So I think I might start writing weekly updates on my ongoing trek through Doctor Who, as it’s monopolizing an awful lot of my brain lately. I’ve decided to buy all the available stories on DVD – at my current rate of one a week, I’ll be caught up with the release schedule by mid-April of next year, I think, and then I’ll be one of the many waiting for the next BBC America newsletter…

Given that the original show was on the air for 26 years, there aren’t as many DVD releases as you’d think – only 49 of the 159 original stories are available on this side of the pond, and with an additional 23 or so either completely or substantially missing from the BBC archives, that leaves 87 more full stories to come out. As you might have guessed, this really appeals to my long-term collector’s nature.

You’d think that the older the story is, the bigger the chance that it wouldn’t exist anymore, but that’s not entirely true. With the exception of two stories, the first two seasons are accounted for – that’s 15 full black-and-white stories starring William Hartnell, the extraordinary first Doctor. The problems start in his third season, but there are an additional four Hartnell stories that exist in complete enough form that they will probably be released on DVD.

So far, we have six of those existing 19. I talked about the first two last week – the neat An Unearthly Child and the oddly superb The Daleks – but I glossed over the third, The Edge of Destruction, because it’s pretty awful. Two episodes, confined to the TARDIS (the good Doctor’s time-and-spaceship, disguised as the iconic blue police box you’ve probably seen, even if you’ve never seen Doctor Who). The main characters all start acting strangely, and for a while you think there must be some kind of alien presence on board, but no… the resolution is so remarkably lame that I’m surprised Hartnell could deliver his lines without laughing.

But this week, I bought 1964’s The Aztecs, the sixth Doctor Who story, and it’s terrific. It is the oldest surviving “historical” adventure, which finds the Doctor and his companions traveling back in time and meeting the titular Mexican natives. That would be enough to be fascinating, but this story also works in a philosophical debate about cultural differences, a morality tale about changing history (even if it is for the better), and a love interest for the Doctor – something that wouldn’t be repeated until the new series in 2005.

The Aztecs is frustratingly studio-bound, and you can tell that when the characters are staring out over the sunset, they’re looking at a matte painting, but if you ignore the Shakespeare-in-the-park shortcomings (something you need to do to watch any Doctor Who anyway), this is a great little story. Hartnell is at his best here, sly and manipulative, but genuinely caring and concerned when need be. Every one of the regulars has some terrific moments, and the supporting cast is superb. (It’s one of the quirks of Doctor Who’s format that you get a new supporting cast each story, with varying results.)

In the end, The Aztecs makes full use of its historical setting to present a morality play, a story of faith, and a sweet little romance, all in 96 minutes. This is what old-time Doctor Who should be – a fun, thought-provoking romp. Hopefully I’ll say the same about next week’s DVD, The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

* * * * *

Since there’s been an avalanche of new music lately, and I’m still digging myself out, I thought I’d give myself a bit of a chance to catch up this week. Most of the CDs I’ve bought over the past couple of weeks have made little lasting impression on me, sadly, and I’d find it difficult to fill an entire column with thoughts on any one or two of them.

So I picked seven, and I plan to keep them short. This will be especially helpful, since the onslaught of new tunes isn’t going to stop anytime soon. August alone will see new ones by Bruce Hornsby, Eisley, Mae, Minus the Bear, the New Pornographers, Over the Rhine, Rilo Kiley, Kanye West, KMFDM and Liars, plus I’m sure a few I haven’t thought of, plus two new Marillion live albums, and on and on. So here is me, shovel in hand, tunneling my way out.

First up is Prince, whose 4,962,589th album is called Planet Earth. It’s no secret that I think the former Purple One is a musical genius, even though he’s a marketing moron – see his scheme to give this new album away free in Britain through the Daily Mail, which has only succeeded in making every British music store owner pissed off at him. This may not concern him now, but when he tries to get them to stock his 4,962,590th album next year, we’ll see how well it works out for him.

Planet Earth’s cover is the most striking thing about it. It’s a flashy hologram that alternates between Prince’s male-female symbol thing and a picture of the man himself, hovering over the Earth like some kind of celestial puppet master. It’s the next step up from his Diamonds and Pearls cover, and it’s so neat that I can almost forgive him for not including the album title or a track listing on the package. (Almost.)

Unfortunately, the music doesn’t follow suit – this is a pretty lazy Prince album. The Artist Formerly Known as a Critic’s Darling gets taken to task a lot for not producing another Purple Rain or Sign O’ the Times, but his last couple of albums have been so self-consciously “classic” Prince that I worried he’d been listening to his detractors too much. Not to worry – Planet Earth is far from classic Prince. It’s a by-the-numbers disc that includes some Motown pastiches (“Somewhere Here on Earth”), some breezy guitar-pop tunes (“The One U Wanna C”), and some of his trademark religious imagery (“Lion of Judah”).

None of it is bad, but none of it makes me want to press play again. The best thing here, and the only song with a definite pulse, is funky workout “Chelsea Rodgers,” containing some bitchin’ saxophone solos. Otherwise, this is a lightweight effort from a guy who can do much better, and I kind of wish I’d been able to get it free with my Sunday newspaper.

* * * * *

They Might Be Giants fare better with their 12th album, The Else, although it’s not quite up to the high standard set by The Spine two years ago. This album was co-produced by the Dust Brothers, but if you’re expecting a return to the synth-heavy days of old, or a beat-crazy collage like Paul’s Boutique, you’ll be disappointed.

I wasn’t expecting either of those, so The Else seemed to me like the next step in a natural progression. Gone forever (most likely) is the image of John Linnell and John Flansburgh in matching suits, standing behind a row of synthesizers. This here is a live-sounding rock band album, with thunderous drums and raucous guitars throughout. Oddly, the opening song, “I’m Impressed,” brings Lincoln to mind, but from there, it’s a thoroughly modern They Might Be Giants.

Trouble is, it just isn’t that compelling. The songs are okay, especially mini-epics like “With the Dark,” and there are superb turns of phrase in tunes like “Bee of the Bird of the Moth” and “Withered Hope,” but largely, this is a forgettable TMBG album. “Take Out the Trash” sounds like a lost Smash Mouth song, all bass and sneering, and it’s the album’s low point. But even the more TMBG-ish songs are less than breathtaking. Breezy closer “The Mesopotamians” may be the best thing here, and that’s unfortunate.

But The Else is probably the first TMBG album that fully makes the case for their records to be removed from the Novelty/Comedy section of the record store. These are probably the most serious songs the Johns have written, and there are no quirky interludes (like The Spine’s “Stalk of Wheat” or “Bastard Wants to Hit Me”) to be found. As much as I’ve been pulling for the Johns to do something like this, and convince all their detractors what legitimate songwriters they are, the result here leaves me a little cold. A bad TMBG album is still better than half of what I hear on an annual basis, but I wish I liked The Else more than I do.

* * * * *

From their first gig to their last multi-day festival, Phish were compared to the Grateful Dead.

Now, I wouldn’t want to suggest they didn’t take a big chunk of their sound and aesthetic from the Dead, but I always thought a bigger influence on the Vermont foursome was Frank Zappa. Their tendency towards jazz-rock, their predilection for comedic/nonsensical lyrics intoned in a low voice, their marathon solo spots in concert, and even lead guitarist Trey Anastasio’s lead guitar tone all seemed to bear the mark of Zappa. (There’s a Doctor Who story title for you: The Mark of Zappa.)

So far, Anastasio’s solo career has been the furthest thing from perfectly Frank, but with his new one, The Horseshoe Curve, he’s brought that influence back in spades. The album is basically Anastasio’s Hot Rats – jazz-rock instrumentals covered in horns, with some dynamic extended solos over them. He’s assembled a nine-piece band – essentially his Petit Wazoo – for the record, and laid down some smoking grooves.

And like Hot Rats, it’s just about the right length at 44 minutes. There’s a certain sameness to some of these tracks, no matter how neat the bass lines are, or how explosive Anastasio’s own solos turn out to be. Pianist Ray Packowski gets a workout here too, and the horn section is excellent, but by the time The Horseshoe Curve is over, you’re pretty much gorged on the sound. It ends with a pair of Zappa-esque compositions, notably the angular “Porter’s Pyramids,” which add just the right cherry on top. This is good stuff, much better than the dreck Phish released in their last years of life, and light years ahead of Anastasio’s own recent solo records.

* * * * *

One thing about Phish, though, is that they were constantly changing. If you need a stable sound, one you can count on year after year, you should try being a Bad Religion fan. Their 14th album, New Maps of Hell, sounds just like their 13th, which sounded just like their 12th, and on and on. But then again, the last time they tried to shake up their sound was in 2000, when they hired Todd Rundgren to produce The New America, and it was a mess. So perhaps sticking with what they know isn’t a bad idea.

So here are 16 more populist polemics set to crashing double-time drum beats and chock full of hooks and harmonies. Greg Graffin’s voice is as powerful as ever, and the three-guitar attack packs just as much punch as it always has. It’s a formula, and sometimes that formula works for me and sometimes it doesn’t. I think it just depends on my mood. I panned The Empire Strikes First for playing into that formula too much, but New Maps of Hell does the same thing, and I found myself liking it a great deal. Most of these songs hover around two minutes long (the last song, “Fields of Mars,” is a genuine Bad Religion epic at 3:39), and all of them deliver hook after hook with their trademark force.

So don’t listen to me. If you ever liked Bad Religion, you’ll dig New Maps of Hell. If you’ve grown tired of their melodic punk sound, then don’t bother, because there’s nothing new here at all. But this time, I don’t seem to mind.

* * * * *

I first heard of Bryce Avary and his one-man band, the Rocket Summer, when I reviewed a reissue of his first record for HM Magazine. I was impressed, to say the least – Avary writes neat little pop songs, with thumping pianos and oceans of harmonies, and while he’ll occasionally invite a guest musician or two on board, he mostly creates this whole shiny, spunky pop sound all by himself.

The Rocket Summer’s new album, Do You Feel, is no exception, but I swear, I didn’t quite make the emo connection when I first heard Avary’s work. There’s some very typical pop-punk stuff on here, nice as it all is, that gets wearying by the end. But hell, that’s quibbling, especially since Do You Feel is so huge and melodic from start to finish. “So Much Love” may well be Avary’s finest moment so far, a piano-pounding pop tune with some sublime saxophone licks and a great chorus at its center, and many of the album’s 13 songs follow suit.

I just wish there were more variation in Avary’s sound here, since it wears a little thin over a whole album. Avary doesn’t push himself here as much as he refines his prior sound for his new major label audience, and while it works, and it certainly inspires singalongs, I find myself wishing that some of these songs sounded significantly different from the others. But Avary’s impassioned, high voice and his knack for killer harmonies sells Do You Feel. It’s a good record, but I want the next one to be better.

* * * * *

If you want a consistent pop-rock record that’s as diverse as it is well-written, though, you can’t go wrong with Rooney’s new one, Calling the World. It took this New York quintet four years to follow up their self-titled debut, but the wait was worth it – the result is a pop gem seeped in history, with hook after hook after hook.

Lead singer Robert Schwartzman is Rushmore star (and former Phantom Planet drummer) Jason Schwartzman’s younger brother, and he proves that a knack for superb ‘60s and ‘70s-based pop melodies runs in the family. Just try not to sing along with “When Did Your Heart Go Missing,” and then prepare to be blown away by “I Should’ve Been After You,” one of 2007’s finest pure pop songs. Seriously, it starts with a Queen-style fanfare, kicks in with a dazzling pop chorus, and then spins off into Rick Wakeman territory for a smashing middle eight. Superb song.

Calling the World pulls from the Beatles, Cheap Trick and ELO in equal measure, and Jeff Lynne himself would probably dig “Are You Afraid,” a tribute to his sound. The album isn’t all amazing, but it is all good, and it’s the first album of the six I’ve reviewed so far this week that made me want to press play again as soon as it was over.

* * * * *

Which brings us to the odd one out, Tegan and Sara’s The Con. It’s odd because it’s the only one in this list that sounds anything remotely like it, but also because it’s flat-out amazing, and even though I don’t have much to say about it, I highly recommend it.

