it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that the future of the show hinged on it. Viewers had to buy the new Doctor, the new cast, the Earth-centric setting, and the bright burst of color, all at once. Spearhead from Space had to be awesome.

It’s terrible.

Really, it’s truly awful. It’s no fault of the cast – Pertwee is good right away, especially in a bit in the first episode where he makes a frantic getaway in a wheelchair. Courtney and John are quite good too, with Courtney especially digging in to a role he would play, off and on, for the next 19 years. But the story is wretched. It’s about this intelligent plastic from outer space that makes department store mannequins come to life. Seriously. That’s what it’s about.

Like The Invasion, Spearhead focuses on the people working to discover and stop the alien threat. Unlike The Invasion, it is dreary and dull and endless, even at four episodes. The Autons (because that’s what the department store mannequins are called once they start moving around) are just silly-looking, not creepy. The actors playing the bad guys are one-dimensional and hammy. And there’s a bit near the end with a tentacle coming out of a tank and squeezing Pertwee’s neck, which caused a burst of uncontrollable laughter the first time I saw it.

So yeah, color was an ill fit for Doctor Who at first, and they launched their new era with a remarkably weak script, and the show was still a massive hit. So I don’t know. The Autons made their return in the first episode of the new series, Rose, and they looked stupid there, too. But many British fans can remember where they were and how old they were when they first saw the mannequins coming to life in the department store window in Spearhead, so maybe I’m missing something iconic.

All I know is this: my Pertwee collection picks up considerably with the fan-bloody-tastic Inferno, the fourth story of his run. But I’ll get to that next week. I’m also far enough along in my viewing that I can tell you that Pertwee deserves his place as one of the most adored Doctors, and Spearhead is just a case of a new team finding its footing. It gets much, much better from there.

* * * * *

A lot of my friends think I’m pretty plugged in to the music scene. Most of the time, though, I feel like I’m racing to catch trains that have already left the station.

The three albums I have on tap this week are perfect examples. I describe them as under the radar, and I wouldn’t expect most people I know to have heard of them, but I feel stupid and embarrassed to admit that I’m just now joining all three of these parties. All three bands have been around for years, and all have multiple critically-adored albums. And yet, here I am, just catching up.

This happens all the time. I missed Sufjan Stevens’ first four albums. I didn’t find Elliott Smith until XO. The first Bright Eyes album I heard was Lifted. For every band I catch hold of early, it seems like there’s three that slip through my grasp. I’m hoping that one day, I’ll wake up suddenly with a brilliant idea for a new invention, market it, make millions and spend the rest of my life hearing every new CD that comes out.

It doesn’t help that the bands I miss out on eventually turn out to be favorites. Take Pinback, for example. The first album of theirs I picked up was Summer in Abaddon, last year – two years after it came out. But you better believe I was there on the day their new one, Autumn of the Seraphs, was released.

I’d heard the name Pinback, but it sounded to me like a generic rock band name, and I stupidly didn’t investigate further. I was dead wrong – Pinback plays some of the most thoughtful guitar-based music I’ve heard, all clean tones and driving rhythms with some sparkling melodies. It’s a very difficult sound to describe – it contains elements of the Cure, Rush, Bob Mould, and a hundred other singular artists. It’s difficult, almost math-rock in its complexity, and yet you’re never left with your head spinning, because they somehow make this concoction surprisingly catchy.

Autumn of the Seraphs brings their season cycle to a halfway point with 11 of the best songs Rob Crow and Zack Smith have yet written. It is their most polished recording, with looped drums cropping up on half the tracks, and criss-crossing, silky guitars tickling your ear just about every second. “From Nothing to Nowhere” kicks things off with a backbeat, while “Good to Sea” will burrow into your brain. But it’s the gentler songs, like “How We Breathe,” that really set this album apart. It’s been a constant evolution to this point, where the pianos are as prominent as the six-strings, but songs like the almost Beatlesque “Devil You Know” ably show why the journey here was worth it.

One quibble – the opening riff of “Blue Harvest” was clearly ripped off from “Message in a Bottle” by the Police, although the song goes some fascinating, almost Yes-like places from there. But that’s it. The whole album is kind of amazing, and will easily factor in my top 10 list decisions this year. I know I prefaced this review by shining a light on my own ignorance, but I still feel confident in saying that there really isn’t another band out there quite like Pinback.

Well, there is Minus the Bear, although the similarities are surface-level. Both bands play complex, clean-toned, driving nerd-rock, and both have been on a road towards more atmospheric works. But where Pinback goes for otherworldly beauty, Minus the Bear just flat-out rocks.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Minus is a band that’s only recently grown up. In truth, all of their albums are serious-minded and complex, but the early ones were saddled with non-sequitur titles like They Make Beer Commercials Like This and This is What I Know About Being Gigantic. Their new one has a much more straightforward title: Planet of Ice. The song titles have all been taken seriously this time too, with the possible exception of the witty “Double Vision Quest.” It’s almost as if the band has decided to finally make the packaging suit the sound.

And what a sound it is. Minus the Bear is clearly a band that works out every second of its music, determining which notes from which instruments will fall on each beat of each song. Their music is intricate and moody, disparate strands of sound spinning out into a perfectly formed latticework. They’re not as catchy as Pinback, but a song like “Knights” works overtime to pull your ears 12 different ways, and the result is enthralling.

The album’s centerpiece is the six-minute “Dr. L’Ling” and its sequel, “Part 2.” Together, they form a 10-minute mission statement, exploding with rhythmic force one minute and drenching itself in fog the next. That they follow it up with the 2:46 “Throwin’ Shapes,” the closest this album comes to a potential hit song, is almost gilding the lily – Minus the Bear is a band that has carefully carved out its own niche, and they’re now exploring it with all they’ve got. The album concludes with the nearly nine-minute “Lotus,” a prog-rock epic that almost serves as a crash course. Planet of Ice is the best record Minus the Bear has made, and another step on a fascinating and unique trip.

But as much as I love both those records – and if it’s not clear, Planet of Ice is another contender for my year-end list – they’re both just refinements, not massive upheavals. For that, you need to turn to multi-national trio Liars.

I have to give Pitchfork credit for this one. They named Drum’s Not Dead, Liars’ third album, as their 6th favorite record of last year, and wrote about it in such descriptive, dazzling language that I simply had to check it out. Of course, now I’m embarrassed that I wasn’t on this train to begin with, but what can you do. Drum’s Not Dead proved impenetrable for a long time, but I stuck with it, and now I consider it one of the most intriguing albums I’ve heard all year.

And then I bought the back catalog, and I was blown away by how far the sound has come in just three albums. The first record, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, is angular, guitar-fueled, stabbing rock – short bursts of near-punk songs with a Fugazi meets Franz Ferdinand feel to them. But the second, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, sets off in a much more droning, atonal direction, taking cues from Japanese noise artists and hypnotic ambient music.

That evolution reached its peak on Drum’s Not Dead, a concept album about doubt and creativity. It’s a strange, off-kilter masterpiece, full of tribal drums, single-note drones, and some of the most unsettling falsetto vocals you’ll hear anywhere. It’s a shambling noise sculpture, miles away from the simplistic rock of their debut, and though there isn’t a single catchy song on it anywhere, it’s an immersive listen from beginning to end.

I read the advance press on their fourth record, Liars, with some dismay – they seemed to be heading back to three-minute rock songs, with verses and choruses and everything. I do realize how odd it is for me to be dismayed at the prospect of structured pop songs, but there you are. Not to worry, though – the self-titled album isn’t quite the return to rock we were led to expect, and thank God for that.

What this album does do is refocus the band, to great effect. Liars is just as noisy and off-balance as Drum’s Not Dead, but it’s performed largely on guitars, with a definite emphasis on sharper songwriting. A song like “Houseclouds,” with an electronic beat propping up a decent hook, is this band’s version of pop, and “Cycle Time” sounds a bit like an attempt to do Led Zeppelin, but then there are tracks like “Leather Prowler” that shamble forward, out of phase and covered in static, and drones like “The Dumb in the Rain” that set your nerves on edge.

This is the sound of Liars taking stock, of trying to graft the strange trips of the last few records onto the rock band they used to be. Strangely enough, it works – this is a weird record, but in comparison to the last two they’ve made, it’s almost catchy, and it cements Liars as a band to watch. Some may listen to this and feel like the band is trying to put one over on everyone – why would they choose to sound like this? But delve in, and you’ll see that this is absolutely purposeful work, taking from a wide range of influences and melding them all together into something new. It’s so new that what you’re hearing is its infancy, its first few steps, its first attempts at words. And I’m excited to watch it grow up.

Next week, probably the final Ministry album, but maybe also new ones from Foo Fighters, Nellie McKay, the Weakerthans, Eddie Vedder and Mark Knopfler.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I know I promised a look at some under-the-radar records this time, including the fantastic new Pinback album, but the new Fish CD showed up in my mailbox on Monday, and I haven’t been listening to anything else since. So I’m gonna talk about that. Next week, I’m sure I’ll get to the new ones from Pinback, Liars and Minus the Bear, but let me just say up front that my choice not to review them this week is in no way a vote against the albums themselves. They’re all great, and all worth your cash.

But for this week, it’s the charismatic Scotsman and his 13th Star.

* * * * *

A couple of weeks ago, Fish played a one-off reunion gig with Marillion.

Fish was their original singer, and thanks to a couple of hits (“Kayleigh,” “Lavender”) on the other side of the pond, he’s still strongly associated with them. Poor Steve Hogarth has been fronting Marillion since 1989, but Fish’s persona and presence are so strongly imprinted on the band that Hogarth is still considered “the new guy” by many. In fact, just about every week on the band’s online forum, someone asks whether a reunion is possible. I find the question insulting to the 18 years of amazing work Hogarth has contributed to the band, but still, people ask.

And a couple of weeks ago, those people got their wish. The four instrumentalists in Marillion joined Fish in the Market Square in Aylesbury to perform (what else?) “Market Square Heroes,” the band’s first single from 1983. By all accounts, a good time was had by all, and I wish I’d been there.

Of course, those same fans that have been begging for a reunion are trying to make more of this one-off than it is, and that makes me sad. This sort of spontaneous reunion could only have happened now, when both Marillion and Fish are producing their best work separately – it’s the only way both parties could be secure enough to even try it. Marillion’s in a great place right now, and even though their 14th album, Somewhere Else, doesn’t quite do it for me, their 13th, Marbles, was perhaps the best thing they’ve ever done.

And while Fish’s solo career has seen its ups and downs, lately he’s been on a roll. The erstwhile Derek Dick released a scorcher of an eighth album a few years ago called Field of Crows, and a stunning acoustic collection called Communion earlier this year. His voice has dropped considerably, and is now this low, rumbling instrument that he’s learned to wield to his advantage – his later work is darker, heavier and creepier than the more Marillion-esque material he used to write.

