This is one of two columns I did this week. The other, a look a posthumous albums by Warren Zevon and Elliott Smith, is in the archive, if you’re interested. It didn’t turn out quite as well as I’d hoped, but it’s there.

I’m using this one, though, for all the other random bits and pieces I’ve wanted to discuss over the past few installments, but haven’t. The week’s theme of finality and loss is touched on here and there, but mostly this is just scattered thoughts, arranged in no particular order. And as usual for columns of this sort, I thought I’d start with a brief look ahead at some of the new music scheduled to hit stores in the coming months.

Next week’s a good one, with the new Rufus Wainwright, the (reportedly horrible) new Wilco, and the (apparently terrific) new Megadeth. After that, you have to wait until June 5 for anything truly significant. We’ll get Paul McCartney, Chris Cornell and Dream Theater on that date, and two weeks later, we’ll see the White Stripes, the Polyphonic Spree and the Chemical Brothers.

Batten down the hatches for June 26, because it’s a flood of new releases, including Ryan Adams, the Beastie Boys, the Click Five (with their new singer), Steve Vai (with an orchestra), and a massive live box set from Pearl Jam. Then in July, we have new ones from Spoon, They Might Be Giants, Interpol, Suzanne Vega, and Velvet Revolver.

Also, July is reunion month, and it’ll bring us the first new Crowded House album since 1993, and the first new Smashing Pumpkins disc since 2000. We know who’s in the House – it’s mastermind and resident genius Neil Finn, Nick Seymour, Mark Hart and new drummer Matt Sherrod. As for the Pumpkins, we know it’s Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlain, and… um…

The rest of the summer is clouded in mystery right now, but given how fantabulous this year has been, expect that it won’t remain so for long. The farthest out I can see right now is August 21, which should bring us new discs by the New Pornographers and Minus the Bear. But I should have updates soon enough.

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Anyone watching Lost? Let me say for the record that if the show goes off the rails in the coming seasons, I will point to this week’s episode, specifically the revelation of Jacob, as the moment when it all went wrong. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but wow… I don’t know what to make of it.

Regardless, the real news on the Lost front hit on Monday, when ABC announced that it would allow producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to set an end date for the show. Lost will run three more 16-episode seasons, for a grand total of 48 more episodes after this season, and will wrap up in 2010. This is an extraordinary move for a major network, and the first time I can think of that any of the big four have taken this step. Lost will end the way the producers want it to, without slowly crumbling over several extraneous seasons that only exist to bring in the advertising bucks.

I credit HBO with making it safe for networks to do this. Thanks to shows like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, viewers are used to smaller, uninterrupted seasons, complex narrative storytelling, and a novelistic structure with an end point. Six Feet Under ended when Alan Ball wanted it to. The Sopranos will shortly wrap up its run with creator David Chase firmly at the wheel.

I remember when DC Comics took a similar plunge. Of course, comics cost less and bring in considerably less revenue than TV shows do, but I recall what a huge deal it was in the early ‘90s when Neil Gaiman announced the end of Sandman. No new writer would take over. When the original creator’s story was over, he would put his pen down and pack up shop, regardless of the fact that DC Comics owned (and still owns) Sandman completely.

I think this is an immensely positive development for lovers of serial narrative, like me. Here’s what happened in the comic book realm: DC took a lesson from smaller publishers and began accepting creator-owned properties with designated end points. Their Vertigo line is famous for it now. Y: The Last Man, one of the finest books currently being published, is set to end its run at 60 issues. 100 Bullets will run 100 issues.

I predict that this will start happening with television shows as well. We’ve already seen it with J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5, pitched as a five-season novel. I think the major networks will start to catch on to this idea, taking pitches from producers who want their shows to run four or five seasons, and then end on a high note, with the conclusion of the story. This is a serious commitment for the network and the producer, of course, and the success or failure of the first couple of these novelistic shows could determine the fate of the paradigm.

And of course, some (if not most) shows will still be based on renewable premises, and will bounce from good idea to bad until the money runs out, just like DC still publishes Superman and Green Lantern and a hundred other ongoing books. But from a creative standpoint, there’s nothing like having a beginning, a middle, and an end to your story, and being able to present it the way you created it. And if Lost does well in its final three seasons, I think we’ll see much more of these finite long-form televisual novels in the future.

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Speaking of end points, the great comic book Strangers in Paradise ends its run this month, and I wanted to give creator Terry Moore a special shout-out to celebrate. He’s finishing the series on his own terms, with his own pen strokes, after 14 years.

Strangers in Paradise is the story of three people in constant orbit around each other, and the satellites they bring with them. It is a violent series, full of intrigue and pain and death, but it is also incredibly touching, a book that gets those small, human moments exactly right. SIP is credited with expanding the ranks of female comic book readers, and it’s easy to see why, with its two strong female leads, but honestly, I believe it brought people of both genders to comics because it’s just a damn good book.

Terry Moore is also reportedly one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet. I got the chance to talk with him a few times during my days as a comics writer, and I found him charming and modest about his prodigious talent.

Anyway, Strangers in Paradise #90 comes out later this month – it’s actually the 106th issue of the book, counting the two prior volumes. And that’ll be it. I’ve been reading SIP since college, and I’m proud to say I’ve bought every single issue from the same comic book store: Casablanca Comics in Portland, Maine. Like Cerebus wrapping up three years ago, the end of SIP means another remnant of my younger life is gone for good. But it was a great run, a great book, and here’s hoping for a great final issue.

Thanks, Terry.

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You may scoff at this, but I don’t honestly consider myself a collector of music.

I’m an obsessive fan of music, it’s true, and I do buy somewhere in the neighborhood of three to five CDs a week, on average. But you won’t see me scouring vinyl bins, looking for out-of-print Australian singles from my favorite bands. You won’t see me seeking out original pressings of anything – in fact, I’ve been known to wait for the remaster more often than not. I own exactly one copy of just about everything I have, and have no use for multiple printings with different sleeve art or different bar code numbers. (Seriously. People pay for an album they already have because the numbers on the bar code are different!)

Still, I do have several collections in progress, and I’m always thrilled when I finish one off to my satisfaction. I did so just last week with one I’ve been tracking down for years, and I’m over the moon about finally having everything I’d hoped to own by this group.

The band is the Prayer Chain, a little-known quartet from California that, in the space of five short years, went through one of the most dramatic artistic evolutions I’ve encountered, and in the process kicked against the very idea of mainstream-label Christian music and what it can be. The members of the Prayer Chain (Tim Taber, Andy Prickett, Eric Campuzano and Wayne Everett) have gone on to either start or contribute to some incredible bands, but none have had the impact on me that the Prayer Chain did.

They started off as a U2-inspired alt-rock band with up-front spiritual lyrics. Their first record, The Neverland Sessions, was released independently in 1991. (And it was the one I needed to finish the collection off – I found a copy online. Hooray for the Internet!) Shortly thereafter, they were signed to Reunion Records, home of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, among other lightweight gospel-poppers. It’s no understatement to say that they didn’t quite fit on Reunion, and would actually be accurate to call them the heaviest and most artistically driven band on the roster.

The Whirlpool EP was something of a restatement of Neverland, but the band’s second full-length, Shawl, blew the doors off. Produced by Steve Hindalong, drummer of the Choir, Shawl is a tough, massive slab of melodic rock with deep themes – “Fifty-Eight” is about the distance between fathers and sons, and “Never Enough” is one of the most chilling songs about needing grace that I’ve ever heard. Still, Shawl was a rock record, and given that as a starting point, no one could have predicted where they went next.

1995’s Mercury still stands as one of my very favorite records. I don’t own very many like it, honestly. The band teamed up with Hindalong again, but the result this time is a strange, minor miracle of an album that winds around Cure-like guitars, space-age drones, armies of percussion, and slowly unfolding flowers of melody. It’s beautiful and ugly and scary, and it ends with “Sun Stoned,” the greatest end-of-the-world song I know of.

Apparently, the record label messed with Mercury, demanding changes and new songs and an overall less frightening vibe, and I would kill to hear the original version of that album before the suits got their hands on it. The remaining tracks that would have been on Mercury were all released later, on the rarities collection Antarctica and the career-spanning So Close, Yet So Far, but we still don’t know the running order, or how they would have sounded mixed and mastered as a record.

But the evolution and dissolution of the band is fun to trace. Mercury’s engineer, Chris Colbert, once said that you could hear the band break up on that album, and it’s true – they lasted only a few more months before going their separate ways. Still, I’m eternally grateful that I got to hear Mercury, and that now, I have all the stops on the journey that led there.

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Next week, my heart will be in it, I swear. New ones from Rufus Wainwright and Wilco, and maybe another installment of Dear Dave Mustaine.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Final albums are difficult to review. Posthumous albums are impossible.

The thing is, artists rarely know when they’re making their last statements. Time and tragedy can’t be predicted. Jeff Buckley had started work on his second album when he drowned, leaving only Grace as his legacy. George Harrison likely didn’t know while making Brainwashed that he was working on his swan song. The sense of finality is just not as prevalent in the work.

But posthumous albums, especially those cobbled together by family members and friends, are a different story. They are often, to me, like sifting through a dead man’s garbage, looking for change. I can’t help thinking while listening to these collections that the only reason I’m hearing these songs at all is that the author isn’t alive to stop me. It’s hard to know what someone like Frank Zappa would have wanted for his thousands of unreleased recordings. Would he have foisted rehearsal tapes like Joe’s Domage onto the public? Would John Lennon have okayed the surviving Beatles using his demos to construct “Real Love” and “Free as a Bird”? Who knows?

It’s hard to take these things as they are, and not surround them with emotion and suspicion. They are reminders of what we’ve lost, certainly, but they are also often collections of recordings deemed unfit for public consumption when the artist in question was alive. I can’t stop myself from thinking, should I be listening to this? Should I have this? Am I going against a dead man’s wishes by hearing this?

These are questions that can never be answered. To his credit, though, Jordan Zevon raises them in his eloquent liner notes to Preludes, the just-released collection of demos and unreleased recordings by his dad, Warren. He wonders whether he will receive a hug or an ass-kicking for this album when he sees his father in the afterlife, and concludes that he’ll probably get both. But at least he considered the question, and that makes me feel infinitely better about listening to this great collection.

Few artists faced death with as much grace and acceptance as Warren Zevon. Truth be told, mortality was always a central theme of Zevon’s work, and he treated it with a hard-edged cynicism obviously earned through years of tempting fate. When it finally caught up with him – Zevon was diagnosed with inoperable, asbestos-related lung cancer in 2002 – he didn’t collapse in a heap, but rather set about making one final record, one last chance at setting things in order.

That record was called The Wind, and it hit stores in August of 2003. Just over one week later, Zevon died, but not before he saw the birth of his twin grandsons, and got to experience having a top 20 album for the first time since 1980. It was a terrific, fitting finish to a career that had flown largely under the radar, and I’d have been perfectly happy to have The Wind as the last album in my Zevon stack.

That’s not to begrudge Preludes at all, though, because as posthumous collections go, this one’s fantastic. It was lovingly assembled by Jordan Zevon, and contains 10 early recordings of songs that later appeared on his albums, and six unreleased tunes, all of which are worth having.

More than half of the demos here are from his underrated self-titled album from 1976, and they include a rip-snorting take on “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” and a gorgeous closing piano run-through of “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” The Zevon trademark of simple yet memorable melodies coupled with lyrics dosed in darkness is in place even this early on, a far cry from “Tule’s Blues,” a semi-sweet version of a ditty from Zevon’s forgotten 1969 debut, Wanted Dead or Alive.

Other highlights include a reggae-inflected, organ-fueled version of “Werewolves of London,” which manages the neat trick of getting me to listen to “Werewolves of London” again. I think it’s nearly criminal that Zevon is best known for this song, when his catalog is deeper and warmer than this knockoff novelty tune would suggest. Just listen to “Hasten Down the Wind,” here performed with little more than Zevon’s voice and piano, or the trio recording of “Accidentally Like a Martyr,” one of the darkest love songs ever written.

But it’s the unreleased songs that really shine. Preludes opens with “Empty Hearted Town,” a piano-based lament that ranks among Zevon’s best work. I’m not sure when this was recorded, or why it never grew into a fully produced album track, but it’s the kind of song that puts lie to the notion that Zevon’s work never had a heart. His catalog is full of songs like this, sad little stories finely drawn, and there are a couple more on Preludes, too, most notably “Stop Rainin’ Lord” and “The Rosarita Beach Café.”

Most revealing is “Studebaker,” a song that Jordan performed on the tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich. Here is Warren Zevon’s only released run-through, and it’s obvious it’s an aborted take, a sketch intended to get an idea down on tape before it evaporates. Zevon plunks the song out, missing beats and obviously working through chord changes, and he abandons it halfway through. He would never finish this song, and the question it raises is this: was he wrong to toss it aside? Should we, as his audience, be granted glimpses at works in progress like this without his permission, and should we be given the choice to, in effect, tell Zevon he made a mistake? Is that our place as the listener?