Tegan and Sara Quin are twin sisters, and their previous albums have found them swimming in familiar pop-punk and folk waters. Not so The Con – I almost didn’t pick this album up, because their previous discs bored me, but this one sounds like a whole new thing to these ears. This one was produced by Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, but even that won’t prepare you for the odd, yet perfect, sound of this record. It is the sisters’ most fully realized effort, even if on first listen it can sound like a collection of disparate parts.

With the Quins’ high, screechy voices and the music’s odd angles, it’s a wonder that The Con is so immediately likeable. It opens with the brief, drum-less “I Was Married,” and it takes a full minute before “Relief Next to Me” takes its full shape, but even through what could have seemed like a false start, the sisters keep the focus on the melodies (and bizarre harmonies) that are this album’s treasure. From there, there is just nothing wrong with this album at all, as the songs move from strength to strength.

It may seem odd that I have very little to say about The Con, other than to recommend it, and I can’t explain that either. I love this album, and it will probably find its way into my top 10 list, and I owe Dr. Tony Shore another round of thanks for urging me to buy it. Every time I listen, I fall in love again with the new wave synths on “The Con,” and the lazy groove of “Back in Your Head,” and the gorgeous guitars of “Dark Come Soon.” Don’t let the truncated size of this review put you off – The Con is one of the coolest albums of 2007, and it comes highly recommended.

And that’s all I have to say.

* * * * *

Next week, the new Swirling Eddies album. After that, a look at three new albums from my friends in Maine, and then, well, the avalanche continues…

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I complain a lot about my nerdy, socially awkward and psychologically scarring childhood, but the older I get, the more I realize how cool it was to be a kid.

Twelve-year-old me never had to make it through a week like the one I just had, with its 12-hour work days pushing me to the brink of exhaustion. Sure, school was tough, but it was over in seven hours, and left me with the whole afternoon and evening to do what I wanted. I had no bills to pay, no responsibilities, and I could literally spend whole days in my head, listening to fascinating music and writing out absurd stories, or watching similarly absurd stories on television.

I’ve recently been described as a big kid, and I guess in some ways it’s true. I mean, I have a good adult job, and I pay all my bills on time, and I own my own car, and all of that, but an enormous chunk of my annual income still goes to fascinating music and absurd stories, much of which I buy because I loved it in my youth. For example, I bought the new Great White album, Back to the Rhythm, this week, not because 33-year-old me expected it to be some kind of masterpiece, but because 14-year-old me loved Great White.

Entertainment corporations are knocking themselves out lately to get me to relive my youth, and spend and spend those adult dollars in the process, and it’s usually easy to see through such crass tactics. I won’t go into depth about the godawful Transformers movie, except to say that it had no connection whatsoever to the Transformers I played with (and, let’s be honest, imagined sweeping, complex epic stories about) as a kid. It was loud and dumb and contained no heart whatsoever. I actually prefer the fairly lousy cartoon show, because at least that stirs up memories for me.

But sometimes the revivals work, because they capture something indefinable about the original. Case in point: Doctor Who, the insanely long-running science fiction show produced by the BBC. Two years ago, producer Russell T. Davies launched a new Doctor Who series in Britain, starring Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, and while it was hit or miss, it did, finally, trigger in me an almost overpowering nostalgia for the original series.

For the uninitiated: Doctor Who ran for 26 years on the BBC, from 1963 to 1989, and was produced in-house for all of that time. It’s about a free-wheeling adventurer called the Doctor, one of a race of near-immortals called Time Lords, who flits about time and space in a machine disguised as an old-model British police box. (They used to be on street corners, and allowed you to lock yourself in to escape attackers, and contact police quickly.) The Doctor usually travels with companions that he picks up along the way, and he faces off against vicious enemies when he’s not solving mysteries in the past or the future.

Sounds silly, I know, and it undoubtedly is. And it was made on the cheap, too, especially in its later years – rubber monster suits, primitive computer graphics, cardboard sets. The whole thing has an element of grown men playing dress-up that’s inescapable, and if you’re not charmed by it, you won’t be able to get through a single episode. But for me, Doctor Who has this odd magic to it, which I certainly attribute to my having watched it religiously as a kid.

Much like just about everyone my age, my first Doctor was Tom Baker.

(I should explain here – one of the reasons Doctor Who lasted for so long was the concept of regeneration. When the Doctor gets himself into a spot he can’t get out of, well, he dies, but then he regenerates into a completely new body. Which means the producers hire a completely new actor to play the part, ensuring that the show goes on past the tenure of its stars. Seven actors played the Doctor during the original run, with an additional three and counting after that. It’s a novel and kind of brilliant device, and helped turn the show into an institution in Britain.)

Anyway, Tom Baker. He was hilarious in the role, that was the first and most important thing. His hair was wild and curly, his toothy grin infectious, and his manner unpredictable. Even as a 12-year-old, I loved Baker immensely. Doctor Who aired weeknights on Channel 2, our Boston-area public television station, at 7 p.m., and as a very young child, I was allowed to stay up just long enough to see the Doctor before heading to bed. The Tom Baker title scene still gives me goosebumps, with its endless tunnel of liquid-looking video feedback, but it scared me to death as a kid.

I think the first story I saw was “The Invisible Enemy,” but I’m not sure. (Doctor Who is an old-time adventure serial and is told in stories, which are each made up of four to six 30-minute episodes.) The first one I really remember, though, is “The Deadly Assassin,” which reduced the Doctor’s arch enemy, the Master, to a desiccated, creepy husk. I was hooked for life.

Naturally, I had no idea what the hell was going on when Tom Baker’s Doctor regenerated into Peter Davison’s at the end of “Logopolis.” I’d never even heard of regeneration when I saw it, so it came as a complete surprise. I later learned all I could about the various actors who played the Doctor, and I still say that even though Baker was my first, I like Davison’s more refined, reserved portrayal best.

The new series just wrapped up its third season, easily the spottiest of the bunch, but they’ve struck gold with David Tennant, the 10th actor to play the Doctor. He’s awesome – manic, hysterical, and yet able to act with surprising force and intensity when needed, something Tom Baker did very well, too. The third season’s best stories brought back that old Doctor Who feeling, especially the devastating “Human Nature/The Family of Blood,” and the surprisingly spooky “Blink.”

But it was sitting down recently with my old friend Mike to watch the entirety of the Key to Time saga, which made up all of Tom Baker’s fifth season as the Doctor, that did it. I had such a good/bad time watching all ten-plus hours of this story (actually six stories that wrap together) that I shortly made a financially idiotic decision: I’m putting together a complete run of Doctor Who DVDs.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. The DVDs are released by story, not season, and command pretty high prices. There were 159 stories in the classic series, and just about 50 of them are on DVD now. (Sadly, more than 25 of those stories are either completely or partially missing from the BBC archives – they didn’t expect to need them again, so they wiped the videotapes.) But I’ve decided to go in chronological order – I bought “The Beginning,” a box set containing the first three stories, a couple of weeks ago.

The first Doctor, debuting in 1963, was an older gentleman named William Hartnell, and his portrayal is surprising at first – he’s a mischievous, irascible old coot who’s always out to save himself, a far cry from the genial and selfless Doctors of later seasons. And unlike later actors and production teams, everyone involved in these first stories took them incredibly seriously, and played them straight.

And it works. The second story introduces the Daleks, basically murderous pepper shakers with toilet plungers for arms, and even as a kid I laughed at these things. They can’t even go up stairs, so how menacing can they be? But damn, “The Daleks” makes them work. They’re actually kind of creepy, and they prove to be a match for the first Doctor and his companions. The story is in seven parts, and lasts almost three hours, but it’s riveting. I’ve ordered a couple more black-and-white Hartnell stories, and I’m looking forward to seeing as many as I can.

I will confess, too, that I skipped ahead, just this once – I was dying to see Tom Baker and Peter Davison again, and the BBC was kind enough to give me a one-stop-shopping opportunity with the “New Beginnings” box set, containing Baker’s last two stories and Davison’s first one. Watching them again brought back a flood of memories, especially the final episode of “Logopolis,” Baker’s swan song. Baker is just as terrific as I remembered, and Davison, while he hadn’t found his swing yet, reminded me throughout “Castrovalva” why I like him so much.

Sure, it’s all breathtakingly cheap, and the stories are convoluted and often nonsensical, but I love this stuff. I even accept the worst of the new series, which has a bigger budget and yet still relies on cheese more often than not, because it’s Doctor Who, and I loved it as a child.

Musically, there are a number of bands I feel the same way about. I will take any scrap of recorded material by the Cure and love it to pieces, because Disintegration saved my life in high school. I will buy new records from the most cornball hair metal bands on Earth because they remind me of my earlier days.

No other band can take me back in time, however, quite like the Alarm can. I owe my friend Chris Callaway for lending me a cassette copy of Strength, back when we were pre-teens, and sparking my eternal love for this band. The Alarm’s fist-pumping anthems are such a part of the fabric of my life that I find I can’t even objectively rate their new work. If it has Mike Peters at the helm, and contains at least one sky-high “woah-oh,” I will love it unconditionally.

I have been waiting since I was 12 years old to see the Alarm live, and earlier this month, I finally did it. The band played (brace yourself) the Ribfest in nearby Naperville, part of a triple-bill of nostalgia that included the Fixx and the Psychedelic Furs. Peters and his new Alarm (he’s the only original member left) played for only 45 minutes, but it was worth waiting 21 years for. They slammed through a set of classics, songs I’ve been singing along with for two decades.

“Rescue Me.” “Where Were You Hiding When the Storm Broke.” “Rain in the Summertime.” “Sixty-Eight Guns.” And to top it all off, perhaps the quintessential Alarm song, “Spirit of ’76.” I’ve been waiting most of my life to hear “Spirit of ‘76” live, and it was amazing – Peters sandwiched modern classic “45 RPM” between the two halves of “Spirit,” and I was hoarse by the end, shouting the lyrics to both songs. It was an amazing show.

But unlike the other two bands on the bill, the Alarm is still going strong – stronger, some might say, than ever. Their last album, 2006’s Under Attack, was excellent, displaying a louder and rawer Alarm sound than I’ve ever heard. Mike Peters has just bounced back from a second bout with cancer, and he’s playing and recording now like he might never get the chance again. You can hear the edge in his voice, and the urgency in his always melodic, always terrific songs is undeniable these days.

And he keeps on trucking. The new Alarm project is called The Counter Attack Collective, a seven-month release schedule leading up to the new album, Counter Attack, in January. You ready for this? You may want to sit down. Peters has recorded roughly 50 new songs, and he’s releasing most of them on six EPs, one a month leading up to the album. Subscribers to the Collective will get the six EPs, a bonus live EP, the full album, and a box to put them all in. That’s just awesome.

So of course I subscribed – it’s a mere $110. And the first two discs showed up in my mailbox this week, including the first EP Three Sevens Clash and the bonus live EP. Peters has gone right back to his punk rock roots with these things. They come in cardboard sleeves, made up to look like cheap one-color punk vinyls, and the CDs themselves are black plastic, designed to look like old 45 RPM records, with grooves and everything.

Seriously, these are so… fucking… COOL.

And the music is just as good. Three Sevens Clash was obviously designed as a unified EP statement, 20 minutes long. It contains four songs, with an intro, an extended outro, and a quick interlude in the middle. “Three Sevens Clash,” the song, is a sequel to “45 RPM,” and is all about the history of the band, in a way. But from there, Peters brings in some deep minor-key grooves on “Kill to Get What You Want” and “Fill in the Blanks” before kicking your ass for 48 seconds with “Zeros and Ones.”

The EP concludes with “Love Hope and Strength,” a slower, more anthemic piece that continues into “Broadcast on Street Airwaves,” an extended coda reminiscent of the Clash at their dub-influenced peak. By the time the three concluding tracks have segued into one another, it becomes clear that Three Sevens Clash is a single 20-minute piece, as full of life and energy and passion as anything Mike Peters has ever done.

The bonus EP is a live medley of punk tunes, including “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.,” filling out a terrific performance of “45 RPM.” It just underscores the focus on the Alarm’s early, street-level days that seems to be the theme of Counter Attack, and if Peters can pull this entire eight-CD project off with the same level of intensity he’s brought to these first two, this could be the most consistent, most unrelenting set of Alarm songs ever. I’m thrilled to find out if he did it.