That trend continues on 13th Star, his terrific new album, but it’s so much more than that. This record is a culmination point for Fish, a summation of all the places he’s been and a beacon pointing towards some distant, undiscovered shore. Is it his best solo album? Well, I’ve only listened to it half a dozen times, but at this early stage in my relationship with 13th Star, I’m ready to say yes.

But let’s back up a bit. When I first heard the title of this album, I was a little puzzled, especially since Fish himself made mention of this being his 13th album. As far as I could tell, there were only nine, counting 13th Star – was I missing a few? I tried adding in collections, like Yin and Yang and Bouillabaisse, but still couldn’t get to 13. And if you mix in all of his various live albums, you get more than 30. I didn’t get it.

And then it hit me. He’s counting the four albums he did with Marillion.

As well he should, since they’re as much Fish’s as anyone else’s, but by encapsulating those four seminal releases, the Piscine One has drawn a straight line from the man he was to the man he is on 13th Star. And while that’s quite a trip, it’s amazing how little some things have changed – Fish is still a helpless romantic, still washed up on the shores of his own failed relationships, and still searching for something better and more meaningful. The Fish of Misplaced Childhood is, in many ways, the same guy that narrates 13th Star.

But one thing has changed, and it’s done so gradually, so you probably wouldn’t notice it so much without playing an early Marillion album and 13th Star back to back: Fish has become a much more direct lyricist in the intervening years. The early Marillion albums are all about Fish, but he disguised his emotions and insecurities in stories about jesters and visions and lizards. These days, he writes about himself in naked, simple language, and never more so than on this album.

In other words, it’s a long way from “The fool escaped from paradise will look over his shoulder and cry, sit and chew on daffodils and struggle to answer why” to “I was lying to even think I could survive without your love, I can’t deny it,” but the sentiments are the same.

13th Star was written during the final weeks of Fish’s public romance with Heather Findlay, singer of Mostly Autumn, and what we get here is a concept album about the dissolution of their relationship. The basic story is of a restless sailor in search of truth, who finds a navigator, is betrayed, and continues searching on. But on prior records, Fish might have disguised the origins of his tale, and here he lays it all out there – he’s hurting, he’s bitter, he thought this one would last, he’s sorry. Even with all the visual imagery artist Mark Wilkinson painted into the amazing (and I mean amazing) cover art, this is Fish’s most personal and pure record ever.

“Circle Line” and “Square Go” set the scene, and they may as well be two halves of a whole. Both are based on repetitive grooves, meant to symbolize the circles our protagonist sails in without his navigator, and both have a surprising depth of color and arrangement, given their single-minded beats and bass lines. Fish wrote most of this album with bassist Steve Vantsis, so the rhythm sections here get a lot of attention, and Fish’s voice is almost a bass instrument itself here.

There is no set Fish style, mostly because the man can’t play any instruments, and so he’s at the mercy of his collaborators each time out. That’s why Marillion’s been more consistent over the years, but Fish has been more adventurous – “Square Go” is one of the heaviest things Fish has ever done, almost industrial in tone, and it works wonderfully. But then it segues into “Milos de Besos” (Spanish for “millions of kisses”), a sweet piano ballad in the vein of “Tara” from Sunsets on Empire.

“Zoe 25” is about meeting your navigator, and not realizing it. It’s also the catchiest pop song here, nearly sprightly in comparison with some of the other tracks. It contains the key line of the album, as far as I’m concerned: “You know you’ll never find her when you’re still looking for yourself.” This endless journey of self-discovery and the relationships it leaves in its wake is the keystone of Fish’s work, and I’ve never seen him lay it out there so directly.

The rest of the album is about Findlay, and there’s no hiding it. “Arc of the Curve” is an acoustic-driven love song, looking at the hopeful start of the relationship, ending with the line “I could never contemplate that you would ever walk away.” But she did, and the second half of 13th Star is about picking up the pieces. Here’s “Manchmal,” another industrial-strength rocker, about the pain of betrayal. Here’s “Openwater,” about the navigator leaving our hero adrift on the open sea. And here’s “Dark Star,” a bitter tune that rehashes the worst moments of the breakup.

Is all this too much straight diary entry? Should Fish have disguised his topic behind more inscrutable metaphors? Perhaps, but I get the sense that he couldn’t have written this album any other way. Fish has never examined and immortalized a relationship the way he’s done this one, and it sometimes feels like voyeurism just listening. (I do wonder how Findlay feels about this record…)

The final two tracks are the most searing and personal, probably because they’re the slowest and most exposed songs here, musically speaking. “Where in the World” deftly sidesteps mawkishness, not an easy task when Fish has written lines like “You took me by surprise, you hurt me so deep inside.” In that song, he wonders where he will go from here, and in the title track, he answers himself – he’ll follow his destiny, navigate by the stars. This part of the journey is finished, but the rest could take a lifetime, and he knows it.

I’ve barely talked about the music, and that’s because, fine as it is, it takes a back seat to the words and the emotions this time. Let me say this, though: 13th Star sounds better than any other Fish album. The production is excellent, the arrangements superb. As for the songs themselves, while I like them all, I think the writing is a notch down from Field of Crows. But here’s the thing – 13th Star sets up such a consistent mood that it plays like one long song, inseparable in the same way Clutching at Straws is. It is a better album of slightly lesser songs, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Fish is nearly 50, and while you can hear his age in his voice here and there, this album is strikingly adventurous for a guy with a 25-year recording career behind him. He’s still trying new things, pulling in new sounds, and making the best records of his life. If you can handle the bare emotionalism of songs like “Where in the World,” you’ll find that 13th Star is quite possibly the best thing Fish has done since leaving Marillion. It’s a 55-minute voyage through sometimes choppy seas, with an uncertain destination, but when it’s over, you’ll want to take the trip again. It’s a fine reward for the big man’s persistence and vision, and also for those of us who’ve followed that vision for years.

Check Fish out here.

Next week, the three I promised last week, and more Doctor Who musings.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I don’t want to hate anything.

I get the sense sometimes that this is what separates me from some other online music critics. I want to love everything I hear. The practical reason for this is obvious – every CD I buy costs me money, and I don’t want to feel like I’ve thrown away 10 bucks. But it goes deeper than that. Every time I plunk down my cash and take a chance on a new album, I’m not-so-secretly hoping that this is the one that changes my life again.

That’s one reason I buy so many records – the more dross I sift through, the better my chances of landing on some gold. That’s the theory, anyway, but it hasn’t quite panned out in practice. My life gets re-ordered by some band or another on a regular basis, but it’s usually once every couple of years. The last two years have seen the arrival of Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom into my musical pantheon, which is better than the usual every-24-months-or-so average. But I’ve been buying CDs at a ridiculous rate for years now.

Most music just bores me, honestly. It just slides in and out of my life without making much of an impact. I can’t say, for example, that I care enough about a band like Maroon 5 to hate them. I don’t hate them, I just don’t listen to them, because their music is like cold grey oatmeal to me. No, in order to get me to hate something, you have to first get me to care about it. With a band, that usually happens over time, and there’s no crueler twist of the knife for a music fan like me than finding something I dislike from a band I’ve loved for years.

If there’s anything I hate, it’s that. It’s a mixture of disappointment and betrayal – I’ve expended all this time and money following this journey, and you give me… this. What is this? Why did you think this was good enough?

The new Crowded House, Time on Earth, is a great example. I will follow Neil Finn’s music until one of us dies, but he’s been slipping lately, and Time on Earth is probably his lowest point, the shabbiest collection of songs he’s ever penned. I’m hoping time will work its magic on that record, but I doubt it, and as I said before, if this had been merely Finn’s disappointing new solo album, that would have been one thing. But it’s not. It’s the new Crowded House album, and it’s like Finn has no idea what that means to his fans.

But the prize for 2007’s Biggest Disappointment still belongs to Marillion. Three years ago, I wouldn’t shut up about this band. I’d loved them for ages, but rarely as intensely as I did in 2004, when the long-running Aylesbury quintet released their modern masterpiece, Marbles. This album was (and is) simply brilliant, a revival and a restatement all at once – here was everything that makes Marillion great, only on Marbles, it was all better than it had been in 10 years.

I still think they’re one of the best bands in the world. They are often mis-labeled as prog rock, when in fact what they do is emotional head music – thoughtful and difficult music that still bypasses the cerebral cortex and aims straight for the heart. They’re able to pull this off in about a dozen different styles, and they write two-minute pop gems and 20-minute epics with equal aplomb. They’re led by Steve Hogarth, one of the finest singers you’re likely to hear – nearly every song he sings gives me goosebumps. And in Steve Rothery they have an extraordinary guitar player, wringing surprising feeling out of every note.

I gush, but trust me, this isn’t a love letter. Their 14th album, Somewhere Else, landed with a thud on my doorstep back in April, and I had to listen to it three times before I could believe it. This was Marillion’s new album, and I… didn’t… like it. At all.

And so I put it aside, expecting, as I will do with Time on Earth, to come back to it later with fresh ears. Instead, though, it’s sat there on my shelf, gathering dust. So I think it’s time for a reappraisal now, and I’ll tell you why – I’ve just received the latest issue of the band’s Front Row Club concert subscription service, and it’s fantastic.

The Front Row Club was a great idea while it lasted – fans pay 100 bucks a year, and they’re rewarded with six full concerts on CD, sent right to their doors. The band is switching to a download-only version of the club after the next two issues, but before they do, they will have issued 40 of these CD sets, representing every era of Marillion history, from their earliest shows in 1983 to the current tour.

The latest, number 38, was taken from the Somewhere Else tour, and for the first time on any live release, it incorporates songs from that album. And amazingly, they hold up. Okay, “See It Like a Baby” is still crap, and it’s nearly painful to listen to them trundle their way through it, especially since it’s the second song of this set. And they didn’t play my other least-favorites, “Most Toys” and “Thankyou Whoever You Are.”

But man, listening to this recording, all my issues with the rest of these songs just fade away. “Somewhere Else” sounds like a classic here – it’s the Marillion sound, keyboard shimmers and aching guitar and Hogarth’s dazzling falsetto, and it stands up next to songs like “Afraid of Sunlight” nicely. “Voice From the Past” sounds even better here, segueing in from a piano-vocal take on “Cover My Eyes,” and what was somewhat static on record is, on stage, a mesmerizing, ever-flowering crescendo.

“The Wound” absolutely comes alive in this setting, and while I still cringe at some of the lyrics to “The Last Century for Man,” the music’s foreboding, moody blues vibe is very effective. Even without the studio-created orchestral ending.

So, in short, the Somewhere Else material impressed me here. Of course, that meant I had to drag out Somewhere Else for another go, which I did this afternoon.

And you know what?

It isn’t that bad.