Philosophical questions aside, Preludes is a fascinating glimpse at the work of an undervalued songwriter. It’s hard to be too sad about it – I miss Zevon and his music, but his work has such a hard, bitter edge to it that it effectively shuts you down before you can let it into your heart. The most touching and emotional thing here is on the second disc, basically an extended interview mixed with songs from Life’ll Kill Ya, including a solo acoustic performance of “Don’t Let Us Get Sick.” That song was written four years before Zevon knew he had cancer, and it’s a cutting and difficult listen now. It’s also lovely.

Should I care about whether Warren Zevon would have wanted me to hear these recordings? I don’t know. I jumped at the chance to hear them, one way or the other, just like I rushed out to buy New Moon, the new two-CD collection of unreleased songs by Elliott Smith. I suppose I consider the morality of these actions too late – whether Zevon and Smith would have given their permission or not, I’ve heard these records now, so all I can do is talk about how they’ve made me feel.

As you may expect, the Elliott Smith has hit me a lot harder. I consider him one of the finest songwriters of my generation, but that’s too simple a description. He was simply Elliott Smith – brilliant, troubled, with an uncanny gift for melody and a knack for expressing his own deepest despair, and making you feel it too. Smith killed himself in 2003, proving once and for all that all of that despair was real, but he left five full-length albums and one half-completed stunner in his wake.

That album, From a Basement on the Hill, was later finished by friends and released in 2004. I love it, but I also understand that it’s probably nothing like the album Smith would have released had he been around to oversee it. The same can be said of New Moon, assembled by his family and former record label, except there’s a difference: there’s nothing half-completed about any of these songs. Most of them are outtakes from the sessions that produced his third album, Either/Or, but any of them could have stood proudly on his early records.

Honestly, I can’t tell you how it feels to experience Elliott Smith songs I’ve never heard before – it’s just too much. My throat all but closed up at the opening strains of acoustic guitar on “Angel in the Snow” – has anyone before or since played guitar quite like Smith? And my God, what a song “Angel” is. Smith, in his brief life, never ran out of haunting, moving melodies, and New Moon’s 24 songs don’t break that streak. It’s like getting two extraordinary lost albums from him, and I can’t even express how grateful I am to have them.

While I question whether Warren Zevon would have wanted me to hear Preludes, my only question about New Moon is how Smith could have let these songs go. These are not outtakes, these are fully formed pieces – you could swap out New Moon’s first disc with Elliott Smith in the official discography with no drop in quality. “Go By” is an atmospheric wonder, “Looking Over My Shoulder” is good old acerbic Smith at his best, and “Going Nowhere” is one of his finest songs ever, a ghostly whisper of a thing that chills to the bone. And the early version of “Miss Misery” here doesn’t yet mention the title character by name, and it illustrates just how hard Smith worked on these songs, how much of a craftsman he was.

Everything here is, in one way or another, unspeakably beautiful, but some moments cut deeper than others. When he mentions suicide in “Georgia, Georgia,” the swell of emotions that surrounded me when I heard of Smith’s own untimely death come rushing back. And I have always loved his spare take on Big Star’s “Thirteen,” this set’s only cover – his voice, so thin and fragile, winding around Alex Chilton’s melody and making it Smith’s own.

But I honestly can’t objectively review New Moon. I can’t even subject it to the same criteria as other posthumous releases – I believe with all my heart, listening to this, that Smith was wrong to cast these songs aside, and that with this collection’s release, the world has been made right once more. These are songs to wrap yourself up in and love with everything you have. These are 24 more reminders of just what the world lost on October 21, 2003.

This is simply Elliott Smith, at his heartbreaking best.

And I miss him terribly.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I can’t believe it. It’s a Christmas miracle.

It’s been nearly 10 years since Tori Amos made a full-length album I can stand to listen to all the way through. She used to be (and in her best moments, she still is) one of my very favorite musicians, one whose work reaches into my life and re-orders it. Little Earthquakes is still one of the finest albums I own – even the b-sides from that record are heart-wrenching – and its two follow-ups were practically flawless, even as Amos strove to explode her trademark girl-and-a-piano sound.

And then, I’m still not sure what happened. 1998’s From the Choirgirl Hotel was something of a misfire, though about half of it was still excellent. Amos tinkered with electronic backdrops, and chose to rock out in some more traditional ways, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I could forgive one misstep, but that was the start of a seriously steep decline.

Her work for Epic Records, with whom she signed in 2002, has been the absolute nadir of her career. Scarlet’s Walk buried a half-decent EP under tons of dreck, and was, to that point, the worst record she’d made. She topped it (or bottomed it, or whatever) with The Beekeeper two years ago – 78 minutes, and not one decent song. It sounded to me like she’d run the whole thing through a Blandifier machine, sanding off all the rough edges I’d always loved about her. The Beekeeper retains a fascinating distinction – it’s the only Amos album with no redeeming qualities at all.

But, you know, I held on through all of this, because here and there, I found flashes of the brilliance that used to flow so effortlessly. The Welcome to Sunny Florida EP was better than all of Scarlet’s Walk. The DVD bonus track on The Beekeeper, “Garlands,” put the entire album to shame. And the live box set, The Original Bootlegs, showcased just the woman and her piano, and it was marvelous. Amos still has it, she just hasn’t proven it on record in a long time.

Advance publicity for American Doll Posse, her ninth album, didn’t really thrill me. Here was Tori, bleeding down one leg, standing in front of a church with a Bible in one hand and the word “shame” written across the other. Oooh, that’s shocking. Here was another ass-aching concept about womanhood and identity, propping up another 79-minute monster of a record that would undoubtedly be too long and too boring.

But guess what? If I have any doubt from now on that 2007 is the best year ever for music, I just need to listen to American Doll Posse, the single best piece of work Amos has turned out since Choirgirl. Yes, it’s too long, and yes, some of it is boring. But the vast majority of it virtually explodes with life – Amos is invested in this record, in a way she hasn’t been in ages, and for the first time since Boys for Pele, I can forgive her excesses and experiments, because when she’s on, she’s amazing.

American Doll Posse comes wrapped in a shaky conceptual framework that could have drowned it. Here’s the idea – Amos plays five different characters, one of them (the one striking a pose outside that church) a caricature of her own image. The others are all aspects of her and her work. Bleached-blonde photographer Isabel is political-minded, for example, while white-haired Santa (really) is sensual and sexual.

Amos seems to be making a point about confining women to one set image – these are all aspects of her, and therefore, of all women, I guess. It seems an obvious point to make – people are complicated, and more than the two-dimensional cardboard cutouts you see on television – but Amos is committed to making it. She splits Posse’s 23 songs up amidst her five characters, depending on its subject matter, and she dresses up as each character for the cover and booklet art.

You might think there would be some reward for following along, for keeping track of which character sings which song, but there isn’t. It’s sort of the point here that these are all Tori Amos songs – the characters are all aspects of her, after all – and they don’t fit together into any kind of story or thematic framework otherwise. So, blessedly, you can just ignore the whole concept entirely and enjoy the record.

And for the first time in a decade, I did enjoy it. Not only is this the first Amos album since Choirgirl that I can get all the way through in one sitting, it’s the first one since that I can’t stop listening to. And she didn’t do it by stripping everything away and returning to the girl-and-a-piano thing that I love, either – American Doll Posse is quite simply the fullest, most rocking Tori album ever, with most of the songs drenched in thick, 1970s-style guitar and fueled by some absolutely punishing drumming. But “bland” is the absolute last word you’d use to describe any of it, thank God.

Unfortunately, Posse is cluttered with a number of weak interludes, like the opener, “Yo George,” a satin slap at our Idiot in Chief. These minute-long ditties don’t do anything to improve an already overlong and scattered record, even though some of them (the stark “Devils and Gods,” for example) are pretty great. Listening to Posse straight through is like hearing a swell hour-long album and all of its b-sides on shuffle, which isn’t inherently bad, but keeps this record from being a home run.

Enough complaints, though. Posse’s first real song is “Big Wheel,” a skipping double-time rocker that sets the pace. Amos sounds invigorated right at the start, belting out the chorus with a passion she hasn’t shown in years. “Bouncing Off Clouds” is even better, lifting off the ground with ease as Amos weaves her own voice around itself again and again. It’s such a treat to hear that voice in full bloom again – she bellows all of “Teenage Hustling” with verve and force, and even takes a mid-tempo meander like “Code Red” into orbit with a few emotional moans.

Highlights are, amazingly, too many to mention, but here’s a few. “Girl Disappearing” is the only example here of her signature piano-and-strings sound, and it’s lovely, although it’s eclipsed in the beauty department by “Roosterspur Bridge,” a heartbreaking song of leaving and loss. “Father’s Son” is similarly gorgeous, and it’s buoyed, not anchored, by its electronic percussion. “Body and Soul” positively rocks, Amos taking on the chorus with all she’s got. I even like the experiments here, like the jazzy shuffle “Mr. Bad Man” and the wank-rock sex romp “You Can Bring Your Dog.”

But it is, honestly, way too long, and it doesn’t help that the boring ones are sequenced near the end. “Almost Rosey” is the low point, at track 18, plying one typical chord progression over and over for five minutes. The album actually finishes up really well, though – despite the fact that “Posse Bonus,” at track 21, makes the final three songs seem like extras, both “Smokey Joe” and “Dragon” are haunting pieces that deserve their place as the finale.

“Dragon,” especially, is great, concluding things with a couplet that sums up Amos’ girl power message with a caress instead of a smack: “Now it has come to light, the gods, they have slipped up, they forgot about the power of a woman’s love…”

I admit, I’ve been worried that Tori Amos had forgotten her own power, and that we’d never hear anything worth praising from her again. It struck me that the last time I heard a Tori album I liked this much, I was in college – I’ve been through numerous jobs in numerous states since then, taking a journey worthy of Scarlet and her walk. I’ve carried Tori’s immortal first three albums with me through all of that, and I kept believing that one day she’d do something that good again.

American Doll Posse is not that album, of course, but it comes closer than anything since, and it has renewed my faith. Amos sounds awake and alive and passionate and engaged with her muse, in ways I’d dreaded she’d never be again. Posse is the sound of one of the world’s best artists waking up, taking stock, and getting about the business of being who she is again. It is her best work in far too long, and the sweetest surprise of 2007 thus far.

Welcome back, Tori. Welcome back.

Next week, letters from beyond the grave.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m feeling terrible today – I worked another hell week, slamming together a couple of major stories, and I slept most of the day away. But I have some really good music to talk about, so I’m trying to imagine myself as a marathon runner, one with just enough energy to sprint over the finish line before collapsing in a puddle of my own sweat. Let’s see how I do.

A quick note before we launch in: Interpol released this week the details of their third album, Our Love to Admire, out July 10. I’m not the biggest fan of this band, although I do like them, but I wanted to mention them because nestled among the track list for Our Love is my favorite song title of the year so far: “There’s No I in Threesome.” That’s just great.

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The new Bright Eyes album, Cassadaga, sports a cover gimmick the likes of which I’ve never seen. The front and back covers look like the snowy pattern of gray you get when your television reception goes out, until you move the included Spectral Decoder over it. The Spectral Decoder is a slip of plastic that filters light in a certain way, causing the true cover design to appear.

It’s interesting, even if it requires you to jump through a few hoops, but what’s ironic about it is that this design adorns the most straightforward and immediate Bright Eyes record yet. It’s also the best Bright Eyes record yet, another terrific gem of a disc in a year positively overflowing with them.

Conor Oberst gets a lot of shit in this column, largely for being pretentious and precious. His early work suffers from a drought of melody, and a threadbare production sense – often, it’s just Oberst and his guitar, yelping out songs that are as thin melodically as they are bloated lyrically. For many, I know, I just described the attraction of Bright Eyes, and as Oberst has moved his musical project further down an epic folk-rock path, some fans have fled, searching for the emotional directness that they believe his later work is missing.

I’m not one of those people. Lifted was the first Bright Eyes album I could stand, and I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning was the first one I could listen to repeatedly all the way through. So naturally, I think the massive sound and dramatic songwriting of Cassadaga is an improvement – in fact, I think it’s an arrival. Conor’s got a solid band behind him this time, and he pulls in numerous guest stars to play numerous instruments, including percussion sections, woodwinds, choirs, and strings. It’s the sound of Oberst leaving his teenage folk trappings behind him, and man, the sound is sweet.

Cassadaga is named after a town in Florida, which seems to exist solely to house the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp, and is known unofficially as the “psychic capital of the world.” As you might expect, Oberst’s lyrics this time are concerned with finding the truth, and with seeing through the sparkle of religious chicanery. “Four Winds,” the first single, is the one to mention Cassadaga by name, and it contains this telling line: “The Bible is blind, the Torah is deaf, the Qur’an is mute, if you burned them all together you’d get close to the truth…”

Elsewhere, Oberst is “looking for that blindfold faith, lighting candles to a cynical saint,” and later he muses, “From the madness of the governments to the vengeance of the sea, everything is eclipsed by the shape of destiny.” By the end, though, he’s certain that “everything, it must belong somewhere,” and he concludes the album with three dots, continuing his quest: “I took off my shoes and walked into the woods, I felt lost and found with every step I took.”