But most of all, I remain amazed that Mike Peters and his bandmates continue to inspire that same feeling in me that the original Alarm did when I was 12. Back then, the Alarm convinced me that anything was possible, that there really were no frontiers that can’t be crossed. And even now, the Alarm still strikes the same chord in me, making me believe that with love, hope and strength we’ll never give up without a fight. I will always love this band, and I will always look forward to anything they do, because they make me feel young and alive. And for that, I can never repay them.

The second EP, called Fightback, comes out in two weeks. Check out thealarm.com.

Next week, a whole smattering of new records. I’ve been deluged with new albums over the past two weeks, but I’ve also had very little time to listen to them. I promise to rectify that next week, with brief looks at Interpol, Spoon, They Might Be Giants, Emerson Hart, Suzanne Vega, the Chemical Brothers, Julian Cope, the Swirling Eddies, and the new Prince album, Planet Earth. Or, again, some combination thereof.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

In case you hadn’t noticed, reunions are all the rage these days.

Among the top-grossing acts at the moment is the reconstituted Police, rehashing their glory days in sold-out stadiums around the country as we speak. Genesis, Led Zeppelin, the Doors… hell, even the fricking Spice Girls have announced reunion plans recently, confirming what the folks in Branson, Missouri have known for ages: nostalgia is big business.

In the constant battle between art and commerce, reunion tours and albums rank almost as far in the filthy lucre camp as you can get. They usually only happen when the old members of some once-famous band realize that they’ve just never raked in as much cash as they did when they were together, and the “musical and artistic differences” that drove them apart just don’t matter so much when they’re unable to buy that fifth Porsche while supporting the massive drug habit.

If you think the Police reunion isn’t about the cash, just look at the sales of anything any of the three members have done in the last 10 years. You’ve got Sting with his fucking lute, tunneling even further up his own rectum, and you’ve got Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland, who haven’t done a damn thing in more than a decade, just waiting to lick their fearless leader’s boots. These are three guys who couldn’t be in the same room together after they split up, but for the right price, they’ll churn out “Roxanne” every night for a few months.

But at least the Police reunion contains all three original members. Nothing’s worse than a reunion that isn’t a reunion, one that’s just one or two original members trading on the name, and putting out music that taints that name in the process. Pretty much the only guy I can think of who’s pulled that off is Mike Peters – he’s the only original member left in the Alarm, but the new band retains the passion and power of the old one, and he never sold it as a reunion. Peters even adds the date after the name Alarm on each new record, just to make the point – it’s the Alarm MMVII on tour now, and the Alarm MMVIII who will be credited on their new album, Counter Attack, next year.

Not so the Smashing Pumpkins, who returned to store shelves this week for the first time since 2000 with Zeitgeist. For more than a year, big bald boss Billy Corgan has kept the lineup of his new Pumpkins a secret, and for good reason – there isn’t one. Zeitgeist is all Corgan and faithful drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. I expected that guitarist James Iha and bassist D’Arcy Wretzky would not be involved, but I didn’t expect that Corgan would just Jack White the whole thing.

The Pumpkins were probably the most ambitious American band of their time, consistently building on their own formula over a delirious deluge of material between 1991 and 1998. With Siamese Dream in 1993 they crafted one of the most layered rock albums of the day, full of seemingly boundless beauty and rage, and then with Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness in 1995 they delivered one of the first true double albums of the digital age, exploding their sound over 28 songs that ranged from good to great. Even the wispy pullback album Adore was a treat, and the Pumpkins also released a treasure trove of b-sides in their heyday, most of which were just as good as the a-sides.

When Corgan fell apart, he fell apart hard. 2000’s Machina/The Machines of God was a terrible swan song, a raging rock record that went nowhere and took forever to get there. And Corgan’s post-Pumpkins output has been pretty sad, especially The Future Embrace, his godawful embarrassing solo album from 2005.

So to say that Zeitgeist is his best work in years isn’t really saying a lot. Despite the money-hungry revival of the band’s name on the cover, this is almost more of a solo album than The Future Embrace was, only this time Corgan’s put aside the synthesizers and returned to his trademark thick-as-molasses guitar sound. Trouble is, he’s forgotten how to make that sound work – Zeitgeist is a remarkable failure in the production department, with a truly abysmal mix and an overall sub-Gish vibe that buries the songs.

Truth be told, the songs aren’t all that bad, for the most part. Zeitgeist mostly sounds submerged beneath an avalanche of squealing guitars, but now and then, Corgan’s stacked harmonies break through, and occasionally (very occasionally) he’ll stumble on a melody worth hearing. Mostly, it’s the songs that sound like Zwan that are the keepers, like “That’s the Way (My Love Is),” or “Bring the Light.” But for a depressing stretch of Zeitgeist’s running time, Corgan tries to capture the magic of Siamese Dream (on which he played all the instruments, too), and it just doesn’t work.

But at least he keeps all those half-ass retreads to four minutes or less. The real stinker here is “United States,” Corgan’s sad attempt at an epic. Over Chamberlin’s thudding drum dirge, Corgan pounds out a repetitive, boring slog that drags on for 10 minutes as he whines about the state of the country in his ever-reedy voice. This song contains the most pathetic call for revolution you’ve ever heard, and its lyrics are typical of the forced social consciousness that infects Zeitgeist like a rash. Corgan’s never written political songs before, and it shows in the clumsy wordplay of “Doomsday Clock” and “For God and Country.”

The final two tracks find Corgan just disintegrating. He brings his beloved synthesizers back, and on “Pomp and Circumstances,” the goopy closer, he conjures little puffy clouds, then goes all ‘80s guitar hero on top of them. It’s laughable, really, something that probably would have been a low point even on The Future Embrace. The last word on the album is “shamed,” and I only wish he meant it.

But Corgan appears shameless here. Slapping the name of his most successful band on a glorified solo record, particularly one as poorly made as this one, just seems desperate, akin to renting out a 50-foot neon sign that reads “LOOK AT ME!”

That’s the downside of reunion records: had this been released under Corgan’s own name, or under another moniker, I’d probably be focusing on its smaller charms, and calling it a leap forward from Corgan’s last couple of efforts. But since it’s the new Pumpkins album, ostensibly, then I have to compare it to the Pumpkins catalog, and I’m sad to say this comes up far short of even the worst of their records. Never mind that this isn’t really the Smashing Pumpkins. It purports to be, and in doing so, stains that band’s legacy.

At least Neil Finn has been honest about the origins of Time on Earth, the Crowded House “reunion” album he’s just released. He’s openly admitted that it began as his third solo album, but after the sad death of Crowded House drummer Paul Hester, he reunited with bassist Nick Seymour and, later, guitarist/keyboardist Mark Hart. And since the band was all there, mostly, he decided to call it Crowded House. (Presumably the fact that the band’s name is still worth its weight in gold in Finn’s native New Zealand didn’t factor in at all…)

But there’s another reason to call Time on Earth a Crowded House record – it’s something of an album-length eulogy for Hester, who took his own life in 2005. There are no songs here that specifically address the void Hester left behind, but there are numerous little lyrical nods, lines about keeping hope alive, and dealing with loss, and sighing with regret. And the entire record exudes a slow, mournful vibe, a hushed reverence that sometimes sounds funereal.

I consider Neil Finn, the driving force behind Crowded House, to be one of the finest songwriters alive right now. His catalog is chock full of gems, from his days in Split Enz to his excellent second solo album One Nil. But his four albums with Crowded House remain his best work. Those records are like an aural home run derby, Finn sending one ball after another out of the park, coming up with hook after indelible hook. Some people think writing good pop songs is simple, and they only think that because geniuses like Neil Finn make it look easy.

So how, then, to explain Time on Earth, an album on which Finn’s gift for memorable melodies seems to have failed him entirely?

It actually starts out well. “Nobody Wants To” is a whisper of an opener, but its chorus is sweet, and Finn includes a lyrical turnaround that knocks me out. The single, “Don’t Stop Now,” is next, and it’s a sweet little song that would have made a nice b-side from the Woodface sessions. From there, though, it’s downhill fast, as Finn delivers his most average and forgettable set of songs… well, ever. Some of it, like “A Sigh,” is very pretty. Some of it, like the Johnny Marr collaboration “Even a Child,” is nearly hummable. But none of it sticks with you, and most of it just lies there, barely moving at all.

Some have termed Time on Earth a grower, and sure, I can see that. Each time I listen to it, I gain more of an appreciation for what Finn was trying to do. But it still takes intense concentration for my mind not to wander away from some of these songs. “Silent House,” co-written by the Dixie Chicks, lumbers forward for an eternal six minutes, doing almost nothing, and it’s hard to pay attention for that long. It would help if the song had anything approaching a chorus, or a melodic hook. But like most of the songs here, it doesn’t.

But at least it’s not dreadful, like the final fourth of the disc. “Transit Lounge” finds Finn trying to shimmy and shake his way through some form of lite-funk, and he just can’t bring the slinky. And the terribly titled “You Are the One to Make Me Cry” slips into Norah Jones territory, and it’s just awful. He pulls it out in the end with the above-average “People Are Like Suns,” but it’s too late. Time on Earth is a full plate of boredom with an embarrassing cherry on top.

Here it is again, the whole reunion thing. Had this album remained the third Neil Finn solo album, I would be calling it a disappointment after the great One Nil, and I would be looking forward to the next one. But it’s not. It’s the new Crowded House album, representing now 20 percent of that band’s output, and it simply is not worthy of the name. Very few new pop albums can stand with the four Crowded House records, and to invite that comparison, especially with a collection this slipshod, is just silly. This is not Crowded House. This is Neil Finn going through a rare dry spell, and coming up empty.

I know, I know. No matter how bad these new albums are, they don’t actually change the old ones. Mellon Collie and Temple of Low Men are both right there on my shelf, just as excellent as ever. It’s just depressing that now I have to file these sub-par reunion affairs right next to them. I’m as susceptible to the name-dropping as anyone – there was no way I (and thousands of others) wouldn’t have bought the new Crowded House, no matter how bad it was, and Neil Finn seems to know it. He has my money, and I have this limp coda to his finest work, and now I have to decide just what to do with it.

Anyway. Next week, better albums from They Might Be Giants, Interpol, Spoon, Emerson Hart, Rooney and the Chemical Brothers. Or some combination thereof.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Hey, it’s America’s birthday! Happy birthday, America! Take the rest of the day off.

As you read this, I am on my first ever paid vacation. That’s right, first ever, from any job. I’m way too old for that to be the case, but it is. And it’s still a new concept for me – I’m chilling in Massachusetts, hanging out with old friends and watching the Transformers movie, and I’m getting paid for it. That’s five kinds of pretty cool.

America’s not the only one celebrating a birthday this week – Radiohead’s OK Computer turned 10 on July 1. I remember when I first heard it, on cassette through headphones while on vacation in Florida. I hesitate to admit this now, but I didn’t really like it upon first listen – it was cold and difficult and shorn of the anthemic grandeur of The Bends. But a couple more spins and everything clicked. The coldness, as just about every reviewer since has said, is the point, and the grandeur is still there, buried under a brilliantly oppressive, icy veneer.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that OK Computer sounds dated now – it sounds like the template for the last 10 years, as dozens of bands have stolen elements of its sound. That Jonny Greenwood guitar is everywhere, and half the singers on the planet now try to emulate the quivery tenor of Thom Yorke’s voice. Some bands have based their entire careers on aping Radiohead. (I’m looking at you, Muse.) Even Nigel Godrich’s production techniques, which sounded like the future in ’97, are now commonplace among “ambitious” bands who want to sound “serious.”

But most people forget that it’s the songs that make this album. Even lesser numbers like the plaintive closers “Lucky” and “The Tourist” keep the melodies front and center, and monsters like “Paranoid Android” and “Karma Police” are unstoppable, multi-part excursions that never just coast along. Some will argue that you can overthink an album to death, but OK Computer is a grand example of striking that balance perfectly – every second of it was planned in advance and meticulously crafted, but it sounds so very alive.

I still think of OK Computer as the best album of the 1990s, because no other record of the time took music as a whole and pushed it forward quite like that one did. Other bands of the time were busy looking backwards, still trying to sop up the commercialized punk throwback wave that crashed when Kurt Cobain died, but Radiohead was one of the only bands seeking out new ideas while keeping their sense of melody and complexity. They soon chucked all that over the bridge with Kid A and its sequels, which turned a once-great act into meandering technology whores, but in 1997, they were the greatest band on earth.