It’s no Marbles, it’s no masterpiece, but over time, as the songs have burrowed their way into my brain, my reaction has mellowed. It’s weak, no doubt – “Most Toys” remains the worst song they’ve done in years, with “See It Like a Baby” close behind, and once you hit track five, there really aren’t any choruses to speak of. But as a mood piece, the second half works. “Voice From the Past” is elegant, starting small and ending up massive. “No Such Thing” is a wonder, still – a single repeated guitar figure, a mantra-like vocal, and some grand atmospherics. And “Last Century” has really started to stand up and claim its place as a good song, Hogarth’s “hats off to China” notwithstanding.

And “Faith,” my forgotten favorite, rounds it out nicely. I forgot how much I like the French horn finale, and Hogarth’s voice sends chills.

I’m not putting this near the top of my Marillion list anytime soon, but time has done its trick. Somewhere Else is a middling record, and a disappointing one after the wonder that was Marbles, but I no longer wonder what they were thinking. It’s there in the grooves of the record, and all it took was a fresh listen to find it.

But if I can, I want to put in a plug for Front Row Club Issue 38. Sadly, you can’t buy this two-CD set without throwing down for a full year’s worth of the club, but it is a perfect two-hour summation of this band. It starts with “Splintering Heart,” a 16-year-old song that’s still the best concert opener they’ve penned. It includes “Afraid of Sunlight,” and “Fantastic Place,” and “You’re Gone,” and “Three Minute Boy.” The band plays the complete 17-minute “Ocean Cloud,” perhaps their best long song. They cap it off with “Neverland,” the best concert closer they’ve penned, and encore with the perennially heart-wrenching “Easter.” (This song moves me every time, no matter how many times I hear it.)

For the past few months, I’ve been in need of a reminder of why I consider Marillion one of the best bands on the planet. Front Row Club Issue 38 is exactly the thing I needed. You want to know why I praise this band as much as I do? Listen to this, from start to finish. You’ll understand.

* * * * *

Today’s Doctor Who flies by at a brisk clip.

Most of the stories are done in one episode nowadays, beginning and ending inside of 45 minutes. There are regular two-part stories, which come in at about 90 minutes, but you’ll only get two or three of those a season. And the finale of the third season (or series, as they call it across the pond) was a linked three-parter, still less than the equivalent of a six-episode story in the classic series.

It’s not just the length, it’s the pace. The new series rushes along at the speed of… well, everything else on TV. It’s frenetic and quick-cutting, and while I like that style, I find myself more attracted to the slower, more luxurious pace of the 1960s and 1970s Who. The old series takes its time, lingering on moments and extending conversations, and what would be crammed into one episode these days often took four, or six, back then.

All this is a way of saying that The Invasion, Patrick Troughton’s 17th story as the Doctor, is long and slow. It’s long even by Who standards – it spans eight episodes, and runs more than three hours. And it’s slow by Who standards, too. This is a classic alien invasion story, with the Doctor discovering and foiling a plan by his recurring enemies, the Cybermen. (Them again?) But viewers don’t even get a glimpse of a Cyberman until the end of episode four, more than an hour and a half in. And the invasion doesn’t even start in earnest until the closing moments of episode six.

So what is this, then? The Invasion is a story about people, and it’s all the better for it. Here’s the rundown: the Cybermen have enlisted the help of Tobias Vaughn, the head of International Electromatics, a worldwide electronics company. Vaughn, a bit of a noble nutter, wants to save humanity from itself, and he wants to use the Cybermen to do it. So he helps them out – he puts mind-control devices into his company’s products, and lets the Cybermen use his facilities as bases for their invasion.

This comes to light very slowly, as the Doctor and his companions, Jamie and Zoe, start off looking for a missing professor, and begin piecing together Vaughn’s plot over the first four episodes. It would be wrong to call this stuff exciting, but it is engaging, and it sets a nice atmosphere as it becomes more and more clear that something sinister is going on. I do wish that I, like the viewing public in 1968, hadn’t known about the role the Cybermen play in this story, because the reveal at the end of episode four is effective and surprising.

But even after that, the pace doesn’t pick up. The Invasion is an important story in Doctor Who lore because it introduces UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, led by Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. UNIT and the Brigadier became staples of the show during the next few years, and in total, Nicholas Courtney played Lethbridge-Stewart in more than 100 episodes. So we spend some time in The Invasion getting to know him and his men, and we undertake a pair of daring rescues with them.

We also spend an awful lot of time with Tobias Vaughn and his team, although we really don’t get into what makes Vaughan tick until the end. There’s a very large cast in The Invasion, and each of them gets a number of good moments – by the end, we’ve gotten to know them all a little bit, and that’s down to the length and pace of the story. Don’t get me wrong, The Invasion isn’t a deep character drama – there’s a lot of pointless running around, a few shootouts and a full-scale military-vs.-metal-men finale, after all – but it is darker, slower and more serious than you might expect from this show.

I mentioned last time that there are only six complete Troughton stories in the BBC vaults, but The Invasion isn’t one of them – episodes one and four are missing. But for this DVD, the producers have come up with an ingenious solution. The audio soundtracks still exist, thanks to fans recording them off air in 1968, and the BBC enlisted animation studio Cosgrove Hall to reconstruct the missing episodes to the audio tracks. The result is brilliant. It’s in black and white, and meshes perfectly with the live-action episodes. It’s awesome, and I hope the BBC uses Cosgrove Hall again – it would be a great way to preserve the more than 100 missing episodes.

Of course, you’ve got a team of animators itching to take a crack at the Cybermen, and except for a two-second glimpse at the end of the fourth episode, there just aren’t any Cybermen in the missing installments. Ah well… Most of The Daleks’ Master Plan is missing, and I’m sure they’d have fun with that one, too.

The Invasion again makes my point that the Doctor Who format is limitless. This story directly follows The Mind Robber, shifting the tone completely from drug-trip fantasy to suspenseful, earthbound drama. While I do think that The Invasion is a tad too long, it benefits immensely from its luxurious pace, and even though it’s a story about metal men in spaceships, it stands as one of the most down-to-earth Who serials available on DVD right now. Two stories later, the producers will flip that tone on its ear with The Seeds of Death, but we’ll get to that one next week.

And after that, Jon Pertwee arrives, and the entire format of the show changes completely. There’s a reason Doctor Who has been around for more than 40 years – the concept is one of the most flexible ever created for television. Show someone episodes from 1966, 1976, 1986 and 2006, and they’d never peg them as examples of the same show, but they are. And the well still hasn’t run dry.

* * * * *

This column is already way too long, but I wanted to put in one recommendation before I go.

Morphine was a band unlike any other. They were the two-string bass and baritone vocals of Mark Sandman, the bari sax of Dana Colley, and the down-tuned drums of Billy Conway, and that was all. They played smoky, sexy, low-register blues-rock, and they could turn any size venue into a dingy nightclub just with their sound.

Mark Sandman died in 1999, but the other two members of Morphine have continued on with a band called the Twinemen, named after a comic strip Sandman used to write. The duo joined forces with singer-songwriter Laurie Sargent, whose vocals are suitably smoke-filled, and they thankfully continue to sound much like Morphine did.

Their third album, the unfortunately-titled Twinetime, is their best yet. It’s eight longer songs, exploring their moodier side, and there’s not a bum note here. The songs are simple, but smooth and haunting – you won’t be able to get the opener, “The End of My Dreams,” out of your head, trust me. It’s fascinating to hear such a low, rumbling sound topped off with the sweet, higher-register vocals of Sargent – Morphine was all about the bass, but the Twinemen add other colors.

The Twinemen aren’t about to set the world ablaze, but it’s wonderful to hear these musicians continuing to play together, and develop a sound immortalized by the late Sandman. If you dug Morphine, you’ll like this.

Next week, we go under the radar with Pinback, Liars and Minus the Bear.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

There are only six complete Patrick Troughton Doctor Who stories in the BBC archives, and I can’t tell you how glad I am that one of them is The Mind Robber.

This is a story like no other in the original show’s 26-year run. Start with the format – it’s five episodes, instead of the usual four or six, a strange decision forced on it when the previous story, The Dominators, ran into script problems. The result is a hastily-written, tacked-on drug dream of a first episode that, oddly enough, actually sets the tone pretty well. Then The Mind Robber ran into its own production problems, and the decision was made to shrink each episode to 20 minutes, instead of the usual 25. So it’s a five-parter that plays like a four-parter, with a strange prelude stitched to the beginning.

But that’s nothing compared to the story itself. The Doctor and his companions (the ever-faithful Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot, science whiz from the future) find themselves outside of time and space, in a realm they soon learn is populated entirely by fictional characters. Like, they meet Gulliver from Gulliver’s Travels, who only speaks lines from the novel. They wander around a forest of oddly-shaped trees, before they decide to climb one and discover that the trees are letters, and they’re on a printed page.

And it keeps getting weirder. Frazer Hines, who played Jamie, contracted chicken pox during one of the production weeks, and this is the kind of story were they found a way to replace him with another actor for one episode, and make it work. The cliffhanger of one of the episodes is Jamie and Zoe being pressed into a giant book. There’s a recurring pulp super-hero character called the Karkus, and while the Doctor can make mythical creatures like Medusa go away by reminding himself that they’re fictional, that trick doesn’t work on the Karkus because the Doctor’s never read his comic strips.

Everything about The Mind Robber is deliriously insane and imaginative. It’s probably the most original Doctor Who story I’ve seen, and just when you think they can’t pile any more crazy on top, there’s another mad moment (like a fight between Cyrano de Bergerac and Sir Lancelot) to add to the pile. I’ve seen all of the Troughton stories out on DVD at this point, and The Mind Robber is my favorite because it illustrates what I love about this show – you can do anything with it. The format is infinitely flexible, and the only limits are budget and imagination.

Case in point – the next story is an eight-part, slow-moving dissection of a subtle invasion of Earth by the Cybermen. It is completely different in tone and execution from The Mind Robber – it’s almost a different show entirely. But we’ll talk about The Invasion next week.

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I’m having a rough week, so this one’s gonna be quick. First, some things I’m excited about in the coming weeks:

The final Ministry album hits on September 18. It’s called The Last Sucker, and it completes Al Jourgensen’s “George Bush Sucks” trilogy (with Houses of the Mole and Rio Grande Blood). Will it actually be the last Ministry album? Don’t bet on it, but I’m always interested to see how artists fare when they choose to bow out on their own terms. Also that week, new ones from Thurston Moore, Mark Knopfler and Eddie Vedder.

September 25 is awesome, with new ones by PJ Harvey, Nellie McKay, the Weakerthans, Devandra Banhart, the Foo Fighters and the Flower Kings. Then October brings the Fiery Furnaces, the Autumns, the Good Life, Coheed and Cambria, Ween, R.E.M.’s first live album, and solo debuts by Serj Tankian of System of a Down and Dan Wilson of Semisonic. Oh, and on October 9, the first new record from Marc Cohn in nine years. Should be a good month.