That all sounds very Bright Eyes, although I’ll say it’s Oberst’s most complete lyrical work, largely free of the cringe-worthy metaphors he’s used in the past. But trust me, when you put this CD in and press play, you’ll think you’ve bought the wrong album by mistake. Opener “Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed)” starts with more than a minute of orchestral sound collage. It slowly transforms into one of the most oddly beautiful things Oberst has written – the orchestra sticks around, taking this mid-tempo, pedal-steel-inflected ballad into orbit, while spacey narration continues in the background. It’s awesome, and very un-Bright Eyes.

“Four Winds” is more familiar, like Ryan Adams by way of Omaha, and it sets the tone for the rest of the album. The chorus is so catchy that you probably won’t notice references to the Great Satan and the Whore of Babylon. “Four Winds” takes a couple of shots at warfare in general (“Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe, there are people always dying trying to keep them alive…”), its alt-country groove boosted by some sweet violin playing by Anton Patzner. This, like much of Cassadaga, is I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning times ten, and it seems Oberst has found his sound.

It takes a lot, for example, to turn a simple chord progression into a timeless standard, but Oberst comes awful close with “If the Brakeman Turns My Way,” a song Bob Dylan would probably be proud to have written. He gets even closer with “Make a Plan to Love Me,” an old-time torch song recorded with strings and spectral backing vocals by Rachel Yamagata. It’s gorgeous.

Best of all, though, may be “Middleman,” a fiddle-soaked minor-key western ballad about those gray areas in between things. It gains force as it goes along, adding layers of sound (including another spooky narration), and on an album bursting with songs about wandering the road, this is the most striking and memorable. Oberst’s voice, so grating when left to fill in the spaces around an acoustic guitar, is magnificent here, its trademark quiver propped up by oceans of production.

Some may balk at just how polished and full this record is, but to me, this is what Bright Eyes has been working towards for years. “Cleanse Song” would be an average acoustic piece if not for the rolling percussion at its edges, or the woodwinds painting its walls. “No One Would Riot for Less” is the quietest thing here, but it would be so much less than it is without the otherworldly backing vocals and the delicately arranged strings. Oberst has always been an ambitious songwriter and record maker, but Cassadaga marks the first time that his reach doesn’t outstrip his grasp – the songs are simple and lovely, and the production takes them to new heights.

Best of all, there’s no weak moment, no self-indulgent, artsy roadblock in the way here. For the first time, I don’t want to skip a second of a Bright Eyes album – even the lesser moments, like “Soul Singer in a Session Band,” are well crafted and enjoyable, and the highlights, like Hassan Lemtouni’s contributions to the extended coda of “Coat Check Dream Song,” are wonderful.

Cassadaga ends with one of its prettiest songs, “Lime Tree,” which opens with one of Oberst’s most haunting couplets: “I keep floating down the river but the ocean never comes, and since the operation I heard you’re breathing just for one…” If not for the strings, this would be the barest song on the record, with just Oberst, his guitar, and his backing vocal quartet. But like a bookend to “Clairaudients,” “Lime Tree” makes full use of the orchestra. This is an old-time Bright Eyes song, and in the past, it would have been recorded with one mic, Oberst cutting his vocal cords and letting them bleed. But even Fevers and Mirrors-era fans will have to admit how lovely it is like this, still subtle but much richer.

It’s taken nearly 10 years and eight albums, but Bright Eyes has finally impressed the hell out of me. Cassadaga is the first of Conor Oberst’s records that I can unreservedly recommend, and the first time that I think he deserves some of the salivating hype he gets. Hopefully, he’ll stay on this road, and not listen to the backlash that will undoubtedly ensue. Oberst may have traded in some raw intensity here, but he’s been repaid twenty-fold with his most developed and complete album yet. It’s fantastic.

* * * * *

The other three I have for you this time are not as good as the Bright Eyes, but they’re still worth checking out. First up is Jonatha Brooke, who for years was the more talented half of the Story, and since then has taken her solo career by the horns. Brooke is one of many artists these days who turned a bad major label experience (MCA released 10 Cent Wings, her masterpiece to that point, and then ignored it, letting it die a quick death) into a step towards independence. She owns her own record label, Bad Dog, and her new one, Careful What You Wish For, is her third self-released studio album.

It also makes up for the spotty showing of her last one, Back in the Circus. That album included some of Brooke’s best songs, mired in electronic experiments and ill-advised covers. Careful is a pure Brooke record, 11 original songs of good-to-great quality, and crisp, clear production. In fact, this is the crispest, clearest production she’s ever had, courtesy of Bob Clearmountain – it’s a Big Damn Pop Album, with one radio single after another.

If you think of pop as a four-letter word, you won’t dig this, but if you like big choruses and sweet guitars and tasteful arrangements, Careful is a feast for the ears. It’s the kind of album Shawn Colvin wishes she could make, veering from the acoustic-based folk-pop of “Baby Wait” to the heavy crunch of “Forgiven” to the Beatlesque turnarounds of the title song with ease. Even the song in French (“Je N’Peaux Pas te Plaire”) is delightful.

As usual, Brooke throws in one minor-key curveball, and this time it’s “Prodigal Daughter,” a tale of no forgiveness sung over a haunting electric guitar bed. But despite some tinges of sadness, this all goes down smooth, an enjoyable collection of tunes that further solidifies Brooke’s reputation. She includes a duet with former Hooter Eric Bazilian (author of Joan Osborne’s hit “One of Us,” believe it or not), and shares the stage with former boy banders JC Chasez and Nick Lachey, with no ill effects. In fact, they sound great.

The album ends with a brief acoustic piece called “Never Too Late for Love,” Brooke sounding to these ears like she’s happy with her life and her lot. And she should be – Careful What You Wish For is a sweet record, one of the best she’s made, and she did it on her own terms.

* * * * *

Less contented, of course, is Tom Morello, who made his name with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. Morello’s never been a happy kind of guy – Rage was one of the most politically charged (and politically active) bands in recent memory, taking on cause after cause, and putting their time and money where their mouths were. Audioslave was more of a straight-up rock band, but Morello never lost his political edge, and it’s here in full force on his new solo project, the Nightwatchman.

Morello also has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most inventive guitar players around. Even in the context of Audioslave’s Zeppelin-style rock, his solo spots sounded like anything but guitar solos, and in Rage, he was practically an army of unusual, yet astonishing tones. (Perhaps their best moment is still their cover of “Street Fighting Man,” in which the three musicians made their organic instruments sound uncannily like a programmed rhythm section.)

If you’re picking up Morello’s debut as the Nightwatchman, One Man Revolution, and hoping for more out-there guitar heroics, you’ll be sadly disappointed. Morello’s working in a much older tradition here – Revolution is a collection of protest songs, in the vein of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, performed the way that Leonard Cohen might do them. Acoustic guitars reign here, and the focus is on Morello’s low, low voice and his sharp, sharp lyrics.

Sharpest, perhaps, is “Maximum Firepower,” which contains the album’s mission statement: “Don’t be surprised if the sermon on the mount next time is delivered in a little coffeehouse, ‘cause somebody here’s gotta let ‘em know, I doubt it’s me, but here I go…” You likely know what to expect from songs with titles like “Let Freedom Ring” and “Battle Hymns,” and the staunch picket line anthem “Union Song” isn’t much of a shock from Morello either. His social conscience has always been informed by the likes of Billy Bragg and Guthrie, and here it’s at its most explicit.

It’s the sound that could have people scratching their heads. These songs are simple, yet effective, built around folksy strumming with some subtle piano mixed in. It’s a perfect setting for these political poems, although most are not as pointed and specific as you might expect, either. “No One Left” hits hardest, comparing the scenes of devastation at the World Trade Center and the streets of Baghdad. “House Gone Up in Flames” references “Colin Powell’s lies,” but as for direct attacks on the Bush administration, that’s about it.

Instead, Morello paints pictures of the world, using dark colors and harsh brushstrokes. “Can you explain to the mothers and fathers of those who come riding home in coffins in their military clothes,” he asks, expecting no answer. Elsewhere, he stands with a striking union, saying, “As they load the rubber bullets, as they fire another round, I’m heading into the tear gas, dig in, man, hold your ground.” He sets scenes of “broken Starbucks glass” and describes himself as slipping “from shadow to shadow,” seeing “things he should not see.” It’s a bleak and blackened America he describes, and it’s chilling.

Here and there, Morello comes up with a line worthy of his heroes, which is the best thing you could expect from a project like this. My favorite is in “Maximum Firepower,” and it goes like this: “Thought hard about this next line, I’m pretty sure it’s true – if you take a step towards freedom, it’ll take two steps towards you.” One Man Revolution is a successful experiment for Tom Morello, and though I’m not sure who the target audience is, he taps into a deep river of social conscience here, and does it proud.

* * * * *

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about import CDs, and how I’ve discarded that old rule that kept non-U.S. releases from my top 10 list. You’d think this would have happened by now, but I’ve finally found myself on the other side of that equation – what do I do if I wait for a U.S. release, and the record’s really good?

The album in question is Imaginary Kingdom, the new solo album from Tim Finn. It came out last year across the pond, and finally arrived stateside last week. And it probably won’t make the top 10 list this year, but in 2006, it may have – it’s very good, far beyond most of what Finn has done on his own. Do I revise and reconsider last year’s list, or give it a belated mention this year? I’m not sure.

What I am sure of is how surprisingly excellent Imaginary Kingdom is. Tim Finn has always suffered in the shadow of his genius brother, Neil, and I’ve occasionally taken Neil to task for dragging his croaky-voiced sibling along with him, whether on Crowded House’s third album or on the pair’s two records as the Finn Brothers. Tim’s solo albums have usually been lesser affairs, too, and if he doesn’t find a producer willing to work with his voice, it comes off as sloppy and unkempt.

But not here. Imaginary Kingdom sports the best songs Tim Finn has written on his own, some crystal-clear production from Bobby Huff, great contributions from Fleming and John (where have they been?), and some real, honest-to-God good singing from Finn. The record bounces to life with “Couldn’t Be Done,” a ‘60s-style shimmy with a great little chorus. Better is “Still the Song,” the second tune, which sounds like something Michael Penn might come up with.

I mean no offense to Tim Finn by saying this, but some of these songs are worthy of his brother – that’s a compliment in my book. “Midnight Coma” is a sprightly piece, with a great hook, and “Astounding Moon” is a delight, winsome and magical. “Salt to the Sea” is uncommonly touching, a song of mourning for a fallen friend. And “Horizon” is a superb song of hope.

The album takes an unfortunate downturn from there, mixing in some blue-eyed soul songs that don’t work as well. Finn also includes “Winter Light,” his track for the Chronicles of Narnia movie, and it’s an odd fit, although a decent song. The record rights itself by the end, though, and closer “Unsinkable” is right up there with the best. Even with its few stumbles, Imaginary Kingdom is Tim Finn’s best solo record in many years, and it would have been worth the import price, if I’d paid it last year.

As a quick concluding note, Tim Finn is not part of the upcoming Crowded House reunion – that’s Neil, Nick Seymour and some other collaborators. Their album is called Time on Earth, and will be out on July 10. Well, that’s July 10 here – it’s out on July 2 across the Atlantic. But I think I can wait for that one.

Next week, Tori. Will it impress, or depress?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The Best Year Ever continues in the coming weeks, with new albums by Tori Amos (it actually sounds… kind of good…), Rush, Bjork, Travis, Wilco, Rufus Wainwright, Richard Thompson, Paul McCartney and Ryan Adams, among others. I have the whole weekend off (a rarity), and it’s about 75 degrees outside. Life is pretty damn good.

So what better time to talk about the end of the world?

Trent Reznor came up with about 10 signs of the apocalypse for his new Nine Inch Nails psychodrama Year Zero, but probably the most convincing one is that he’s finished and released a new album only two years after the last one. This is a guy who notoriously spends half a decade putting together his records, and it hasn’t seemed to matter what they sound like – a retread like 2005’s With Teeth takes him just as long to complete as a double-disc masterpiece like 1999’s The Fragile.

Most of the time, I can see why. Reznor is a one-man band, meticulously constructing Nine Inch Nails songs from the ground up, and he’s always been more sonic architect than pop star. His work is ugly, but precisely so, and his reputation as a fishnet-clad idol for goth teens belies his genuine craftsmanship. Reznor may have popularized industrial music, but he also brought into the field a sense of real songwriting mixed with a genius for pure sound. Countless acts have imitated his work, but few have matched his adventurousness and skill.