* * * * *

What better way to celebrate OK Computer’s birthday than by talking about an album that’s its polar opposite in nearly every way?

I talk a good game when it comes to liking intricate, artistically ambitious music, but as long-time readers no doubt have figured out, nothing quite pushes my particular buttons like well-crafted pop music. My favorite band is the Beatles, and even though I love their revolutionary epics like “A Day in the Life,” I’m also a dumbstruck fanboy of the perfect two-minute breezy pop of their first five albums. In the past, I’ve put records by Matthew Sweet, Phantom Planet, Sloan and Fountains of Wayne on my top 10 list. I won’t deny it – I have a weakness for that sugary-sweet melody rush.

I’m used to the ration of shit I have to endure whenever I recommend a so-silly-it’s-wonderful pop record, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the metric ton of feces I got for putting the Click Five’s groovy debut, Greetings from Imrie House, into my 2005 top 10 list. Virtually no one I know heard what I still hear in that album. Maybe it’s the matching suits and haircuts, or maybe it’s the ill-advised tours with Ashlee Simpson and the like, or perhaps the band just takes too much from 1960s romance-pop for a lot of people, but Imrie House made a lot of people question my taste.

But listen to the record. It’s a blast. It is a gleaming, perfect little nugget of power pop, and if the subject matter leans a little heavily into prom theme territory, it’s the same kind of delightful cheese that’s all over “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” or “She Loves You.” The Click Five are absolutely in on their own joke, winking at you while delivering goofy, infectious tunes like “Catch Your Wave” and “Just the Girl.” Nothing here will change your life, nothing here will make you a more musically sophisticated person, and nothing here will increase your credibility in the eyes of Pitchfork readers. Imrie House is just a knowing, well-crafted good time that draws on decades of similar, sweet pop music.

The debut was such a sugar rush that I doubt they could have done it again. As it happened, though, circumstances intervened, and the Click Five of 2007 is a very different proposition. For one, lead singer Eric Dill is out – he reportedly wanted to bring the group into a more hard-hitting direction, and the rest of the band resisted. Dill did stick around long enough to film Taking Five, a Hard Day’s Night-style movie starring the quintet, but he left soon after.

Dill’s replacement is Kyle Patrick, whose voice is similarly strong, but lower and more direct. The band probably could have made another Imrie House with Patrick, but instead they’ve chosen to diversify on their second record, Modern Minds and Pastimes. And the result is a slightly better album that, paradoxically, just isn’t nearly as much fun.

Where Imrie House flashed by in a blur, every song drawing from the same power-pop well, no two songs on Modern Minds sound quite alike. The band has brought in a strong new wave influence (and funny how we still call a sound more than two decades old “new wave”), especially on synth-driven tracks like “Addicted to Me.” They tread into Def Leppard territory on “Happy Birthday,” crank up the amps on the near-punk “When I’m Gone,” and deliver another great prom theme with “The Reason Why.”

Two tracks in particular are genuine surprises. “Headlight Disco” might yank the rug out hardest, with its convincing 1970s four-on-the-floor stomp – check out Ethan Mentzer’s elastic bass line, and the wonderfully cheesy female vocals after the choruses. This is the goofiest song here, and it’s contrasted with the closer, “Empty,” a forlorn acoustic ballad that morphs into a Weezer-style finale. “Empty” is pretty much the first Click Five song that demands you take it seriously, which leads us to the biggest problem with Modern Minds – they’ve stopped winking.

More on that in a second, because I want to be clear about something – every single song on Modern Minds is chock full of hooks and memorable melodies, and while there are a couple of lesser lights (most notably the idiotic “Happy Birthday,” but also “Long Way to Go” and second-tier ballad “I’m Getting Over You”), nothing here is bad. In fact, many of these songs are better than their counterparts on Imrie House, and overall, the Click Five has crafted a superior follow-up.

So why don’t I like it as much? I mentioned before that it’s certainly not as much fun. Most of these songs are about adolescent heartbreak, and it’s a subject that just can’t stand up to solemn treatments. It’s a shift in tone – where Imrie House was effervescent, Modern Minds is more down-to-earth. It is, in a way, this band’s Pinkerton.

Case in point. The first single from Imrie House was “Just the Girl,” a song about a teenage boy in wide-eyed love with a frustrating girl out of his reach, and it was a fizzy number that melted in your mouth. The first single from Modern Minds is “Jenny,” about a similar situation – the guy has been dating the girl for a while now, and she’s still frustrating, in a much more real way. “Jenny” is as close to a classic pop song as this album gets, but it isn’t a shiny happy gem like “Just the Girl.” And songs like “Addicted to Me,” a junkie anthem sung from the drugs’ point of view, and “When I’m Gone,” which may be about the end of a relationship or about sudden death, only add to the comparatively solemn mood.

One might guess that Kyle Patrick just has a rougher perspective than Eric Dill does, but it’s keyboard whiz Ben Romans who wrote most of these songs, as he did on Imrie House. It’s just a shift in tone for the band, and while the Click Five template is still there – crashing guitars, glittering synths, stacked harmonies, and melodies galore – the fun is mostly missing. On Modern Minds, the Click Five sound like a really good power pop band with an eye towards the Kelly Clarkson market. But on Imrie House, they sounded like the most delightfully stupid-smart power pop band in the world.

Still, I don’t want to downplay just how enjoyable this new album is. It’s a testament to the strength of these songs that I remembered every one of them after only hearing the record once, and it’s only grown in stature with me since. I’m going to get shit for recommending the Click Five again, but I can’t do anything but recommend an album so full of terrific tunes. Music like this takes me back to when I was a kid, back when a song like “All I Need is You” would have set me humming for days. It’s that soft spot again – I can’t help it. Songs like “Flipside” and “Jenny” just make me want to listen again and again.

So, in summary, the Click Five have survived the loss and replacement of their lead singer with only minimal damage, and they’ve grown up in some unfortunate ways. But they’ve still made a great little pop record with Modern Minds and Pastimes, and even though the cliché would call for the band to break up for good in a year or so, I hope this is just the first chapter in a longer story. The glimmering pop band of Imrie House is no longer with us, but this Click Five is still very good, and Modern Minds is still one of the most hummable, most immediately memorable records I’ve heard this year.

Everything’s different now, everything’s the same. The Click Five is dead, long live the Click Five.

Next week, well, we have some choices – there are new records from the Smashing Pumpkins, Spoon, Crowded House, They Might Be Giants, Interpol, Bad Religion, and Nick Drake. The following week will see new ones from the Chemical Brothers, Rooney, Emerson Hart, Teddy Thompson and Suzanne Vega. It’s a good time to be alive.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So I’ve just seen Sicko, Michael Moore’s new documentary on the health care system. And it saddens me to report that I have the same problems with it that I had with his film on the Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11.

This is the second Moore movie in a row to put me in a strange, uneasy quandary. Sicko is a polemic about universal health care, advocating for the United States to drop the privatized, for-profit, insurance-driven health industry we have now and switch to a government-funded approach with full access for every American. I agree with his premise wholeheartedly – the current system is broken, and a humane, civilized nation would put the health of its people ahead of the profits of the drug and insurance companies.

As with the Bush administration’s response to September 11, there is a riveting and in-depth documentary to be made about a health care system run by companies whose best interests are served by denying their clients the care they need. And as with Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko is not that film. Moore has once again made a rousing, enjoyable, moving, one-sided argument for his thesis instead of digging deep to find the real, complex, messy truth of the situation.

Moore built his case against the American health care system by putting out a call for horror stories, then cherry-picking the dozen or so most damning examples of callous profiteering. He then contrasted that with universal health care systems by traveling to countries that have them, finding some of the best success stories he could, and failing to include some of the biggest concerns those countries have about their government-funded national health services.

It’s obvious for Moore that the issue is black and white – insurance companies have never done a good thing for anyone, and universal health care will turn the U.S. of A. into a golden paradise of health and longevity. Except you could make the exact opposite case just by reversing the steps: put out a call for Canadian, French and British health care horror stories, and then talk to the American insurance companies, who would be glad to point you in the direction of people they’ve helped.

One thing Moore excels at is tugging on the ol’ heartstrings. Sicko is an emotionally manipulative film, and it does its job well – Moore includes interviews with mothers who lost their children because they were denied treatment, and an older couple forced to move in with their daughter because of escalating health care bills. These stories tell the tale – the system is broken, and needs fixing. As one former insurance company worker says in the film, “You didn’t slip through the cracks. Somebody made that crack and then swept you toward it.”

But he blows it at the end, when, in a typically grand gesture, he brings a trio of September 11 volunteers to Cuba to receive free treatment for respiratory and other ailments they suffered as a result of their selfless actions at ground zero. For one thing, the story didn’t unfold the way Moore leads you to believe in the movie – it looks for all the world like the filmmaker and his merry band landed in Cuba and made their way to the first hospital they could find, when in fact Moore set the whole thing up beforehand.

Of course the Americans got amazing medical treatment in Cuba, especially while the cameras were rolling. The Cuban government even wrote a press release to coincide with the film’s release, saying it shows the “greatness of the Cuban health care system.” Speaking as a journalist, this has all the hallmarks of a classic manipulation, and either Moore fell for it, or he’s complicit in it. Either way, he can’t expect us to believe that the care his charges were given at the end of Sicko is representative of the care all Cubans get for free, especially since he made no effort to find out if that assertion is true.

Moore doesn’t even point out something that can plainly be seen in his own film. He makes a special effort to chastise the United States for dropping to 37th on the United Nations’ ranking of health care systems – “just above Slovenia,” as he says. But guess which nation is listed at number 39 on that very ranking, below Slovenia? That’s right, Cuba.

While I definitely agree that a humane nation takes care of its people, the problem is, and always has been, how to pay for it and effectively manage it. Moore leaves that part out. In Canada, they manage it by imposing a 50 percent tax rate, and Canadians still cross the border into the U.S. for better medical care. The British and French National Health Services are struggling to keep up with the demand, and teetering under the financial strain. Will Americans acquiesce to monumentally higher taxes to put health care in the hands of a government that can’t fix the schools, repair social security, or even deliver the mail with speed and accuracy? I don’t know, but Moore doesn’t even ask.

I hate raising all of these complaints, because Sicko is a rousing little film with a basic premise I can stand behind. My theater audience gave it a standing ovation, and I joined in, even though I had reservations about some of the tactics Moore used in the movie. As always, I wish that Moore would just get out of the way of his own point, because it’s a good one, and his tactics distract from the good his film might otherwise do.

A final thought: My theater’s audience clapped once in the middle of the film, too, during an interview segment with former British parliamentarian Tony Benn. He said what to me is the most important line in the movie, talking about where his government (and others) find the resources to maintain their national health services. Amidst all the grandstanding and obfuscation in Moore’s film, this little gem sticks out, and is worth repeating and remembering:

“If you can find money to kill people, you can find money to help people.”

* * * * *

I wrote all that before reading Kurt Loder’s review here. I know, he’s Kurt “MTV News” Loder, but seriously – read it. He lays it all out nicely.

* * * * *

I am struggling to come up with anything clever to say about Ryan Adams’ new album, Easy Tiger.

I think I know why, too. Adams has always been a living sound byte, with his seemingly self-destructive attitude and his insane work ethic. Since I started the online incarnation of this column, Adams has kindly provided me with much to talk about. First, he pissed off his label, Lost Highway, by handing in the ‘80s-inspired Love is Hell, which they rejected. In petulant retaliation, Adams then gave them Rock n Roll, a tossed-off collection of Replacements-style pseudo-punk that was even further from the twangy, emotional pop the label had hoped for. (Lost Highway finally released both.)

And then, in 2005, the former Whiskeytown boy genius had his best year ever, putting out three albums (Cold Roses, Jacksonville City Nights and 29) that were all varying shades of excellent. As good as they were on their own, the trilogy really came alive when viewed as a whole, providing a picture of a diverse songwriter hitting his stride.

When I jokingly suggested in my review of 29 that Adams should take 2006 off, I didn’t actually expect he’d do it. And when he announced his return to store shelves with Tiger, he thwarted expectations again by not doing anything crazy or extraordinary. If you’re looking for a hook for Easy Tiger, some quotable reason to rush out and buy it, well, there isn’t one. It is, by comparison, the most immediately unexceptional record he’s ever made.