And now, one review, and I’m going to bed.

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The age of the supergroup is long past.

There was a time, though, when bringing together artists from various successful bands was considered a good idea. Crosby, Stills and Nash. Cream. Blind Faith. Bad Company. Even, to some degree, Led Zeppelin. Few would argue that these bands were not worth the effort it took to bring their members together.

But then came Asia, and the Firm, and Damn Yankees. Even the much-vaunted Traveling Wilburys records were underwhelming, considering their pedigree. And now we have crap like Audioslave and Velvet Revolver further tarnishing the supergroup name. Forming these groups used to be like putting together a fantasy baseball team – if you had the best players, you’d likely get good results. I’m not sure why that was ever true to begin with, but it’s a laughable idea now.

Which is why the New Pornographers are such a treat. The octet has, in the past, bristled at the term “supergroup,” since before forming, the individual members weren’t well-known outside of Canada. But come on. We have superb singer-songwriter Carl “A.C.” Newman, songstress extraordinaire Neko Case, and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar in the same band. That’s a supergroup. And the fact that they’ve managed to make three increasingly excellent, democratically created records is kind of miraculous.

I suppose, then, that I shouldn’t be too surprised at the relative mediocrity of their fourth, Challengers. The New Porn magic couldn’t hold out forever. What is surprising, though, is just how quiet and subdued this album is. The songs are simple, the acoustic guitar is prominent throughout, and only infrequently does the record spring to life. The last New Porn album, 2005’s Twin Cinema, was just unstoppable – one amazing melody after another, played as if each one were the last the band would ever turn out. Challengers is kind of a lazy Sunday afternoon in comparison.

The album starts with four such snoozers, one after another, and while these songs have charms, it takes a few listens to uncover them. The title track, in particular, has a nice melody and some subtle banjo flavoring. (And a lyrical nod to the old Marvel comic Challengers of the Unknown.) But “Myriad Harbor” is just boring, a Velvet Underground tribute that goes nowhere very slowly. There’s nothing particularly bad about the other three, but stacked on top of one another right at the outset, they don’t exactly roll out the red carpet for the rest of the record.

Thankfully, it picks up from there. “All the Things that Go to Make Heaven and Earth” is the first tune with a pulse, and it’s a corker. I’m not sure why the usually reliable Newman didn’t have another eight of these tucked away for this session, but he didn’t. The only other rocker on Challengers is “Mutiny, I Promise You,” with its odd beat and killer chorus. After “Earth,” were back to blasé territory with the wooden “Failsafe,” although the slow epic “Unguided” is pretty successful. The record sputters to a close with two drifting, string-laden ballads, a soppy finish to a decent but disappointing release.

Neko Case is almost sidelined for the whole of this album – she contributes no songs, and her sterling voice only comes to the fore on a few tracks. Could this be a sign that she’s disconnecting from the group, following her own blossoming solo career? Possibly. History shows us that it’s rarely possible to keep a supergroup going for very long. Challengers shows us the cracks in the foundation for the first time, and while it’s still a pretty good record, future generations may look at it as the point where the New Pornographers began their decline.

Let’s hope not, because when these disparate egos work together, they’re spectacular. Challengers could be a bump in the road, or a sign saying “bridge out ahead,” and only their fifth album will tell us which one it is.

Next week, I have no idea.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like that first time.

Fans of Doctor Who in 1966 could be forgiven for thinking they knew what this show was about. For three years it had been the story of an elderly, time-traveling alien who dispatches grandfatherly advice and crotchety bluster in equal measure, flitting about the universe with his younger companions. So those fans sitting down to watch The Tenth Planet, the second story of the show’s fourth season, were likely completely unprepared for what they saw.

I’ve only seen about two minutes of The Tenth Planet, but they’re the minutes at the end, where the Doctor, played by William Hartnell, collapses on the floor of his Tardis. (That’s British for “time machine.”) There’s a brilliant white light, and then the Doctor… changes. Completely. When he wakes up, in the next story (The Power of the Daleks), he’s played by Patrick Troughton, a younger, impish man with a bowl-cut hairdo and an ever-present twinkle in his eye.

Remember, this was long before the internet came along, with its behind-the-scenes reports and spoilers – if you missed the news stories that reported Hartnell’s departure, the end of The Tenth Planet was a complete shock. I’d bet that some viewers watched Troughton’s first story, expecting that this was a plot device – the Daleks had somehow changed the Doctor into this new form, and by the end of the six episodes, he’d put things right. But then Troughton did a second story, and a third, and by that time, it was obvious this was a new Doctor.

The concept is called regeneration, and I still think it’s one of the most brilliant ideas for a television character I’ve ever heard. It was developed out of desperation – Hartnell was old, and his health and memory were failing him, and he needed to leave the show. But Doctor Who was then, as it is now, a massive draw for the BBC, and a merchandising cash cow. They couldn’t ax it, so they needed a new lead actor and a way to explain him. What they came up with is the idea that when the Doctor gets into a scrape he can’t get out of, he dies, and then every cell in his body is reborn – he looks and acts completely different, but has all the same memories.

This wacky idea could easily have fallen on its face, but one thing that must have helped sell it is the fact that Troughton is fantastic. He’s magnetic, an absolute joy to watch every moment he’s on screen. He plays the Doctor like some kind of mischievous clown, but there’s a wild intelligence behind those eyes, and Troughton uses his sometimes silly mannerisms as a mask for the Doctor’s true cunning. (The seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, adopted this technique as well.)

For most of his run, Troughton’s Doctor was accompanied by one of the best companions in the show’s long history, too – Jamie McCrimmon, the savviest 18th Century Scottish highlander you’ll ever see. He was played with wit and charm by Frazer Hines, who shared a connection with Troughton that few Doctor-companion match-ups had.

Here’s the tragic part for those of us who are just catching up with these early episodes. Troughton played the Doctor in 21 stories, from 1966 to 1969. Of those 21, only seven exist in their entirety. Most of Troughton’s run is missing – scattered episodes from 10 other stories exist, and four are gone entirely. Of the surviving seven, four are out on DVD, including one long thought lost – The Tomb of the Cybermen.

What the hell are the Cybermen, you ask? They’re basically the blueprint for the Borg, Star Trek’s inhuman assimilation machines. Cybermen are metal men with a chilling lack of emotion and personality, whose only goal is to conquer and make as many copies of themselves as they can. They, too, assimilate – they convert people into Cybermen, turning them into faceless drones, and they often say “resistance is useless” while they do it. Seriously, Trek pinched the whole concept.

The Tomb of the Cybermen is a locked-room story, taking place on the Cybermen home world. A group of archeologists have landed, looking for (you guessed it) a tomb full of dormant Cybermen, and two of the scientists have a secret plan to revive the metal monstrosities, hoping to use them as a private army. It’s terrifically silly, especially if you add in the Cybermats, little metal bug creatures that the Cybermen use to go places they can’t. Some of it is laugh-out-loud funny, but some of it is effectively creepy, too.

And then there’s Troughton, who is unquestionably in charge from the first scene. He manipulates events to his liking, using everyone except his companions, and stays one step ahead of the plot from minute one. There’s a great scene where he plays with over-the-top villain Klieg’s ego, spurring him on to greater and greater dreams of conquest, before stopping and saying, “Well, now I know you’re mad. I just had to be sure.”

The Tomb of the Cybermen is pulp adventure at its best, and I’m glad it survived all these years. The Restoration Team has worked magic again, cleaning up 40-year-old film to an amazing degree. The effects are silly, the Cybermen (and especially the Cybermats) are more laughable than scary, the whole story is just ridiculous, but man, it’s a lot of fun.

Next week, I’ll talk up The Mind Robber, a surreal and superb Troughton story. We now return you to your regularly scheduled music column.

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I’ve never understood the big deal about Rilo Kiley.

I don’t hate them – that would require a lot more effort and attention than I’m willing to give them. They have a scrappy indie-pop-folk sound that bores me more often than not, and despite having a very good vocalist in Jenny Lewis, the quartet often fails to come up with any hooks or melodies to make use of her. The band has become more and more shiny and poppy as they’ve gone along, but even their last one, More Adventurous, lay flat for most of its running time. Lewis’ solo excursion, a stripped-down country record called Rabbit Fur Coat, was somehow better and more memorable than anything she’d done with the band.

When I reviewed that record, I wondered whether Lewis would bring any of its naked and soulful qualities back to Kiley. Turns out, though, they’ve gone exactly the opposite direction – Rilo Kiley’s fourth album, Under the Blacklight, sounds nothing like anything they’ve done. It’s a glossy, big pop album, loaded with hooks and drum machines and sparkling keyboards. Some will cry sell-out, no doubt, and they may be right. But they’ll be missing out on the fun, because Under the Blacklight is the best record Rilo Kiley has made.

Maybe it’s just that it sounds so very different from anything I expected. Opener “Silver Lining” is the record’s highlight, skipping along in a ‘50s pop vein before taking off with a sweet chorus and an actual, honest-to-God hook. I’ve heard More Adventurous probably eight times, and I can barely remember any of it, but I was humming “Silver Lining” for hours after my first spin. Does that make it better? Probably not, but it certainly trips my particular wires more.

The record continues lobbing surprises at you. First single “The Moneymaker” is a dirty funk rumble that’s so left-field from Lewis and company that I almost didn’t notice that it has no chorus. “Close Call” has one, though, and it’s a winner. “Breakin’ Up” starts off like a Joy Electric song, all analog synth sounds and trippy beats, but morphs into a sort of first cousin to the Caridgans’ “Lovefool,” Lewis following up the forlorn pre-chorus (“Are we breakin’ up?”) with an effervescent pink bubble of a refrain (“It feels good to be free…”).

Blacklight is a tawdry record, most of its songs dealing with cheap and dingy sex. “Moneymaker” is obvious, but there’s the prostitute at the center of “Close Call,” the dangerous dancer that narrates “Smoke Detector,” and the teenage seductress at the heart of “15.” (The video for “Moneymaker” features real porn stars, too.) One gets the sense that these are characters, as much as the meeker souls that populated Lewis’ lyrics in the past, but Rilo Kiley has never been this sexy, this willing to get down and dirty, and it’s a surprising delight.

The album doesn’t sustain its high, unfortunately. The Dusty Springfield knockoff of “15” is kind of embarrassing, and “Dejalo” is a skipper for sure. “The Angels Hung Around” is the only thing here that sounds like Kiley of old, and as such, it stands out, but they close with “Give a Little Love,” a limp attempt at R&B that makes for a lousy comedown. But for the most part, Under the Blacklight is a swell surprise, a collection of well-written pop songs spit-shined and candy-coated. It’s just my kind of record, though it may turn off some of the band’s more indie-oriented fans.