Which is why With Teeth was so frustrating. It’s not a bad album, really, but it was the first NIN record to steadfastly refuse to move forward. It was lean, simplistic, and surface-level – essentially, everything you’d think NIN is, if you’ve never explored Reznor’s work. It may have been just the record he needed to make at that time – many balked at the prog-rock overtones and overarching concept of The Fragile, and With Teeth was certainly a reaction to that backlash. But as an NIN album, it’s pretty lame.

So given that Reznor worked for five years on that record, I didn’t have high hopes for what sounded like a rushed follow-up. Reznor said he completed Year Zero quickly, in a flash of inspiration, and its birth was preceded by a slouching toward Bethlehem the likes of which I’ve never seen. Songs were leaked by placing USB drives in bathrooms at shows, an intricate lattice of websites was designed to lay out the world in which the album’s story takes place, and the URLs of those sites were cleverly hidden in teaser trailers and the like.

The marketing campaign has been extraordinary, and naturally, my worry was that much of the two years separating With Teeth and Year Zero was spent writing and creating this interactive element, with not much spent on the album itself. The idea is neat – the album takes place in a dystopian future ruled over by the U.S. Bureau of Morality, and while much of the record is devoted to deconstructing the steps America took towards this future, there is also The Presence, apparently a giant hand that comes down from the sky at random intervals to snatch people up. Naturally, Reznor uses this framework to rail against the current political and religious power structures, and the weak response of the people.

But is the album any good? Can it be, given how quickly this anal-retentive perfectionist constructed it?

In a word, hell yeah. Year Zero is a return to form for Reznor, a noisy, teetering structure built with human bones and clanging gears, a monstrosity that can stand proudly with his best work. The songs, while not quite up to the twitching, odd-tempo heights of The Downward Spiral, are mostly knockouts, and of a piece with one another, pulling you gently through the creepy concept. And Reznor has never wielded noise as an instrument quite as well as he does here – gone are the standard buzzsaw guitars of With Teeth, and in their place is wave after wave of reality-folding, brain-distorting, spindled and mutilated cacophony.

Also, this may be the sexiest album about the end of the world ever made. Many of these songs are set to sinewy, mid-tempo beats that will likely find their way to the seedier strip clubs before long, and Reznor never lets his voice slip into the throaty metal-shout he’s built his career on – his vocals are low-key and elastic for most of the album. When he does need to explode here, he does it with vocal layering, pumping up the sound with an army of himself.

Year Zero starts weakly, with an uninspiring instrumental called “Hyperpower!” (really) and a simple ditty titled “The Beginning of the End.” But once you hit the lead single, “Survivalism,” we’re off and running. The beats are a whirlwind, and Reznor’s concept is in full swing early: “I got my propaganda, I got revisionism, I got my violence in high-def ultra-realism…” It’s the most cathartic piece on the record, and it’s sequenced third.

Most of the songs that follow are slower and creepier. “The Good Soldier” is a standout, taken from the point of view of one of the government’s nameless enforcers. “I am trying to believe,” he moans, over one of Reznor’s deft touches – a small synth ray of light that breaks through the din. “Me, I’m Not” is the second cousin of “The Wretched,” off of The Fragile, with its insistent bass throb and noisy sideshows that never fully distract from the main trip.

Take one guess who “Capital G” is addressed to. Over a slinky, near-blues beat, Reznor does in fact take aim at our commander in chief, but his real target is those who voted for him (twice), and would do so again: “Well I used to stand for something, now I’m on my hands and knees, traded in my god for this one, he signs his name with a capital G…” “God Given” contains one of many heart-stopping moments on this album – the clattering bedlam disappears, leaving nothing but a hi-hat and Reznor’s whisper: “I would never tell you anything that wasn’t absolutely true, that didn’t come right from his mouth…”

Year Zero is, for all its futuristic trappings, a warning against tolerating tyrants, whether they come from the political or religious systems around us. As such, it’s nothing you’ve never heard before, and it’s littered with cliches, just like all of Reznor’s work. But this time, I’m able to roll with it a lot more. I felt the same way about Spiral and Fragile, two albums that spun tales instead of relying on autobiographical whining. There’s little here that breaks new ground lyrically for Reznor, but I’m enjoying these words a lot more than his last set.

But no one listens to NIN for the words, and it’s the sonic architecture I want to dance about here. The final third of the album is extraordinary, even for Reznor – “The Greater Good” sets the stage, with its whispered vocals and scratchy bass, before “The Great Destroyer” sets the formula on fire. It sounds like a standard verse-chorus song for a while, albeit a terrific one, until the harmonies take over on the title phrase, like an instantaneous sunrise. From there, it’s a descent through a twisted metal sculpture of noise, so close that it sounds like it could prick your skin.

“Another Version of the Truth” is an instrumental, the next step forward from “A Warm Place,” and it ends with two minutes of sweet minor-key piano. But it ain’t over yet – “In This Twilight” is one of Reznor’s best songs, with a sucker-punch melody that hits the stratosphere. “All the black is really white, if you believe it,” he sings, either a final capitulation to brainwashing or an anthem of hope. (As an interesting side note, the compact disc itself has a thermal label. It’s black when you put it in your CD player, but when you’re finished playing it and you take it out, it will have changed color – by the end of the album, all the black is really white.)

“Zero Sum” is a fine conclusion, a mostly spoken summation of where we are: “In our hearts we knew better, and we told ourselves it didn’t matter, and we chose to continue, and none of that matters anymore in our hour of twilight…” Again, depressing or hopeful? I can’t tell, and the music doesn’t help – it’s simultaneously bright and dark. The album ends with a minute of mournful piano, which could be a funeral march or a segue into the next phase. (And yes, there is a second chapter to Year Zero, which Reznor promises will be out next year.)

Concepts and fifth-grade-level lyrics aside, though, Year Zero is a Reznorian masterwork, a great new record that once again establishes him as one of our finest musical engineers. This is music built from schematics and blueprints, sure, but Reznor infuses it with life and personality, which sets him apart (and accounts for his commercial success). Year Zero is, in the end, a story of people raging against a machine, and don’t think for a second that just because the music is electronic, that Trent’s heart is with that machine. It’s a darkly human piece of work, and the best thing he’s done this decade.

Next week, we catch up with a bunch of minor new releases, clearing the way for Tori, Bjork and Rufus in the coming weeks. As an aisde, I’m gratified and surprised that my praise of Silverchair’s Young Modern last week wasn’t met with as many guffaws as I’d expected – in fact, some closet Silverchair fans came out of the woodwork to agree with me about Daniel Johns’ songwriting skill. If you haven’t heard Young Modern yet, the whole thing is still up for free streaming here. Record of the year so far, I’m telling you.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I had a great trip back east, thanks for asking.

I got to catch up with some friends I haven’t seen in a while, and I got to see a kickass, hilarious movie (Grindhouse) with my best friends in the world. But the highlight of the weekend may have been getting to meet Nolan Jeffrey Maxwell, son of Jeff and Melissa. Nolan is three weeks old now, and cute as a button, and just seeing Jeff and Melis around their kid is quite beautiful in itself, so aglow are they in the awe of new parenthood.

Our municipal election is on April 17 here, so I’ve been really busy since getting back on Monday. But don’t worry, faithful readers, I’ve found time for you too. This week, I thought I’d talk about something that wouldn’t ever have been a topic of this column just three years ago: import CDs.

I used to have this rule that no albums that were not readily available in the United States were ineligible for my top 10 list. It took way too long to realize that this rule was silly. The original idea struck me during my Face Magazine days, when my circulation was only a few thousand. I figured that it would do my readers no good to recommend an album they couldn’t easily buy. Of course, back then, I had only the barest idea of this thing called “the internet,” and how easy it would soon become to get anything and everything you could want, musically speaking.

Without the internet, for example, I probably couldn’t be a Marillion fan.

Here’s a band that has used the internet like few others. As a Marillion fan, I get constant updates on the status of new projects emailed to me, and easy access to all the information I could want at marillion.com. Plus, I get a lively and entertaining message board, and a website-only club that sees a full recorded concert winding its way into my mailbox four times a year. I have roughly 75 Marillion CDs now, thanks to their self-funded and self-operated label, Racket Records, perhaps the best-run internet-based label I’ve ever encountered.

None of that would mean anything if the music were crap, but there’s nothing crap about what this band does. In 24 years, they’ve never made an album I dislike. Marillion is a British band, and I have to pay import prices for their work – between $25 and $30 each, including shipping, on average. And I gladly keep paying it, because their music is like magic to me. I know very few bands that have managed to deliver so consistently for so long, in so many different styles – Marillion covers a sonic range equivalent to that of four or five other bands put together.

Marillion is also a band that gets no respect. In the U.K., they’re best known for a 1985 hit called “Kayleigh,” a sappy yet memorable ballad they penned with their former singer, a guy called Fish. Steve Hogarth has been the singer since 1989, but in the land of the Brits, the number one question the band still gets is, “Where’s Fish?” And that’s the good news – they’re virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic, despite a massive catalog of brilliant music.

Three years ago, the band released Marbles, which may well be the best album they’ve ever made. In 100 minutes, they summed up everything that’s always been great about them. Marbles included the best four-minute pop singles they’d written in ages, including “You’re Gone” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” but it also proudly featured three huge epics, each more than 10 minutes long (with the amazing “Ocean Cloud” clocking in at 17:57), and each earning every second of that time.

The release of Marbles was an event. The band spent two full years on it, giving the fans updates all the while, and they funded it through pre-orders, so we all felt like part of the process. The limited edition is a gorgeous hardbound book, with the names of each financial contributor listed in its pages, and when it started landing on people’s doorsteps, the excitement was palpable. And it wasn’t over – the band asked its fans to buy the “You’re Gone” single when it came out, and between us, we gave Marillion their first top 10 single since 1987.

In contrast, the release this month of their 14th album, Somewhere Else, has been pretty quiet. There were no pre-orders this time. The album is half as long as Marbles, and it comes in a regular jewel case. There’s no real sense of excitement this time out, or at least, none that can compare with the Marbles campaign. This time, it’s not about us, it’s about the band and what they’ve come up with.

And sadly, what they’ve come up with is just not that great.

Don’t get me wrong. Somewhere Else is a pretty good album, by just about any other band’s standards. But in the shadow of Marbles, it just doesn’t hold up. This album most resembles Marillion’s late-‘90s trilogy of This Strange Engine, Radiation and Marillion.com, and after the phenomenal leaps forward the band made on its last two albums, this backslide is unfortunate.

Somewhere Else is an album of halves. It is one-half of a double record – album 15, still untitled, was recorded at the same time, and will be out next year. Several of its songs are broken up into halves. And it is also half-excellent, and half, well, not. In fact, some of it sounds half-finished.

In contrast to the multi-dimensional sound of Marbles, the band and producer Michael Hunter have gone for a live feel here. You can hear the difference right away on “The Other Half,” a mid-tempo rock opener with a dynamic chorus that will stick in your head. Just when you think you’ve got this song down, the band launches into a jazz break and then guides you through the, um, other half. As Mark Kelly lays down a bed of piano chords, Hogarth shows off one of the best voices in modern music, singing, “The other half cannot be parted from the other half…”

Alas, he’s right, as the album takes a serious downturn from there. Marillion has, for whatever reason, always tried to write hit singles for every album, and the next three songs are Somewhere Else’s radio fare. “See It Like a Baby” has grown on me, and I have come around to liking what’s there, even if I’m still mystified at what isn’t. This song needed a good bridge, not a second looping guitar solo. It’s just not finished. “Thankyou Whoever You Are” is better, a Coldplay impression that unfortunately pours on the power ballad cheese during the chorus. (Those synth strings, so effective on “Fantastic Place,” sound like overkill here.)

And then there is “Most Toys,” a dreadful attempt at rocking out. It’s only two minutes long, but it overstays its welcome, repeating its bumper sticker chorus (“He who dies with the most toys is still dead!”) over and over until you want to punch something. I’m sure that on stage, this will bring the house down, but on record, it’s just embarrassing.

Thankfully, that’s the worst of the lot. From here on, we get the classic Marillion sound, dripping with atmosphere and chock full of nuance. The title song is a near masterpiece, Kelly’s piano leading the way as Hogarth sings delicately about his recent divorce. The lyrics to this song are among Hogarth’s best – he uses metaphor and imagery throughout (“Mr. Taurus ate a thesaurus, made the girls cry and skipped straight to the chorus”), until the end, where he throws it all away and sings directly. “Everyone I love lives somewhere else,” he wails, as Steve Rothery plays some incredible leads – he’s always tasteful and reserved, but a more emotional guitar player you will never hear.

And on it goes, with the band hitting the mark as often as they miss it. “A Voice From the Past” creeps up on you – you think you’re listening to a soft piano piece, but before you know it, you’re in one of the best extended crescendos the band has ever laid down. It is one of two political pieces on the album, and together, they illustrate the inconsistency here – “Voice” is all subtle rage, Hogarth describing the horrors of worldwide poverty as “perfect nonsense to the next generation.” The song leads up to a wonderful line – “I want you to feel someone else’s pain” – and by that point, he’s made you feel it already through his words.