Easy Tiger is 13 good songs on a single slab of plastic. That’s it.

Even while spinning it, I find it difficult to latch on to anything to discuss. Tiger is solid – the weakest song here is the first single, “Two,” a lazy acoustic breeze that features Sheryl Crow on anonymous backing vocals. The rest of the record is a guided tour of just about everything Adams does well, from the country waltz of “Tears of Gold” to the folksy melody of “Off Broadway” to the high-and-lonesome bluegrass of “Pearls on a String” to the sweet acoustic lament “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.” He rocks out a couple of times (“Halloweenhead”), and delivers some of his trademark lovely ballads (“Rip Off”). And in the Cardinals, he has found the best backing band of his career.

But what to say about it? I honestly haven’t a clue. Adams has turned in his safest, most accessible work here – the whole thing glides by in 38 minutes, from the rousing, twangy opener “Goodnight Rose” to the Neil Young-esque closer “I Taught Myself How to Grow Old.” Adams’ voice is in fine form, his melodies are simple and elegant, and his lyrics are typically earthy. If you’ve ever liked Ryan Adams before, you will like Easy Tiger. If you were hoping that he’d take his Cold Roses sound to the next level, you’ll be disappointed, but not very much.

I just wonder about records like this. I’m not sure how often I will listen to Easy Tiger – it’s nice, and sweet, and full of good songs, but it hasn’t burrowed into my brain. Do I need a clever hook to capture my interest? Isn’t writing 13 decent songs and playing them very well enough for me? I’m not sure. I would never caution you away from buying Easy Tiger – it’s a pleasant listen from start to finish, and some songs (“The Sun Also Sets,” for example) are prime Ryan Adams.

But it drifts right by, unlike some of his best work, and it smacks of underachievement. Maybe Adams was trying to make a sampler, a little taster for new listeners. Or maybe he just didn’t infuse this album with the personality he normally stamps on everything. Whatever the reason, Easy Tiger is a good Ryan Adams record that still feels like a minor entry in his canon, a palate-cleanser for his next bold adventure. You won’t regret hearing it, but when the Ryan Adams story is complete, this album will barely be a footnote.

* * * * *

And now it’s time for the second quarter report. It’s a little disappointing – you remember all my talk earlier about how this is the best year ever? Well, that noise certainly quieted down in the second quarter, with one unfortunate misfire after another (I’m looking at you, Bjork, and you too, Wilco), and a number of records from old favorites that turned out to be just, you know, okay (Ryan Adams, Rufus Wainwright).

It’s still shaping up to be a pretty good year, and there are some potential winners coming in July from the reunited Crowded House, They Might Be Giants, Spoon, Rooney and Prince. And Virginia quintet Mae has put two songs from forthcoming album Singularity online at their Myspace page, and they’re excellent. August will bring new ones from Over the Rhine, the New Pornographers, Rilo Kiley, Minus the Bear and Eisley, so all is not lost.

And hey, the second quarter brought us a new #1 album for the list-in-progress, so it can’t be all bad. At halfway through 2007, here’s what it looks like:

#10. Low, Drums and Guns.
#9. Loney, Dear, Loney, Noir.
#8. Tori Amos, American Doll Posse.
#7. Bright Eyes, Cassadaga.
#6. Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.
#5. Explosions in the Sky, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone.
#4. Aqualung, Memory Man.
#3. The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible.
#2. The Shins, Wincing the Night Away.
#1. Silverchair, Young Modern.

This will change, absolutely, but I have to say, that’s one fine top 10 list as is. I also just ordered the new Julian Cope, called You Gotta Problem With Me, and the first Swirling Eddies album in more than 10 years, The Midget, the Speck and the Molecule, should be in my mailbox before too long. A couple of mediocre months can’t get me down.

Next week, the new Click Five, Modern Minds and Pastimes.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I have friends from every chapter of my life who won’t read this column because it’s not heavy enough.

These friends of mine will poke their heads into my cyber-realm whenever I review something like the new Megadeth, which I did recently, or bands like Mastodon and Pelican, which I do infrequently. But for the most part, they tell me the music I write about is just too wimpy for them. Where’s the muscle, they ask? Where is the nigh-unstoppable hammer of the gods that is real, unadulterated heaviness? And what is that – is that a banjo? What the hell, man?

And every once in a while, I feel the need to re-establish my heaviness cred. But the truth is, I’m not sure what the word “heavy” really means anymore. To my 30-something ears, the anguished beauty of, say, Low’s new album is heavier than anything Sepultura has ever done, or at least it leaves a bigger impact when it strikes. “Heavy” has long been a euphemism for loud, fast and angry music, but when heavy metal started, it was thicker and slower and didn’t have much to do with the “play a million notes as fast as you can” mentality that soon overtook it.

But can music that isn’t considered metal still be heavy? What does that word mean?

For example, no one would confuse the sunshine pop of the Polyphonic Spree with heavy metal, and yet, the band themselves have used the word “heavy” to describe their sound, most notably in the title of their second album, Together We’re Heavy. Speaking strictly in terms of pounds and ounces, they’re the heaviest band on earth – the Spree has 24 members, incorporating strings, horns and choirs as an integral part of their sound.

The Spree is the vision of former Tripping Daisy frontman Tim DeLaughter, another one of those high-voiced guys who does Wayne Coyne a hundred times better than Wayne Coyne does. His masterplan was to create a massive, expansive sound, one that would explode his little pop gems from the inside out. The Spree doesn’t use strings and horns the way many bands do – as ornamentation, as window dressing. The violins and trumpets are key components of the Spree’s thing, and the end result, at least on Together We’re Heavy, is enormous, almost monolithic.

But is it heavy? In that hippie sense, the Spree has always been heavy – they sing about love and peace on nearly every song, and often sound like they’re reaching all 48 of their hands out, trying to take as many people as they can to some grand utopia. But in a musical sense, the Spree always tempered their sheer mass with long passages of orchestral beauty. Together We’re Heavy is a masterpiece, but it’s too spaced out and too blissful to be truly heavy.

Apparently DeLaughter saw that as a problem, because the band’s third album, The Fragile Army, takes everything the Spree has been and punches it up. You can tell right away that this is a heavier Spree – DeLaughter has ditched the colored robes the band has always worn in favor of black military-style uniforms, leather boots and all. He’s also done away with the expansiveness, compressing the band’s full-to-bursting sound into quick-hitting salvos, with none of the instrumental frippery that characterized their prior discs.

And it works. The Fragile Army is fast, upbeat and exhilarating, and what DeLaughter has sacrificed in dynamics, he’s gained in propulsive force. On first listen, it seems stripped down, with most songs coming in right around four minutes, and the focus squarely on the voice and melodies. But listen again, and you’ll hear that DeLaughter hasn’t taken anything away at all, he’s just squeezed it into place. The Spree still sounds like a giant in the world of men, but this time, the giant is leaner and meaner, faster and more agile.

Just listen to “Get Up and Go,” the orchestral rock song DeLaughter has been trying to write for years. The brass sections are given equal footing with the squealing guitars, and the resulting one-two punch is awesome to behold. The title song sounds like it will be slower and more naked, but it evolves quickly into a psychedelic anthem. There are a pair of slower songs – “We Crawl” and “Overblow Your Nest” – but both crescendo into sky-high stunners, the choir backing up DeLaughter perfectly.

Admittedly, there is a certain sameness to these 11 new songs, so it’s good that the album clocks in at a nice, compact 46 minutes. There were a couple of directions DeLaughter could have taken his grand experiment after Together We’re Heavy – he could have gone further into an orchestral prog direction, composing 30-minute songs, which would have been interesting, or he could have done what he did, which is find some way of reining it in without pulling it back. The Fragile Army is a very big small, a bunch of tiny tunes performed by the largest band on the planet, and as a next step, it’s a winner.

But is it heavy? How about this – can something so polished and produced ever be truly heavy? Didn’t heavy music start out with working-class kids in garages, making as much noise as they could? The Polyphonic Spree has been working on The Fragile Army for more than a year. Isn’t heavy music – you know, real rock – supposed to be raw and raucous?

The White Stripes are, in many respects, the exact opposite of the Polyphonic Spree – they’re a minimalist guitar-drums duo from Detroit, notorious (at least in my house) for putting in the least amount of effort possible and still making listenable records. A beat, a blues-metal guitar riff, a wailing vocal and they’re done.

Their sixth album (and Warner Bros. debut), Icky Thump, took Jack and Meg White three weeks to complete. You may think that’s pretty quick – it took longer than that just to set the levels on some of my favorite records – but for the Stripes, that’s a marathon session. And listening to the record, you’ll wonder what took them so long. The sound is crisper and cleaner than on past Stripes discs, and there’s a bit of overdubbing, with Jack playing an organ on most of the tracks along with his guitar, but mostly, this is a White Stripes album: loud, dirty and bluesy.

At first blush, it’s a bit of a step back from 2005’s Get Behind Me Satan, the most experimental Stripes record to date, with its pianos, marimbas and Queen-like cycle of styles. Icky Thump (a bastardization of ecky-thump, a British expression of surprise, as well as an apt description of Meg White’s lumbering drum work) takes a few detours, but sticks mostly to the duo’s Zeppelin-inspired riffing and roaring. “Bone Broke” could have appeared on the back half of Physical Graffiti, and the title track shifts rhythmic gears half a dozen times, a la “Black Dog.” They even skip forward to Robert Plant’s solo work for “I’m Slowly Turning Into You,” a tune that could fit nicely on Pictures at Eleven.

As always, though, it’s the diversions – the less heavy tracks – that provide the most enjoyment. “Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn” is a Scottish jig, complete with bagpipes and mandolins, and it leads into the fascinating interlude “St. Andrew (This Battle is In the Air),” on which Meg White intones poetry in her girlish voice. “Rag and Bone,” a bluesy stomp, finds the two posing as junk dealers looking for a bargain, and it’s kind of hilarious, if a bit filler-ish. And “I’m a Martyr for My Love for You” may be the prettiest song Jack White has yet written.

But best of all here is the one that makes the most use of that new major-label money, an ass-kicking version of the Patti Page number “Conquest.” The Stripes turn the song into a full-blooded Mariachi throwdown, as if preparing a submission for Robert Rodriguez’ next south-of-the-border shoot-em-up. As the horns blare, an army of Jack Whites tell a battle-of-the-sexes tale with something approaching polish. This tune, explosive as it is, may have taken up the majority of the recording time to get right.

So is Icky Thump heavy? Well, it tries to be here and there, but as the Stripes grow up, they’re moving further and further away from the raw blues of their first few records. I never thought I’d say this about the Detroit duo, but they’re too interesting, too idiosyncratic, too ambitious to settle for just being heavy. Icky Thump is a ride, one that brings back the guitars, but keeps the genre-hopping of Get Behind Me intact. It’s probably their best work, and at this stage in their career, also probably the heaviest album they’re likely to make.

But how about a more single-minded band? You’re not going to hear a lot of different styles on an album by Dream Theater, for example – you’re going to get technically dazzling prog-metal, and that’s about it. Dream Theater are equally influenced by the expansive compositions of Yes and the crunching riffage of Metallica, and they definitely fit a more conventional definition of “heavy.”

While it’s true that you know what you’re going to get with DT, lately they’ve seemed a bit more restless than usual. Following their opus Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, which featured the 45-minute title track, the band made Train of Thought, a pure, punishing metal record, and then Octavarium, a summation of their career that was so scattered it felt like a case of multiple personality disorder. It’s been a while since they’ve knocked one out of the park – since 1999’s Scenes From a Memory, in fact.

So it’s about damn time they made something like Systematic Chaos, their finest and fullest record since the early days. Unlike on the tired and confused Octavarium, the band seems revitalized here, more comfortable with their place as the standard-bearers for this bombastic sound. This is Dream Theater at their peak, for better and for worse – you get some very inventive riffing, some phenomenal musicianship, but you also get long (looooong) stretches of instrumental wankery, and the over-the-top vocals of James Labrie, singing (as usual) some inane, artless lyrics.

But as stated before, you know what you’re going to get, and for the first time in a long while, what you get is the best this band has to offer. The record opens and closes with “In the Presence of Enemies,” a 25-minute epic broken up into bookends a la “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” only with more ‘80s-metal guitar solos. It’s a fantastic Dream Theater piece, chock full of melody and technical wizardry – in fact, this album renews the band’s focus on melody, which had lately been obscured by their lack of direction. They know exactly what they want on Systematic Chaos, and there’s rarely a minute that goes by on this very long album when they’re not doing something interesting, if not mindboggling.

