So this is the new year, and I don’t feel any different…

Actually, that’s not true. I had a good, if hectic, Christmas break – met some new people, connected with some old friends, and got more DVDs than I have time to watch. I slipped back into the work routine this week, writing about disputed old hospitals and public housing and Christian horror films. (I love my job – it’s never boring.) And I feel refreshed, ready to take on 2007.

On the musical front, my selection of Joanna Newsom’s Ys as the best record of 2006 has brought on the diverse reactions I kind of expected. I have an annual tradition of listening to the album of the year, in full, with my friend Mike before midnight mass each Christmas Eve, and he was so enraptured with Newsom’s songs and voice that he swears he’s going to buy the album. Mike owns about 12 CDs all together, so this is a big deal for him.

On the other hand, my friend Jeff is convinced I’m putting everybody on. He compared Newsom’s work to music from a Tim Burton movie, written by Jack Black and sung by Bjork. Which, to me, sounds really appealing, but for Jeff is like setting his eardrums on fire. He’s certain that I’ve lost my mind, or else I’m punking the whole of my readership, and all of my friends and co-workers. Such is the divisive nature of Newsom’s music.

For the record, I’m still happy with my choice, though I understand the objections, and I get why some won’t take to Newsom. It’s just that every time I listen to this album, I get wrapped up in it again. It weaves a spell, and I’m caught in it.

Good thing, too, because I’m going to need something to get me through the winter doldrums. January is traditionally the most barren month for new releases, and while 2007’s going to be a little better on that score – I’m actually excited about the eight or so new ones hitting by the end of the month – it’s still going to be a tough 30 days for this music junkie. And February, if you can believe it, looks like it’ll be even worse.

I do have contingency plans for this column – I’m still working on the Frank Zappa Buyer’s Guide, which I hope to have ready in two weeks or so, and there were a couple of stragglers from December that impressed me enough to warrant their own reviews. But this week, I think I’ll go easy on myself. I was originally going to write up a bitch session about Pitchfork and their picks for the best of the year (Liars? The Knife? Ghostface Killah? WTF? Although they shared the Joanna Newsom love, and that Hold Steady album is pretty good…), but I’m not feeling that negative today.

Instead, I thought I’d springboard off of the final few paragraphs of last week’s column, and give you a more in-depth glimpse at some of the things I’m looking forward to this year. Of course, I have no idea of the shape of the year yet, and no doubt the best stuff has yet to be announced, or in some cases even recorded. But as of the first week of January, here are some coming attractions that have me jazzed for 2007:

The Shins – Wincing the Night Away
We don’t waste any time getting right to the first major release of the year, the third record from the Shins. Forget all that indie hype, the Shins are just a classic pop band trafficking in superb melodies and inescapable sweetness. I honestly think that “Girl Inform Me,” off of their 2001 debut Oh, Inverted World, is one of the finest pop songs of the past 10 years. Their two albums thus far have been spotty, but the bright spots have been absolutely brilliant. “Caring is Creepy.” “Mine’s Not a High Horse.” “New Slang.” “Saint Simon.” Need I say more? The first single from Wincing is called “Phantom Limb,” and it easily joins the aforementioned tracks in the modern pop hall of fame. Let’s hope the Shins have finally made that cohesive, knockout album they’ve been threatening. It’s out January 23.

Pain of Salvation – Scarsick
This one’s likely going to be a lot less sunny, if the title’s any indication. I’m excited for this because it’s the follow-up to Be, one of the strangest and most rewarding albums of the Aughts so far. Be was a thesis on God and man, and on the interconnectivity of all things, but even beyond the cerebral exercises, it was an amazing musical statement, taking on three dozen different kinds of music and melding them into a cohesive wonder. It took a few listens, but Be quickly revealed itself as a masterpiece. What I’ve heard of Scarsick incorporates an unfortunate rap-rock influence, but I’m still hopeful. That’s out January 30.

The Brothers Martin
Nearly two decades after the breakup of their last joint band, Dance House Children, Ronnie and Jason Martin have collaborated on another project. Who are Ronnie and Jason Martin? Well, Ronnie is the quirky genius behind Joy Electric – he writes spunky, melodic tunes and performs them on nothing but analog synthesizers. And Jason is the primary force driving the enduring guitar-pop dynamo that is Starflyer 59. Both Martins know their way around a pop song, and what I’ve heard of The Brothers Martin has been a perfect marriage of their styles. Here, take a listen to “Communication.” That’s out on the 23rd.

I may as well note here that Ronnie has a busy year ahead of him. Already winging its way to me is Workmanship, Joy Electric’s new EP, and Martin promises another one before the release of The Otherly Opus/Memory of Alpha, his reportedly amazing new full-length, on March 20. I’ve also heard something about a Joy E live album that might be out this year, too. Ronnie Martin’s music is unlike anyone else’s, and I’m always excited to get another glimpse at the world through his eyes.

Explosions in the Sky – All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
Pelican – City of Echoes
I love complex, dreamy instrumental music – see my rave of the new Hammock album – and these two bands scratch that itch nicely. Chicago’s Pelican is an instrumental metal band, playing mostly slow, heavy, intricate music that crushes all in its path. Oddly, though, their stuff is mesmerizing, almost ambient in its thunderous power. Explosions in the Sky are very different, preferring to work with clean guitar lines and atmosphere, and their work is surprisingly emotional and vast. All of a Sudden is out February 20, and City of Echoes will hit on May 22.

Type O Negative – Dead Again
Since we’re talking about slow, deep and hard music, the latest from Type O will be out on March 13. People are often surprised to find out how much I love Type O, and I’m not sure why – they have a striking, individual vision, they sound like no one else, and they write some great songs. Some write them off as a goth-metal band, but they’re so much more, mostly because they never let you forget that at heart, they’re just four jerks from Brooklyn. Their stuff is both funny and surprisingly moving. The new one, with that typically Type O title, is 10 songs in 77 minutes, and seems like it will be a return to the classic, doom-laden sound of old.

Enuff Znuff – Lost in Vegas
Speaking of bands people can’t believe I like, there’s EZN, one of the most enduring bands to come out of the ‘80s. Writing off EZN because of their hair-metal past is a huge mistake – few power pop bands have produced so many great, hummable songs over the past 15 years. EZN is like Cheap Trick could have been if they’d remained fantastic, and the tentatively titled Lost in Vegas will be their 13th record. The last one, ?, was a bit of a letdown after a string of winners, so I’m hoping they return to form here. There’s no release date yet, but I’ll be on the lookout.

Fountains of Wayne – Traffic and Weather
Is there a better pop band than Fountains of Wayne? They have equals, but few can surpass them for wit, melody and sheer fun. Their last album, Welcome Interstate Managers, hit #3 on my list for 2003, and would have been higher if not for some superfluous songs at the end. Tracks 1-12 are perfect, from the guitar-driven joy of “Bright Future in Sales” to the wispy sadness of “Hackensack” and “Valley Winter Song,” to the loungy fun of “Halley’s Waitress.” If Traffic and Weather can measure up, count on its inclusion in the 2007 top 10 list. It’s out on April 3.

Marillion – Somewhere Else
You knew I’d have to mention this, currently the farthest point out on my ’07 musical map. Marillion is one of my favorite bands, technically amazing and yet unfailingly emotional, and their 14th album is out on April 9 in the U.K. The good news is that the sessions also produced their 15th album, out in May of 2008, reportedly. Somewhere Else sounds like it will be more straightforward than 2003’s masterpiece, Marbles, and we’ll see when the first single, the distressingly titled “See It Like a Baby,” hits in March. Of everything here, this is the one I am most excited to hear.

There are others, of course, including records by Of Montreal, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Bloc Party, the Magic Numbers, Bright Eyes, Lovedrug, Neal Morse, Ted Leo, the Arcade Fire, Low and Grant Lee Phillips on the horizon. It’s shaping up to be a pretty good year, all things considered, and I’m looking forward to diving in. Thanks for coming along for the ride. And please let me know if I missed anything worth checking out.

Next week, a few albums that snuck out while I wasn’t looking last month. And the week after that, hopefully, a whole bunch of Zappa.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This is Fifty Second Week.

But first, a small update, for those interested in my work-in-progress, the Frank Zappa Buyer’s Guide. If you recall, I’ve been waiting for the latest Zappa Family product to show up at my door, that being the four-CD audio documentary MOFO, or Making of Freak Out. And also, if you recall, I wrote a bitchy diatribe aimed at the Zappa family, taking them to task for releasing the two-CD version first, promising that it had extra material not on the four-CD set, and then refusing to let us pre-orderers know the track list of the four-CD set we’d already bought.

This is bad business, I think, but my anger has subsided – the four-CD MOFO did indeed show up in my mailbox this past week, and it’s a wonder. The package is this fold-out origami creation, in a way, made out of the same hard plastic as those old Trapper Keepers. It’s gorgeous, even though it took me about half an hour to get two of the CDs off the hard plastic hubs. The book is beautiful, and the whole presentation is much better than I expected it would be.

But yes, there are seven (count them, seven!) tracks on the two-CD MOFO that are not on the four-CD MOFO, despite the fact that each of the four discs clocks in at around an hour, and there was plenty of room to include everything. I’m not sure why the Zappas decided to do this, but the most obvious reason seems to be money – they can milk the hardcore collectors for $70 for the big MOFO, and another $30 for the little MOFO, even though they share about 90 minutes of the same material.

This is incredibly annoying, and honestly, the wrong way to treat Frank’s fans. The whole MOFO project was mishandled, which is a shame, because the product is excellent. Gail Zappa says that this is the first in a series, and the obvious care she took in arranging and designing this set bodes well for future volumes. But I wonder if anyone will pre-order them, after the lack of consideration and professionalism the Zappas showed the fans this time.

Seriously, Zappas, next time, just do a couple of simple things – release a track list, and if you must make a deluxe version and a standard version, put everything you have on the deluxe version, so the collectors don’t have to shell out twice. That’s it. A steady flow of information and some simple courtesy to the fans will get you everywhere.

Now that MOFO is here, expect that Zappa guide sometime in January. But for now, as I said, this is Fifty Second Week.

This is a new tradition here at tm3am, one I started in 2005. At the end of every year, I find myself with this towering stack of unreviewed albums, ones that, for whatever reason, I just didn’t get to during the course of 12 months. Fifty Second Week is a way to burn through that stack, giving short reviews of each CD, so that I don’t leave anything worth talking about out of the column. Basically, I give myself 50 seconds to write a short review. It’s an experiment in brevity, something I’m really not good at, and I’ve promised myself that wherever I am in my review – mid-sentence, mid-word, whatever – when the timer runs down, that’s where I stop.

Fifty Second Week was a hit last year, and a lot of fun to write. I have 45 albums to get to this year, which, if I do it right, should take about an hour. So here we go. Fifty Second Week starts… now.

* * * * *

Trey Anastasio, Bar 17.
I disliked Trey’s Shine album for being too glossy, and Bar 17 rectifies that, but is a bit too sloppy and unkempt this time. I know, I know, I’m never happy, but this is kind of a mess with a few really good tunes thrown in.

Trey Anastasio, 18 Steps.
If you ordered Bar 17 off of Trey’s website, you got this EP free. It’s stuff from the same sessions, so it sounds like Bar 17, but it seems to have more of a focus than the full album does. In some ways, I like this better, and I’m glad I made the online purchase so I could have it.

Annuals, Be He Me.
I picked this up after a good review, and it’s not bad at all. It’s intricately produced acoustic pop, and even though the songs aren’t particularly memorable, the sound is nice. I don’t know that I will buy another Annuals album, but this one isn’t a blight on my collection or anything.

Army of Anyone.
This is Richard Patrick from Filter and the DeLeo brothers from Stone Temple Pilots, and you can tell. But it’s also one of the crunchiest, most memorable rock records of the year, even if it’s a little cliched at times. Patrick has a really cool voice, though. This is recommended.

Bright Eyes, Noise Floor.
Immensely appealing rarities collection from Conor Oberst, taken from every stage of his career. Oddly, I don’t remember many of the songs, except one really mean one about eating for you or something, but I do remember listening to this and liking it. Oberst is dreadfully overrated, but take him for what he is and he’s not a…

Shawn Colvin, These Four Walls.
I could swear that I heard this, but just like her last one, Whole New You, I don’t remember a damn thing about this album. I recall that it was the same sweet acoustic pop that Colvin always delivers, but the spark she used to have seems absent. Or maybe it’s just me.

Danielson, Ships.
This is an awesome bit of craziness from Daniel Smith, sounding like the most bizarre carnival you’ve ever seen. The best song is called “Did I Step on Your Trumpet,” which should tell you all you need to know. This is Smith’s most advanced and insane album ever.

Glenn Danzig, Black Aria II.
BWA-HA-HA-HA! No, hang on, I mean… BWA-HA-HA-HA-SNORT! Wait, what? I paid full price for this? Dammit!

The Dears, Gang of Losers.
Much more of a straight rock record than No Cities Left, this one is compact and distorted, but no less dramatic. “Whites Only Party” is probably my favorite Dears song right now.

Dredg, Live at the Fillmore.
Dredg has a really appealing modern drama-rock sound, and they somehow manage to replicate it live on this superb document. They even do a bunch of the segues from El Cielo, mixed with the more straightforward rock they proffered on Catch Without Arms. Love this.