But then, what’s life without a little risk? This album plays less like a calculated sell-out and more like a great experiment. It’s the Jenny Lewis Show – she’s at the wheel, and she’s taken the opportunity to write some of her most compact and memorable songs. Is it a bid for stardom? Maybe it is, but when I spin this album, I hear a bright, danceable pop confection that still retains its intelligence and earthiness. To me, there’s nothing strange about taking on new influences and trying something so very different, especially if the results are this much fun.

Rilo Kiley in my top 10 list? Now, that would be weird.

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Over the Rhine are no strangers to the list – their double-disc masterpiece Ohio made it there a few years ago. That massive work felt like the peak, the culmination of years of this husband-and-wife duo honing their woodsy pop sound, and since then, they’ve produced a stripped-back regrouping album (the superb Drunkard’s Prayer) and a couple of stopgaps – two live records, a Christmas album, and a best-of collection. And none of these releases answered the big question: what’s next?

Well, here it is, proof that Rilo Kiley isn’t the only band exploring new caverns of sound. The Trumpet Child, Over the Rhine’s eighth full-lengther, finds them slipping backwards in time, and coming out fresh and reinvigorated. OTR has always been a traditionalist act, and every time they’ve run aground in their long career, they’ve returned back to their roots – stark acoustic folk and blues, with an unmistakable earnestness and a genuine belief in beauty. On Trumpet, they find their footing in 1920s cabaret-style jazz, spinning earthy tunes the likes of which we’ve never heard from them.

Opener “I Don’t Want to Waste Your Time” starts with a saxophone quartet, and morphs into a piano-led invocation, a torch song invitation to spend the next 42 minutes in Over the Rhine’s company. “I won’t pray this prayer with you unless we both kneel down,” Karin Bergquist sings, and then spends the next batch of songs in the church of the jazz crooners. “Trouble” is a knockout, an acoustic shuffle with light piano sprinklings from Linford Detweiler. “Nothing is Innocent” picks up a light samba beat, and the title track is a devastating gospel ballad with some glorious trumpet and saxophone work.

Bergquist and Detweiler haven’t completely given over to their nightclub spotlight muse. “Entertaining Thoughts” is a pretty standard Over the Rhine song, poppy and driving, while “Let’s Spend the Day in Bed” is a mini-epic, its electric piano groove sliding effortlessly into an extended guitars-and-drums blowout. But they always dip back into their Wayback Machine – “Desperate for Love” follows “Let’s Spend the Day,” and it’s a lilting showtune with a great clarinet solo. And while the title character of “Don’t Wait for Tom” may not be Mr. Waits, the music is all him, echoing his delightful perversion of old-time jazz. Plus, we get to hear Detweiler’s Waits impression, which is pretty damn good.

At the core of this album, as always, is Bergquist, and let me just take a moment to rhapsodize about this woman’s voice. There’s no question she can sing, but just listen to any random three tracks of The Trumpet Child – she can really sing. She does vixen on “Trouble” with surprising ease, rolls out her playful side on “I’m On a Roll,” and just two songs later, her vocal on “The Trumpet Child” will simply slay you. She takes on many different roles during this album, and plays them all with different personalities, singing the hell out of every song here. Bergquist has always been great, but this album fully reveals her as one of the finest singers we have.

If you want to think of The Trumpet Child as a flat-out masterpiece, it’s probably best to consider the closer, “If a Song Could be President,” as a bonus track. The one flaw on an otherwise flawless album, this slipshod country ballad would have sounded out of place even if Detweiler hadn’t saddled it with hokey, hippie lyrics of the worst kind. “We’d vote for a melody, pass it around on an MP3, all our best foreign policy would be built on harmony,” Bergquist sings before suggesting that Neil Young should be a Senator despite his Canadian birth, and Emmylou Harris should be an ambassador because “world leaders would listen to her.” I’m not sure what they were thinking, but this song is an embarrassing blotch on an album that could have been perfect.

But you can’t win them all, and that’s why God made the skip button. For 10 superb songs, Over the Rhine rewrote their own rulebook, and the album they came up with is one of their very best. Every Over the Rhine album is worth it just for Karin Bergquist’s amazing, angelic voice, and this one even more so, but it’s the restless musical spirit here, the search through the back alleys of history to find something pure and timeless in these grooves, that makes this one special. I hope they keep traveling this path, because it’s a fruitful one.

Over the Rhine on my top 10 list? That wouldn’t be weird at all.

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Next week, well, it could be anything. We’ve got new ones from Jeremy Enigk, Minus the Bear, the New Pornographers, Liars, Collective Soul and Lyle Lovett, to name a few. I’ll just pick a couple and let you know what I think.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’ve said this before, but one of the big problems with immersion in a relatively obscure art form is that when something tragic happens to one of your heroes, no one knows who you’re talking about. That’s partially why I sometimes pass over some of the more famous deaths that occur, content in the knowledge that they’ll be eulogized elsewhere.

But when someone like Mike Wieringo passes on, I kind of feel like it’s my duty to say something. Wieringo was a comic book artist, and a damn good one. He toiled on big-name super-hero comics, drawing Spider-Man and the Flash, but the work I’ll always remember him for is Tellos, a brilliant little book about talking animal pirates and one imaginative little boy, created with Todd DeZago. He had a style that was instantly recognizable – I’d buy comics just because they were Mike Wieringo works.

Wieringo died of an apparent heart attack on Sunday. He was 44. Fittingly, Tellos will be released next week in a complete, gorgeous-looking hardcover, and I can’t wait to have it on my shelf. Rest in peace, Mike, and thanks for all the great work.

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So let’s do Doctor Who up front this week. I’m through the William Hartnell era, or at least the ones that have been released on DVD, and I’m neck-deep in the Patrick Troughton era now. But let’s catch up a little bit first.

William Hartnell played the Doctor for three seasons, from 1963 to 1966. There are 29 stories that bear his name, not counting his turn in The Three Doctors in 1972. Of those, seven are completely lost, save for some clips, and another five exist only partially. Of the remaining 17, only six are out on DVD at the moment, so those are the six I’ve watched.

The final two are from the show’s second season, during which the ratings were spectacular and the production team were becoming more ambitious, despite their miniscule budgets. Hence The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the 10th story, which finds the crew filming those rolling pepper shakers all over London, stepping outside the studio for the first time in the show’s history. And it’s mostly a success, if you’re able to look beyond the early ‘60s camera techniques and special effects.

My biggest problem with the Daleks has always been that they’re not scary. Their first story, just called The Daleks, actually went some distance towards rectifying that – most of those seven episodes were drenched in spooky, alien dread, and they worked pretty well. But take the Daleks out into the streets of London, and they’re a lot less scary, especially as they trundle wobblingly over bridges and sidewalks. In this story, the Doctor and his companions have landed on Earth far into the future, after the Daleks have successfully conquered it, and the first thing you need to do to enjoy these episodes is suspend your disbelief that a rolling sex toy with no opposable thumbs could enslave humanity.

But if you can get beyond that, it’s a fun little romp. The location filming gives the story room to breathe, and even though the six-episode length is a little long for the plot, it’s an enjoyable ride all the way through. Kudos to the Restoration Team, who painstakingly transferred the black-and-white archival film of this story to digital perfection, and I’d highly recommend making use of the optional GCI effects they’ve whipped up for certain scenes. The pie-plate-on-a-string flying saucer is just too laughable…

Fancy new effects could not have saved The Web Planet, the 13th Doctor Who story, sadly. This is a case of ambitions far outstripping cash and technical ability, a clusterfuck of incredibly funny proportions. Let me set the scene for you – The Web Planet takes place on Vortis, a world where the only inhabitants are insect creatures. Big ant-things called the Zarbi, dancing moths called the Menoptera, and grunting grubs called the Optera. That’s three races, needing three kinds of costumes.

The Zarbi, then, are giant fiberglass ants with human legs sticking out of the back. It becomes clear early on that the actors in these ant suits can’t really see, so they bump into things and each other all the time. The Menoptera have plastic wings, striped jumpers and funny antennae, and they literally dance about and wave their arms as if they’re mimes. But they’re not – they speak in a sing-song voice that really grates. And the Optera are dressed in felt, and look amazingly stupid. And they talk in a strange language that’s never explained.

Six episodes of this. The Zarbi beeping and blipping, the Menoptera flitting here and there, and the Optera shouting out nonsense. There’s a plot, about something called the Animus taking control of Vortis and making the Zarbi their slaves, but after an hour or so, you won’t care, and you’ll still have 90 minutes to go…

The only thing that makes The Web Planet watchable is the so-awful-it’s-funny nature of the whole thing. Hartnell can’t get through a scene without screwing up his lines – there’s a moment in the first episode where he’s obviously blanked out, and the other actors just stare at him for what seems like a full minute. Director Richard Martin smeared Vaseline on the lenses of the cameras to play up the alien atmosphere of Vortis, but the result just looks like poor, smudgy film quality and crappy lighting.

And there’s this hysterical bit in the third episode where a giant fiberglass ant runs smack into the camera. What’s even funnier is the inevitability of it – you’re watching this thing lumber towards the camera for about eight seconds, and it’s obvious what’s about to happen the whole time. “If he keeps going, he’s going to run right into… ah, he did.” Really, the only way to get through all six episodes is by laughing, and even then, the final couple will test your will to live.

So that’s the first big strikeout, and even The Web Planet is fun in a way – they shot these things live, with almost no money, and I watch this one wondering just what made them think they could pull it off. Anyway, that’s it for Hartnell – he was replaced by Patrick Troughton in 1966, and I’ll talk about the concept of regeneration and the oldest surviving Troughton story, The Tomb of the Cybermen, next time.

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What’s that? You want to read about music? Okay, then. I have a lot of catching up to do, and some superb albums have hit the stores (and the ‘net) in recent weeks. Here’s a brief look at seven of them, all of which are worth your money.

First up is the Alarm, continuing their Counter Attack Collective series with the third of seven EPs, Fightback. Mike Peters and company continue their homage to old punk singles with this record, which actually looks like a record – black plastic, grooved front, cardboard LP sleeve, the whole bit. And like Three Sevens Clash, the first EP, Fightback has an intro, an extended outro, a couple of kickass punk tunes, and some fine surprises. These EPs are obviously crafted as individual 20-minute pieces, cohesive and inseparable.

One criticism often levied at the Alarm is that all of their songs sound the same, blurring into one long anthem. This is, to put it bluntly, a lazy and inaccurate dismissal, and Fightback proves it. It opens with “The Fall Out,” a mostly instrumental intro with shades of U2, then slams into the title track, a pure punk burst of positive energy. “What About the Man on the Street” is classic modern-day Alarm, propulsive and melodic and just plain awesome.