There is some diversity here, although it is Dream Theater diversity – both “Constant Motion” and “The Dark Eternal Night” conjure up early Metallica, with their jackhammer riffs and snarling (and, admittedly, somewhat silly) vocals, while both “Repentance” and “The Ministry of Lost Souls” stretch their slower, more ambient grooves out past 10 minutes. “Prophets of War” continues their unfortunate obsession with Muse, down to the arpeggiated keyboards, and is the record’s weakest moment, but a strong, melodic tune like “Forsaken” makes up for a lot.

The secret here is a return to the sense of dynamics that marked early DT albums – in a way, this album is their best in a long time because it’s their least heavy. Even though quite a lot of it takes a traditional metal approach, and much of it is fast, loud and uncompromising, just as much of it is slow and tuneful, and it’s the contrast that makes the difference. Even within one song – “In the Presence of Enemies Part II” begins as a spacey dirge, but over the next 10 minutes, blossoms into a chugging powerhouse, drummer Mike Portnoy and guitarist John Petrucci locking into a pummeling groove.

So is it heavy? Well, yeah, but in a way, it’s less heavy than a solidly focused effort like the Spree’s album. And when it’s over, like with most Dream Theater albums, it won’t stick with you – you’ll have a vague memory of having your musical mind blown by five of the most accomplished rock musicians currently playing, but nothing will hit you emotionally. It’s not heavy enough to leave a mark.

But hell, do you need your music to wound you all the time? Is it possible to be bone-crushingly heavy and still fun? I say it is, and so does my favorite of these four albums, Devin Townsend’s Ziltoid the Omnisicent.

Wait, what? Ziltoid the what now? What the hell is this? Well, listen to this description, and tell me this isn’t an album you just need to hear. Devin Townsend is a Canadian supergenius best known for his extreme metal band, Strapping Young Lad. He’s back to solo work, and this is his concept album about an alien named Ziltoid the Omniscient (natch), on an interstellar quest for the universe’s best cup of coffee. (“You have five of your Earth minutes. Make it perfect!”) When he doesn’t find it, he decides to blow up the Earth, and the story is about what happens next.

Want a taste of Ziltoid? Townsend has also created a series of puppet shows starring the snaggle-toothed invader – search YouTube for “Ziltoid the Omniscient” and you’ll find them. Yeah, puppet shows. The “what the fuck” factor is pretty damn high on this album.

But the actual record is, honest to God, great. Over a lengthy career, Townsend has pioneered a style of ambient metal that virtually no one else is doing. It’s heavy as all hell, with precise guitar-bass-drums riffing as its base, but it’s also blissed-out and atmospheric, treated guitars and synths providing an otherworldly, placid component that shouldn’t work, but does. Ziltoid is perhaps Townsend’s finest ambient metal record – amidst the jokey dialogue and sound effects, he’s crafted some genuinely powerful music for this bizarre radio play.

Take “By Your Command,” the first proper song. Over nine minutes, it morphs from a screaming metal explosion to a sound as vast as space itself, which segues into the absolutely devastating “Ziltoidia Attaxx!!” (Spelling and punctuation preserved.) But then there is “Solar Winds,” a moment of reflection that achieves actual beauty. You may be wondering what a genuinely gorgeous song like “Solar Winds” is doing on this album, but that’s what’s so cool about it – the Ziltoid concept allows for anything. It’s like the cheesy rock operas Frank Zappa used to make – you wouldn’t expect something as touching as “Watermelon in Easter Hay” on a sleaze-fest like Joe’s Garage, and that’s why it works.

Throughout this record, Townsend balances his metal and ambient sides perfectly, as if he knows that both styles can be incredibly heavy. Ziltoid the Omniscient is easily the heaviest of the four albums on tap this week, but it’s also the most fun, and most completely successful. Townsend sets up an anything-can-happen atmosphere, so when the storyline disintegrates at the end and we discover it was all a daydream in the mind of a coffee shop worker, it still makes perfect sense.

Whoa, wait, what? The whole album takes place inside someone’s head? Wow, that’s… heavy, man.

A quick story before I go. I sent links to a couple of the Ziltoid puppet shows to my friend Chris L’Etoile a while back, and he watched them with his two-year-old son Jeremiah. This is the email he sent to me right after that:

“So I showed that to Jeremiah…
JEREMIAH: Oh no!
ME: Oh no! What are we gonna do?
JEREMIAH: DANCE!”

Suffice it to say, I will never erase that email.

Next week, a series of single reviews starts up, beginning with the new Ryan Adams, Easy Tiger. Also coming up, reviews of the Click Five and the Beastie Boys.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Well, look at that. I’m 33.

Apologies and thanks to everyone for understanding – I really needed that week off. My gracious appreciation to everyone who wrote me with well-wishes, particularly those I haven’t written back yet. I’m working on finding the time, I promise.

I usually think of birthdays in terms of people I’ve outlived. I know, that’s incredibly morbid, and all it does is make me feel old, and I really should knock it off. A couple of years ago, I passed Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin pretty much all at once. (Jimi and Janis were 27 when they died, and Cobain was 28, but only by a couple of months.) This year it’s Jesus – he was 33 when the Romans hung him from a tree, if I remember correctly.

And next year, it’s Elliott Smith. God, that is depressing. On to happier things.

Mine wasn’t the only birthday to happen during my week off – my favorite album of all time, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, turned 40 on June 2. I can still remember the first time I heard the album straight through, in the kitchen of the house I grew up in. I was 15 years old, and while I’d heard music before, even great music, that was the first time I really understood what it could be. Just about everything else I’ve ever listened to has been various shades of disappointing in comparison to that first brush with the Beatles.

Why do I love it so much? For starters, I’m a melody addict. I’m fascinated and enthralled by soaring, swooping, sublime melodies, and Sgt. Pepper is full of them. I’m also a fan of the complete album statement – I hate it when bands churn out one or two good tunes and pack the rest of their records with tossed-off fluff. Even the deep cuts on Sgt. Pepper, potential throwaways like “Good Morning, Good Morning” and “Lovely Rita,” are immaculately composed and produced. It was arguably the first album-length conceptual piece in pop music history, too – I love Revolver, but it’s just a collection of songs, whereas Sgt. Pepper is a journey.

I’m also a fan of difficult music, in every sense of the word. Every time I listen to Sgt. Pepper, I have to remind myself that at the time, this was an album by the most popular band in the world. Aside from the fact that, due to the fragmentation and individualization of popular culture, no band will ever equal the Beatles’ worldwide status again, there is literally no world-famous, top-selling act that would dare drop an album like this one. It’s a tough sell, particularly its loopier passages (“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”), and it was astonishingly expensive for its time, too.

The music itself is difficult, too – complex and intricately arranged. Had there ever been a song like “A Day in the Life,” the rich suite that closes the record? For all that, it’s a remarkably silly album, full of stories about carnivals and meter maids and friends helping friends sing on key. The goofiness sometimes leaves you ill-prepared for the prickly little surprises, like the casual domestic abuse chronicled in “Getting Better,” but overall, it’s a delightfully sweet album of near-nonsense.

One of the finest examples of that nonsense is “When I’m Sixty-Four,” Sir Paul McCartney’s clarinet-jazz paean to growing old. “Will you still need me, will you still feed me,” McCartney asks, and I can’t have been alone in wondering whether he’d still be around at 64, and whether, in fact, we’d still need him.

Turns out, despite all the “Paul is dead” rumors floating around through the years, Sir Paul is still very much alive, and yes, we still need him. McCartney has a few days left before he turns 65 (on June 18), and he spent much of his 64th year writing and recording his 22nd post-Beatles pop album, called Memory Almost Full. (I didn’t include the classical stuff, or his techno trips as the Fireman, or Liverpool Sound Collage – if you do, it’s closer to 30 records.) For those of you wondering what Paul might sound like when he’s 64, well, here it is.

And as it happens, he sounds remarkably like he’s 25.

Memory Almost Full is the rare album by a senior citizen that makes me feel young – McCartney is nearly twice as old as I am, and he sounds energized, even youthful here. It’s another in a string of late-career records from Sir Paul that has not only resurrected his solo career, artistically speaking, it’s revitalized it. He’s still nowhere near as good as he was in the Lennon/McCartney days, but Memory Almost Full sounds like something he could have made during the Wings days – a far cry from mid-period twaddle like Pipes of Peace.

That said, it comes off for me like a bit of a step back from 2005’s brilliant Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, even though McCartney used a similar process to record it. Once again, he played nearly every instrument by himself, and once again, the result is anything but canned. But where Chaos was mostly a mid-tempo meditation, Memory is a full-fledged pop-rock album, with all the pros and cons that have attended McCartney’s pop-rock albums since the Fab Four dissolved.

It opens with one of those cons, a mandolin-fueled trifle called “Dance Tonight” that a songwriter with McCartney’s chops should have left on the rehearsal room floor. It’s a warm introduction, though – “Everybody gonna dance tonight,” he promises, and with the next song, he gives them all something to dance to. “Ever Present Past,” the first single, is an unqualified winner, a hopeful and thankful look back at a full life. (More on this theme in a moment.) The bridge section (“It went by, it went by in a flash…”) is my favorite moment here, one that’s been stuck in my head more than a few times this month.

But where Chaos was an organic, piano-and-guitar album, Memory has more of the cheesy synths that McCartney has loved for most of his solo career. “See Your Sunshine” is a bit of a Todd Rundgren-esque soul ballad, complete with an awful electric piano sound, and many of Memory’s other tracks suffer from overly synthetic orchestration. “Only Mama Knows” starts off like the worst of the lot, burbling to life with synthetic strings, but it soon crashes into the most convincing rocker here.

Producer David Kahne gives McCartney a much freer rein than Chaos producer Nigel Godrich did, and it results in a few maudlin pieces like “Gratitude,” but it also allows him to create perhaps his loopiest solo song, “Mr. Bellamy,” a radio play about a crazy old man in a tree. (I think.) Kahne also indulges Sir Paul’s penchant for suites – the back half of Memory runs together, Abbey Road-style, into an interconnected musing on mortality. The heart of the album is here, too, and it sums up everything I’ve loved about McCartney’s work through the years.

Here are the album’s best songs, including the shuffle “That Was Me,” which finds McCartney wistfully looking back at high points in his life – appearing in a school play, gigging at the Cavern Club. “House of Wax” is a beautifully cryptic dirge about death, which features a fine, dramatic crescendo, Paul in probably the finest voice I’ve heard him in since Flowers in the Dirt. And “The End of the End” is just amazing, really – a ballad that strips away the cryptic and stares death in the face. It’s the only time I can think of that Macca has really addressed his own death in song, and as you’d expect, he’s nothing but grateful for his time on Earth:

“At the end of the end, it’s the start of a journey to a much better place
And this wasn’t bad, so a much better place would have to be special…”

It’s so warm, so gorgeous, that it seems like a shame to end the album with “Nod Your Head,” a throwaway track that is this album’s “Her Majesty.” But I can forgive McCartney wanting to send us out on a joyful note – Memory Almost Full is good old Paul having a grand old time, and writing some excellent songs in the process, and it’s just not like him to end things with a funeral. We need the afterparty, the celebration of life.

A funny story – the one time I’ve ever been physically threatened over something I’ve written was when I gently trashed Flaming Pie, McCartney’s 1997 album, in Face Magazine. Some guy actually came to our offices to beat me up for talking smack about what was obviously one of his favorite records of that year, and at the time, I didn’t quite understand the devotion. But looking back, Flaming Pie was the start of this remarkable renaissance, this late-career explosion of near-greatness from McCartney, and he hasn’t looked back since.

And while Memory Almost Full is not quite the revealing portrait of genius that Chaos and Creation was, it is so much better than anything I thought we’d be getting from Paul McCartney at this point in his career. As well as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has aged, it’s almost more remarkable how well its co-author has gracefully grown older. Yes, Paul, we’ll still be sending you a valentine, and birthday greetings. Here’s to many more – both years, and records like this one.