Fair, The Best Worst-Case Scenario.
One of the better records I didn’t review this year, this is Aaron Sprinkle’s new band. You may know Sprinkle from Poor Old Lu, or his own solo stuff, and this sounds essentially the same, if a little fuller and darker. “Blurry Eyed” is one of the year’s best songs. Highly recommended.

Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds.
I should have reviewed this one, too. This is Owen Pallett of the Arcade Fire, playing almost nothing but violins overdubbed on top of one another. It’s fantastic stuff, and he gets extra points for the album title – only Yo La Tengo came up with a cooler album name this year.

Foo Fighters, Skin and Bones.
If you liked the second disc of In Your Honor, you’ll love this – it’s the Foos live and acoustic, running through some of their best songs. I have always been a big fan of “Everlong,” the song that closes this set, and in this setting, it’s almost better. The rest, well, you know if you’re going to like this or not, right?

Vince Gill, These Days.
Ambition gets me every time. Gill’s album is a four-CD set, broken into country, pop, rock and bluegrass volumes, and it’s perhaps the clearest statement of his vision you can find. It’s great, if you like Vince Gill, but again, you already know what you’re going to get here, I think.

The Gothic Archies, The Tragic Treasury: Songs from a Series of Unfortunate Events.
The Gothic Archies are Stephin Merritt’s goth band, when he’s not fronting the Magnetic Fields, and this is his soundtrack to the 13 Lemony Snicket books. It’s just as clever and gloomy-fun as you’d expect, especially with song titles like “Smile, No One Cares How You Feel.” Great stuff.

Hem, No Word from Tom.
Hem is a soft-spoken country-folk band in the Cowboy Junkes vein, and this is their rarities collection. Worth it to hear Sally Ellyson sing R.E.M.’s “South Central Rain” and Fountains of Wayne’s “Radiation Vibe,” though nothing else stands out.

Hem, Funnel Cloud.
Two Hem albums this year, and I didn’t review either one. Not sure why, because this album is another slice of atmospheric country-folk-pop in the same lazy, low-key vein this band has always traversed.

Indigo Girls, Despite Our Differences.
After two great little acoustic-pop records, the Girls turn in this by-the-numbers, rote, boring album of typical folk music. It’s always a treat to hear Emily Saliers and Amy Ray sing together, but this is not their best set of songs, not by a long shot.

Elton John, The Captain and the Kid.
Nostalgia got me on this one. I will never again believe the hype surrounding a new Elton album, no matter how many respected critics try to convince me that it’s just like the 1970s stuff. It isn’t. It’s much, much lamer, especially the second half.

Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, All the Roadrunning.
God, this is great. Don’t know why I didn’t review this either, considering that Knopfler is one of my favorite guitarists, and he and Harris sound like they were born to perform together on this swell little record. It’s traditional-sounding, granted, but it’s damn good.

Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, Real Live Roadrunning.
And here’s the accompanying CD/DVD package from the tour, which is equally great. Knopfler gets to stretch out on guitar here, and the duo included a bunch of great Dire Straits songs, including “Romeo and Juliet” and the wonderful closer, “Why Worry.”

L.E.O., Alpacas Orgling.
This is power-popper Bleu turning in a refined Jeff Lynne impersonation, but it’s much better than that makes it sound. The first few songs, especially, are ELO-style pop wonderamas that will make just about anyone smile. Thanks to Tony Shore again for this one.

Live, Songs From Black Mountain.
I don’t know where Black Mountain is, but if these are the songs they sing there, I hope I never go. After a couple of decent albums, Live slips into self-parody with this terrible platter full of melodrama and self-serious silliness. Blah.

Loreena McKennitt, Live in Paris and Toronto.
This is a live document from McKennitt’s last tour, many moons ago, and it includes many of her best songs. This deserves more and better words than I’m able to give it in 50 seconds, but there you are.

Loreena McKennitt, An Ancient Muse.
And this is McKennitt’s first new album in nine years, and she sounds basically the same. Her stuff is often called new-age, but that’s just plain wrong – it’s folk music with an international flavor. “Penelope’s Song” ranks among her most beautiful.

Stephin Merritt, Showtunes.
I’m just now realizing that I’ve never listened to this. I bought it because it’s Merritt, and it collects songs from a few plays he scored, and the lyrics looked interesting, but I’ve never actually taken it out of its case and pressed play. That’s incredibly sad.

Willie Nelson, Songbird.
I bought this because it was produced by Ryan Adams, and Willie’s backing band here is the Cardinals, but it ended up being a lot better than I thought it would be, even if the world doesn’t ever need another version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

Om, Conference of the Birds.
Om is the bassist and drummer from Sleep, carrying on that band’s stoner-rock tradition. This album is two very long songs, although the first, the 16-minute “At Giza,” is a real departure, perhaps the softest and most mesmerizing song these guys have ever contributed to.

The Panic Channel, (ONe).
This is half of the original Jane’s Addiction with a new singer and bass player, but it’s a little bit better than you’d think it would be. Basically, though, this is standard melodic modern rock, with nothing extraordinary to recommend it. I liked it enough to keep their pretentious spelling and punctuation, though.

Tom Petty, Highway Companion.
I’m not sure why I keep buying new Tom Petty albums. It’s not like he’s ever going to change, at this point. If you liked Petty before, you’ll like him now, but I’ve grown tired of his heartland rock and his Bob Dylan impressions. I listened once, then filed away.

Glen Phillips, Mr. Lemons.
Stupid title, sweet record from the former Toad the Wet Sprocket singer. This is more stripped-down than his last one, Winter Pays for Summer, and includes a great cover of Huey Lewis’ “I Want a New Drug.” Not sure why I didn’t review this one, either.

Robert Pollard, From a Compound Eye.
Never sure what you’re going to get from Mr. Guided by Voices. In this case, his first post-GBV solo album, you get a 70-minute mish-mash of fully fleshed-out songs, minute-long bursts of noise and demo-quality experiments…

Robert Pollard, Normal Happiness.
This is more like it. Pollard’s second record of 2006 is 16 short, sharp punk-pop tunes, and it comes on like a bullet and is over before you know it. This is the Robert Pollard I like, and I hope the seven or so albums he has set for 2007 are this good.

Shiny Toy Guns, We Are Pilots.
Saw these guys opening for Mute Math, and thought they looked idiotic, but their synth-pop sound was appealing, The album is pretty good, especially “You Are the One” and “Don’t Cry Out,” and their sound is even more appealing when I don’t have to look at their face-painted drummer guy.

Slayer, Christ Illusion.
The classic lineup reforms for a classic Slayer album, all speed and technical riffing and snarling about Satan. This is great stuff, though, and it’s just short enough that it never drags. Like their early records, this one kicks your ass and then high-tails it before you can get sick of it.

Snow Patrol, Eyes Open.
Yeah, my eyes are opened to this band’s Matchbox 20 impersonation. I don’t understand why so many critics fell all over themselves to praise this record. It’s bland and boring, and it doesn’t even have the moments of interest that Final Straw had. I think I’m done with Snow Patrol.

Sparklehorse, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain.
Here’s another one the critics fellated for reasons that escape me. This is lazy to the point of catatonic, and even if some of the atmospheres are interesting, the songs aren’t at all. There’s nothing here that will keep me coming back.

The Stills, Without Feathers.
This is a major reinvention for the former new wave band, combining rocking guitars with a newfound sense of straight-ahead rock. Too bad the Killers made the same change later in the year, and got all the credit for it…

Sting, Songs From the Labyrinth.
Damn my completist nature for making me buy this. Oh, look, it’s Sting and a lute, playing 16th Century music while tunneling up his own ass! Try this – play this album, and then Outlandos D’Amour back to back, and then ask, what the hell happened to this guy?

Strapping Young Lad, The New Black.
Strapping Young Lad is Devin Townsend’s outlet for aggression – prior SYL albums were wall-to-wall rage, with no breaks. So this is surprising – this album has quiet passages, and places where the music breathes. But somehow, in this style, that’s a detriment, and kind of a letdown.

Matthew Sweet and Susannah Hoffs, Under the Covers Vol. 1.
This is what you’d expect – sugary covers of some of the best fizzy pop tunes in music history, including songs from the Beatles, Love, the Beach Boys and the great Left Banke. Plus, can I just say that Hoffs has aged very, very well…

Ty Tabor, Rock Garden.
And how retarded is that album title? Tabor cranks up the volume again after his more acoustic solo record, Safety, and this sounds like second-rate King’s X stuff. For once, it’s obvious that both he and Doug Pinnick saved their best stuff for their main band’s album.

TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain.
Hi, I’m a rock critic. “Oh, TV on the Radio, can I wax your car, or mow your lawn or anything? You’re just so brilliant!” No, really, they’re not. This is pleasant and acceptable and sonically interesting, but not as good as the first one, and nothing special.

Various Artists, To Elliott From Portland.
Tribute albums scare me, especially ones for unabashed geniuses like Smith, so the quality of this is surprising. I especially enjoyed the Decemberists and Eric Matthews, but the rest is decent, too. You can’t go wrong with these songs, though.

The Wonder Stuff, Suspended by Stars.
Much better, in both production and songwriting, than their last album, Escape from Rubbish Island. Miles Hunt is still a sarcastic asshole, as songs like “Someone Tell Me What to Think” will attest, but this is a fun record from a band I’d written off.

And that’s it. Once again, I had fun doing this, but I’d love to hear what you think of the Fifty Second Week idea. Is it fun to read? Should I go back to the drawing board?

Since this is the last column of 2006, I thought I’d end by talking about a few things I’m looking forward to in 2007. The new Shins kicks the year off on January 23, and the single, “Phantom Limb,” is a winner. Pain of Salvation also follows up the extraordinary Be with the reportedly more straightforward Scarsick that week, too.

There are new ones coming from Explosions in the Sky, Bright Eyes, Lovedrug, Ted Leo, Joy Electric (the title of which keeps changing – the most current is The Otherly Opus/Memory of Alpha), the Brothers Martin (Ronnie of JE and Jason of Starflyer 59), the 77s and their mastermind, Michael Roe. And then, on April 9, we get the 14th album from Marillion, titled Somewhere Else. The best part? They recorded enough songs for two albums, so their 15th will be out in May of 2008.

Oh, and sometime in March of ’07, Axl Rose has promised to release the long-awaited Guns ‘n’ Roses opus, Chinese Democracy. And then the earth will crack in half, the skies will open, and Armageddon will begin.

On that cheery note, have a happy new year. Thanks for reading year six. Next week, year seven.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I don’t know about you, but for me, 2006 flew by.

It honestly felt more like six months, or even three, than the full 12. I remember reading somewhere that time gets faster as you get older – summer vacations used to be small eternities, but now I’m just getting used to the warmer weather when fall sets in. Soon I’ll be 75 years old, the theory goes, and I won’t have any idea how it happened.

More likely, though, is the fact that 2006 was a year of stability and routine for me. I don’t know if I’ll ever really settle down, but in Aught-Six, I certainly settled in. I have a job I love, and people I love seeing and hanging out with. It was like I turned my back for a minute, and somehow I got a life. A pretty good one, too. I’ve ended this year happier than I’ve been in a long time, and I’m oddly hopeful for the future. It’s kind of a new experience for me.

My year was almost entirely absent drama, and the music of 2006 followed suit. I’m tempted to write ’06 off as a bad year, but it wasn’t, really. It was a solid B-minus, with only a couple of outstanding albums, but dozens of pretty good ones. Such a year makes these annual lists much more difficult, since (except for my choice for #1) there wasn’t much of anything that grabbed me by the throat and took over my life. The past two years have seen obvious choices land at the top spot (Brian Wilson’s SMiLE in 2004, and Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois in 2005), but this year, there was no undeniable masterpiece.

In a way, though, the lack of no-brainer choices made it easier, because the 2006 Top 10 List is almost entirely made up of little favorites. I always try to balance out the albums I love just because they push my particular buttons with a healthy dose of clinical observation, and I include records I admire more than love pretty often. I had no need to do that this year – most of the records I heard in 2006 were about the same level of quality, so I got to pick nine just because I adore them, if that makes any sense.

The exception is the #1 choice, which, yes, I both admire and love. I knew 2006 was an off-kilter year when we’d entered November without a clear choice for the top spot. I usually know when I’ve heard it – my first run-through of Illinois last July was like a sign from the heavens, for instance. But this year, I wrestled with it, swapping two albums back and forth, in and out of the summit slot for months.

And then, you know, I heard it, finally, and the two records I’d been considering were bumped to #2 and #3. (They fought over those slots, too, but I’ll get to that.) All it took was one listen to the album that sits atop this list, and I knew I’d heard it. The next seven listens only confirmed it, and although I seem to be in decent company this year, I know some of my faithful readers are going to think I’ve lost my mind.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First up, the rules, which I’ll keep short this year, since it’s been pointed out to me that everyone who’s ever made a top 10 list uses pretty much the exact same set of regulations. Here it is: only new studio albums count. No live records, no compilations, no soundtracks, no EPs, no best-of collections. I try to hear everything I can within a given year, which is difficult and expensive, and even with all the albums I buy (more than 200 in 2006 alone), I find things on other critics’ top 10 lists every year that I’ve never heard of. But I do try.