But then come the curve balls. “War Cry” is a Clash-style reggae tune, and even though I normally hate those, this one makes me sing along. It’s the weakest thing here, but it’s followed by the strongest – “Love Is My Enemy” may be the finest song Peters has written since the original Alarm broke up in 1992. It’s a minor-key stunner, starting off with a web of clean electric guitars and bursting into a great chorus that’s pure Alarm. It reminds me of “Strength” more than anything. The EP ends with “Life Support System,” almost a dance remix of the last five tracks.

There are another four of these EPs coming, one a month, with a full-length album scheduled for a month later, in January 2008. Peters says that none of these EP songs will appear on the album, which is just amazing – if these are the castoffs, then Counter Attack should be nothing short of incredible. The next EP, Watching Me Watching You Watching Them Watching Us, should be out in about three weeks. When this is all together, it could stand as the best thing Mike Peters has ever done. Check it out here.

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I owe Jim Worthen for getting me into Mae.

Worthen is a bigwig at Washington-based label Tooth and Nail, and he sent me Mae’s terrific debut, Destination Beautiful, when it came out. The label was understandably proud of that record, and even more so of Mae’s sophomore effort, The Everglow. Here is some of the catchiest modern rock you’ll find anywhere, with a genuine skill behind it – the melodies rarely go where you’d expect, and the instrumentation is surprisingly complex at times.

Mae has moved onward and upward to Capitol Records for their third album, Singularity, and I’m not sure how Worthen feels about that. (I haven’t asked him.) But I can tell you that it’s Capitol’s gain, because Singularity is great, another leap forward for the band. They’ve retained their focus on tight songwriting, and they’ve added a bit of prog-rock – the album is colored with synthesizers of all kinds, and some of the songs (“Sometimes I Can’t Make It Alone,” “Rocket”) edge into King’s X territory. But amazingly, they can still pass for a swell modern rock band, albeit a more talented one than most of their peers, and their sound should appeal to melody addicts of all ages.

Singularity’s opening trilogy is a rocket ride. “Brink of Disaster” was the first song I heard from this project, its looping synth line and dynamic chorus sticking with me for days afterwards, and “Crazy 8s” is just as good. What you think is the chorus is in fact just the pre-chorus – most bands would have stopped there, but Mae kicks their tune into orbit with great melodies and harmonies. And the title is the only thing about “Sometimes I Can’t Make It Alone” that’s reminiscent of U2 – the song is a powerhouse of stop-time riffs and soaring vocals.

I could keep going – “Just Let Go” is sweetly straightforward, “Sic Semper Tyrannis” has one of the record’s coolest choruses (“All hands on deck, we’re going down…”), and the final few tracks are beautiful – but suffice it to say that if you liked The Everglow, Singularity is several steps above even that album. And if you’re not yet a fan, and you’re wondering where all the good modern rock bands are these days, well, buy Singularity. It’s enough to shame the members of Fall Out Boy into retirement. Or at least, I can hope.

* * * * *

I was worried that we’d never see a second Eisley album.

Their 2005 debut, Room Noises, was terrific, even though I never got around to reviewing it here. They’re a family band from Texas – three sisters, their brother, and their cousin, all named not Eisley but DuPree. The name actually is a Star Wars reference – they were originally Moss Eisley, after the Mos Eisley Spaceport in Episode IV, but legal worries forced the change when they signed to Warner Bros.

For those of you who tuned out at Star Wars, don’t worry. Eisley isn’t even close to a geek-rock band. They play deep, atmospheric pop with crystal-clear harmonies, and while their stuff isn’t always memorable, it is always pretty. Room Noises had some lovely songs on it, reminiscent of the more ethereal side of Sixpence None the Richer, and their sophomore effort, Combinations, is no different.

It sounds like it will be at first, though. “Many Funerals” is surprisingly loud in places, with a killer riff in the middle, and some hurt and angry lyrics. (“How could you have left us here, you had friends, had us… goodbye…”) Combinations, all told, is not a happy or peaceful album, but from there, the music takes on more of the expected ambient pop sound. “I Could Be There For You” is lovely, as is the closer, “If You’re Wondering,” and the band even kicks up some low-key dust on “Ten Cent Blues.”

And again, Eisley’s work is not always memorable, but it is always well made, and very pretty. The production, by a multitude of folks, positively shimmers, and the Sisters DuPree weave a thick, gossamer vocal web atop it. If this is the band’s sophomore slump, then it should be smooth sailing from here, because Combinations is swell.

* * * * *

Shifting gears entirely, we have Upfront and Down Low, the third album from Teddy Thompson.

Thompson is the son of Richard and Linda Thompson, two of the brightest lights in the folk-rock sky, so he labors under charges of nepotism from the start. But over two good-to-great albums, Thompson has proven himself as a songwriter – his second, Separate Ways, is a gem. Still, the last thing you’d expect from an up-and-comer still struggling to get his own songwriting vision out there is a covers album, and especially a covers album made up of nothing but old-time country classics.

Fellow Brit Elvis Costello did this very thing with Almost Blue in 1981, and it nearly derailed his whole career. Thompson is in little danger on that score, however, because as much as I like Almost Blue, Upfront and Down Low is better. Thompson sticks to slower, weepier numbers, like Dolly Parton’s “My Blue Tears,” and his band, including some of Nashville’s finest (and his dad), does a sterling job with them. The star, though, is Thompson’s voice, deep and husky and strong. As well as he does with his own pop-rock material, these country standards sound like the songs he was born to sing.

He even adds one of his own, the sweet “Down Low,” and it fits right in. This is a hazy, tears-in-your-beer kind of record – Thompson only kicks up the dirt once or twice, most notably on the closer, Boudleaux Bryant’s takedown of country cliches “Let’s Think About Living.” But as good as it all is, the highlight, as far as I’m concerned, is a bonus track – Thompson’s acoustic read of the Everly Brothers’ lovely “Don’t Ask Me to Be Friends.” I’ve always loved this song, a rare jewel tucked away in the lower reaches of the Brothers’ catalog, and Thompson does an amazing job with it.

Upfront and Down Low is a strange choice for a budding songwriter – at least, on paper. But press play on this disc, and it becomes clear quickly why Thompson did it. This collection sounds like coming home for Thompson, and whether he chooses to do another set of originals next or a box set of these grand old songs, I’ll be happy.

* * * * *

It’s been six years since Suzanne Vega’s last album. It’s also been 20 years since the general public gave a rat’s ass whether Suzanne Vega has a new album – her one fluke of a hit, “Luka,” took over the charts in 1987. I’ve said this before, too, but the general public has been missing out, since Vega is one of the most consistently rewarding songwriters of her kind.

Her new one, Beauty and Crime, is a mere 34 minutes long. But what minutes they are. Vega writes deceptively simple songs that hide labyrinths of complexity beneath them, and stretches themes to album length. This record is a love letter to New York City, a series of snapshots through time, sketched out in a multitude of styles. The base is Vega’s traditional folk-rock, of course, with her precise, half-spoken vocals atop it, but here she explores samba beats, small combo jazz, and Hollywood-sized vistas.

Here is “Frank and Ava,” a cautionary tale about Sinatra and Gardner and their volatile relationship, revolving around the line “It’s not enough to be in love.” Here is “Pornographer’s Dream,” a bouncy yet deep tune about Bettie Page and other out-of-reach women. Here is “As You Are Now,” the sweetest love song since “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” And here is a brief connected suite, titled “Bound” and “Unbound,” about marriage and separation – these are the heart of the album, and the most lavish productions.

But they are not the soul. That’s in the closer, “Anniversary,” a lovely acoustic statement of newfound purpose. “Put away the draft of all your eulogies, clear the way for all your private memories,” Vega sings, before exhorting, “Make the time for all your possibilities, they live on every street.” This is a line about New York, and about life, and it caps an album about memory and loss beautifully. It’s been six years since the last Suzanne Vega album, and as Beauty and Crime can attest, that’s way too long to be without a songwriter of her caliber. This is one of the finest records of the year.

* * * * *

In contrast, Julian Cope seems to be on a serious roll – no six-year delay for him. We’re lucky if we get six months between new releases.

You’d think that wouldn’t give Cope time to fully express his mad genius, and in a way, you’d be right. His two 2005 albums, Citizen Cain’d and Dark Orgasm, were both raw and ragged affairs, victims of their low budgets. Cope also used both albums as a way of bringing the proto-punk sound of his side band, Brain Donor, into his solo work, with decent results. But Cope had yet to make a latter-day album that was the equal of his best stuff from before the turn of the century, including Jehovahkill and Autogeddon.

But hold on. He’s finally got his pagan ass in gear, and made the greatest Julian Cope album in ages with You Gotta Problem With Me. Another two-disc affair from his own label, Head Heritage, Problem returns Cope to the trippy, psychedelic sound of his best work. He’s still as insane as Syd Barrett was, but he’s kept hold of his finely developed sense of melody this time, turning out some of his most bizarre yet singable songs. It’s still a low-budget concoction, and if you’re looking for easy listening that doesn’t require a lot of effort on your part, I wouldn’t recommend this. But if you’re a Cope fan, you should buy this right the hell now.

The album opens with its oddest piece, the nine-minute, nearly drumless “Doctor Know,” which rumbles through its many movements with the grace of a wounded elephant. But the core melody is excellent, and the overall trippiness of the song sends it over. Two tracks later, Cope is trying on his sarcastic side with “Soon to Forget Ya,” a monologue about cavalier men with a chorus like a great lost Kinks song. And the title track is one of the few raging rockers, but it’s drowned in odd electronic noises, all playing in the wrong key.

Here’s the thing with Julian Cope, too – while listening to him, I’m often reminded of the old saying, “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That adage springs to mind when I’m faced with Cope’s simplistic criticism of Arab culture in “They Gotta Different Way of Doing Things,” although he fares better on “Can’t Get You Out of My Country,” sung from the point of view of an orphan on the streets of Baghdad. Cope has a unique perspective on the world, one I’m not in sync with most of the time, though it is interesting to peer through a window into his mind.

The second disc contains the most successful stuff, including the breathtaking “Woden,” a menacing acoustic tale of old gods falling before a vengeful and jealous Christianity. “Vampire State Building” is my favorite song title of the year so far, I think, and the tune itself is a creepy takedown of the new American empire. And if Problem opens with its most inscrutable song, it ends with its most straightforward – “Shame Shame Shame” is further proof that a protest song is always more effective if you can sing along with it.

You Gotta Problem With Me is Julian Cope’s best album of the new century so far, and if he’s faltering or slowing down with age, he’s certainly not showing it. Check out his work here.

* * * * *

And I think I’ve saved the best for last again.

You ever hear a song and immediately know you will follow its authors until either you or they die? That’s how it was with me last week, when I first heard Okkervil River’s “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe.” It’s the leadoff track on their new album, The Stage Names, and is easily one of the best songs of 2007.