* * * * *

If I needed more proof that the boys in Marillion don’t know a good thing when they have it, I got some this week. I have pledged to support this band through thick and thin, since they’ve made so much great music over the years. So even though their 14th album, Somewhere Else, is sub-par, I bought the new single, a double a-side of “Thankyou Whoever You Are” and “Most Toys,” to aid their quest for another top 10 chart placement.

For the first time in years, the band has included original b-sides on this single, which is available in three formats. (I bought all three.) And one of them, “Circular Ride,” is what I’ve been waiting for – the first excellent song to come out of these sessions. It’s a great, catchy, dramatic pop tune, and it blows away all the so-called hit singles that weigh down the first half of Somewhere Else. It is the first Marillion song I’ve heard this year that I genuinely love.

So, to recap: the band has now officially released the three worst songs from Somewhere Else as radio singles, including the abysmal “See It Like a Baby,” all the while keeping a winner like “Circular Ride” under wraps and off the album. It’s a better single than any of the three they’ve tried to sell to radio, and it’s buried, wasted as a b-side. Seriously, guys, what the hell?

Okay, rant over. We’re back to a weekly schedule, and next week, a random look at some of the gems from the past two weeks, along with the new Polyphonic Spree album, The Fragile Army.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m going to try to keep it short this week. I’m sniffling and sneezing every few seconds, and my head is pounding, and I really just want to drift into unconsciousness. Let’s see how long I can stay awake.

I’ve gone on and on about what a great year for music 2007 has been, but looking back on it, there have been just as many high-profile disappointments as left-field successes. I lambasted Wilco two weeks ago, and even though the record is growing on me a bit, Sky Blue Sky still sounds like a joke that fell flat to me. Marillion’s Somewhere Else takes the crown for most crushing disappointment so far this year – I live and breathe that band, and even after 30 or so listens, this album still isn’t bringing the magic.

Opening salvos from two upcoming albums haven’t exactly whetted my appetite, either. Take the first single from the reborn Crowded House’s new album, Time on Earth. It’s called “Don’t Stop Now,” and you can hear it here. It is, perhaps, the lamest song I have ever heard from the pen of Neil Finn – boring, uninspired, thin, completely forgettable. Considering how incredible the first four Crowded House albums are, the thought of this new one sullying the band’s good name just makes me sad.

Ryan Adams re-emerges on June 26 with Easy Tiger, an album that’s generating some of the best pre-release buzz of the man’s career. But listening to the single, “Two,” you have to wonder where the accolades are coming from. (Here, check it out.) He welcomed Sheryl Crow up to the mic for backing vocals, and turned out a safe, lazy piece of pop nothing. Adams put out three albums in 2005, and none of them contained a single song as boring as “Two.”

And then there’s Bjork.

I’ve been a fan of the bizarre Icelandic pixie for a long time, although we didn’t exactly meet on good terms. My junior year of high school, my best friend Mike bought for me a random selection of cassette tapes from the local store. He’d never heard any of the artists he selected – he went solely on the cleverness of the band’s name, and the coolness of their cover art. I barely remember most of them, but I do recall that one of them was Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, the second album by the Sugarcubes.

And I hated it. So I avoided Bjork’s solo career for years, convinced that nothing good could come from the Sugarcubes. (For the record, I still don’t like Here Today – it’s too silly, too reggae-inflected, and too formless.) So I missed her dazzling Debut, and her even-better follow-up, Post. Thankfully, I jumped aboard with 1997’s Homogenic – I was intrigued by a pre-release description that included the coined phrase “technorchestral” – and discovered I’d been turning a deaf ear to one of the most engaging and innovative artists of our time.

I’ll brook no dissent on that one. I can understand not warming up to Bjork’s full-throated, heavily-accented voice, and I get that her work isn’t for everyone, but to my mind, very few artists have struck out in as many new directions and crafted as many new sounds as Bjork has. The argument starts with the “technorchestral” overtones of Homogenic – organic strings meeting brittle, crunching electronic beats, with melodies galore – and it ends with 2004’s Medulla, a captivating record made up largely of human voices, and little else.

A new Bjork album is an event, especially since she’s one of the very few artists that can still surprise me. I have no idea what she’s going to try next, and that kind of unpredictability is thrilling. Of course, an experimental streak like that is bound to lead to the occasional misfire, and that’s what she’s delivered, sadly, with Volta, her new album.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Volta pissed me off before I even pressed play. This CD comes in one of the most irritating packages I’ve seen in a while. The red digipak opens in the center, instead of at one end, and the two halves of the front cover are held together by a sticker depicting Bjork dressed up like some kind of Technicolor onion with enormous feet. You have to pry one end of the sticker up to get at the CD, and it’s not easy to do without tearing it.

Once you’re in, good luck getting the booklet out of the awkwardly positioned middle panel. Seriously, good luck. When you give up on that, you can flip the panel and pull the CD out, but then if you want to close the package up again, you have to press the end of that sticker down to keep it from popping open. Pry that up and then re-seal it enough times, and the sticker will lose its stickiness, leaving you with an annoying pop-up book of a package. It’s just poorly designed, and it seems like the intent is to keep you from listening too often.

Which is okay, because Volta is not an album you’re going to want to revisit that often. It is easily the most confused, directionless, meandering thing Bjork has ever released. Her vocals are still gripping, but she’s given herself no melodies to chew on, and precious few fascinating soundscapes to sing over. Most of the album sounds like it was performed by a drunken brass band, recorded in a canyon, and while the moods are sometimes interesting, the songs hardly ever are.

The proceedings actually begin well. “Earth Intruders,” a collaboration with Timbaland, is one of Bjork’s sprightliest singles, all beats and synth bass and the catchiest “ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!” you’re likely to hear. “Wanderlust” is pretty good, too – the brass band makes its entrance, but there’s a thudding beat and an actual chorus to carry the day.

Alas, things go downhill quickly. “The Dull Flame of Desire,” one of two duets with Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), is an endless bore, a repetitive intertwining of voices that goes nowhere for seven minutes. “Innocence,” another Timbaland creation, is just not up to par with “Earth Intruders,” and once it’s done, all sense of fun just drains out of the rest of the record. Just about everything else here is a droning meander, whether accompanied by plunking stringed instruments or muted brass.

Are there moments of joy along the way? Sure. Bjork has never made a lousy album, and even this slipshod effort doesn’t fully obscure her genius. “Pneumonia” is one of those brassy excursions, but it contains probably her best vocal in many years – she’s just breathtaking on this song. “Hope,” the final Timbaland monster, mixes in some interesting sounds, even if the song goes nowhere. And “Declare Independence” is an embarrassing, noisy disaster, shrill and distorted beyond all reason, but it does keep you listening, like the aural equivalent of a five-car pileup.

But overall, Volta just isn’t up to par. Bjork has always been good at developing a theme for her albums, leading you sonically from one end to the other, but this one doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, or what mood it wants to set. It’s saddled with brass interludes that resemble foghorns in the night, and it never takes flight – it’s missing that one amazing song that could make up for an album of failed experiments.

One thing you do have to say for it, though – like all of her albums, Volta sounds like no one but Bjork. Most of these tracks are unfortunate missteps, but at least they’re courageous missteps. There’s nothing formulaic or shopworn about Volta, and it’s unmistakably Bjork, even though she’s never sounded like this before, and hopefully never will again. You have to admire her willingness to chart new courses, even if they sometimes end up with her boat dashed on the rocks.

That said, I don’t see myself reaching for this album too often. It’s already on the ever-growing pile of disappointments from 2007, along with Fountains of Wayne, Ted Leo, and a host of others. Thankfully, the good stuff this year has been amazingly good, and though I wish Volta had been better, it doesn’t bring the batting average down too much. And you can’t keep a restless artist like Bjork down – she’ll bounce back next time, with a record that undoubtedly will sound nothing like Volta, and nothing like anything else on the shelves.

Next week, we get new ones from Paul McCartney, Dream Theater, Shellac, Pelican, Chris Cornell and Marilyn Manson. We also get something called Ziltoid the Omniscient, from the mind of Devin Townsend. Has he lost it completely? We’ll know in a few days.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Dear Dave Mustaine,

Hey, man. It’s been a while since my last letter. Hope everything’s going well for you. I don’t know if you remember me (and if you do, you’ve probably torn this letter to shreds by now), but I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time now.

Hell, that’s not even close to saying it right. I know I’m going to get shit from the “serious music fans” who read this site, the ones who agreed with me about Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom (and I hope right now you’re saying, “Who the hell are they?”), but your music changed my life. When I was 15 years old, I thought you were the best musician in the world. Seriously.

I look back on it now, and I know it’s kind of silly. Even you must see the humor in a band name like Megadeth. I know, I know – “Megadeath” is a real term, coined by Herman Kahn in 1953, and it means one million deaths. It’s the kind of word only a civilization with the frightening ability to destroy itself in a matter of minutes would come up with, and I like to think that’s why you chose it, but I don’t get why you misspelled it. That’s the kind of thing that 15-year-old me thought was cool, but it makes 32-year-old me grimace.

But you know, as you said once, it’s not the size of your pencil, it’s how you sign your name. The first four Megadeth albums are – and forgive me, serious music fans – awesome. Still, today, they hold up. They are fast, aggressive, explosive, complex, sneering and hilarious. You were young, you’d just been kicked out of Metallica for being a bigger badass than they were, and you were determined to make the best metal albums you could.

Rust in Peace came out when I was 16, and it knocked me on the floor. You should take this as a massive compliment – I was at the height of my teenage metalhead phase, and I’d heard it all, and I thought, honestly and sincerely, that Rust in Peace was the best album ever made. I know the last thing you wanted at the time was to make hummable music, but I would walk around humming the amazing opening guitar lick to “Holy Wars… The Punishment Due.” (And I would get a lot of strange looks for doing so.)

And then… well, I’ve written about this a number of times, and it’s never less depressing. Your music fell into a downward spiral that just has to be heard to be believed. Countdown to Extinction was pretty good, easily the best of this new melodic direction you’d gone in, but by the time Cryptic Writings came out in 1997, you were going through the motions, it seems to me.

I was fresh out of college, living in Maine, and the release of that album sparked the first of these Dear Dave Mustaine letters. It opened with me telling you I’d just heard the album, and asking you, “What the hell was that?” Because Cryptic Writings sucks. You know, I went back and listened to it again recently, in preparation for writing this letter, and while it’s a little better than I remembered, it’s still a half-assed Megadeth album. I mean, “Mastermind”? “She-Wolf”? Really?

But little did I know how good I had it in 1997. By 1999, when Megadeth hit its nadir with Risk, I had my own column (the print version of this puppy right here, published by Face Magazine), and I felt it was time for another letter. This one started a little differently, if you recall: “Dear Dave Mustaine, fuck you.”

I am such a fan that when EMI remastered the Megadeth catalog, I ran out and bought them all again, including Risk. (You’re welcome.) And I read your liner notes for that record with a smirk – you all but disowned it, detailing what you called the hijacking of your band from under your nose. I hated the same things about it, especially the WWF-inspired disco-metal of “Crush ‘Em,” although we disagree on “I’ll Be There” – I think it’s one of the worst pieces of crap you’ve ever written. The Megadeth I loved at 16 would never have written a song called “I’ll Be There.” Never.

Honestly, it was almost a relief for me when you injured your hand in 2002 and called it quits.

It should be obvious at this point what I want from you, Dave, and I hope you get other letters that ask for the same thing. I want aggressive, powerful, tricky, challenging metal, music that sounds like shrapnel exploding, music that makes my ears ring and my nose bleed. You must have noticed by now that other, younger bands are kicking your ass – Mastodon, Lamb of God, In Flames, and a dozen other acts are regularly producing heavy-as-shit metal that makes your mid-period music sound like Hall and Oates.

I admit, I was skeptical when you re-formed Megadeth, apparently having healed from your debilitating injury. I didn’t expect much, and yet, like the dutiful fan I am, I bought the album – number 10, in fact, called The System Has Failed. The cover is great, depicting longtime mascot Vic Rattlehead giving out pardons for cash to a long line of familiar faces, including Bush, the Clintons, Condi Rice and Ted Kennedy. Still, I wasn’t optimistic, and I braced for the worst as I pressed play.