A few tidbits about the list this year. For the first time in a while, there’s a notable absence of old favorites – only three of the 10 have appeared on prior lists. Three of the albums are debuts, and one is a solo debut, which is a good average for a new music column, especially one run by a guy who can’t stand most of the overhyped new bands he hears. There’s only one woman represented here, but given how effusive I’m going to be about her, I don’t think anyone will mind.

And I owe three of these selections to Dr. Tony Shore, without whom I may not have heard them. The band at #4 and the guy at #6 are both Shore recommendations, and the album at #5 may have slipped right by me without Tony’s review. Shore also turned me on to a few other records I liked this year, including Mew’s And the Glass-Handed Kites and Fair’s The Best Worst-Case Scenario. If you think I’m ahead of the curve, this guy’s three curves ahead of me on his slowest day.

Anyway. Because the year was only a B-minus, and so many decent albums came out that failed to truly distinguish themselves from each other, I have a ton of honorable mentions. A couple of these could easily slide into the #10 spot, while most of them would vie for #11. It was just that kind of year.

We can start off with Belle and Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit, which had an early lock on my top five. I still think this breezy pop gem is a delight, but it just didn’t stick in my memory strongly enough. The same goes for Yo La Tengo’s deliriously titled I Am Not Afraid of You, and I Will Beat Your Ass, an album whose diversity is both its finest asset and its greatest liability when it comes to this list. Honestly, this record gets an honorable mention largely because I wanted the chance to write I Am Not Afraid of You, and I Will Beat Your Ass a couple more times.

Neko Case made an early-year highlight with Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, a sweet slab of country-rock that shines. The Violet Burning also came out swinging early with Drop-Dead, sporting Michael Pritzl’s finest batch of songs in a long time. Ester Drang sparked my interest (but oddly, not a full review) in January with Rocinate, their most complex and melodic album yet – opener “Come Back Alive” jams four or five styles together seamlessly in five quick minutes, and the rest of the album is just as challenging and terrific.

Spiritual supergroup the Lost Dogs returned with their finest album in years, The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees. Also making a long-awaited comeback was Paul Simon, whose Surprise appeared on early drafts of this list for combining modern production techniques with Simon’s trademark folk melodies. That just sounds like it would be awful, so the fact that Surprise is pretty much superb is kind of a miracle. And Built to Spill made a comeback and a half, rediscovering their classic sound with You in Reverse.

Nellie McKay also made her return after battling with Columbia Records over the length and sequence of her sophomore album, Pretty Little Head. The record finally made it out as McKay intended it, almost a year after it was first expected, and it’s a doozy – oddball jazz-pop at its finest. Speaking of length and sequence, there’s the Early November’s epic The Mechanic, the Mother and the Path, a triple-disc rock opera that succeeds on some well-written songs on its first two chapters, and pure zany ambition on its third.

Two of the most beautiful records I heard all year were mostly instrumental affairs. Hammock added another slice of ambient beauty to their ever-growing catalog with Raising Your Voice… Trying to Stop an Echo, featuring some of the most otherworldly guitar sounds you’ll ever hear. And Brian Transeau, better known as BT, outdid himself and then some with the amazing, intricate album-slash-movie This Binary Universe, which sounds both as delicate as a single moment and as big as time itself.

And then there is Weird Al Yankovic. (Seriously. Don’t look at me like that.) With Straight Outta Lynwood, Yankovic proved once again that he’s among the sharpest critics of popular culture, and without doubt one of the funniest. Anyone who still doesn’t believe that Yankovic is a real musician, or that his band is one of the most capable on the planet, just check out “Pancreas,” a perfect tribute to Brian Wilson performed on an array of instruments that would make Sufjan Stevens jealous.

Finally, we have Grandaddy, and in the case of Just Like the Fambly Cat, I do mean finally. Fambly Cat is the last album from Jason Lytle and his band, and while I was initially overcome by the finality of it all, and rated it a bit higher than it deserved, I think this is where it belongs – at #11, just outside the list. Lytle’s last statement is sweet and sad, but in the end, just not as compelling as it should have been, and it deserves an honorable mention, but that’s all.

Are you ready for this year’s top 10? Well, too bad, because here they are:

#10. Quiet Company, Shine Honesty.

Quiet Company is largely a front for songwriter Taylor Muse, and his debut album on Northern Records signals the arrival of a major talent. Shine Honesty is one of the few albums this year that I enjoyed more each time I listened to it, unlike most of the honorable mentions, which diminished in stature with each play. Muse’s songs have a breathtaking sense of dynamics, and he never loses focus of the most important thing – his melodies. I said this in my initial review of this album, but I’m at a loss as to why indie darlings like Conor Oberst get so much praise when there are songwriters like Taylor Muse, toiling in obscurity and simply blowing the competition away. Listen and buy here.

#9. The Alarm, Under Attack.

I will readily admit to a sentimental bias here. I have no objectivity when it comes to the Alarm – I grew up with this band, and I’ll never stop loving their stuff. But even with that bias, Under Attack blew me away. It’s the second album from the “new” Alarm, including only singer-songwriter-soul Mike Peters from the original lineup, but this one makes 2003’s five-CD In the Poppy Fields sound like a warm-up. Songs erupt from the speakers with an energy Peters hasn’t shown in years, and the whole album surges forth on fury and hope. Peters was battling cancer at the time of this recording, and it seriously sounds like he thought it would be the last album he’d ever make. If you’ve ever pumped your fist to a song, or reveled in the wonders of a good “whoa-oh” chorus, this is the record for you.

#8. Roger Joseph Manning Jr., The Land of Pure Imagination.

If you know who Roger Manning is, then chances are you probably have this record already. Manning made his mark as part of Jellyfish, one of the finest pop bands to ever grace the planet, and he’s gone on to a number of other projects, like Imperial Drag and the Moog Cookbook. But this is his solo debut, and man, what a blissful pop record this is. If he had done nothing more than write and record “Too Late For Us Now,” I’d still be considering this album for the list, but he also included the wondrous title track, the delicate “Sandman,” and the groovy “I Wish It Would Rain,” along with seven other gems. Manning played and sung virtually every note here, but this is no lo-fi basement affair – this is a rich, layered, glorious slice of innocent pop music that just knocks me out. It’s almost (though not quite) like having Jellyfish back.

#7. Sloan, Never Hear the End of It.

Canada’s best band returns with a monster of a new record – 30 songs, 75 minutes, all stitched together like an extended homage to the second side of Abbey Road. Better still, this is a return to the self-produced ‘60s and ‘70s sound of One Chord to Another and Navy Blues, and if those albums weren’t so damn good, I would be tempted to say that Never Hear the End of It is the one you should pick up first. There are a dozen one-minute wonders here, but no fillers, and as the album leaps blithely from style to style, perfectly segueing from light to shade, from hilarity to sensitivity, it ends up as the perfect summation of Sloan’s career. Yep Roc is releasing this in the United States next month, and if you’re a fan of classic pop, you won’t want to miss it.

#6. David Mead, Tangerine.

Without Tony Shore, I’d probably still have no idea who David Mead is. It turns out, he’s a songwriter of remarkable skill, and after years of being shuffled about by record labels, he’s made his masterpiece in Tangerine. Though he enlisted a small army of instruments and players, the star of this show is Mead’s songwriting, rooted firmly in melody and a classic folk-pop sound. Just try to get “Fighting For Your Life” out of your head, and when you’re done with that, try the a cappella melancholy of “Reminded #1” or the low-key epic “Hunting Season.” This is a relatively quiet record, one that got lost amidst the bluster of the year, but it deserves a spotlight, because Mead’s talents are extraordinary.

#5. Ross Rice, Dwight.

I’m so happy I didn’t miss this album. Ross Rice gets lifelong love from me just for his work with Human Radio, one of the most unjustly ignored bands of the 1990s. Their two albums (one released, one not) are pretty much perfect, and I looked forward to what Rice, the band’s mastermind, would do next. And for a while there, it seemed like he’d do nothing – he released one middling solo record in 1997, and that was it. But ring out the bells, because Dwight is magnificent, the best set of songs he’s come up with since the first Human Radio record. From the punch of “Hard Times for the Revolution” to the proggy thunder of “Blindman” to the sweet foibles of “Words Fail Me,” this is Ross Rice finally back at the top of his game. Get it here.

#4. The Feeling, Twelve Stops and Home.

This is another Tony Shore special, and another album that hasn’t reached these shores yet. But when it does, America is in for one of the niftiest fizzy pop platters in years. The Feeling encapsulate 50 years of British music in 12 silly, wonderful songs, and even if the record goes slightly downhill in its second half (but only slightly), the first three tracks here are classics, among the finest shiny pop confections I’ve heard. “I Want You Now,” specifically, is just relentless in its pursuit of pop nirvana, especially when it explodes into Queen-like harmonic overload. But slower numbers like “Sewn” and “Kettle’s On” are winners too, and overall, Twelve Stops and Home gets the prize for the most fun you’ll have listening to music this year. It’s only available as an import right now, and I have no news about a U.S. release, but take a listen.

#3. Mute Math (original release).

I can’t tell you how much I hate having to include that parenthetical. It’s one of the main reasons why Mute Math’s knockout debut is below my #2 choice on this list, despite putting up a fight for second (and even first) place earlier in the year. The record I’m honoring here is the original, self-released iteration, not the more widely available Warner Bros. version that includes old songs and cuts one of the best new ones (the epic “Without It”). The simple truth is that the album was basically perfect to begin with, and messing with the track listing and sequence resulted in an inferior record. But not by that much, since the music is still incredible – Mute Math sounds like the Police if they stayed together and stayed awesome. This is a deeply searching, spiritual disc, but you’d never know it from a cursory listen, since the grooves and melodies are so unstoppable. With “Chaos” and “Noticed,” Mute Math delivered a one-two punch that few bands could match, especially on their full-length debut. It’s a shame you can’t get the superior version anymore, but whichever Mute Math you end up buying, you won’t regret it.

#2. Keane, Under the Iron Sea.

But in the end, Keane made the year’s best pop album, and I had to give them full credit for it. Under the Iron Sea was ignored on this side of the Atlantic, which makes no sense, since it’s in every way superior to their popular debut, Hopes and Fears. Here Keane reached deeper, crafting a darker album, but one with more great melodies per minute than most bands manage over an entire career. Tom Chaplin sings like a bird, his effortlessly powerful voice always front and center while Tim Rice-Oxley layers keyboard sound over keyboard sound, crafting the most original pop backing tracks of the year. Keane manages to create soaring rock without using any guitars, a tremendous feat in itself – seriously, have you heard “Is It Any Wonder”? No guitars. It’s amazing. But they also delivered great song after great song here, never running out of ideas. It’s an album that never lags and never falters – even the iTunes exclusive bonus track, “Let It Slide,” is excellent. And it becomes even more rich when you realize that most of the songs are little letters of desperation from Rice-Oxley to Chaplin, begging to keep their friendship together. Simply put, Keane outdid their already smashing debut many times over, and Under the Iron Sea is everything I could have hoped for and more.

Which brings us to number one. As I said, this was a late-year surprise, and it’s not often that I get to November 14 without knowing what the top album of the year will likely be. The most surprising thing about my choice this year is just how different it is from the makeup of the rest of the list. As such, I can’t really recommend my #1 album to anyone who enjoyed the other nine – the list does not peak with this record as much as it does take a strange 45-degree-angle turn into another dimension.

So anyway, here it is:

#1. Joanna Newsom, Ys.

That’s right. The album I described as ‘70s prog played on 16th Century instruments and sung by an intoxicated pre-teen. But you know what? It took merely one listen for me to realize that this album is extraordinary, and subsequent listens have convinced me that it’s brilliant and magical. No other artist this year created a world and then drew you into it like Newsom did, and no other artist displays such supreme confidence in her own vision of music like Newsom does.

Nothing on Ys should work. On paper, it’s a disaster. It’s five long songs, ranging from seven minutes to just under seventeen. Newsom plays the harp (beautifully, I might add), and the only other instruments you can readily pick out are the strings, arranged by Brian Wilson’s favorite confidante, Van Dyke Parks. Newsom’s lyrics are all rambling symbolic poetry about meteorites and stuffed animals, and she sings them in a magnificent elfin squeak of a voice that must be heard to be believed.

It sounds like it would be awful, but the miraculous truth is, it’s mesmerizing. Newsom displays a staggering range of emotions with her strange voice, and her songs are stunning, working through themes and movements and entrancing melodies. Parks’ strings provide just the right touch to hold the whole thing together, stepping back when necessary and adding nearly mythical grandeur when called for. The songs on Ys are very long, but they never drag – Newsom and her collaborators keep coming up with new ways to keep you interested.

But I’m describing it in very cold, clinical terms, and this is anything but a cold album. The reason Ys tops this year’s list is that it is emotionally transporting in ways no other 2006 record even attempted. Newsom’s masterpiece, “Monkey and Bear,” will send you through child-like innocence to desperate longing to genuine fright – from “somewhere there’s a place for us” to “someday you’ll bare your teeth” – in the space of 10 minutes. Her other masterpiece, “Sawdust and Diamonds,” is an emotional journey through deeply personal pain, using nothing but harp and voice to cut right to your heart.