Let me try to describe it for you. It starts off with a Cars-like guitar part played on an acoustic, as leader Will Sheff sidles in with his commanding voice. “It’s just a bad movie, where there’s no crying,” he sings, and then he slips into the main melody, and it’s kind of awesome. The snare drum enters sparingly, the first sign that the song is about to get grander, and then without warning, Sheff shoots up an octave, the piano kicks in, and the song is in the stratosphere. And it never comes down.

It’s the best opening to any record this year, and The Stage Names mostly lives up to it. Okkervil River hails from Texas, and they play a scrappy version of down-home folk-rock, with that edge of grandeur that some folks call pretension. I just call it knowing what you want, and Sheff and company are in control of every second of this album. “Movie” throws down a gauntlet that the rollicking “Unless It’s Kicks” can’t quite pick up, but “A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene” is terrific, with its memorable horn section.

And then there is “Savannah Smiles,” one of the prettiest songs I’ve heard yet this year. (Yes, I know, too many superlatives, but it’s true.) The sad tale of a father reading his daughter’s diary and seeing for the first time how difficult her life is, “Savannah Smiles” will tear you apart. It’s almost entirely acoustic guitars and xylophones, and it’s haunting.

The album never quite hits that height again, but it remains excellent until the end, especially the semi-sweet “A Girl in Port” and the wonderful “Title Track.” The record ends with “John Allyn Smith Sails,” which segues into a rocking version of “Sloop John B,” a nice surprise for Beach Boys fans. And when I finished The Stage Names the first time, I felt stupid for not having heard Okkervil River before. This is pure American music, traditional-minded and earthy, yet it sounds fresh and new, and incredibly gorgeous. The Stage Names just gets better each time I hear it, and I’m already buying the older ones, reveling in this great band I’ve finally discovered.

You can hear all of The Stage Names here.

* * * * *

Next week, we get new ones by Over the Rhine, the New Pornographers, Rilo Kiley, Jeremy Enigk and Minus the Bear, all of which are getting nice advance notices. And I’ve just pre-ordered the new Fish album, 13th Star, which many are saying is the big Scot’s best record yet. The year is looking up! Thanks for trawling through this very long column.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

When I tell people that I spent four years chronicling the music scene in Portland, Maine in the late ‘90s, I always get the same question: “Portland, Maine has a music scene?”

And I always give the same answer: “Hell yeah it does.”

I started as an intern at Face Magazine, Portland’s premier music mag, and worked my way up to editor-in-chief. When I began working there in 1996, I was living in my car and using the showers at the school I’d graduated from only two months before. I ended my tenure as the highest-paid employee on staff, and it still wasn’t very much – there isn’t a lot of money in free music publications, honestly. But in those four years, I found myself tapped into a rich, diverse musical environment. Whatever style of music you’re into, someone in Portland does it, and does it very, very well.

Life at Face was never boring. One week I would be talking to a jazz saxophonist who had composed a suite based on fractal mathematics, the next I would be interviewing some up-and-coming metal band fresh out of high school. And the next I’d be talking to one of my idols over the phone for one of our regular cover stories on world-famous acts visiting the area. And the week after that, I’d be laughing hysterically as a local disco-pop band conducted their interview with me in character, as aliens from the planet Funktar.

The best part was, I didn’t have to pay to see live music while I was there. It was my job, and I got into every show for free. Some were a chore to sit through, but once in a while, I would get to see a band that any city would be proud to call its own. Face being what it was, I became much more entrenched in the rock and metal scenes than any of the others, so I got to meet and see bands like Colepitz and Twitchboy and Gouds Thumb that were making innovative, terrific, heavy-as-shit music, and pulling it off on stage.

But if Portland had a superstar band, it was Rustic Overtones. I know, it’s an unlikely name for a popular act, but while I was there, everyone in Portland knew Rustic. Funny story – they started out as a three-piece while I was in high school, and during my freshman year of college, they decided to put together their soon-to-be-trademark horn section. So they auditioned a trumpet player who lived across the hall from me in my freshman dorm. He didn’t work out, but he did give me Rustic’s pleasant first album, Smile, on cassette. I had no idea that the band would soon be everywhere.

By the time I’d graduated college, Rustic had recorded and released their signature album, Long Division. Here was the Rustic sound – heavy, often funky rock with a full horn section, led by a singer (Dave Gutter) with a superficial resemblance to Dave Matthews, but a much more soulful edge. The songs were long, massive affairs that remained danceable even at their most thunderous. And the album contained “Simple Song,” and you couldn’t get away from that damn catchy tune in 1996.

By that time, I was working at Face, and I got to help chronicle the band’s ascension. They released the excellent, diverse Rooms by the Hour in 1997, and then signed with Arista – when that news hit, Rustic were heroes. They’d signed a major label deal and gotten out of Portland. Alas, it wasn’t to be – they recorded their major label album, but parted ways with Arista before it could come out. The less-than-stellar Viva Nueva (which ironically means “new life”) was released on Tommy Boy in 2001, but it was too little, too late. The Rustic boys moved on to other things – most notably, Gutter and Jon Roods’ project Paranoid Social Club.

That story’s been repeated time and time again in the Portland scene. An extraordinary band gets close, tantalizingly close, to national recognition, and then it all falls apart. I’m sure it’s the same everywhere, but I got to see it up close as the public face of Face. Rustic’s fall was sad and surprising, because they have everything one would think you’d need to make it big.

And maybe they’ll get another shot. After five years of working separately, the seven members of Rustic Overtones have reunited, and they have a new album, called Light at the End. None of them are saying whether this is a permanent deal, and the album title certainly lends credence to the theory that it’s a temporary, final outing, but I’m overjoyed to report that if this is the last Rustic record, it’s a much better way to go out than Viva Nueva.

Light at the End contains both old and new material – five new recordings with local legend Jon Wyman, and four tracks from the Viva Nueva sessions, produced by Tony Visconti. The five new ones are the best – I found Viva Nueva overbaked and underdeveloped, but Wyman’s light touch makes the new tunes seem like classics. “Rock Like War” is all over Portland radio, as it should be – it’s a stomper of a song, horns blazing.

But it’s “Troublesome” that takes the prize – it’s awesome, just a tight, melodic pop song. The title track is terrific, and the folksy political rant “Letter to the President” is a nice surprise – Gutter really nails this one. And I don’t want to give the impression that the Visconti tracks are no good. They’re just thicker and more plodding. “Oxygen” is a flurry of drums and horns accompanied by a string section, the best of the Visconti tracks, but “Carsick” has a great percussive riff, and the extra production works well on the dreamy “Carnival.” And the new “Hardest Way Possible,” a song that’s now appeared on three Rustic albums, is good as well.

Overall, though, this album is a treat, and it’s great to hear the mighty Rustic Overtones flexing its muscles again. They were the biggest, and they were among the best, and Light at the End is a good reminder of why. If this is the last Rustic album, then at least we got one more than I expected we would. And if this is the start of the second phase of their career, then count me in for the long haul.

Check out Rustic here. As far as I know, you can only get Light at the End from Maine’s own Bull Moose Music.

* * * * *

While Rustic were just starting out when I arrived in Maine, Twisted Roots had been together for some time already. They released their first full-length, Turn to Stone, in 1993, at the height of the grunge revolution. By the time I got to interviewing them, on the occasion of their superb 1999 album Body in Trunk, Brick on the Gas, they were already the elder statesmen of Portland rock – I called the article “Still Here, Dammit!,” a statement with a double meaning – the band was still together, but still in Portland, when they deserved much wider recognition.

I lost track of Twisted Roots after leaving Maine, so I was heartened to see, on a recent trip up north, that they’re still together, and still releasing albums. T-Roots remains Pete Giordano, Adam Powers, Mark Lennon and Sonny Robinson, their lineup for the last 10 years, and they’re still making superb, heavy music.

From the band name and their album titles, you might get the idea that Twisted Roots is a metal band, and that’s not quite accurate – they’re more of a heavy rock band with a strong blues influence, and it’s clear even from their most recent stuff that they came up during the Seattle craze. Their focus is on energy and on Giordano’s clear, powerful voice. Still, I can imagine the surprise your standard metal fan may feel if they pick up T-Roots’ new disc, 12 Skies, Fire and the Black, just based on its title and foreboding cover art, and when they press play, they get the acoustic opening of “New Monday.”

Things certainly get heavier from there, but they don’t get less melodic – these nine songs are the finest to ever bear the band’s name, and even though the album is only 27 minutes long, it’s the best thing they’ve done. The songs are compact – most don’t even break the three-minute mark, and they don’t have to. “New Monday” is bluesy, but “Dig” is a monster with a pummeling riff, and “Fire and the Black” is a four-minute epic with enough ideas for five separate songs.

I remember being disappointed with Twisted Roots live, because they just crank everything up to ear-bleeding levels and assault the audience. Their albums, including this new one, have many shades, and the production by the band and Lance Vardis is crystal clear. You can hear every nuance of the band’s twin-guitar arrangement on “Refugee of Tomorrow,” and even the more explosive tracks, like the oddly-spelled closer “See Through Mee,” are beautifully recorded.

But it’s the songs that win the day here, and the skilled performances of the four band members, who by this point must know each other’s playing styles inside and out. There are benefits to sticking together for more than 15 years, and Twisted Roots are reaping them. 12 Skies is a great little disc, and I’m thrilled to see that a band I admired when I was little more than a kid can still rock with the best of them.

Twisted Roots can be found here. Again, go to Bull Moose to get the record.

* * * * *

It’s nice to see the old bands are still together, or reuniting, but what about the new ones? I’m less connected to the Portland scene than I once was, so I don’t know what new high school or college band is tearing up the clubs now, but I can tell you about a new band made up of local legends, one that deserves all the success they’ll undoubtedly get.

The band is Lost on Liftoff. My friend Shane Kinney is the drummer – he’s one of the few people I’ve stayed in touch with since leaving the Great White North, and a nicer and funnier guy you’re not likely to meet. He’s also a great rock drummer. Kinney has joined forces here with Walt Craven, a guy who has tasted national success twice now, with Gouds Thumb and 6gig. Craven is a gifted songwriter, a good guitarist and a compelling singer.

Last year, Lost on Liftoff released a four-song EP that hinted at their sound – melodic and tuneful, guitar-driven, almost power pop. Craven has been mining this territory for a while, and he’s very good at it, but he’s never been better than he is on LOL’s full-length debut, Mixtape Blackouts. And I have to think it’s the musicians he’s playing with, including Nicholas Lamberto on guitar and Dan Walsh on bass, that has pushed him to these heights.

Every song here features a soaring chorus, a thick and powerful arrangement, and a focus on strong songwriting. I had commented to Kinney some time ago that the songs here maintain the high standard set on the EP, but after a few more listens, I think they’ve surpassed it. “Husk” remains a favorite for this melody addict, and I find myself singing along with the chorus every time. “Greens and Yellows” has some superb stop-time work, Kinney just nailing it, and “You Idiot” and “Sunburnt” simply rock. The band reprises “Naked and Wasted” and “40 Miles” from their EP, and they fit in nicely.