And 48 minutes later, I breathed a sigh of relief. Holy shit, Dave, this album is great. You weren’t lying, you weren’t kidding. It’s the heaviest and best Megadeth album in more than 10 years. And maybe I’m just getting old, but the slower, more melodic ones really did it for me this time, too, especially “Truth Be Told.” I was sad to see Dave Ellefson go – he’s been with Megadeth since the beginning, providing great bass work – but it seems like you’ve really taken control of the band now, and you’re inspired, for the first time in ages.

I’m happy to report that I also like the follow-up – it lives up to its very Megadeth title, United Abominations. The front cover even reminds me of the classic image that adorned Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying, all those years ago, and while the music inside is a far cry from the speed-metal genius of that album, it ain’t bad at all. This record’s of a piece with The System Has Failed, and in fact sounds like the second part of a trilogy. Am I right?

The other thing that makes me think we’re dealing with a new trilogy is the lyrical content. This is the second album in a row that focuses on the state of the world, politically speaking, and it takes aim at some worthy targets. I disagree that the U.N. should have supported our illegal and immoral war in Iraq, as the title track says, but tunes like “Washington is Next” show that the guy who served as MTV’s political correspondent for the 1992 elections hasn’t lost that social conscience.

It’s not all good news, Dave. This album is a bit of a step down from the out-of-the-box excellence of System, and there are a few clunkers. Oddly enough, you seem to have sequenced them all in a row, dragging down the middle of the album with slower, less exciting numbers. There are a few too many places here where you just let the power chords and endless solos ring out over mid-tempo, repetitive backdrops, which is all the more depressing when you contrast these bits with the best stuff, like “Sleepwaker” and “Washington is Next.”

You also, for some reason, have included a new version of one of your finest songs, “A Tout le Monde,” off of the otherwise lousy Youthanasia. Can I tell you that you’ve done this song no favors with this new version? Sure, you share vocal duties with Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil, and she has a nice voice, but in all other ways, this is a lesser effort than the original, which had the textured work of guitar god Marty Friedman. Nothing against you or new guitarist Glen Drover, but there’s no magic here, just a straight rendition of the tune, like a local cover band might do.

But hell, this song deserves to be heard, and United Abominations is a better record than Youthanasia, all told. You pull it out at the end, too, with three superb, angry songs with wonderfully metal names. (“Amerikhastan” is my favorite, but the directness of “You’re Dead” shouldn’t be understated, either.) Overall, it’s a lesser effort when compared to the first part of this new trilogy, but it’s pretty damn good, especially for a guy I’d all but written off.

Yeah, that’s you, Dave. I’d almost given up on you, more than once over the last decade. I’m still not sure why I didn’t, or why your work remains so important to me. You’re still the only musician I’ve chosen to address directly like this, and I’m not certain why that is. I definitely have more to say to someone like Brian Wilson, or Ben Folds. But I’m not as invested in their careers as I am in yours. I want you to succeed, I want you to produce the best, heaviest, most ass-kicking stuff you can, and keep challenging yourself.

Don’t ask me why, but it’s important to me that Megadeth survives, and remains awesome.

You sound like you’re on the right track, Dave. You’ve curbed that pop-metal urge, and you sound invested in the music you’re making again, which is a very good thing. You’re 45 now, as hard as that is to believe, but I’m glad to hear you’re not giving up and turning into Elton John. I guess what I’m trying to say is this – five years ago, I danced on Megadeth’s grave, rejoicing at the news that you were throwing in the towel after a decade of increasingly horrid records.

I was wrong. And I’m glad you’re back. And my inner 15-year-old is even more glad.

Keep it up, Dave. I’ll talk to you when the trilogy’s complete. (I am right, aren’t I?)

Sincerely, your fan (still), Andre.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I get a surprising amount of grief for the positive bent of this column.

I honestly get letters all the time asking for more negative reviews, from people who apparently believe that all the music coming out these days is crap and deserves to be slated. I got one the other week that started like this: “Is there anything you don’t like?”

The answer is, of course there is. But here’s the thing, the guiding philosophy behind it all: I love music. I don’t want to hate anything I buy, because I’m not buying it as a critic, but as a music fan. I want to enjoy every single CD I plunk down my cash for. Given how many records I buy on a weekly basis, I know that’s an impossible expectation. But I never greet the inevitable moments of crushing disappointment with glee. I don’t want any music to suck, and I’d rather praise something to the skies than tear it down, honestly.

I’ve learned over the years not to expect too much from artists, especially ones with only one or two albums under their belts. I loved the first Click Five album, for the very same sugary-sweet qualities that turned a lot of people off, but I won’t be too sad if the second one (Modern Minds and Pastimes, out June 26) isn’t very good. New singer Kyle Patrick isn’t as charismatic as Eric Dill, and the single, “Jenny,” isn’t a patch on the power pop gems on that first album. But I want it to be great, and I’ll buy it hoping that it is.

It’s the established artists that inevitably end up making my heart sink. There’s nothing quite like following a promising artist as he or she delivers on that promise, and then follows up with a limp effort that just lies there. I’m left wondering just what happened, and who’s to blame for sullying what up until that point had been a sterling catalog. The more good albums an artist makes, the more disappointing a bad one is.

This is all buildup to my thoughts on the new Rufus Wainwright album, Release the Stars, but I don’t want to give the impression that our boy has made a bad record here. It’s actually pretty good, but that’s the thing about being outstanding – you can’t go back to pretty good.

I’ve said this before, but Rufus Wainwright may very well be the best pop songwriter in North America. Some may have difficulty classifying Wainwright’s opulent, dramatic music as pop, but to me it unquestionably is, just like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim are pop. His first two records set the pace, the simple piano and strings of his self-titled debut making way for the brilliant off-Broadway chamber-pop of Poses. At the time, I’d rarely seen an artist improve so much between first record and second, but Wainwright was just getting warmed up.

Released in chapters over two years, Want, Wainwright’s third and fourth albums, painted his flamboyant, fantastic style over a candy-colored sky. It was the most massive, most elaborate, and most artistically successful work of his career thus far, a bright burst of sustained creativity that firmly cemented Wainwright’s place among the greats of his time. It was everything he does well, but bigger and better than it had ever been – he spared no expense, left no stop unpulled, and ended up with a nearly two-hour masterpiece.

So if Want was Wainwright’s Grand Statement, then Release the Stars is just the next day of the rest of his life. Which isn’t bad, but it is a significant comedown.

But it’s very difficult to dislike Wainwright, even when he’s on autopilot. Stars crashes open with “Do I Disappoint You,” a strikingly orchestrated curtain-raiser that carries on in the Want tradition. From there, things take a step back with first single “Going to a Town,” a caustic piece about America that hides its claws beneath lovely rolling piano and subtle strings. It took a while for this song to grow on me, but it has, and I think it’s one of this album’s best.

But elsewhere, Wainwright stumbles, his gift for melody giving way to a meandering style that resists hooks and refuses to stick. “Not Ready to Love” may be the worst, a slow, sometimes (gasp) boring number that lopes along unconvincingly until it dies with a whimper. I like the arrangement of “Slideshow,” but the ascending hook of the chorus is all it has – it’s not a great song. And snoozy groovers like “Tiergarten” and “Rules and Regulations” are nice, but they don’t leave much of an impression.

Ah, but when Rufus is on, he’s spectacular as always. “Nobody’s Off the Hook” is a sweet piano-and-strings piece that makes full use of the dramatic pause. “Leaving for Paris No. 2” is his best ballad this time out, a captivating mourner that, surprisingly, is also the sparsest thing here – just piano, bass and eerie cellos. And “Between My Legs” lives up to the campy naughtiness of the title, with a dazzling overload of guitars and strings bursting at its edges.

Release the Stars may not live up to the bar set by the Want records, but it seems to signify a new beginning for Wainwright. It’s the first album he’s produced himself, and the first one to feature his own string arrangements, which are uniformly wonderful. I get the feeling that this is the first step on a new journey, and in a couple of albums, he’ll be ready to grace us with another adventurous, ambitious work of classic pop wonderment.

I would never steer you away from buying a perfectly acceptable effort like Release the Stars, especially if you’re a fan of Wainwright’s other works. But trust me on this one – if you’ve ever liked Wilco, and you want to keep on liking them as much as you do, then I’d stay as far away from their new album, Sky Blue Sky, as you can.

I like Wilco. I’ve liked Jeff Tweedy since his days in Uncle Tupelo, one of the greatest alt-country bands to ever walk the earth. Right out of the gate, Tweedy’s post-Tupelo project knocked his former bandmate Jay Farrar’s work with Son Volt flat on its ass. With Being There, Wilco made an extraordinary rock record, one that all but closed the book on the indie country thing for me. With Summerteeth, they stretched out and made a classic pop record. And with the amazing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, they somehow crafted one of the best albums of the decade so far.

And then, well, wow. Tweedy’s partner in crime, Jay Bennett, left the band, and he seemingly took all of their melodic sense with him, as 2004’s A Ghost is Born trafficked in somnambulant boredom, when it wasn’t being actively annoying. Following that train wreck, Tweedy unveiled the new Wilco, including guitarist extraordinaire Nels Cline, and utility man Pat Sansone. And surprise surprise, the subsequent live album Kicking Television was pretty great. With this lineup, Wilco seemed poised to deliver something superb next time they hit the studio.

Alas, here is Sky Blue Sky, and it is music to grow old and die to. Tweedy has thankfully curbed the experimental streak that led him to include 12 minutes of white noise on Ghost, but he’s also reined in the whole “rock band” thing, leaving his dream lineup sounding like every lame soft-rock band on AM radio in the 1970s. Many of the songs on Sky Blue Sky are ones the Eagles would have rejected as too wussy, especially in the saggy middle third, and the whole thing sounds like background music for the shuffleboard court.

Some of it’s not bad – “Impossible Germany” ends with a striking guitar duel between Tweedy and Cline, one of the few moments of pulsing life here, and closer “On and On and On” is Tweedy’s best work on this record. The bar’s not all that high, of course, but this song actually has a melody you can recall 10 minutes after you hear it, so it gets the prize.

The tragedy of this mellow California sunshine record is that the band Tweedy’s assembled to play it is obviously much more talented than the material. These songs are beneath them, and you can hear it every time Cline peals off a jazzy, complex solo, or Sansone whips out a piano flourish. They’re straining against the boundaries of these half-assed songs, trying to make them interesting and failing. I don’t mind low-key breather albums, but why would you make one of those when you have these musicians at your disposal, obviously aching to make great music?

Here is what I think: Jeff Tweedy is punking us. Except for a couple of places (like the near-metal solo on “Side With the Seeds”), this album is so mellow that even my dentist would be bored with it. It reminds me of nothing more than those latter-period Phish albums that I listened to once or twice, and then shelved without much comment. Only you never heard critics calling The Story of the Ghost a work of genius, and yet here’s every pundit in the country falling all over themselves to justify an album this lackadaisical from one of their anointed heroes.

I think Tweedy is trying to see what he can get away with and still get rock reviewers to kiss his feet. It’s the same thing Radiohead’s been doing for years. It’s an elaborate joke fueled by laziness and lack of inspiration. It’s just a theory, of course, but the other alternative is that Tweedy really likes this album, and believes it holds up next to the likes of Being There and Foxtrot. And if that’s the case, it really is a tragedy.

That’s the other side to the expectation game – if Sky Blue Sky had been an album by a new band, I’d probably be willing to give it more of a chance. It would still bore me, but maybe the lazy, hazy vibe would connect more if I didn’t have more than a decade of history to compare it to. As an album, Sky Blue Sky is probably a C minus. But as a Wilco album, it’s a dreadful failure. That’s the curse of excellence. Most bands will never make a record as good as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Wilco likely never will again. It’s an albatross around their necks, and its shadow makes a trifle like Sky Blue Sky seem like an unpardonable sin.

But all you can do as a fan is get used to disappointment. I’m already dreading the next albums by Sufjan Stevens, Mute Math, Keane, Joanna Newsom, Aimee Mann, the Choir, and a dozen others that are on a roll with their recorded output. But even if they fall flat on their faces, as Wilco has, I will faithfully line up and buy the next one, and the next one after that, because being a music fan is all about hope and faith. Every once in a while, the impossible happens – U2 makes an amazing record after a decade of fumbling about, or Brian Wilson finds his voice and finishes one of the best albums ever made. You never know with music, and that’s the magic of it all. It makes even the worst of it worth every second.

Next week, probably the next installment of Dear Dave Mustaine.

See you in line Tuesday morning.