The record ends with “Cosmia,” which I foolishly called the weakest track in my initial review. I have come to view it as perhaps the most affecting and startling thing here, one of the most passionate songs of separation I own. “And I miss your precious heart,” Newsom sings with all of hers while her harp and the strings explode beneath her, and the moment is beyond moving.

And that’s it – Newsom tops this list because she made me feel like no other artist this year. Everything else on this list is enjoyable and well-crafted and easy to recommend. Joanna Newsom’s album is challenging, heart-wrenching and transcendent, even though I have difficulty urging anyone to buy it. You will either want to grind this CD into dust, or love it like your own child, and there will be no middle ground. Your experience with Ys will be as personal as mine is, and your mileage may vary.

I would not be upset or surprised if many of my long-time readers hate this record. If you do, here is a suggestion – call Grandaddy #10, and bump everything else up one notch so that Keane becomes #1, knocking Newsom off entirely. That’s a perfectly respectable list – Grandaddy, Quiet Company, the Alarm, Roger Manning, Sloan, David Mead, Ross Rice, the Feeling, Mute Math and Keane. I would put my name to that list in a heartbeat.

But I’m willing to bet that there are some of you out there who will hear what I hear in Ys, and who will love it like I love it. For me, there’s no other choice, and I knew it immediately. This album is courageous, masterfully crafted, and utterly bizarre, yet completely magical. It is, for me, the best album of 2006.

One last thing – the folks at Litho Express in Minnesota were apparently upset that I didn’t mention the packaging in my initial review of Ys, so here’s my chance to correct that oversight now. The album is sumptuously designed, with a raised slipcase and a thick bible-style booklet with gold-leaf pages. It’s beautiful, and regal, and quite fitting for the album inside, and it deserves a Grammy for best packaging. Just another reason to love this album, really.

That should do it for this year. Next week is Fifty Second Week again – I have about 45 records to review, which, if I do it right, should take less than an hour. And after that, we start year seven. Thanks to everyone who stuck with me through year six, and to everyone we picked up along the way – I hope you stay a while. We’re just getting warmed up here. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, and enjoy the time off from work. Do something worthwhile with it, and play some good music while you do it.

See you in line Tuesday morning… and to all a good night.

Christmas music gets a bad rap.

Is there anything more reviled than the stop-gap Christmas album? It’s the province of pop products-slash-stars like Mariah Carey, a tradition that goes all the way back to Elvis and the Supremes. It just smacks of behind-the-scenes handling, like some guys in marketing pointing to bar graphs that chart sales and release windows and particularly popular carols.

So when genuine artists decide to release Christmas records, it’s kind of mystifying. Are they out of ideas? Are they just cashing in? Last year, for example, I refused to buy Brian Wilson’s follow-up to SMiLE, the wretchedly titled What I Really Want for Christmas. I’m sure it was great, and I’ll probably pick it up eventually, but I couldn’t stomach the idea of following one of the greatest pop albums of all time with a middling holiday confection.

But I’m not sure why it’s such a big deal. Wilson, for example, has a long history with Christmas music – the Beach Boys recorded a lot of it, including Wilson’s own “Little Saint Nick.” (Currently appearing in the latest of those Coke commercials with the polar bears. They added penguins this year, another decision that reeks of the guys with the bar graphs.) And in fact, Christmas is the only holiday I can think of with its own centuries-old songbook, a rich history ripe for the plucking.

You can also trace the battle between the religious meanings of Christmas and the Hallmark card-style rewriting of the holiday into a romantic American myth through the music. The same event inspired both the reverent Christianity of “O Holy Night” and the effervescent frivolity of “Frosty the Snowman.” (Oh, and the decidedly irreverent frat-boy profanity of Ben Folds’ “Bizarre Christmas Incident.”) You can have yourself a merry little Christmas, or a blue Christmas, or a silent night, and there’s a song for it, no doubt recorded hundreds of times by hundreds of artists.

Still, there’s a stigma attached, especially when the artist in question is someone like Sarah McLachlan. She’s always straddled the line between pop star and serious songwriter, and even at this late date in her career, your opinion of her could go either way. Plus, she’s almost impossibly slow, given how little her records have changed through the years – Fumbling Towards Ecstasy came out in 1993, Surfacing in 1997, and Afterglow in 2003. In between, she’s dropped live documents, remix collections and other patches to fill the holes.

So perhaps it was inevitable that she’d produce something like Wintersong, as close to a standard pop Christmas album as you’re likely to hear. It’s what you’d expect – gauzy, low-key, piano-led, and centered on her admittedly terrific voice. McLachlan and her longtime producer Pierre Marchand include a mix of traditional religious carols like “Silent Night” and popular songs like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and they only stretch out, musically speaking, once: on a medley of “The First Noel” and “Mary Mary.”

There are a couple of neat surprises – Joni Mitchell’s “River” is here, a song that should be a Christmas standard, as is John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over),” a song that, in a perfect world, would have faded with the end of the Vietnam War. Alas, its direct sentiments are unfortunately still relevant. McLachlan ends her collection with Vince Guaraldi’s gorgeous “Christmas is Here,” forever linked to the Peanuts Christmas special in the minds of millions. It’s a nice choice, and McLachlan’s own original entry into the canon, the album’s title track, is sweet as well.

But this is pretty standard stuff, all in all, and the net effect feels as hastily thrown together as the cover image. (Surely there was a better photograph they could have used, no?) It’s pleasant, if you like Christmas records, but never rises above the level of the Very Special Christmas series. Given her career thus far, Wintersong is, both in its existence and in its quality, pretty much as expected.

Harder to explain, yet much more enjoyable, is Aimee Mann’s Christmas record. Mann has been a prickly iconoclast since Til Tuesday broke up, railing against the record companies and their practices, so it’s difficult to understand at first why she’d engage in one. But the record itself is pure Aimee Mann – delightful and sad. It even has a classic Mann title. I mean, who else would call their holiday album One More Drifter in the Snow?

Mann’s quirky pop sound survives the transition to Christmas music intact. This album is full of the chiming guitars and strange keyboards and nifty arrangements as her regular albums, with a few string sections here and there to smooth it out. She sets the tone early, opening with Jimmy Webb’s heartwarmingly depressing “Whatever Happened to Christmas,” and she largely stays away from the churchier carols, sticking to the likes of “Winter Wonderland” and “White Christmas.” (She does do “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” and hearing Mann sing “Christ our savior” is an interesting experience.)

The two new songs are hits as well. Her own closing song, “Calling on Mary,” is pure Mann, detailing loneliness and separation with a Christmas backdrop. (“I heard the sidewalk Santa say, salvation’s coming cheap today, I searched the skyline for a star, and wondered where you are…”) Her husband, Michael Penn, contributes “Christmastime,” a more joyous affair with a knockout melody.

But the hidden highlight is her read of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” It’s just as goofy as any good version of this song, and she enlists Grant Lee Phillips, owner of one of the best voices in rock, to play the narrator. While most of One More Drifter is as bleak as you’d expect from Mann, this track is a true gem, a rare moment of uninhibited fun from one of our more serious artists. Mann pulls off the very un-merry Christmas album well, much to my surprise, even though she doesn’t stretch too far out of her comfort zone to do so.

Over the Rhine took a different tack with Snow Angels, their second Christmas album – they eschewed familiar songs all together, composing almost a whole record of originals. This is obviously an album for fans of the band, since the average Christmas shopper isn’t likely to pick up a CD featuring exactly no songs they’ve heard before. But such a tactic reveals an intimate connection to the holiday, and a personal commitment to these songs that rarely comes through on Christmas records.

The duo (singer Karin Bergquist and pianist Linford Detwiler) keep things hushed, like their last album, the amazing Drunkard’s Prayer, making Snow Angels essentially a collection of Christmas love songs, a fine soundtrack to the first snowfall. It opens much like Mann’s does, with a song called “All I Ever Get for Christmas is Blue” that’s exactly what you think it is. Given their tangential history with the Christian music industry, it’s no surprise that they rewrite “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and make it their own, nor that they write their own tunes with religious overtones, like “White Horse” and “New Redemption Song.”

Detwiler includes an instrumental reading of Guaraldi’s music from the Peanuts special, which he titles “Goodbye Charles” in memory of the strip’s creator, Charles Schulz. Things get kind of wonderful from there, with the longing of “Snowed In With You” and the bluesy highlight “North Pole Man,” perhaps the sexiest song about Mr. Claus since “Santa Baby.” The title track is an Over the Rhine classic – traditional-sounding melody, lovely lyrics, and Bergquist’s amazing voice.

Snow Angels concludes with “We’re Gonna Pull Through,” a New Year’s song if I’ve ever heard one, and it caps this lovers’ conversation about Christmas well. Most holiday albums are content with timidly nudging one original song into the storied history of Christmas music, so it takes guts to write 10 of them, and while it would be a stretch to say that they’ve come up with any songs here that will take their place alongside the carols you know by heart, Snow Angels is a sweet collection that’s worth hearing this season.

Here’s the thing, though. A lot of artists have explored Christmas music, dipping their toes into the vast pool of it that stretches back centuries, but few have worked to understand it and envelop themselves in it like Sufjan Stevens has. He’s famously obsessive about things – here’s a guy who plans to write a full album for each of the 50 states, after all. So once a year since 2001 (skipping 2004) he’s put together a Christmas EP for friends and family, part of an ongoing project to really sink his teeth into the traditional canon, and find out what makes a good Christmas song.

All five of his EPs are now available in a box set called Songs for Christmas. They come individually packaged in their own sleeves, and accompanied by a book of drawings and essays, a sheet of Christmas stickers, and a comic strip. It’s a fantastic package, and the music contained therein may just be the best, most comprehensive Christmas album ever made. Stevens takes the traditional carols as his base, working through multiple arrangements in subsequent years (there are three completely different, yet stunningly beautiful, renditions of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” on here),and putting together his own songs to stand alongside them.

The set is fascinating for Sufjan fans, as it allows you to trace the evolution of his sound. The first EP, Noel, is bare and acoustic, but by 2006’s Peace, he’s added his customary horns, strings and choirs, and it sounds a lot like Illinois. Stevens somehow retains his ability to connect emotionally through all of his intricate arrangements – he did it on Illinois, and he does it here. The earlier CDs in this set are tentative, as if Stevens hasn’t quite committed to this project, and some of the songs sound thrown together. But by the later discs, he’s lavishing as much time and energy on these little EPs as he does on his main albums.

While Noel’s “Emmanuel” is gorgeous, and 2002’s Hark! contains the nifty original “Put the Lights on the Tree,” things really get going with 2003’s Ding! Dong! Recorded the same year he released Michigan, the first of his states albums, this EP’s originals truly shine. While “Come On! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!” is just as silly as it sounds, “All the King’s Horns” is an amazing piece of music, one that would have fit well on Michigan. And “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” reads like it would be funny, but in reality it’s heartbreaking.

By 2005’s Joy, Stevens is really cooking. His own “Hey Guys! It’s Christmas Time!” is a grungy highlight, but he also works wonders with “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Away in a Manger,” two songs that have rarely been treated as reverently as this. But the best thing here is “Did I Make You Cry on Christmas? (Well, You Deserved It!),” a hushed yet simmering piece that describes a scene playing out in living rooms across the country. Despite the title, the recriminations here are surprisingly gentle, and the song leads nicely into “The Incarnation,” an instrumental of uncommon majesty.

But it’s the latest, 2006’s Peace, that takes the prize, and proves that Stevens just keeps getting better. How can you resist a song called “Get Behind Me, Santa!” There’s no way, especially once you hear the fantastic horn arrangement and organ lines. Here are “Jingle Bells” and “Emmanuel” and “Holy, Holy, Holy,” all performed with grace, but here as well are Stevens’ best Christmas originals, including the tricky “Christmas in July” and the absolutely gorgeous “Sister Winter.”

The highlight of the EP, and perhaps of the set, is the seven-minute “Star of Wonder,” which most effectively marries his Illinois sound with the religious sentiments of the season. Stevens is not shy about exploring his Christian beliefs in song, and a Christmas collection gives him ample opportunity, but he retains his artful, exploratory nature, and his gift for poetry. The EP, and the set, concludes with “Holy,” and a chiming instrumental called “The Winter Solstice” that provides just the right exit music.

It’s not often that a Christmas album is infused with this much artistry and personality, or is able to take you on a journey comparable to any artist’s regular releases. Songs for Christmas is an amazing set of music, one that bursts with love for these songs and this holiday, but also with intelligence and depth. If you’re looking for something light to put on behind the Christmas party, you may want to look elsewhere.

But if you want a Christmas album that truly tries to understand what it means to be a Christmas album, one that wraps you up and takes you someplace, then buy this. Or, you know, put it on your wish list and drop subtle hints to loved ones. However this finds its way into your collection, you’ll treasure it for many Christmases to come.

Next week, the top 10 list.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So as you can plainly see, there is no Frank Zappa Buying Guide this week. I’m hoping for mid-January now, but who can tell – I’m at the mercy of the Zappa Family Trust on this one, as I’m waiting for my copy of their latest archival project to arrive. I could do the Guide without it, I suppose, and I have been working on it, but the new project is the perfect capper, since it will bring the whole catalog full circle.