“The Last Century for Man,” on the other hand, is a clunker, a slow blues with a great orchestral buildup by the end that’s simply ruined by Hogarth’s lyrics. All subtlety evaporates as he croaks out lines like “Let’s decide who the terrorists are” and quotes another bumper sticker: “If you’re not outraged, you haven’t been paying attention.” I don’t mind political statements, I just dislike clumsy ones, and it’s a pity because “Last Century” has some superb melodic moments.

But nothing puts the dichotomy of this album into sharp relief like “The Wound,” the other extended song. Its first half is deadly dull, just two chords played over and over, louder and softer, as Hogarth whines about everything he’s done to heal his pain: “I bandaged it, wrapped it, stitched it, tourniqueted it…” Just when you’re about to write the song off, it segues into an absolutely hypnotic second half, all keyboards and drum loops and spectacular imagery. It drifts off without returning to the original theme, leaving two completely unrelated halves to stand or fall on their own.

You’re probably getting the sense that I don’t like this album, and you’re wrong – what’s good here is very, very good. Take “No Such Thing,” the record’s biggest surprise – it’s a mesmerizing mantra-like song reminiscent of Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan,” new territory for the band. Hogarth sings through a phaser over Rothery’s delicate and unchanging guitar line while the impeccable rhythm section (bassist Pete Trewavas and drummer Ian Mosley) slowly add layers of sound. It’s great.

And then there’s “Faith,” the closing track. Marillion fans know this song – it’s been kicking around the live set for three years, and it’s shown up on a couple of releases. Here it is in finished form, and it’s beautiful, a much better choice for a single than any of the three pop songs written specifically for that purpose. There’s a new French horn part that adds a touch of grace to the ending, and a new line, probably Hogarth’s best on this album: “If you don’t believe in love, you’d have to make it up.” “Faith” has long been a favorite of mine, and this version is pretty much perfect, a great way to close out the album.

It’s almost enough to make you forget what a patchy work this is. Where Marbles sounded like a fully planned out suite, Somewhere Else is just a clutch of songs, some good and some not so good. And I think I know what part of the problem is. No offense to Michael Hunter, but Marillion needs Dave Meegan behind the boards – taking him away is like parting them from their other half.

If you look at the past 18 years of Marillion albums with Steve Hogarth, the undisputed high points (Brave, Afraid of Sunlight, Marbles) were all produced by Meegan. He’s almost like a sixth member of the band, because I think Marillion needs someone to tell them no, to sift through their ideas and find the best ones. They needed someone this time to say, “You know, guys, ‘See It Like a Baby’ isn’t quite finished here, and while I’m sure ‘Most Toys’ is fun to play, it doesn’t belong on a Marillion album.” The records helmed by Meegan have no half-formed ideas. The records helmed by others are mostly inconsistent. It’s a pattern worth paying attention to.

Of course, just watch – “Most Toys” will be released as a single, and will score the band their first #1 hit since “Kayleigh,” proving once again that I don’t know anything.

I do know that if album 15 is similarly spotty, and I find that the good songs from each album could have been combined into one killer disc, I’m going to be disappointed. When Somewhere Else is good, it’s very good, and it certainly sounds like the band had fun making it. Perhaps I’m expecting too much – they can’t make a Marbles each time out. It’s just hard to hear music you don’t like from one of your favorite bands. I was reserving a space on the top 10 list for Somewhere Else, and its inconsistency is a sad surprise. But I’ll get over it.

Speaking of surprises, though, there’s the album that currently sits at #1 on that list. If you didn’t read last week’s column, prepare to be knocked out of your chair when I tell you what it is: Silverchair’s Young Modern.

If you’re my age, you probably remember Silverchair for their grungy 1995 hit “Tomorrow,” a carbon copy of Pearl Jam’s sound written and recorded when the band members were 15 years old. They’re all in their late 20s now, and it’s almost beyond belief, but leader Daniel Johns has grown into one of the finest songwriters on the planet.

That’s right, on the motherfucking planet.

We got hints of his genius on Diorama, Silverchair’s fourth album from 2002, and even more on his side project with techno producer Paul Mac, The Dissociatives, in 2004. That album made it into my ’04 top 10 list, despite sounding a little bit unfinished in places. I wondered then what a fully produced, completely consistent Daniel Johns album might sound like.

And now I know. Young Modern is absolutely brilliant pop music, front to back. If you remember them, you will not believe that music of this quality could come from Silverchair. And even if you don’t (which may be better, in the long run), you’re in for a delirious ride here. Young Modern never seems to run out of incredible melodies, and its ‘60s and ‘70s informed pop music is infectious and delightful. It’s like getting a new Jellyfish album, and longtime readers know how I feel about Jellyfish. Young Modern fulfills my number one criteria handily. You ready? Here it is:

All. The. Songs. Are. Great.

Every single one. The album opens with what may be the catchiest rock song of this year, “Young Modern Station” – the feedback and moans that start the tune make you think you’re in for the Silverchair of old, but the pounding piano part and stunning falsetto melody dash that notion quickly. The chorus is singable and haunting, and the tune is over before you know it, segueing into the single, “Straight Lines.” It’s a great choice, despite being one of the more melodically simple songs here – the sweet piano figure of the verses leads into a great chorus, and that leads into an even greater bridge. It’s awesome.

It’s also one of the weaker songs here. Starting with track three, the record just gets ridiculously good. “If You Keep Losing Sleep” is a creepy wonderland of sound, and the first instance of Van Dyke Parks’ stunning string arrangements. This is like Danny Elfman scoring Yellow Submarine. It’s absolutely extraordinary. “Reflections of a Sound” is a sweet prelude, in a way, to the album’s centerpiece, the breathtaking “These Thieving Birds” suite. In seven and a half minutes, the band and Parks take you to half a dozen different musical continents, never running out of inspiration. There’s an eight-note descending melody played on bells here that just puts a big dumb grin on my face each time.

Can the rest of the album compete with the suite? It can, and it does. If there’s a sweeter song this year than “Waiting All Day,” I’ll be surprised. “Waiting” is almost a 1950s ballad in 1970s clothes, with a chorus melody that does that thing that great music does to me – it makes me sing along, arms outstretched to the sky. “Mind Reader” is a noisy glam rock song, and nestled between a couple of pop masterworks, it’s a nice break. Johns does his best trash-rock vocals in the chorus (“Don’t know what you want, no I’m not a mind reader, baby!”) before the whole thing disintegrates and the doo-doo backing vocals take over. And is that a Theremin I hear? I think it is.

“Low” takes us into ELO territory, with its Jeff-Lynne-producing-George-Harrison guitar lines and electric piano. But man, that chorus – it’s pure pop beauty. “Insomnia” is even better, coming out of nowhere with its foreboding, angular lead lines and piano pounding. And again, here’s a chorus that just moves mountains.

The record ends way too soon with “All Across the World,” another collaboration with Van Dyke Parks. If you want to learn how to write a melody that is both musically complex and immediately memorable, study this song. It’s nigh-on perfect – there is no chorus, just an unbroken melody line from beginning to end, while the sounds shift, divide and recombine behind Johns’ voice. My only complaint is that it ends at all, but then, that’s what the repeat button is for.

I doubt this album will be a success in America. (It already hit #1 in the band’s home continent of Australia.) It will take a lot to erase the history the name Silverchair brings with it for music fans of a certain age group, and the band certainly isn’t playing in a style that’s burning up the charts. But for those who love well-crafted pop music, you owe it to yourselves to track this album down. I ended up paying an import price of $31 for it, and I don’t regret it for a second. (It’s expected to receive a U.S. release in July, if you can wait that long. I couldn’t.)

After the Dissociatives record, I expected the new Silverchair to be pretty good. I wasn’t expecting this. Young Modern is an absolute modern pop masterpiece, and if you think I’m gushing too much, you probably haven’t heard it. I’ll take the weird looks and derisive sneers to push and defend an album this damn good. I expect that I will be saying the following three sentences quite a lot before the end of the year:

Yes, it’s Silverchair. Yes, it’s brilliant. Go buy it.

Next week, Year Zero.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I am headed east for Easter, so it’s a really quick one this week. I was originally going to review Silverchair’s amazing Young Modern this time, but I was unable to secure an import copy, and I don’t want to write something based on nothing but MySpace streams. Still, I’ve gotta say this: having the actual CD in hand can only improve my opinion of this album, and I already think it’s the record of the year.

But yeah, I only have one CD to discuss today, and it’s the new Fountains of Wayne.

If I ever need reminding that the Grammy awards mean nothing whatsoever, all I have to do is remember that these Empire Staters won the Best New Artist trophy in 2004 on the back of their third album, Welcome Interstate Managers. The Fountains (songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood) struck gold with a silly hit single called “Stacy’s Mom,” a guilty-pleasure novelty tune that introduced the world to what fans of the band had known for more than half a decade.

At least, I hope it did, because what those fans know is that “Stacy’s Mom” is not representative of the band’s work, at all. It’s a great song, of course, with its Cars-like rhythms and cheeky lyrics, but the heart of the band could be heard elsewhere on Managers. Fountains of Wayne, more than just about any other band, is able to find the sadness and sweetness in modern life. Their songs are peppered with pop culture references, but rarely in an artificial way – when they mention Christopher Walken in “Hackensack,” for instance, it’s heartbreakingly perfect.

Welcome Interstate Managers made #3 on my top 10 list in 2003, despite four bum tracks at the end, which should tell you how much I love the opening three-fourths of the record. It took the band four years to craft the follow-up, Traffic and Weather, which was okay with me – the last thing I wanted was a rushed, cash-in collection of “Stacy’s Mom” clones. It’s no exaggeration to say that Traffic and Weather topped both my “most anticipated” and “most dreaded” lists for 2007.

The good news is, Traffic and Weather contains not one carbon copy of the band’s big hit. It’s a solid collection of 14 new songs that, on the surface, seems to continue the band’s winning streak. You have to dig a little deeper for the bad news, unfortunately – this album contains very few of the sad, beautiful moments that I love Fountains of Wayne for. If you’re in the market for quirky pop songs with clever lyrics and good storytelling, you’ll get that here. But if you’re looking for anything that approaches the emotional heights of “Valley Winter Song,” you’ll be disappointed.

That disappointment will be mild, though, considering the quality of most of these songs. Traffic opens with the single, “Someone to Love,” which is easily one of the best songs Schlesinger and Collingwood have written. It’s the story of Seth Shapiro and Beth McKenzie, two New Yorkers that seem destined to meet and fall in love… until the knockout punch of the third verse. It’s catchy, it’s hooky, it’s perfectly produced. It’s everything that a good Fountains of Wayne single should be.

The second track, “92 Subaru,” is even better. It’s a send-up of every anthem ever written about a car, with a pumping guitar riff and a superb chorus. (“You better make way ‘cause I’m coming through, in my late ’92 baby blue Subaru…”) “Yolanda Hayes” is a delight, all about meeting the love of your life through the window at the DMV. And the title song imagines two newscasters in love, with one assuring the other, “We belong together like traffic and weather…” That song’s a repetitive dance drone that will stick in your head, despite not being as immaculately crafted as most of the other songs.

And on it goes, Schlesinger and Collingwood spinning out one clever bon mot after another over classic pop melodies. “This Better Be Good” is the tale of a suspicious boyfriend waiting for an explanation from his cheating girl. “Revolving Dora” is a brief, bouncy character study full of nifty details. And the great “New Routine” follows several people as they decide to move to each other’s home towns, looking for fresh experiences.

But amidst all the witty wordplay, the genuine emotion that made Welcome Interstate Managers such an affecting piece of work seems to have been shunted to the side. There are a couple of lovely moments, most notably “Michael and Heather at the Baggage Claim,” a sweet song about a tired couple searching for their luggage after a long flight. Its final verse is so heartwarming (“Michael says, ‘Heather, have you had enough?’ Heather says, ‘Michael, you know that it’s you I love…’”) that I can almost forgive “Strapped for Cash,” the synth-driven drivel that follows.

But wait – the next track is “I-95,” another great ballad, and to these ears the highlight of the album. It details a long-distance romance, and the lengths one will go to maintain it: “It’s a nine-hour drive from me to you south on I-95, and I’ll do it ‘till the day that I die if I need to, just to see you…” This song, more than any other on Traffic and Weather, puts you in a place, introduces you to the people who live there, and makes you feel what they feel. In the verses, the singer describes in detail the items on sale in a roadside gift shop, and rather than an artificial list of cultural touchstones, it ends up as a terrific scene-setter. This is the kind of song Fountains of Wayne does better than any other band, period.

The rest of the album isn’t bad, but it aims low. “Planet of Weed” may be the most dismal thing to ever bear the Fountains name, but otherwise, Traffic and Weather is a perfectly fine collection of smirking pop songs. For the most part, it’s exactly what people who’ve never really investigated the band might assume they’re like.