But the finest of the new songs is the most atypical – “I Can Hear You in Stereo” shimmers to life slowly, and rises and falls dynamically throughout its five minutes, Craven’s vocals at their most plaintive. “For all we know, it’s impossible to know for sure if we will make it through another day,” he sings, and then leaves the final minute-plus up to the band. They turn out a beautiful coda, and if LOL had chosen this song to end the record, I wouldn’t have argued with their decision. (Actual closer “Still Remember” is a rocker with a great concluding riff, so I can’t complain.)

And then there is track 12, “Don’t Change.” I listened to this album straight through the first time without realizing that this song is an INXS cover, so completely do Lost on Liftoff own it. This is what a cover should be – the band takes the core of the song, rearranges it to suit their style, and slots it right into their catalog, sounding for all the world like an original. It’s just great.

My only complaints about Mixtape Blackouts are a guitar-heavy mix that sometimes drowns out the bass and drums, and a consistency of style that gets slightly wearying after 13 tracks. But Craven, Kinney and company have produced a terrific debut here, hopefully the first of many records to come, and they offer further proof that the Portland, Maine scene is alive and well.

Check out Lost on Liftoff here. They’re practically giving the album away at, yes, Bull Moose.

* * * * *

Next week, I’m aiming for seven reviews, including new ones from Mae, Eisley, Teddy Thompson, Suzanne Vega and the great Julian Cope. And maybe the return of the weekly Doctor Who report.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So let’s get this out of the way first: I preordered the new Swirling Eddies album, The Midget, The Speck and the Molecule, on May 19, 2004.

I know this because I kept the receipt, though I did have to dig it out and check it once the album finally arrived this week. On May 19, 2004, I paid my $20, and waited, having no idea at the time that the record would take three years and two months to complete and ship. It’s the longest I’ve ever waited for an album I’d already paid for, and I admit there were times when I thought this record would never materialize.

Honestly, there are only a few artists I’d do this for, and the Eddies are among them. I don’t know quite how to begin explaining why. I suppose I should begin by explaining who the Swirling Eddies are, and how they came to be.

Once upon a time, there was an amazing spiritual rock band called Daniel Amos, or DA for short. They were led by a mad genius songwriter named Terry Taylor, a guy who has never been content with just one style, or just one identity. In addition to DA, Taylor writes the lion’s share of the songs for the Lost Dogs, kind of a Traveling Wilburys of spiritual pop music. He’s also been known to go by the name Dr. Edward Daniel Taylor when he’s feeling surly.

Anyway, in the 1980s, Daniel Amos released a string of brilliant but low-selling albums, including their Alarma Chronicles, a series of four interlinking records telling a cohesive story. As an encore, they released Darn Floor – Big Bite in 1987, an absolute stunner of an album that still stands as the best of their early work, despite the weird title. Fans praise it now, but in ’87, it was rejected completely by a music industry that didn’t quite grasp it. Plus, it sold terribly.

Upset with the reception his finest set of songs had received, Taylor decided on a bizarre left turn – he’d round up the members of DA and form a new band with them, one that could serve as an outlet for Taylor’s more sarcastic side. This band was the Swirling Eddies, and they released their first album, Let’s Spin, in 1988. The musicians all took on fake names – Taylor called himself Camarillo Eddy, for instance – and the album was a full-on sneer party. But it was nothing when compared with their 1989 opus Outdoor Elvis, which practically oozed anger.

They threw a curve in 1994 with Zoom Daddy, a slinky, strange, long record that, despite being released under the Eddies moniker, included everyone’s real names, and was a musical and lyrical tour de force for Taylor. Even now, 13 years later, it’s still one of his best records, and he has more than 30 to his name. Of course, the Eddies followed that up with Sacred Cows, a free-range slaughter of some of the crappiest Christian music ever recorded, including Amy Grant’s “Baby Baby” and Stryper’s “Sing Along Song.”

And then Taylor put the Eddies to bed. He did his cowboy thing with the Lost Dogs, made a phenomenal new Daniel Amos album in 2001, and seemed to settle into a late-career groove. It was clear that the Eddies were of their time, a manifestation of a younger man’s anger and disappointment. Does the world still need Camarillo Eddy? More to the point, does Terry Taylor still need Camarillo Eddy?

So yeah, even before the three-year wait (and even before we knew what it was called), The Midget, the Speck and the Molecule had a lot to live up to. Admittedly, 90 percent of the population has never heard of the Eddies, or of Terry Taylor, DA, the Lost Dogs, or any of the bands in this fertile little pocket of spiritual pop. But for those of us who know the story, and who’ve been following along, this is an Event. No, this is an EVENT.

I said before that I’ve never waited three years for an album I’d already purchased, and even though I remained patient throughout that time, The Midget had to be worth not only the 11 years since the last Eddies record, but also the small eternity that’s passed since Taylor started putting it together. Sing along if you know this song:

It was worth all that and more.

The Midget, the Speck and the Molecule is extraordinary, easily one of the finest albums of 2007. Far from the comedic knockoff that part of me was dreading, it’s a major work from the mind of Taylor, still one of the sharpest songwriters around when he’s on his game. The album brings together many of Taylor’s styles, and works in a few more he’s never tried. And yet, it is still absolutely a Swirling Eddies album, quirky and funny and a genuine treat to listen to.

The music is terrific, some of it taking from DA and some from the Zoom Daddy sound, but it’s the lyrics that make this record. Taylor is in full glory here, writing about lecherous lotharios, lonely homeless men, despairing old couples, doubt, regret, humility, and even on a couple of occasions, his own band. This is top form Terry Taylor, every line a knockout, and every song inviting you to pick it apart and find the hidden meanings.

The album opens gently with “It All Depends,” and it’s immediately clear that there have been a few changes to the Eddies lineup. Derri Daugherty and Steve Hindalong of the Choir are all over this thing, Daugherty caressing the sweeter numbers with his trademark shimmering guitar, and Hindalong playing exotic percussion as only he can. Fellow Lost Dog Mike Roe is on here too, joining original Eddies Taylor, Jerry Chamberlain and bass god Tim Chandler. (The three best bass players in pop music, as far as I’m concerned, are Paul McCartney, Colin Moulding of XTC, and Tim Chandler.)

And so “It All Depends” whispers to life, a sweet acoustic guitar floating over delicate bongos and a cloud of ambient electrics. It’s a song about perspective – “Faith to move a mountain or a zealot’s wishful thinking, a connoisseur of the finest wines or just another drunkard drinking, one more dirty whistle blower or a conscience coming clean, I suppose it all depends how you look at these things…” But as it goes along, it gets louder and deeper, Taylor inviting you to share his perspective, whatever your own. Perhaps my favorite line in this song: “Some say death is a doornail, some say death is a door…”

The title track comes next, and it’s also surprisingly gentle, strange and beautiful. Taylor uses the title’s imagery to dramatize regret, I think – the old hitchhiker becomes a midget, then a speck, then a molecule in your rear view mirror as you drive away, the image of someone you failed to help haunting the rest of your journey. “Madonna Inn” is, of course, about the famous hotel in California, where each room is a different experience. This one sounds the most like Zoom Daddy, all slithering bass and low, half-spoken vocals. It’s spooky and sexy and terrific.

The album to this point has set such a mood that it’s almost a shame when middling rocker “Giants in the Land” ruins it. But Taylor saves “Giants” by making it perhaps the cleverest song about his own band he’s ever written: “There were giants in the land in those ancient days, there were giants in the land, now they’re in their graves, indifference killed ‘em, it buried the band, all they wanted was a tour and a rental van…” The final verse is almost a message to Taylor’s small group of devoted fans: “In those ancient days, there were giants in the land, you wanna raise them up, you gotta give them a hand…”

Naturally, of course, we did by pre-ordering this album three years ago, which makes the raucous “Medley of Our Hit” all the more inexplicable. This song is possibly the most insular thing I’ve ever seen an artist of Taylor’s stature do – it directly references the message board flap over the pre-orders, and takes people to task for whining about it. Leaving aside whether it’s a good idea for a guy with a few thousand fans to start calling them out by name, the song is a hoot, and it makes a perfect point – this preorder thing is not important, not worth complaining about. It’s just another “piece of hit.”

Or, you know, it all depends on how you look at these things, because some people were genuinely upset over the long wait, and a humble “we’re sorry,” either in song or in the packaging, would have gone a long way. (The entire thanks list: “The Swirling Eddies would like to extend their deepest love and utmost respect to us, the Swirling Eddies.”) Still, this song is exactly the way Camarillo Eddy would react to the controversy, and the lyrics are deceptively self-deprecating: “Take the crank, give it a yank, ‘cause we’re on empty, so fill up our tank with good and plenty, milk and honey and money in the bank…”

I could name and describe each song, since they’re all highlights, but I won’t. (Okay, I do have to bring up “My Cardboard Box,” the tale of a lovestruck homeless guy. This is the funniest thing here, and Taylor’s Camarillo voice – lower and more guttural than his natural one – is perfect for it.) The back half of the album is flawless, playing like a terrific DA album, particularly “Tremolo” and the great “A Humble Man Rises.” (The full line is, “A humble man rises to a new low.”) It’s in the second half that the amps are cranked and the real rock begins, Chandler going to town on his four-string while Taylor screams and flails like a man half his age.

What a great little joke, then, to end this album brimming with ideas with a song about running out of them. “This is the Title” describes its own creation as it goes along: “Can only come up with a few lines, I just sang the lines, these are the lines…” (Providence, Rhode Island band Exhibit A had a similar tune called “This is Where You Put the Title.”) It’s a sweet and funny finish, and the whole thing concludes with a reprise of the title track, Daugherty’s lovely waves of guitar the last thing you hear.

And then you press play again.

I’d have waited twice as long for an album this good. The Midget, the Speck and the Molecule is even better than I’d hoped, a genuine triumph for Terry Taylor, and the best thing he’s contributed to since the last Daniel Amos album in 2001. It’s a prickly, thoughtful, funny, inspiring little disc, one that definitely lives up to the Eddies legacy. But don’t worry – it’s enjoyable even if you’ve never heard of the Eddies or Terry Taylor before.

Get on over to www.danielamos.com and check it out. And while you’re there, try the Lost Dogs’ new one, The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees. And then work backwards and pick up everything Taylor and his fellow Dogs have ever done, because it’s all worth hearing.

* * * * *

I’ve gone on and on about the Eddies, so no Doctor Who update this week. Suffice it to say that I’ve seen a couple more William Hartnell episodes, including the nigh-unwatchable The Web Planet, and I’m itching to talk about them.

Next week, some missives from Maine, including new ones from Rustic Overtones, Twisted Roots, and my friends in Lost on Liftoff.

See you in line Tuesday morning.