And let me rant for just a little bit here. I don’t want to trash Gail Zappa and the Family Trust too much, because the slow trickle of new stuff since Frank’s death in 1993 is still better than having all those unreleased tapes sitting in the vault and collecting dust, but I wish Gail would do some research, and take a look at some other web-based music businesses. None of them would do what she’s done with the most recent project, and it’s pretty upsetting.

A side note – I went to a comedy show last night starring my co-worker Steve Lord and his troupe, Gag Reflex. One of their sketches involves a guy who’s just learned that his cat has cancer, and he goes to a party and tries to elicit sympathy. Meanwhile, the other party guests all have much worse things happen to them – one is going through a bitter divorce, for example. News then arrives of two of the partygoers’ mutual friends who have been in a car accident, and are in critical condition. But our first character, showing a phenomenal lack of perspective, throws a tantrum. “Oh, boo hoo! They’re in the emergency room! My CAT has fucking CANCER!!”

All of that is to point out that when I say I’m upset at Gail Zappa and the ZFT, I’m still able to put it in perspective. I’m annoyed, like I would be if I got a paper cut, but it’s not the end of the world, and if I met Gail, I would first and foremost thank her for keeping Frank’s music available, and probably not mention this little tantrum I’m about to throw. This is a real “my CAT has fucking CANCER” kind of a rant – I know there are bigger problems.

But this one’s irritating.

Here’s the situation. The new Zappa release is a “project/object” called MOFO, or the Making Of Freak Out. It’s an audio documentary, whatever that is, of the recording of Frank’s 1966 debut, Freak Out, the first double album debut in rock history. MOFO was originally made available for pre-order on the Zappa website waaaaay back in August as a deluxe four-CD set, and those who chose to pony up early were offered a chance to get their names listed in the packaging. Thing is, MOFO costs a stunning $75, plus shipping, and the only info given was cryptic and vague – it’s an audio documentary, it’s four CDs, and that’s about all.

I did hesitate, given the price, but I bit the bullet and purchased the thing. It was originally supposed to ship “in the vicinity” of September 21. It didn’t. It was then supposed to ship “when the frost is on the pumpkin,” in Gail’s words. It didn’t. Meanwhile, word trickled out of a two-CD version of MOFO, which I assumed would be just a mass-released edit of the four-CD set. Gail Zappa wouldn’t put a bunch of material on the two-CD version that isn’t set to appear on the four-CD version, would she?

She would. Out this week in record stores is the mini-MOFO, a two-CD set that includes the original vinyl mix of Freak Out (actually a big deal), and a selection of outtakes and rehearsals. It looks like it’s a great listen, but it costs anywhere between $25 and $30 – a tad pricey for two CDs in a standard case. But here’s the rub – there is, apparently, material on the mini-MOFO that will not be on the big MOFO. Gail has said as much. Which means, to have the complete “audio documentary,” you have to get both.

Now, completists are screwed, of course, but as for those of us who like to get value for our dollar, well, it should be an easy choice. We just compare the track list of the two-CD MOFO with that of the four-CD version, see how much is exclusive to the two-CD, and purchase (or don’t) based on the value of those tracks. Here’s the problem – despite having paid $75 for the four-CD MOFO, and despite having waited almost three months beyond the original release date, I still have no idea what’s on it. No track list has been released.

Is disc one of the mini-MOFO the same as disc one of the deluxe version, as many suspect? No idea. The fear, of course, is that if I buy the mini-MOFO now, when the four-CD version shows up, I will have spent about $30 for only two or three exclusive tracks. But of course, I want to hear the vinyl mix of Freak Out and the demos and rehearsal tracks RIGHT NOW. Releasing the two-CD set first, when I still don’t know what’s on the four-CD set I’ve already paid for, is like twisting the knife in my little collector’s heart.

Naturally, this mismanagement has upset fans far and wide, and the Zappas only answer complaints with the most cryptic and tossed-off replies you could imagine. The four-CD MOFO is now expected to arrive after Christmas, maybe. Gail Zappa has to know how the delays and the lack of information will affect sales of future projects – she’s likely banking on the fact that she holds the keys to the vault, and Frank’s most ardent fans (myself included) will keep coming back. I just think the Zappa legacy deserves better. At the very least, it deserves a well-run, customer-oriented web presence, one that does not consider standard information like track listings to be a privilege.

The ideal solution would be to include everything MOFO-related on the four-CD set, but since that’s not going to happen, the ZFT should release the track listing for the deluxe version, so that obsessive collectors like me can make an informed choice on the two-CD version. If I have to buy both, I will, but if in the end I’ve spent more than $100 on material that could have fit on three CDs and an EP, I’ll be upset. More upset than I am now, I mean.

Wow, that’s a long rant. By the way, my CAT! Has fucking CANCER! My life is HARD! Listen to ME!!

* * * * *

The top 10 list is done, set in stone, and ready to debut in two weeks. Pretty much every year, I am asked questions about my criteria, and why certain albums are ineligible, so I thought I’d go through a few new releases that are, by their natures, disqualified from the list, just to illustrate why these rules are what they are. Often I wish they weren’t in place – every year, I am forced to disqualify excellent records that I love, and every year I consider abolishing some of these regulations. And every year, I have to remind myself why they’re important.

So here are some things I do not accept for the list: soundtracks, best-ofs, live albums, covers records, various artists collections, rarities compilations, and box sets. Some of them are no-brainers – I can’t take best-of albums, for instance, because in some cases they’re culled from 30 years of recordings, which isn’t fair to the other candidates pulling from only one year, or one session. Also, the Beatles would win every other year if I allowed that.

I long ago decided that composition was just as important as performance in selecting the top 10 records, which is why covers albums are excluded. The ratio of originals to covers has to be at least 80-20 on any given CD for me to consider it. The problem I run into sometimes is that some artists’ covers are more original than many artists’ self-penned tunes. But rules are rules – if the artist in question didn’t write it, or at least the vast majority of it, then it doesn’t count.

In the case of previously released material, I’m back and forth on the specifics of the rules. Take, for instance, the new record by Ben Folds, a regular presence on these lists. Supersunnyspeedgraphic, the LP is an album-length collection of Folds’ favorites from the series of EPs he released in 2004 and 2005. As I said when Super D, the final mini-release, came out last year, if Folds had just released those 15 EP songs on one disc, he’d have had the album of the year on his hands.

Supersunnyspeedgraphic doesn’t quite measure up to that prediction, since Folds only chose 10 of the EP songs for this disc. He neglected some of my favorites, including “Wandering,” the piano-vocal take of “Give Judy My Notice,” and the great “Kalamazoo.” He did, however, include just about every cover version in the series, including the Cure’s “In Between Days” and the Divine Comedy’s sweet “Songs of Love.” Why he picked those over his own swell songs, I don’t know.

The disc is rounded off with the hard-copy debut of his hilarious take on Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” and “Bruised,” the best song from his EP with the Bens (Folds, Kweller and Lee). So it’s uneven at best, and he made a disastrous choice by including an alternate take of his cover of the Darkness’ “Get Your Hands Off My Woman,” this one a duet featuring the over-the-top awfulness of Corn Mo. The version on Super D, with just Folds, is a million times better.

This record wouldn’t have made the list to begin with, but because it consists mainly of material that is available elsewhere, it’s ineligible anyway. Plus, it’s one-third covers, which seals the deal. Supersunnyspeedgraphic is a fun collection of tunes, but not a great album in its own right, and you may be better off just picking up the EPs it samples from.

Much more deserving of inclusion is Tom Waits, whose three-CD set Orphans was released a couple of weeks ago. Its 56 tracks take from a mish-mash of previously available and unreleased recordings, but they also include 30 new songs, more than two albums’ worth of new material. That’s why I’m so undecided on what to do with this thing. Does it count as a 2006 album if more than half of it is new, and more than half of the other stuff is unreleased?

Complicating matters is the fact that Orphans is excellent. Everything Waits does is worth hearing, but Orphans is an embarrassment of riches, a treasure trove of forgotten gems. It’s separated into three discs, each with its own title and musical style – Brawlers collects the bluesy ass-kickers, Bawlers is all weepy ballads, and Bastards is a mixture of experimental tunes and monologues. At more than three hours, it’s almost too much Tom Waits, especially if you’re among the many who can’t get past his voice, which sounds like he’s been gargling with battery acid. But if you’re a fan of his idiosyncratic yet traditional style, this will send you over the moon.

Brawlers is mostly blues, like the thunderous opener “Lie to Me,” but there are diversions into gospel (“Lord, I’ve Been Changed”) and balladry (“Rains on Me”). The centerpiece of this first disc is the fantastic seven-minute “Road to Peace,” a brutal excoriation of the Bush administration and the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s almost as direct as anything on Neil Young’s Living With War, but it’s much more artful and captivating.

Bawlers sets its tone with “Bend Down the Branches,” a classic Waits ballad. This is the most textured of the three discs, with bright horn sections and sad pianos abounding. There are too many highlights on this disc to mention, but suffice it to say that Waits makes his cigarettes-and-alcohol voice work for him on these jazz-inflected weepers better than you’d expect – unless you’re already a fan, in which case, this is exactly as good as you’d expect. Typically classic line: “There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth, I saw Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth down there by the train…”

But it’s Bastards that pulls off the prize, with its odd selection of covers, poems, rambles and rock songs. It opens with a wild take on Kurt Weill’s “What Keeps Mankind Alive,” a song that’s been done by a wide range of performers, from William S. Burroughs to the Pet Shop Boys. It continues on with Waits’ readings of Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac and the World Book Encyclopedia, all delivered in that gravely, gin-soaked voice. He does an a capella cover of Robert Johnson’s “King Kong,” surrounding his screeches with explosive mouth percussion. The best thing here, however, may be hidden track “Missing My Son,” a shaggy dog story of the highest order.

But after all that, I have decided that Orphans is inadmissible for this year’s list. One of the things I try to find and reward, after all, is album-length statements, and Orphans is 56 different statements from 56 different places. It is a collection, not an album, even though it is an amazing collection for all that. Without the rule against compilations, though, this would be a shoo-in for the 2006 list, and it’s highly recommended. The packaging, as well, is superb – it comes in a hardbound book with lyrics and tons of photos. Like most everything Waits has done, it’s a beautiful, sick, ugly thing, and it deserves your praise.

Live albums present some interesting challenges as well. In recent years, live documents by Jeff Buckley and Ben Folds have become ineligible favorites. Some bands are more comfortable on the stage than in the studio, and many live records I hear during the course of a year turn out to be pretty definitive when it comes to a certain band’s sound.

But I can’t include them – they’re not collections of new songs, for the most part, and if I let one live album in, I have to let them all in, and archival live releases from 1960s and 1970s bands would then become eligible. Someone reissues At Fillmore East with bonus tracks in any given year and the ballgame’s over. And I’m oddly glad that Frank Zappa died before I started keeping these lists – his predilection for releasing live albums of new material, or basing his studio projects around live backing tracks, would have sent me into a confused tizzy.

This year, the rule isn’t going to keep anything off the list, but it will disqualify Mark Kozelek from an honorable mention, so I’ll give it to him now. Kozelek is the main man in Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon, and he plays lazy, gorgeous, lengthy dream-pop songs with otherworldly electric guitar tones falling from them like moonbeams. I am ashamed to admit this, but I first heard his work in a Gap ad, which featured beautiful people in stylish clothes falling backwards into snow-covered landscapes, set to the Red House Painters’ beautiful take on the Cars’ “All Mixed Up.”

That song, along with 19 others from Kozelek’s strange, subdued career, wound up on Little Drummer Boy Live, a limited-edition collection recorded between 2003 and 2006. But unlike much of his studio work, these recordings feature just Kozelek and his acoustic guitar, for the most part. (He’s assisted here and there by Phil Carney on a second acoustic.) The results are beautiful and striking. While Kozelek’s songs have never been masterpieces, here they set a pin-drop-quiet mood and envelop you in it.

Standouts include the RHP classic “Down Colorful Hill” and the Sun Kil Moon epic “Duk Koo Kim,” and Kozelek also added a few of his extraordinary reinventions of Modest Mouse and AC/DC songs. (He’s released a full album of each.) In all, Little Drummer Boy is the best live album I’ve heard this year, a collection for an overcast and chilly day, to be listened to while wrapped up in a blanket and sipping hot chocolate. It’s utterly gorgeous stuff.

And yet, completely ineligible for the top 10 list. You see my dilemma?

Anyway, the one record that’s giving me the most trouble this year comes from my favorite band of all time (yes, of ALL TIME), and it’s one that I had to be talked into buying. It’s Love, from the Beatles, which from the track listing and semi-cheesy packaging looks to be yet another best-of taken from the Fab Four’s 13 official albums. But it’s not. It’s much, much more, and it can be argued that it’s a whole new thing, a Beatles album in its own right.

Love was commissioned by Cirque du Soleil, a mark against it in my book right there, and seemed at first to be another in a long line of attempts to squeeze Beatles fans for their cash. I felt bad enough buying Let It Be… Naked, so I wasn’t about to pick up this thing, but Dr. Tony Shore once again cajoled me into throwing down my $15. Shore’s having a party in his pants over this, calling it the best record of the year and declaring it on par with Brian Wilson’s SMiLE. Needless to say, my expectations were not that high.