But for those of us who know what they’re capable of, the album is a mild disappointment. It’s fun, it’s funny, it’s chock full of hooks, and it’ll make you chuckle more than once, but it won’t stay with you. In a year like this one, with so many great albums hitting so early, Traffic and Weather is the first letdown, but don’t let that stop you – think of it as a B-minus on a report card full of As. It’s an acceptable grade, if you ignore the heavy sigh of the teacher who knows her favored student can do better than this.

Next week, Silverchair and Marillion, hopefully.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

At the bottom of this week’s column, you’ll find my first quarter report for 2007. I’ve decided that since it was such a hit last year, I’m going to keep posting early drafts of my top 10 list as the year progresses. If nothing else, I find going back to the early ones pretty amusing, especially after the final list is written.

I’m mentioning it up front, though, because you won’t find my current favorite record of the year on that list. That’s because it’s not out yet – I heard it through the band’s MySpace site, and so can you. Anyone who was near a radio in the mid-‘90s remembers this band, and it’s kind of amazing to me that I’m about to recommend their disc above all others I’ve heard, but here it is.

The band is Silverchair.

That’s right, the erstwhile Pearl Jam tribute band. Believe it or not, they’ve grown up into pop geniuses, especially leader Daniel Johns, who proved his worth as a songwriter on 2005’s Dissociatives project. This guy is incredible – the melodies on Silverchair’s new album, Young Modern, go every direction except the one you’d expect, and every song’s a keeper.

I’ll put up a full review next week, along with my thoughts on the new Fountains of Wayne, but for now, check out Silverchair’s site. You can hear the whole record for free, right now. If you only remember Silverchair for their grunge-heavy hits from the days of flannel, prepare to be blown away.

Meanwhile, here are some other albums I heard this week, including another contender for the year-end list. I’ll save that one for last. We begin with a minstrel. Well, he’s not really a minstrel, but he plays one on TV…

* * * * *

Grant-Lee Phillips may be named after two opposing Civil War generals, but there’s nothing conflicted about his music. For more than a decade, he’s trafficked in confident, propulsive American pop, both on his own and with his old band, Grant Lee Buffalo. I’m not sure he even could sound uncertain – he has one of those voices that just convinces you to believe in whatever he’s singing.

Phillips has taken a couple of interesting detours lately. His last original album, 2004’s Virginia Creeper, wound down a knotty acoustic path, and last year, he gave us Nineteeneighties, a set of stripped-down covers of ‘80s tunes, like “Wave of Mutilation” and “So. Central Rain.” These were neat records, but I longed for a return to thicker production and meatier songwriting.

And here it is. Phillips has called his fifth solo album Strangelet, but there’s nothing strange about it. The album is 12 straightforward, strummed pop tunes with a bevy of beautiful embellishments. “Dream in Color,” for example, is a classic Grant-Lee tune, low-key and bright, with sweet strings and horns all over it. It’s like the second coming of “Hummingbirds,” and I love it.

Phillips maintains his twangy charm on songs like “Hidden Hand,” a mostly acoustic number that sounds like an old standard, but he reaches for the Beatles references he’s ignored for too long on tunes like “Chain Lightning.” His voice is in top form here, occasionally sounding like a more sedate Mike Peters.

As much as I enjoy his more upbeat tunes, it’s the slower, moodier ones here that really do it for me. “Same Blue Devils” is terrific, a languid electric piano piece augmented by a great string line. And “Killing a Dead Man” may be the highlight, a dusty blues with a weeping cello and some great rasping by Phillips.

The record turns more traditional by its end, with closer “So Much” offering a pleasant wave goodbye instead of a grand finale. And that’s the biggest problem I have with Strangelet – it doesn’t really present itself as anything significant. It’s just 12 pretty good songs, performed pretty well, and in a year like this, that’s not enough to bring out the superlatives.

But if you’ve ever liked Phillips before, you’ll like this. And if you only know him from his recurring role as the Stars Hollow minstrel on Gilmore Girls, well, this is a good place to start checking out his day job. Strangelet isn’t anything earth-shattering, but it is a good way to while away 48 minutes and not feel like you’ve wasted any of them.

* * * * *

The indie purists are gonna hate me for this comparison, but it’s true: Ted Leo is what Joe Jackson could have been, had he not discovered the piano and a taste for jazz.

Since the 1980s, Leo has been writing and playing melodic guitar-pop, the kind Jackson made on his first three albums. But where Jackson drifted off into some (admittedly fascinating) orchestral dimensions, Leo’s sound has rarely changed – he’s still making guitar-bass-drums rock music with a hummable pop twist.

Leo convened his current rhythm section, the Pharmacists, in 1999, leading them with his semi-snarky (and very Joe Jackson) voice and his knack for catchy guitar riffs. The band’s last album, 2004’s Shake the Sheets, was a virtual riff monster, a consistently enjoyable slab of punky, danceable rock ‘n’ roll. There are no frills on a Ted Leo album, nothing to distract you from the songs themselves, and on Shake the Sheets, the songs were marvelous.

The same is not always true of Living with the Living, Leo’s fifth album with the Pharmacists. It’s hard to tell what’s disappointing about this album, since it sounds almost exactly like the others. It just seems like the spark isn’t quite there this time.

Living isn’t quite a clone of the first four records. Leo has taken some neat detours here, most notably “A Bottle of Buckie,” a nifty folk song that sounds like the Goo Goo Dolls playing an Irish pub. (Buckie is the nickname for Buckfast Tonic Wine, produced in southwest England.)

That song is so sweet that it leaves you unprepared for the next track, “Bomb Repeat Bomb,” with its explosive guitars and Rage-like political shouting. It’s louder and more aggressive than anything Leo has ever done, and a definite highlight of this record. Also worth noting is “The Unwanted Things,” which incorporates a heavy reggae influence. (Again, like Joe Jackson…)

But elsewhere, it’s business as usual for Leo, and this time, business isn’t quite as good. “La Costa Brava” stretches its two-chord framework over an endless six minutes, a malady that afflicts much of the back half of the record. Ted Leo is very good at writing catchy three-minute tunes, but when he tries his hand at six-minute power ballads like “The Toro and the Toreador,” the results are decidedly mixed. And stretching a groovy ditty like closer “C.I.A.” to six and a half minutes is nearly criminal.

In the end, Living with the Living is something of a chore to sit all the way through. It’s more than an hour long, and its bonus EP, Mo’ Living, is more of the same, without much life to it. I want to like this more than I do, because Ted Leo has a way of making simple little rock songs sing, but here he just plods along, workmanlike, for a distressing percentage of the running time, and it’s a bit of a bore.

As with any no-frills artist, Ted Leo albums rise and fall on the songwriting. When he’s on here, as he is on delights like “Colleen” and “The World Stops Turning,” the melodies carry the day, but there aren’t enough tunes like these two to match the unbeatable Shake the Sheets. Leo didn’t do anything wrong here, per se, and his fans will still like this record, but there’s definitely something missing, and I hope he finds it before pressing the record button again.

* * * * *

Almost as an antidote to the same-old same-old of Ted Leo, here comes Duluth, Minnesota’s Low with an album quite unlike anything else they’ve done, or in fact anything else I’ve heard. It’s called Drums and Guns, and it’s one of the most harrowing albums of the year so far.

Low has always been about minimalism, but this album takes that aesthetic to a new level. Gone are the sonic embellishments of The Great Destroyer, and in their place is a creepy, skeletal, twitchy bed of nails, one that underscores the darkness of the anti-war poetry that nests in this album’s soul. Many of these songs sound like wailing prayers, framed by stuttering percussion and deep rivers of organ and bass.

Drums and Guns is unsettling, in the best way. It’s been a while since an album has shaken me as much as this one does. It opens with a feedback dirge called “Pretty People,” over which Alan Sparhawk chants, “All you pretty people, you’re all gonna die…” That leads into “Belarus,” which sets the sonic template – a repeated piano note, a thin layer of vocals, some pattering percussion, and the twin voices of Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, harmonizing in the right channel. The whole album is panned hard to one side or the other, usually drums in the left, vocals in the right.

The lyrics are just as unnerving, and often just as minimal. “Belarus” goes like this: “To my mouth, frozen shut, mother’s son, paper cup, pressing light, brighter sound, black and white, fading now…” Aside from eight repetitions of the title word, that’s it. But the effect is hypnotic. “My hand just kills and kills,” Sparhawk moans in “Breaker,” and it sends chills. The Eastern harmonies in “Sandinista” will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

There’s hardly any respite, no steady ground to stand on. “Breaker” is a handclap, a foot stomp, an organ, some feedback and vocals, and that’s all – it gives you nothing to hold onto, nowhere to hide. Drums and Guns is rarely an enjoyable listen, but it is a mesmerizing one. Just listen to the sparse crawl of “Dust on the Window” to hear just how beautiful ugliness can be.

Like a shaft of light breaking through, “Hatchet” provides a single moment of brightness on this dark, woodsy jaunt. Its riff, though spare, is almost funky, and the song revolves around the line, “Let’s bury the hatchet like the Beatles and the Stones.” It’s two minutes long, and it barely fits in here, but as a breather, it’s welcome. After the minute-long, mostly a cappella “Your Poison,” we’re right back in the darkness for the rest of the album.

“Take Your Time” is a masterpiece, its thudding piano nearly drowned in waves of ambience as Sparhawk tells the tale of a prayerful girl working on a mysterious stain. The words “take your time, sweet thing” have never sounded creepier. The final three songs almost sound like bonus tracks after this thing, even though they are no less shiver-inducing.

“In Silence” is almost the mission statement of the record, a song of hope that builds and builds to a powerful climax. “They thought the desert would divide us, they filled our hearts and hands with violence, it’s time to leave the fields behind us, in silence…” It’s gorgeous. The final two songs put lie to its redemptive tone, however – “Murderer” finds the singer offering his services to God, standing ready to do his “dirty work,” and “Violent Past” ends the record on a note of hopelessness. It’s all a cycle, violence begets violence, and it’s inescapable. Forever and ever, amen.

Drums and Guns covers a wide breadth, and all of that in 41 minutes. It is, sonically, the most fascinating album of the year thus far, and lyrically, a powerful statement in miniature about the planet we all share. This is an incredibly brave record – it sounds nothing like anything else out there right now, and very little like Low, either. But it is the only album I’ve heard thus far in 2007 that sounds birthed from necessity, like it simply had to be made, and made this way. It’s astonishing.

* * * * *

Which brings us to the 1st quarter report, and it’s no surprise that the Low album made its way onto the list at the 11th hour. The rest should be no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention over the past three months. It’s only the order of the entries that I struggled with.

The coolest thing? It’s only the end of March, and I would stack this list up against the final drafts from several of the previous years of this column. Best year ever. Here’s the list:

#10. Menomena, Friend and Foe.
#9. Joy Electric, The Otherly Opus.
#8. Bloc Party, A Weekend in the City.
#7. Loney, Dear, Loney, Noir.
#6. Low, Drums and Guns.
#5. Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank.
#4. Explosions in the Sky, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone.
#3. Aqualung, Memory Man.
#2. The Arcade Fire, Neon Bible.
#1. The Shins, Wincing the Night Away.

As I said earlier, this will change next week, when Silverchair comes out. Plus, I’m expecting new ones from Fountains of Wayne, Marillion, Jonatha Brooke, Nine Inch Nails, Bjork, Wilco, and numerous others that could land on this list before long. Check with me in three months and we’ll see where we are.

Next week, Young Modern and Traffic and Weather.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

And the deaths just keep on coming this year. I just heard that Drew Hayes, creator of Poison Elves, succumbed to a heart attack earlier this week.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Poison Elves was a comic book about a nasty, nasty elf named Lusiphur. Drew Hayes, a physically imposing and yet, by all accounts, incredibly nice man with a knack for detailed linework, wrote, drew and self-published Poison Elves for 20 issues. Then he hooked up with publisher Sirius Entertainment and wrote and drew 79 more.

It’s been years since we’ve seen a new Poison Elves issue, and more than once, I’d thought that stopping with #79 was a cruel joke – if you add the self-published issues, then Drew got to #99, just one shy of that magical one hundred. Rumors of ill health abounded for years, and Hayes spent some time in the hospital, but in his public statements, he remained upbeat. His heart attack came after a long bout with pneumonia, just as he had been discussing re-starting Poison Elves. He was only 37.

Even at its best, Poison Elves was crude, full of typos and sketchy backgrounds. But it also had a phenomenal energy, and was obviously the work of a committed creator. I met Drew a couple of times while working on Tapestry, and he had even agreed to do a cover for our ninth issue. We never got past issue six, so I never got to see what Drew would have done with our characters, unfortunately.

Sirius has kept the Poison Elves universe alive in recent years with a number of ancillary books, including Lost Tales, Ventures and Dominion. But without Drew Hayes, it just wasn’t the same. And now, it never will be again. So long, Drew. You’ll be missed.

* * * * *

On to happier things. If you need further proof that 2007 is the best year in a long time for new music, well, my plan today is to provide that proof. It hardly matters what kind of music you like, this year has slaked your thirst and then some. This week I have new records for people who dig indie rock, piano balladry, epic metal and electro-pop, and they’re all superb. If you read music reviews for the witty bitching about the state of the music industry, you may want to check somewhere else, because I’m all smiles right now.

We’ll start with the most anticipated, and most discussed, of our fantastic four: Modest Mouse. Truth be told, I’ve never been a huge fan of Isaac Brock and his crew, especially their early work. This is the kind of admission that can get my membership in the Snotty Music Reviewers Club revoked, but I can still, to this day, barely get through all of their ass-aching debut, This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. (In my house, it is alternately known as This is a Long Record for Someone with Nothing to Sing About.)

But like any good band, Modest Mouse has grown progressively better, often by giant steps. Follow-up The Lonesome Crowded West was much better, if still a little sparse and overly long, and breakthrough The Moon and Antarctica was even better than that. Then came 2004’s ubiquitous Good News for People who Love Bad News, the band’s biggest leap away from their roots and into fascinating new musical styles. Even if you don’t think you have, you’ve heard “Float On,” the massive hit from that album, and the new textures (coupled with the newfound popularity) incensed some fans and critics.

Naturally, it was my favorite Modest Mouse album. I say “was” because the new one, blessed with the extraordinary title We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, has supplanted it. To my mind, there’s no question that We Were Dead is the finest Modest Mouse record to date, and the first one I can unreservedly recommend.

As you’ve probably guessed, that means We Were Dead leaps even further away from their scrappy rock roots. If you liked Good News, well, good news: this album dives wholeheartedly into glorious, lush production, and expands the group’s songwriting further into the realms of epic pop. To these ears, We Were Dead sounds like the funeral party for the Lonesome Crowded West band, and though some will mourn, I think it’s an unqualified good thing.

I’m not sure how much of the new sound is attributable to Modest Mouse’s newest member, former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr. But I can tell you this – the band has never produced anything like the liquid guitar tones on “Fire it Up,” or like the shimmering melodies of “Little Motel.” The album squonks to life with “March Into the Sea,” an accordion-driven beast that finds Brock making Cookie Monster noises, but before long, “Dashboard” takes over, its dance beat and clipped six-string lines making it the perfect first single.

Most of the record vacillates between those two poles, Brock shouting over controlled mayhem one minute and delivering sweet singalongs the next. The astonishing “Parting of the Sensory” hits all the spots at once, starting with a slinky crawl and building to a grand breakdown, complete with tribal drums. “Florida” finds Brock doing a dynamite David Byrne impression over a pounding backdrop. “We’ve Got Everything” perfects the dance beat style, taking from new wave as much as from classic indie rock. And the great “Spitting Venom” takes its sea shanty framework and expands it into an eight-minute wonder, with shining clean guitars weaving in between subdued horn lines. It’s the first of the Mouse’s longer songs that I think earns the extra space.

Shins leader James Mercer guests on vocals on three songs, and wow, what a contribution he makes. He’s especially effective on the aforementioned “We’ve Got Everything,” providing high countermelodies and a great bit where he’s repeating “We’ve got, we’ve got” as the band shimmies and shakes behind him. I’m in a real Shins mood lately – their excellent Wincing the Night Away is still my favorite record of the year – so Mercer’s appearance here was a nice surprise.

But it’s Brock’s show, and he’s stepped up with the best songs of his career. We Were Dead is Modest Mouse’s most consistent album, and unlike the endless drone of Long Drive and other early works, this album pulls you along in its current. You won’t even notice its 62-minute running time. I can fully understand the bad reviews of this record from the more indie-minded publications – this is the most polished, shiny, squeaky-clean album the band has ever made. It’s also the best, and if, like me, you’ve been waiting for Brock to grab hold of his potential and realize it, then buckle up and take the dive, because he’s done it.

* * * * *

Matt Hales calls himself Aqualung. I don’t understand it, I don’t agree with it, and I think of Jethro Tull every time I hear someone say it. But there it is – somehow, Hales has picked the worst possible name for himself, considering what he does. (Okay, something like Fuckbutcher would probably be worse, but you know what I mean.)

The shame of the name is that Hales is a great piano-pop songwriter, in the modern Brit-pop tradition. He has the charm and melodic sense of Coldplay (and now that I think about it, I guess Coldplay is a stupid name, too) and the same love of atmosphere that Marillion brings to their work. (Marillion’s not that great of a name either. Maybe it’s just the Brits. They also gave us Mansun, Echobelly, Menswear… yeah, it’s the Brits.)

Sticking with the odd names, Hales has titled his just-released third album Memory Man, after an effects module that can create analog-sounding delay and reverb. That little box with knobs on it above his keyboard on the cover? That’s a Memory Man.

Americans have never really heard an Aqualung album. Hales’ first U.S. release was Strange and Beautiful, a compilation of the 12 best tracks from his first two albums, Aqualung and Still Life. Like most compilations, Strange had no dead spots, but since I’ve never heard the two albums it drew from, I wondered what Hales’ hit-to-miss ratio would be when delivering 11 new songs all at once. As it turns out, it’s pretty damn good – Memory Man is pretty much extraordinary from the first note.

The first thing you’ll notice about this new album is how sonically rich it is. Opener “Cinderella” takes its cues from Radiohead (by which I mean good, early period Radiohead, not later period, self-indulgent ass party Radiohead), throwing in a brass section and, in one breathtaking section, a choir. It’s enormous, and yet still delicate, like the best of Hales’ work. First single “Pressure Suit” is superb – what could have been a simple, bare ballad becomes a masterpiece thanks to some great production, and Hales’ falsetto carries the melody beautifully.

“Something to Believe In” is as close as Hales comes to rocking, with its insistent beat and sharp chorus. But most of Memory Man is given over to fragile, graceful ballads, like the grand “Glimmer” and the gentle, almost creepy “The Lake.” Hales takes on a soulful tone with “Rolls So Deep,” backed by a gospel choir. Two songs later, he’s defying gravity on “Black Hole,” a thick, oscillating number that revolves around the line “If love is not the answer, then maybe I misunderstood the question…”

Like Modest Mouse, Aqualung includes a guest vocalist – Paul Buchanan of the Blue Nile sings on “Garden of Love,” which could easily be a Blue Nile song. Like his special guest, Hales writes sweet little epics that take time to sink in, and “Garden of Love” is perhaps the least immediate of these tunes. But give it a few listens, and its beauty becomes undeniable, especially when Buchanan comes in over Hales’ rolling piano chords, which build to a massive climax. It’s a great little moment.

Memory Man concludes with perhaps its most affecting song, “Broken Bones.” Played with just piano and voice, it is a plaintive plea for grace. Its first half sounds like it was recorded through an old radio system, far away and doused in static, with occasional noisy breaks as the signal cuts out. Before long, though, Hales is right next to you, playing and singing his heart out on a piano that seems to drop out of tune here and there, adding to the effect. “This world is burning and I’m terrified,” he sings. “I need a little more time with you.”

Against the odds, Memory Man is actually a better album than Strange and Beautiful, with a better batting average. Hales has turned in his finest work here, and if your tastes range towards the peaceful and heartbreaking, I’d recommend picking this up. It takes a lot to get me to look past a name like Aqualung, but Hales is a terrific songwriter and record maker. Don’t let a lousy sobriquet keep you away from his work.

* * * * *

Pretty high on the list of Bands People Can’t Believe I Like is Type O Negative.

How to explain what I love about them? Type O is often pegged as a Black Sabbath tribute band, but this is only partly true. The quartet does take their slow-as-death crawl and riff-heavy style from Sabbath, but they also take liberally from the Beatles, from gothic music, from hardcore, and from a hundred other sources. When they mix all this up with fantastic production and an ever-present sense of black humor, the result is usually both musically fascinating and completely enjoyable.

No question, Type O is a dark, dark band, at least on the surface. Listen more closely, though, and you’ll realize that these are the guys who crack up at funerals, who laugh at death and despair because it’s better than succumbing to it. They first drew national attention with “Black #1,” a song that was somehow embraced by the goth-music community, despite its taking the piss out of the whole goth scene. Type O records deal with drug abuse, misery, pain and, of course, death – lots and lots of death – but they do so with a whistling-past-the-graveyard kind of wryness that I find inexplicably appealing.

The band’s seventh album has a very Type O title, Dead Again, and a very Type O cover picture, an all-green shot of Russian mystic Gregori Rasputin, who was assassinated in 1916. The CD jacket folds out into a cross, and the four band members are not pictured, though they are depicted as skeletons in coffins. They’re in on this joke, folks – the Type O boys will never let you forget they’re just a bunch of goofballs from Brooklyn.

But one thing that’s never a joke is the quality of the band’s music. On the heels of the quirky, shorter pop songs of Life is Killing Me, Dead Again features 10 songs over 77 minutes, and hails the return of the band’s epic side. It also includes some of the heaviest, fastest material the band has released since its debut back in 1991. Don’t be fooled by the crawling, sludgy intro to the title track – one minute in, Johnny Kelly’s drums explode with fury, and bassist/singer/giant freaking man Peter Steele is shouting at himself, condemning his own drug problem: “First to admit I’m a doomed drug addict, and I always will be…”

From there, the band launches into some of its finest longer songs. “Tripping a Blind Man” takes its Sabbath core and tears it apart, with delirious harmonies all over the chorus. “The Profit of Doom” (love that title) snakes its way through a dozen movements and styles, and “September Sun” starts off with a cheesy piano part (a la “Changes” on Black Sabbath Vol. 4), but soon morphs into a trademark Type O heavy ballad, with slow chords and winding, oddly lovely vocals.

The album does include a few shorter corkers as well, including “Halloween in Heaven,” a stomper about dead musicians, and “Some Stupid Tomorrow,” the closest the band has come to real hardcore since maybe “Kill All the White People.” But the heart of the record is in its masterful longer tracks. The longest of them is “These Three Things,” a song that begins with a verse condemning abortion, the clearest sign of Steele’s recently regained Catholic faith. The song itself is a stunner, 14 minutes of confident, thick, powerful Type O goodness. (Listen for the “Hey Jude” quote right around minute 12, just where you’d least expect it.)

I suppose I can’t really explain why I love Type O Negative. Some of it is Steele’s lower-than-low voice, complete with self-mocking rolls on the Rs, but some of it is the great production by keyboardist Josh Silver, and some of it is just the pure musicianship of the quartet. Type O records are silly, yet deadly serious at the same time – they’re no joke, but every once in a while, amidst all the heavy riffing and dark imagery, they’ll wink at you.

Dead Again is a classic Type O record – ironically, the band sounds more alive here than on their past couple of albums, and they’ve turned in one of their best sets. Everything that makes this band special is here, infused with some of their most energetic and incendiary playing in a long time. Every Type O album is rumored to be the final Type O album, but if they were, in fact, to go out with this one, it would be a great way to finish up. For newbies, it’s also a great place to start.

* * * * *

Which brings us to Joy Electric. I’ve gone on at length before about Ronnie Martin’s brainchild and what makes it special, so I’ll summarize here – Martin writes dazzling pop songs, tunes that would be hits if he played them with an electric guitar, and then records them using nothing but analog synthesizers. The result is like nothing else. It’s quirky, gurgling and initially quite odd, but it’s also unfailingly melodic, well-crafted and brilliant.

If you don’t like synthesizers, you’ll probably listen to the Joy E discography (10 albums, eight EPs and one box set, and counting) and hear sameness. It takes a while to break into Martin’s pocket universe, but once you’re there, you can hear the obvious, amazing progression his work has undergone. In recent years, he’s perfected his pop-punk-synth hybrid (2004’s Hello, Mannequin) and set out into uncharted waters with last year’s percussive, creepy The Ministry of Archers. He’s working exclusively with Moog synths now, and his range of sound has opened up considerably.

Album 10 is called The Otherly Opus, and it’s one of the most daring evolutions Martin has attempted. Opus is a vocal album – the instrumentation is almost minimal, with little of the swirling synth lines that characterized some of his earlier work. In their place is layer upon layer of stacked, harmonized vocals, sometimes a dozen or more tracks worth, filling in the spaces and carrying the melodies. Many songs begin with a capella sections, something Martin’s never done before.

Amazingly, it works. I say amazingly because vocals have always been Martin’s weakest point. It took him more than 10 years of albums and live shows to get his voice in the shape it’s in now – listen to Melody and Robot Rock to hear how weak it used to be. His vocals still have a thin, breathy quality, but he puts surprising force behind them, and it’s especially strong when he overdubs them into a near-choir. Even his solo vocal turn in “Write Your Last Paragraph” here finds his voice in good shape – we turned our backs for a second and he’s become a singer on us.