Anyway, Cirque du Soleil enlisted famed Beatles producer George Martin to remix the original studio tracks into something theatrical. He and his son Giles certainly did more than that – they refashioned this trip through the Beatles catalog into a cohesive 77-minute suite that employs mash-up techniques, utilizes alternate and unfamiliar takes, and even includes a new string arrangement by George Martin himself. In many cases, it’s like hearing these songs for the first time.

Love starts with an a capella mix of “Because,” off of Abbey Road, and then the fun begins – we hear the unmistakable opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night,” which leads into Ringo’s drum break from “The End.” The Martins keep that drum beat and lay the rest of “Get Back” on top of it, mixing in (I kid you not) the orchestral crescendo from “A Day in the Life.” It’s extraordinary, and it goes on like that – they make a superb medley out of “Drive My Car,” “What You’re Doing” and “The Word,” and later on lay the vocal and string lines from “Within You Without You” over the powerhouse rhythm section of “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Purists are right now clawing their eyes out, and honestly, I thought I was one of them until I heard Love. These remixes are amazing, and they lend new appreciation to the originals. They’re obviously no replacement for the original records, but they shine a light on parts of them you’ve never paid attention to. The version here of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” for example, starts with just Lennon and his acoustic guitar, and the Martins slowly bring in each element of the insane production, putting the spotlight on each as it enters. By the end, it’s the familiar “Strawberry Fields,” and they’ve shown you step by step how the band and George Martin got there.

One moment that really did it for me – the intro to “Octopus’s Garden,” one of my least favorite Beatles songs, pits Ringo’s vocal over the orchestral score for “Good Night,” the closing track on the White Album. And it works. It’s almost crushingly sad. Of course, another favorite moment is Geroge Martin’s new string arrangement for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” laid over George Harrison’s acoustic guitar and vocal.

Even if you’re not interested in the mash-ups, the sound of Love is a revelation. The Beatles have never sounded this good – every element is crystal clear, from Paul’s stand-up bass to Ringo’s hi-hat, even on the earliest recordings. I desperately want the Martins to get cracking on the whole catalog, remixing and remastering – I want that Complete Recordings box set in pristine digital clarity. It’s a shame that the Beatles CDs you can buy now sound just as muddy and hissy as the Beatles CDs you could buy 15 years ago.

By Love’s conclusion, the Martins have all but abandoned the mash-up idea, choosing to play the final few tracks straight. They include “A Day in the Life,” but don’t close with it, choosing “All You Need is Love” as the finale. In the end, it’s an inspired decision, as it finishes on just the right note. Love is an inessential release, no doubt, but if you’re familiar with the Beatles catalog, it’s a treat. (In fact, the more familiar you are with the catalog, the better Love is, as you’ll spot more of the Martins’ tricks.) I’m glad I bought it.

But it’s not eligible for the top 10 list, as it’s self-evidently old recordings of old songs. I wrestled with it for a bit – Dr. Shore’s going to call it the record of the year anyway, but I can’t include it. It differs from SMiLE in some very important ways, most notably that Wilson’s album was comprised of new recordings. But just as important to note is that SMiLE, the 2004 version, is the first appearance of the finished composition. It was always intended to sound the way it does now, whereas Love is a producer’s holiday, apart from the original plans of the artist. If I include this, I have to include remix albums and DJ records and all kinds of other things that have no place on the list.

That shouldn’t stop you from buying Love, though. Nor should my rules keep you from purchasing Tom Waits and Mark Kozelek. (You can pick up Ben Folds’ album too, but I’d recommend getting the original EPs, if you can find them.) In fact, my silly little regulations should never be seen as a judgment on anyone’s musical taste, or a criticism of the kinds of albums I don’t include. A case could definitely be made that Love is the best album of 2006, and I’d bet virtually everyone who regularly reads this site will enjoy the Beatles disc more than the one I’ve actually chosen for the top spot this year.

But I do think the rules are important, as gatekeepers if nothing else. They keep my list focused, as I think it should be, on new studio album statements from active artists. Every time I think about doing away with them, I think of a hundred reasons to keep them. Unfortunately, albums like Love and Orphans and Little Drummer Boy Live end up with the short end of that stick. But expect more of these “ineligible doesn’t mean bad” columns in the coming years, because I think the rules are sticking around.

Next week, Christmas music from some surprising artists.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I do have three albums to discuss this week, but first I’d like to ramble a bit about The Fountain, which is perhaps the most original and beautiful movie I’ve seen this year. The problem is, I can’t really talk about it without spoiling elements of the plot and theme, so if you haven’t seen this movie yet, please, please skip down to the first set of asterisks below. This is not a movie you want me to ruin for you.

All aboard who’s coming aboard? Okay then.

The Fountain is Darren Aronofsky’s third movie. That would have been enough right there to make me want to see it – his first two, Pi and Requiem for a Dream, are a pair of the most stylistically innovative lower-budget flicks this side of Eraserhead. (And they both make a hell of a lot more sense than David Lynch’s first opus does.) He is, no two ways about it, a great visual filmmaker.

Here’s what he cooked up for his third film. Hugh Jackman plays three guys named Tom, each separated by 500 years. Tomas is a conquistador in 16th Century Spain, Tommy is a research scientist in the present day, and Tom is a celestial traveler floating through space in a clear bubble half a hundred years from now. Each Tom is haunted by his devotion to a woman named Isabelle, played each time by Rachel Weisz. And of course, all three stories interconnect to tell a tale of love and death and rebirth.

But it’s the ways in which they interconnect, and the symbolic bridges between them, that make The Fountain a work of magic. I will try to summarize, but the web is tricky – I’ve seen the movie twice, and have plans to see it a third time, and I still feel like I have only the most tenuous grasp on it. But here goes: The modern-day Thomas is a geneticist trying to find a cure for brain cancer. He’s working around the clock, sacrificing all his spare time, because of his wife Izzi – she’s dying of a brain tumor, and Thomas is convinced he can cure her. And he finds a cure, but not in time.

Izzi, meanwhile, is writing a book called The Fountain, that’s about the 16th Century Tomas. In the book, Tomas is sent by Queen Isabella to look for the Tree of Life, so that she (and by extension, Spain) may live forever. The book is obviously a metaphor for how Izzi sees Thomas, crusading for her life, and yet Aronofsky never gives short shrift to this third of the story. Intercut with these stories are scenes of Tom, in his glass bubble, bringing a withered tree to a dying star in the hopes of reviving it. (The tree, not the star.)

And as the modern-day Thomas discovers a cure for aging (it has something to do with another tree in Guatemala), it becomes increasingly clear that the future Tom is the present-day Thomas, driven mad by Izzi’s death. He’s marked himself with tattooed rings for each year, like the inside of a tree, and when we see present-day Thomas making the first of those rings, the moment is astonishing. It is then that the juxtaposition becomes heartbreaking – he is unable to accept Izzi’s passing, even as she herself embraces it, and he spends the next 500 years trying to outdo, to “cure” death.

There’s a lot more – I haven’t even mentioned Izzi’s final request to Thomas, one which resonates through the years with multiple meanings. The Fountain is a head-scratcher, a deftly edited and sharply written puzzle, and if that were all it accomplished, it would still be worth seeing. But it goes far beyond that. This is a deeply felt film, an outpouring of grief and pain that reaches for transcendence, and actually gets there. If you’ve ever lost someone and tried with all your might to hold on to them, this film will speak to you, and move you.

Many, many people hate this movie. It’s the risk filmmakers like Aronofsky run when they put themselves out there like this. The Fountain doesn’t hide its big ideas, but more importantly, it doesn’t disguise its emotional core with irony or clever wordplay. The film is unfailingly earnest, which makes it easy to ridicule. It’s an audacious, risky movie with a big, wide heart and a depth you won’t find too often at the local multiplex. I would rather watch a daring, thoughtful filmmaker like Aronofsky fall on his face, which he most certainly has not here, than sit through a hundred cookie-cutter, big-budget action orgies.

Speaking of the budget, one of the amazing things about The Fountain is the saga of its creation. The movie itself had its own death and rebirth – its original incarnation as a big-money star vehicle for Brad Pitt was canned when Pitt pulled out, and Aronofsky transformed his film into a leaner, more direct work for Jackman. The visual effects are incredible, given that they were made with water and a microscope, and cost a grand total of $140,000. I would take these effects shots over the digital, soulless wonders Aronofsky likely would have wound up with had the original plan not fallen through.

And how this movie would have worked with Pitt is beyond me. Jackman is perfect in all of his roles here – it is, bar none, the best performance I have seen him give. The movie is him, he’s in virtually every scene, and he delivers Thomas’ grief-stricken determination and Tom’s pain and release beautifully. In a movie that easily could have been confusing and cold, Jackman brings the soul, and connects you instantly and completely to his character(s).

In short, everything seemed to work out perfectly – The Fountain plays like it was always meant to be like this, and unquestionably heralds the return of a gifted and fearless writer/director. It’s a movie that’s easy to stand back and laugh at, because it stands naked and defenseless and invites you to shed your own ironic armor and go deeper with it. If you’re willing to do that, it’s a powerful film, but if you’re not, it’s a load of pretentious hooey. There is no middle of the road here.

I was willing, twice now, and I’m very glad I was. The Fountain touched me like no other movie this year, and it is an example of my favorite kind of art – the kind that exists because its creators simply had no choice but to make it reality. It is a passionate, powerfully imagined and deeply personal movie, and I hope the day never comes when I stop seeking out and loving films like this one.

Thanks, Darren. Welcome back. Now get to work on the next one!

* * * * *

The Good.

When you think about it, Spock’s Beard is a really silly name for a band.

I wonder if the band members ever considered changing it. They had the perfect opportunity three years ago, when founding member, lead singer and chief songwriter Neal Morse left for a solo career. But drummer Nick D’Virgilio (still one of the finest multi-instrumentalists I’ve ever seen live) took over on lead vocals, and the Beard pressed on. And if any questions remained about keeping the name, they seem to have disappeared – their just-released ninth album is self-titled, which seems to signify the cementing of the new lineup.

Despite the goofy name, which they took from an episode of the classic Star Trek series, Spock’s Beard plays intricate, crunchy, melodic progressive rock with a brain. Neal Morse’s songs and lyrics were little masters’ classes on how to write prog without slipping into bombast or self-indulgence – even his 25-minute epics had choruses and soaring melodies. Without him, the Beard has struggled to maintain the same level of quality – 2003’s Feel Euphoria wasn’t much to write home about, and 2005’s Octane was better, but still chock full of average rock songs.

What a surprise, then, to hear “On a Perfect Day,” the opening shot from this new album. It’s nearly perfect – it starts with a classic prog riff on guitar and organ, moves into a memorable chorus, makes room for keyboard and guitar solos, and even contains an acoustic guitar duet in the middle, the kind Yes used to do. D’Virgilio’s voice is clear and captivating throughout, his drum work is awesome as usual, and the rest of the band really locks into a groove. It is the best song they have done since Morse left.

And the album it kicks off is self-titled for a reason – this is the definitive disc from Spock’s Beard 2.0. Gone is the tentative nature of the previous two releases, and here at last is a comfortable, energized record from these guys, one that doesn’t sound as if they lost a limb when Morse quit. At right around 77 minutes, it’s a monster of a record, but none of these tracks sound like filler to me. The Beard tries out a multitude of styles, from classic ‘70s prog to straight-ahead rock to jazz fusion to orchestral grandeur, and each one fits.

“On a Perfect Day” leads into “Skeletons at the Feast,” a furious instrumental that shows off just how good these guys are. But lest you think it’s all chops and wankery, check out “All That’s Left,” a deceptively smooth 6/8 ballad with a great chorus. Just from the title, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “With Your Kiss” is a romantic number, instead of the nearly 12-minute psychodrama it is. (The title phrase is used thusly: “Seal my fate with your kiss.”) The band nimbly shifts from blues (“Sometimes They Stay, Sometimes They Go”) to stately prog (“The Slow Crash Landing Man”) to lovely piano pop (“Hereafter”).

But the biggest surprise is the album’s “epic,” “As Far as the Mind Can See.” Neal Morse wrote one of these massive multi-part suites per album when he led the band, and D’Virgilio, I think, has felt obligated to follow suit. His first couple, though, were weak affairs, stitched together because the fans expected a 20-minute song, when he is most comfortable writing five-minute tunes. He was out of his element, and it was obvious.

But “As Far as the Mind Can See” is terrific, a 17-minute, four-part opus that feels organically grown. The Beard stretches its sound here, with the jazzy feel of the second movement (“Here’s a Man”) and the brass sections and choirs of the third (“They Know We Know”). The shifts between movements are natural, the theme is clearly thought through, and the reprise at the end is perfectly executed. It’s the first time that the D’Virgilio Spock’s Beard has shown, without a doubt, that they can carry on with Neal Morse’s traditions while expressing their own new identity.

And in a way, that brings us back to the name. Like it or not, the Spock’s Beard name carries with it a history and a standard for a passionate group of fans, and this is the first time that the new lineup has proven worthy of it, so to speak. After a pair of half-steps, this is the one that deserves to be self-titled, the one that proclaims loudly and proudly, “We are Spock’s Beard.” Hopefully it’s the start of good things to come from the band – for the first time since Morse left, I’m looking forward to many years of new Beard music.

* * * * *

The Bad.

I am late to the Copeland party. I first heard them last year, picking up their second album In Motion on the strength of “Pin Your Wings.” But I was sold when I heard their awesome cover of Carly Simon’s “Coming Around Again,” on their Know Nothing Stays the Same EP. Aaron Marsh possesses a voice of remarkable clarity and agility, and his band plays sweet piano-fueled melancholy rock. Their work is nothing extraordinary, but it’s well-made and worth hearing.

Even so, I was excited to hear their new album, Eat, Sleep, Repeat, because the more I listened to In Motion, the more it seemed just a few nudges in the right direction shy of being great. Too bad, then, that Repeat actually stumbles backwards, smoothing off all the bite of the band’s past work and settling for bland and boring songwriting. Sonically, it is the band’s most accomplished effort, but all the polish can’t disguise the fact that Marsh fell down on the job this time, turning out very few memorable songs and saddling the ones he did dream up with cripplingly bad lyrics.

Now, I admit it – I may be feeling some residual anger over the botched packaging. Eat, Sleep, Repeat comes in one of the most annoying cardboard sleeves I’ve ever seen. It has this die-cut foldover flap that, when you buy it in the store, is affixed to the rest by a semi-adhesive rubber cement-like substance. Remove that, and the flap never stays down. It’s like a perpetual pop-up book. The liner notes are affixed to absolutely nothing, and flop out of the package constantly. The artwork by James Douglas Adams is beautiful, and frankly deserves a better package than this.

So some of that resentment may be bleeding over into my thoughts about the music, but the record itself deserves its own criticism. There are only three songs that rise above the mediocrity to deliver memorable melodies, and they’re all in a row. To get to them, you have to listen to Copeland take on a newfound Radiohead influence – the guitars on the title track are so Jonny Greenwood, and so 1997. The band strikes gold with “Control Freak,” but Marsh turns what could have been a delightful song into a silly one with his repeated refrain of “you’re freaking me out.”

“Careful Now” is almost a complete success, and so is “Love Affair,” with its gentle piano chorus and its Burt Bacharach finale. But after that, the album completely loses its way. “I’m Safer in an Airplane” sounds like a winner from the title, but the electric piano and beat box ditty just lays there. “Cover What You Can” is a formless interlude that floats by without making much impression, and “The Last Time He Saw Dorie” is barely audible, so restrained is every element of it. As much as I like string sections, the arrangement here just makes it worse.

“I’m a Sucker for a Kind Word” sounds like it’s getting back on track, with its sky-high chorus, but then the finale, “When You Thought You’d Never Stand Out,” retreats back into the murk. It’s obviously supposed to be some kind of epic, but it floats away and out of my memory seconds after it’s done. I know I’m being harsh – Eat, Sleep, Repeat is not horrible, just boring, which is almost worse coming from a band that had such spark just last year. There’s still no way to dislike Aaron Marsh’s voice, but the songs he lends it to here are wispy, forgettable things, and I know he can do better.

* * * * *

The Worse.

No, for something that moves beyond boring into the truly godawful, you need to hear the new Damien Rice.

Actually, scratch that. It sounds too much like a recommendation, like it’s the bit Rice’s website will excerpt in its quotes section: “‘You need to hear the new Damien Rice!’ says Tuesday Morning 3 A.M.” And the truth is that no one needs to hear the new Damien Rice. Absolutely no one.

I first discovered Rice the way most everyone did, through the movie Closer, which prominently featured his “The Blower’s Daughter.” I bought O, his oddly titled debut, and liked quite a bit of it. It was typical singer-songwriter stuff for most of it, but elegantly played, and accented with sweet strings. I also liked how the songs segued into one another, as if you were listening to one uninterrupted performance, even though by the ridiculous “Eskimo” the record could have used an interruption.

But on 9, his similarly oddly-titled sophomore album, Rice has amplified all the worst aspects of his first record, and diminished all the little things I liked. And I honestly don’t think it’s down to personal taste. The songs on 9 are just worse, ranging from boring to excrementally awful. The strings are louder and gloopier, but the skeletons are so threadbare and amateur that the orchestrations just sound like smokescreens. The focus is on performance, not songwriting, and Rice puts his all into these shitty little songs, but they’re still shitty.

“The Animals Were Gone” is actually one of the better ones, with thunderous strings sticking to the exposed ribs of the song. But since the focus is on Rice’s voice and lyrics, there’s no excuse for this: “At night I dream without you, and hope I don’t wake up, ‘cause waking up without you is like drinking from an empty cup…”

That’s nothing next to “Elephant,” a small eternity of a crescendo that doubles as one of the silliest sex songs ever. It starts like “The Blower’s Daughter,” with Rice’s close-miked vocals picking up the guitar strum from what seems like far away. Over an endless six minutes, Rice caterwauls as more and more instruments find their way into the mix.

“You can keep me pinned ‘cause it’s easier to tease, but you can’t paint an elephant quite as good as she,” he wails, everything building up and up to a massive crashing wave of sound. And the song climaxes (no pun intended) with the line “I am lately horny,” sung as if Rice is imparting the secret of life. And it ends with a veiled masturbation reference – “You can’t make me happy quite as good as me,” Rice coos in his wispy falsetto, as if it’s the cleverest line in all of popular music.

Seriously. It’s terrible.

“Rootless Tree” sounds like it will be better, until Rice gets to his “fuck you, fuck you, fuck you” chorus. I liked this song a whole lot better when it was called “Untouchable Face,” from Ani DiFranco’s Dilate in 1996. By the end, I swore that if he said “let me out” one more time, I would set him on fire. “Dogs” has the temerity to rhyme “girl that does yoga” with “when we come over,” and sadly nothing else about it is remotely memorable. Similarly, “Coconut Skins” is only notable for its exhortation to “sit on chimneys and put some fire up your ass.”

But if you really want to sit through a small eternity, put on “Me, My Yoke and I,” another great title ruined by a crappy song. It is six minutes of the same riff and half-assed melody, over and over, which Rice obviously thinks is rocking. “I’m mad, I’m mad, I’m mad like a big dog,” Rice screeches, before announcing “my god, my god, my god gave me a rod” in his best metal voice. If he didn’t actually enlist a six-year-old to write this thing for him, then he should have his ASCAP card taken away.

It’s not even worth discussing the rest of the record, but suffice it to say that it doesn’t get any better. When it’s not badly aping Duncan Sheik aping Nick Drake, it’s limping forward on overused chords and childish lyrics. The album’s barely an hour, not counting the useless bonus stuff after “Sleep Don’t Weep” ends, but it feels like six, like watching the crushingly slow Meet Joe Black twice. It’s a mess, and sophomore slump doesn’t even begin to cover it. Sophomore stinkbomb, maybe.

But worse, 9 proves that Damien Rice is a truly overrated and meager talent, and of the worst kind, too – one who thinks he’s producing brilliant, moving work. Some may find something to like and admire amongst the simplistic and interminable dross here, but I’m all done. I’ll stick with the other guy named Rice, the one who earned a spot in my top 10 list this year, despite having no budget and even less fame to work with. Talent comes through, and on Damien Rice’s 9, it’s sadly absent.

* * * * *

Next week, no Zappa, I’ve been told, so I’m going to delve into some records that, just by their very nature, can’t compete for my top 10 list. Then, Christmas music on the 13th, the top 10 list on the 20th, and the return of Fifty Second Week on the 27th. And that will do it for year six.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

2006 is winding down. I’m Christmas shopping already, and I’ve just made my last major purchase of the year, musically speaking – the three-CD Tom Waits set Orphans. (I have listened to half of it, and I would call it extraordinary so far, if this level of quality weren’t Waits’ normal standard.) I am pretty sure about my top 10 list now, barring another major surprise (wait until you see what made number one), and I’ve mapped out the last six columns of the year.

This is always a weird time for me – the assessment period, when I try to put a few adjectives and a nice little bow on the year. I think 2006 was about stability for me, about setting the boundaries of my world, and going about the business of filling it up. It was a relatively peaceful year, all told, with no earth-shattering changes, just little ripples. Although there’s still a month left, so anything could happen…

But what better way to wind down a peaceful year than with peaceful music? Considering my addiction to melody, many find it surprising that I’m also a fan of ambient and shoegazer music, the kind based in drones and soundscapes. It’s an odd side pocket of my obsession, I admit, but in some ways, it’s my favorite kind of music. Nothing else transports me so completely. There’s something vaguely spiritual about it, and although I know intellectually that the magic is performed with technology – the tweaking of effects boxes, the permutation of sine waves – it still sounds like magic. More to the point, with most ambient music, I don’t want to know how it’s done.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all Music From the Hearts of Space on you this time, but I do have four records from three bands that live on the soundscape side of town, three bands that are essentially unknown outside their own circles. And I think that’s a shame, because all three produce some beautiful work.

Iona is perhaps the best-known of the bunch – their unique mix of Enya and Rush has, over the 16 years of their existence, drawn the attention and respect of the progressive community. Still, they’re not really a part of that scene, just as they’re not really a part of the Christian music industry, even though their old-world spirituality has earned them a home there, too. Iona is one of a kind, a Celtic-ambient-prog-pop band beholden to no trends or fashions. They were mixing Uilleann pipes and synthesizers for nearly a decade before James Horner thought of it, and they’ve always been what they are now.

In some ways, that’s the problem with The Circling Hour, their sixth full-lengther. All the hallmarks of Iona’s sound are here – Celtic instruments mixed with soaring guitars and sweet synth beds, Frank Van Essen’s thunderous drums, Joanne Hogg’s breathtaking voice, a couple of very long songs and a multi-part epic, and a spiritual concept. It is, without a doubt, an Iona record, and my major complaint with it is that it doesn’t break any new ground for the group. It doesn’t even hone the sound presented on 2000’s Open Sky, it just presents it again.

Any disappointment you may have with their creative repetition, however, should be allayed by the quality of the record. It’s an Iona album, but it’s a very good one, and as long as no one else sounds like this, they might as well own the style. Opener “Empyrean Dawn” begins with nothing but Hogg’s voice, but very soon explodes with guitars and keyboards, finally settling into a stately groove. The songs on Circling Hour are a bit more propulsive than those in the past – there is no sunset-lit ballad here this time, only moments of bliss before the drums kick back in.

Like always, guitarist Dave Bainbridge and pipes player Troy Donockley get plenty of space to trade leads, and in the album’s centerpiece, the 11-minute “Wind off the Lake,” they duel and duet restlessly, each pushing the other. That song contains pockets of ambience and long stretches of jig-like playing, and is the most sterling example here of their modern Celtic sound.

The other epic, “Wind, Water & Fire,” spreads its 14 minutes over three tracks. The first, “Wind,” is the most placid thing here, rising slowly, until Hogg enters at the start of “Water,” imitating lapping waves with her wordless vocals. “Fire” finds the band at full force, and while it would be silly to think of this as heavy music, the instrumental prowess exhibited here does carry substantial weight. The album ends with “Fragment of a Fiery Sun,” a brief reprise of “Empyrean Dawn” that brings The Circling Hour, well, full circle.

There’s nothing here that should surprise longtime fans, and those who’ve never sampled Iona before can start here with no fear. If you like this, you’ll like everything they’ve done before, and conversely, if you like anything they’ve done before, you’ll like this. I can whine all I want to about stylistic variation, but when a band has developed something this interesting and this unique, it seems petty. Iona is Iona, and probably always will be, and The Circling Hour is just another reason to like them.

If you want a band that sounds different album to album, you could do worse than Unwed Sailor, an instrumental collective from Seattle based around former Roadhouse Monument bassist Jonathon Ford. They haven’t been particularly prolific, but the Sailor boys seem to undergo a massive change each time out – the electric webs of The Faithful Anchor were no preparation for the haunting storybook sounds of The Marionette and the Music Box, for example.

This year, Unwed Sailor took another turn into more ambient territory with their third album, The White Ox. The signs were there on the Circles EP, released in May as a teaser for the full-length. Circles is one 16-minute song divided into two parts, and is the most droning, repetitive thing the band has ever done. The first part is an 11-minute crescendo looped around a simple, repeating bass figure, and while the second kicks things up a little, it ends just as it’s getting more interesting. It’s still oddly captivating, but in a much more subdued way than their other work.

The White Ox follows suit. This is an album to listen to in total darkness, with the volume on 11. It’s a moody, subtle effort, built on repetition and atmosphere. Opener “Shadows” is essentially three or four little pieces stitched together by synth washes, with a massive sound and some thunderclap percussion. “Gila” crawls along like the titular lizard, with a slinky bass line and some electronic distortion keeping the beat. It’s also the only song here with lyrics, a definite surprise – the last time we heard Ford’s voice was on the closing track of The Faithful Anchor. His low tone works well with this menacing number.

Most of this album happens beneath the surface, and the changes are so subtle and small that it’s easy to miss them if you’re not listening intently. “Numbers,” for example, is just as much a math-rock piece as anything on the band’s first couple of records, but this one’s performed on acoustic guitars, synth sounds and wordless vocals. Ford spends the final moments of that song counting out loud to 10, kind of a reverse countdown for “Night Diamond,” one of the most subdued tracks. The chiming guitars add a layer of shimmering beauty to this piece, and the piano melody is sweet.