Just listen to the awesome vocal melodies on “The Memory of Alpha,” the original title track to this album. He repeats “memory” several times, adding harmonies, until the chorus explodes with counterpoints and “ah-ah” bits. It’s great stuff. I reviewed “Red Will Dye These Snows of Silver” before, when it was released as the single, but man, those “oh-oh” sections are awesome. “Ponderance Need Not Know” is probably my favorite here, largely due to the sweet vocal lines, and Martin’s voice simply shines on the closing melancholy ballad “A Glass to Count All the Hours.”

With the spotlight on the vocals, naturally the lyrics are in focus more than ever, and Martin has stepped up with his trademark cryptic poetry. Dig this from “Ponderance Need Not Know”: “All the icicles from the house that hanged us, I realize they still melt on us, you decline to reach for the apparatus, I cry as they carry you out…” His words, as always, reward careful readings, but they’re never as direct and accessible as his melodies.

Despite that, my only complaint with The Otherly Opus is the same one I have with virtually every project from Ronnie and Jason (Starflyer 59) Martin – it’s too short. This album is 32 minutes, and most of the songs hover around the three-minute mark. Martin does stretch out once here, on the five-minute “The Ushering In of the Magical Era,” and it’s a highlight – he repeats one of his best vocal arrangements, building it into a near-remix by the end before dropping everything else out. It’s just great.

I don’t know if I want Martin to continue down this vocal-driven path or not. On the one hand, The Otherly Opus is superb, one of Joy E’s finest releases, and I wouldn’t mind hearing more like it. But on the other, Ronnie Martin has proven himself to be a restless artist, always looking for new directions and new angles, and I’m excited to hear what he comes up with next. He’s said that his 11th album could be out by the end of the year, and whatever style he chooses, he’ll remain one of the most visionary performers we have, continuing to author a catalog driven by no outside trends or market forces. Ronnie Martin’s Joy Electric is one of a kind, and The Otherly Opus is another simply fantastic album.

* * * * *

Next week, Grant Lee Phillips, and my first quarter report. Did I mention it’s been an amazing year so far?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I was going to do this anyway.

Last week, I had just barely heard about the death of Brad Delp, lead singer of Boston, before finishing and posting my column. I wrote a perfunctory farewell nestled at the end of last week’s missive, but it felt rushed, and I knew I wanted to do more.

Like I said, I was going to do this anyway, but then the news broke that Delp’s death had been a suicide. Apparently, the man had set up a pair of charcoal grills in his house, and killed himself with their fumes. He left a series of notes, calling himself a “lonely soul” and saying he had “lost his desire to live.” And the same conflicted mess of feelings I get whenever someone commits suicide washed over me, mostly anger and sadness in equal measure.

So now it’s become even more important to me to do this, to celebrate Delp’s work and its impact on me as a young man. Longtime readers will know that I was a teenage metalhead, with long-ish hair and a deep respect for the ouvre of Megadeth. But what you may not know is that one of the first real pop albums I heard and fell in love with was Boston’s 1986 opus, Third Stage.

Boston gets a lot of shit. They’re slammed routinely as a corporate rock band, purveyors of a certain slick sound that infected AOR radio in the wake of their hit songs. I said this last week, but seriously – there never was a less corporate rock band than Boston, and the stack of lawsuits filed by pissed-off record company execs should prove it. In their heyday, they wrote glossy rock songs and ballads with soaring choruses, but they didn’t do it in that Night Ranger way. Tom Scholz and Brad Delp were artists, crafting a signature sound, and it’s not their fault that a hundred godawful bands copied that sound.

Boston seemed to be well on their way to a successful mainstream rock career in 1978. Their second album, Don’t Look Back, was another smash, including such soon-to-be radio staples as “Feelin’ Satisfied” and “It’s Easy.” These joined the mega-hits from their self-titled 1976 debut, including the great “Long Time” (preceded, always, by the dazzling organ instrumental “Foreplay”), “Peace of Mind” and the seemingly ubiquitous “More Than a Feeling.” These are songs that end up on every one of those Sounds of the ‘70s collections, and it’s easy to forget that the first two Boston discs are really great little records.

Naturally, the record company (Epic) was hoping that Boston would follow the same formula of success that most of their artists had – make a new record every two years, one that sounds just like the first two, and tour the hell out of them, raking in the cash. Instead, Tom Scholz and Brad Delp locked themselves in their home studio for six years, crafting Third Stage.

Six years. Seriously. And they worked on it the whole time, and you can tell.

I was 12 in 1986, although I didn’t hear Third Stage until a couple of years later. But when I did, it struck me as heartfelt and beautiful – I didn’t know a rock ‘n’ roll cliché back then even when it was staring me in the face, and Third Stage is full of them, but the music and Brad Delp’s vocal delivery are all feeling. Some accuse Boston of over-cooking their music, processing out all the emotion, but those people obviously have never heard Third Stage as a wide-eyed 14-year-old.

The story behind the album certainly appealed to my nerdy nature. Third Stage was recorded between 1980 and 1985, but the band used vintage equipment – 1970s guitars, amplifiers and microphones, and no synthesizers. To get the sound he wanted, Scholz invented a device called a Rockman, a precursor to the more modern effects pedals, which could make his guitar sound like ringing chimes, violins and thunderstorms.

The fact that Third Stage is a concept album also appealed to teenage me. Granted, it’s not a complex novel of staggering proportions, but it does have a narrative thread. It uses space travel as a metaphor for the beginnings and endings of relationships (the “third stage” of those old Apollo flights was “separation”), and strings together a suite of songs on the second side about learning to take responsibility for yourself before you can love someone else. Sure, it’s not The Wall or anything, but it is unquestionably a cohesive, story-driven album, meant to be heard start to finish.

After hearing of Delp’s death last week, I pulled Third Stage out and listened to it again, for the first time in years. I came away with two impressions. First, this album desperately needs remastering – the 1980s CD quality is poor when compared with anything coming out now, and especially when compared with the new versions of the first two Boston albums, released last year.

Second, this is an amazing album. Start to finish, top to bottom, one of the finest pop-rock records ever made.

I may not be the most objective source for a statement like that. I know every note and every word by heart, of course, but it surprised even me how easily I slipped back into 14-year-old me while listening to Third Stage. There’s just something unidentifiable about the sound – the guitar tones, the incredible vocal layering, the organically produced effects. It’s the soundtrack to a very particular time in my life.

The album opens with its hit song, “Amanda,” a gentle invitation of sorts. “Amanda” is, to my ears, the weakest song here, even though it runs through some gorgeous chiming guitar parts and features an ascending bridge that knocks me out. But the record really kicks off with “We’re Ready,” a mid-tempo stage-setter with some absolutely monolithic lead guitar sections. There are solos on Third Stage, but the majority of the lead work on the album consists of these meticulously crafted melodic runs, often in harmony with each other. It’s a sound that very few guitarists do as well as Tom Scholz.

And then there’s Delp, who sings his heart out on “We’re Ready.” The harmonies on “sympathize a change of seasons” send chills every time, and he pulls out the stops for the high, clear “come on” that leads into the guitar sections. As good as he was on the first couple of Boston albums, Third Stage is Delp’s showcase, especially slower songs like “My Destination” and “To Be a Man.”

The next song, however, doesn’t have Delp on it at all. It’s “The Launch,” a refinement and explosion of the spacefaring instrumental “The Journey” on Don’t Look Back. I can’t even tell you how amazing I think this tune is. It starts with barely audible organ, then lifts off with a guitar-piano sound that has to be heard to be believed. Scholz’ lead guitar tone here is practically indestructible, and just when it’s at its peak, the Rockman-powered thrusters kick in, simulating a rocket ride. It’s awesome.

Slight personal digression – when I was in high school, my friend Mike Ferrier and I made a pair of really bad movies about these two space cadets who save their solar system, then get trapped on Earth. Near the end of the second film, our two heroes (named Sourcil and Nez) find a spaceship and make it fly, enabling them to get back home. The scene was accomplished with state-of-the-art digital technology (a Commodore Amiga, I believe), and the music I chose to accompany it was, of course, “The Launch.”

On the album, that song leads directly into “Cool the Engines,” (see the theme taking shape?) the most rocking track here. “Engines” has a surprisingly live band feel to it, considering the obvious work that went into making it sound just right. Delp whips out his ‘70s rock voice here, holding “cool it doooooown” for a ridiculously long time, and harmonizing with himself on the backing vocals. For all its bluster, though, this is the song that signals a sea change in the album – it’s all been rising action to this point, and we’re about to settle into orbit, as the gentler coda suggests.

“My Destination” is beautiful. It’s essentially a reprise of the melody of “Amanda,” played on a real live Wurlitzer electric piano, with some of Delp’s finest vocals in the second half. The lyrics are no giant leap forward for mankind, but they point to the self-realization themes of the second half: “It’s not where you can be, it’s what you can see that takes you there, your destination is here inside…”

The second half of the album traces the waking epiphanies of its hero and the sad dissolution of the relationship depicted on side one. We start with “A New World,” almost a cousin to “The Launch,” complete with a string section that sounds real, but isn’t – it’s guitars through the Rockman. “To Be a Man” may be the loveliest Boston song, and is certainly the fullest realization here of Scholz’ vision. It’s a simple piano piece that is lifted into the stratosphere by some shimmering lead guitar melodies, and Delp in three-to-five-part harmony. You just have to hear Delp sing “it’s not what you are, it’s what you can feel” over Scholz’ soaring guitars.

It also contains my favorite moment on a record full of little favorite moments. The first time Delp ends a verse with the line “What does it take to be a man,” it’s in full choral splendor, overdubbed what sounds like half a dozen times. You’d expect the same the second time, especially since the music builds and builds through the second verse, but no – it’s a lone voice, full of emotion, that delivers the line. The lyrics then answer the question: “The will to give and not receive, the strength to say what you believe, the heart to feel what others feel inside, to see what they can see…”

“I Think I Like It” turns the focus outward, as “changes really open your eyes” to the state of the world. It’s a rewrite of an old John English song, apparently, but I’ve never sought out the original – the Boston version is enough for me. Perhaps the most standard rock song on the album, “I Think I Like It” includes some absolutely killer leads from Scholz and original Boston guitarist Gary Pihl. Somehow, even when whipping out the solos, Scholz sounds like he’s playing on another planet, so unearthly is his tone.

Then there’s the epic, “Can’tcha Say/Still in Love.” The back cover will tell you this is 7:14, but don’t believe it – it’s a trim 5:13, even though it runs through half a dozen moods. It opens with the great Brad Delp overdubbed into a celestial choir, pleading, “Can’tcha say you believe in me, can’tcha see what you mean to me,” before the lovely piano comes in. “Every night I think of you, you’re on my mind,” Delp sings sweetly, and as the music builds up, it becomes clear that this is the song of loss, the third stage.

When the “Layla”-esque guitar lines come in, it’s practically transcendent. The guitars snake their way through the perfect pop-rock chorus, leading back into the perfect pop-rock verse. And when that chorus loops around again, and Delp sings “I still love you,” the whole mood changes. “Still in Love” is an interlude, with sad-sounding clean guitar lines, little bursts of lead six-string, and Brad Delp in full breakdown mode. “Can’t you see I need you, baby,” he wails, as if no one had ever sung those lines before. And then it builds back up, crashing into perfect pop utopia once again.

And finally, there is “Hollyann,” the closer, bookending the album with another first-name song. This one is a look back on a happier time, made sadder by its placement on the album after “Can’tcha Say.” The chorus of “Hollyann” even brings its predecessor to mind, with another soaring lead line from Scholz, and some thunderous drumming. And seriously, just listen to Brad Delp belt out this song: “We made the dark into light, we saw the wrong from the right, we were for life and we would never concede it…” The end is, if anything, too abrupt – Third Stage is a tight 36 minutes, which means the band recorded an average of six minutes each year they were working on it, and it seems simultaneously too short and just the right length.

I could go on and on. Third Stage took up residence in my heart 18 years ago, and it’s still there. I bristle whenever anyone calls Boston soulless, or cold, or faceless. They are none of those things, and even though the lyrics are plain and simple, Third Stage has always struck me as a very emotional record. Parts of it are practically dripping with feeling, and the band uses their thick and layered production to enhance those qualities, not mask them. Later-period Boston sounds made by computers in places, but Third Stage is an almost achingly human piece of work.

Perhaps I’m lending it those qualities, since the album meant so much to me as a teen, and perhaps, after reading this long and effusive tribute, you’ll press play and just hear a bunch of mainstream rock songs and ballads. I don’t know. But to me, Third Stage will always be one of my favorite records. In my younger days, I called it the best rock record ever made, and even now, in my 30s, I can listen to it and remember why I once felt that way.

I have no idea what drove Brad Delp to do what he did. I actually know very little about the man. But the most important thing I know about him is this: 21 years ago, he and his band put out an album that changed and brightened my life, and I’m grateful for that. So long, Brad. Hope you reach your destination, and thanks for Third Stage.

Next week, Modest Mouse, Type O Negative, Aqualung, and Joy Electric. This being 2007, the best year ever, it should be no surprise that they’re all terrific albums.

See you in line Tuesday morning.