While this music just floats by on first listen, keep digging and it becomes clear that Ford has made a little masterpiece here. My main disappointment is with the length – Ox is 33 minutes, and Circles is 16. Together they’d have made a normal-sized album, but no, we have to pay for them separately, even though the cover art and design makes it clear that they’re parts of a whole.

But that’s a minor quibble. There’s apparently a second Unwed Sailor full-length called Little Wars that’s in the can, and I hope it’s as consistent and lovely as The White Ox. It’s like nothing Ford has done before, and fans of the more energetic Sailor material may find it too simple, but for me, The White Ox is a lovely little record, and a happy addition to my collection of spaced-out mood music.

Of course, no one in this field can hold a candle to Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson, the mainstays of Hammock. Byrd and Thompson were members of Common Children, and Byrd has recently joined my favorite band on the planet, the Choir. But nothing in their prior catalogs could have prepared the way for Kenotic, Hammock’s magnificent 2005 debut.

Byrd and Thompson don’t play music as much as they sculpt it from the air. Every sound on Kenotic feels like it’s made up of elements from beyond the atmosphere, and describing Byrd’s reverb-soaked guitar playing as otherworldly almost seems like an understatement. This is definitely one of those cases where knowing how it’s done – arrays of pedals and stacks of electronic effects processors – really detracts from the experience, because Hammock music sounds mystical.

Hammock’s second full-length is called Raising Your Voice… Trying to Stop an Echo, and with it, they’ve landed a dream of a dream-pop record deal: they’re on Darla, home of Cockteau Twin Robin Guthrie. That name means nothing to many of you, but some of you are undoubtedly whipping out your credit cards already, because Guthrie’s name has been associated with some of the most glorious ambient pop music ever made.

The match-up is a fitting one. Raising Your Voice is 76 more minutes of Byrd and Thompson’s astonishing float music, performed with some of the most alien and transporting guitar tones you’ll ever hear. (For you Choir fans, imagine an entire album of the spacey bits of Circle Slide. Yeah, it’s that good. Better, even.) They’ve added lyrics to three songs here, sung by Byrd and his wife Christine Glass, but don’t worry, they work brilliantly, especially the awesome “Shipwrecked (Flat on Your Back).”

Elsewhere, little has changed. The duo still creates cascading waterfalls of sound, with occasional help from Glass on wordless vocals and Matt Slocum (Sixpence None the Richer) on cello. Subtle beats weave in and out of these 18 songs, but the focus is on the deep emotional undercurrent of this music. That’s right, it’s emotional music, even without lyrics or indelible melodies, which is a feat in itself. A piece like “Losing You to You” dares you to remain unmoved as oceans of emotion crash over you. This is passionate music, and hidden in its corners are surprisingly powerful moments.

The one thing Hammock needs to work on is crafting album-length journeys instead of collections of smaller trips. These 18 tracks ebb and flow, but they don’t connect as well as they could, and the final track, “Sparkle and Fade,” is more like an interlude, one that’s over before you know it. It’s a small complaint, but sequencing can often be the difference between good records and great ones.

Raising Your Voice is a marvelous follow-up regardless, and hopefully a sign that Byrd and Thompson plan to keep making this glorious music for years to come. They’re getting some well-deserved respect for it, and hopefully some well-deserved sales. It’s obvious, with every beautiful note, that this is the music Byrd and Thompson have wanted to make all their lives, and I hope they get to keep on making it, because at times, this is the music I’ve wanted to listen to all my life, and I want more of it.

Links. Clicky. Iona. Unwed Sailor. Hammock.

Next week, catching up with some minor-league releases. Then, Christmas music and (hopefully) Frank Zappa before we plunge into the year-end extravaganzas.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I knew I shouldn’t have called Nellie McKay weird. Next to this week’s contestant, Joanna Newsom, Nellie McKay is as normal as Nelly Furtado.

Newsom is… well, let’s put it this way. Every once in a while, you find an artist with a sound so completely their own that you just know they will never have any imitators. Pop culture impact is often measured in influence – how many other bands try to sound like yours? The Clash, for example, are one of the most influential bands that ever walked the earth, and the reason is twofold: they came up with a new sound, and that sound was easy to replicate and build on.

But then there are those artists who sound so much like no one else that no one else could ever sound like them, if that makes sense. Bjork is a good example – her mix of techno-savvy, pop classicism and orchestral grandeur would be enough, but then there’s that voice, towering above (and sometimes overpowering) everything else. She’s an original, in both the best and worst way.

The same can be said of Newsom, who came into the world kicking and coughing with a little record called The Milk-Eyed Mender. It’s an innocent, childlike album, featuring little else but Newsom and her harp. That’s right, her harp. The songs on Mender are melodic and folky, with sparkles of stardust, but to appreciate them, you have to get past her voice, which often sounds like that of an intoxicated child. Newsom has complete confidence in her elfin, yet powerful vocals, and they manage to be simultaneously unrestrained and paper-thin.

For all of that, The Milk-Eyed Mender is a little album, with lovely little songs. Her sophomore effort, out this week, is defiantly not little. The only thing small about it is its title, Ys, which is pronounced “ees,” and which means… who the hell knows. Everything else about the album, though, is massive, ambitious, monolithic – essentially the recipe for a disastrous sophomore slump, and the sign of an artist who suddenly has more money and control over her own work than she should.

Except it’s not a slump, and Newsom seems to have exactly the right amount of control over this monster. I don’t know how she alchemized all the elements she used here. In fact, I’ll list them, and you tell me if you can hear in your head how it would come together, because I sure couldn’t.

First, Newsom wrote five long, complicated, progressive-folk songs. The shortest of them is more than seven minutes, and the longest weighs in at 16:53. She then took her harp and her songs to producer (sorry, recorder) Steve Albini. This is a guy whose most commercial-sounding production ever was Nirvana’s In Utero. His usual fare is raw and untouched – he has the uncanny knack of making shitty-sounding bands sound even worse, in the pursuit of “honesty.”

So the guy who ruined PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me recorded the harp and vocals on these songs, and then Newsom took those tracks to Van Dyke Parks, best known as Brian Wilson’s collaborator on SMiLE, to add some strings. Let me just emphasize how weird it is to see Albini’s name right above Parks’ on the same project. So Van Dyke wrote some arrangements for full orchestra, conducted and recorded them, and then, even weirder, sent the whole mess to Jim O’Rourke, erstwhile member of Sonic Youth and Wilco, to mix together into a record.

The result? Well, the best I can come up with is that Ys sounds like 1970s prog-folk played on 16th Century instruments and then sung by a drunk 10-year-old. And if that doesn’t sound magically appealing, then I’m telling it wrong.

To be honest, I expected an unlistenable mess. What I got is a delirious wonderland, a swirly-sky journey through perhaps the most singular, idiosyncratic talent I’ve encountered in years. On paper, it sounds impenetrable, but as it’s blissfully wafting from your speakers, spreading little sprinkles of fairy dust as it rises, it sounds amazing.

Speaking of on paper, you have to have a gander at some of these lyrics. The record plays like a stream of consciousness, and reads like free-verse poetry. Little of it makes logical sense, but all of it makes emotional sense, if you know what I mean. And it’s stuffed with words you normally wouldn’t find in any kind of music, like “inchoate” and “lissome” and “hay-monger.” Here, look, it’s like this:

“Awful atoll
O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow!
Bawl, bellow:
Sybil sea-cow, all done up in a bow,
Toddle and roll;
teethe an impalpable bit of leather,
while yarrow, heather and hollycock
awkwardly molt along the shore.
Are you mine?
My heart?
Mine anymore?”

All punctuation and capitalization preserved from the lyric sheet, of course. I don’t mean to imply that these lyrics don’t work, but that they are tongue-twisting tales leagues beyond the average pop lyric, and merely reading the liner notes, you’ll probably wonder just what kind of music fits these words. It is a testament to Newsom’s skill that the songs themselves never sound cluttered or overstuffed.

But back to the sound itself. Albini actually did the reverse of what I expected – he smoothed out Newsom’s voice. Together, the two of them have figured out how to use her maddening, magnificent voice as a true instrument, carrying the melody and adding just enough character. The full orchestral arrangements certainly help, framing her babe-in-the-woods squeak with Fantasia-like grandeur. But the 10-minute “Sawdust and Diamonds” is all Newsom and her harp, and even there, she seems more controlled, more aware of her abilities and limitations.

Her songwriting appears to have no such limitations. Opener “Emily” incorporates half a dozen dramatic shifts and at least as many memorable melodies over its 12 minutes, and astoundingly turns an epic poem into a delightfully memorable piece. When you can get a 12-minute song stuck in your head, that’s something special. “Only Skin,” the phenomenal 16:53 piece referenced above, earns every second of that running time, and here Van Dyke Parks stands out with a spectacular string arrangement that will knock you over if you’re not careful.

But strangely, it’s something called “Monkey and Bear” that takes the top prize. It’s a 10-minute programmatic exploration of society in allegory form, and it starts as a fairy tale, but ends with an extraordinary chanted segment that will set your hair on end. Surprisingly, the strings take a back seat during this movement, leaving Newsom to kick up a storm on center stage by herself, and she does so brilliantly.

Ys sputters to a close with “Cosmia,” the clunkiest and shortest thing here, but even that misstep can’t derail this spellbinding album. And that one ends beautifully, Newsom stepping out of her comfortable range to wail desperately at its climax, in plain, gorgeous language. “And I miss your precious heart,” she cries, and you can hear the longing bursting from her.

Somehow, Newsom made everything work, and she’s ended up with a second record that no one could have expected. You cannot judge Ys as pop music, or as folk music, or as pretty much anything else – it is its own thing. It will undoubtedly be a divisive work among those few who actually hear it, and my bet is people will either reach for the stop button before the first track ends, or they will fall in desperate, maddening love with it. Something this bold leaves no middle ground.

Me, I love it. I’ve found it difficult, if not impossible, to listen to anything else over the past week. But it’s hard for me to recommend it, since I know that those who dislike it will violently dislike it. However, those who love it will absolutely, without reservation, love it like their own child. It’s that kind of album. It’s difficult to rank something this singular against anything else out there, since its goals and accomplishments are so different from virtually any other record I’ve heard this year. But in every way I can think of, Ys is one of the best (and oddest, and weirdest, and most bizarre) albums of 2006.

Next week, some pretty, pretty noise.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s a short one this week – I was out last night until about 6 a.m., and only got a few hours of sleep, and I think I’m getting some kind of chest cold, so we’re going to keep it kind of brief.

Obviously, the big news for this week (not counting the crumbling Bush empire, the sweeping success of Democrats in the mid-term elections, and the none-too-soon exit of Donald Rumsfeld) is the release of Frank Zappa’s Trance-Fusion, after a 13-year wait. Well, okay, it’s big news in my world, and some may be wondering why I’m not going to review it this week.

The simple answer is that I’m planning something special soon, kind of a Frank Zappa buyers’ guide to navigate newbies through his daunting catalog. I hope to have that ready about the time that the third Zappa album of the year, the MOFO box set, ships. (Given the numerous delays on this collection, I may have more time than I need…) But because Trance-Fusion is such a big deal, here’s a brief preview:

Trance-Fusion is the first of the Holy Trilogy, three albums that Zappa finished before his death in 1993. I have no idea why the Zappa family has been sitting on these records since then, but Trance became the first to hit shops, with virtually no fanfare, last week. The cover is incongruous, but beautiful – it depicts a collage of dolphins in the shape of Zappa’s trademark (literally) facial hair. It’s a beautifully designed package, with loving liner notes (as always) by Gail Zappa – it’s a fitting release for this near-mythical album.

The record itself is Zappa’s third collection of guitar solos, culled mostly from his final tours in 1984 and 1988. If you’ve never heard a Zappa guitar album, here’s what they are – Zappa recorded every show he ever played, and later sorted through and found the best moments of guitar-band improvisation and stitched them together. Zappa was a guitar player unlike any other. His solos were often dirty and ugly, but could just as often be incredibly beautiful, and not even the man himself knew which would come out when he started to play. The solos really are little pieces unto themselves.

This is Zappa’s most focused guitar solo album, too – it’s confined to one disc, 16 solos in just over an hour, and it’s apparent why each one was included. For my money, Frank’s 1988 tone is unbeatable – he debuted this clean, spacey, almost brittle sound that’s crystalline and piercing, and the nine solos from that tour (his last) are the highlights. Frank’s son Dweezil duets with his dad on the opening and closing tracks, and it’s a sign of how much Zappa respected his son’s playing that the first solo you hear on Trance-Fusion is Dweezil’s.

In short, this is great stuff, especially for fans of inventive guitar playing. Those dipping their toes into the Zappa experience may not want to start with this, since there are no real “songs,” per se, and no lyrics. But for Zappa fans, the release of Trance-Fusion is a good omen, a sign that the vaults may be swinging open and the rest of Frank’s completed output may be available soon. (The other two parts of the Holy Trilogy, by the way, are Dance Me This, a synth-orchestra album, and The Rage and the Fury, a collection of Edgard Varese pieces that Zappa conducted.)

But I’m not reviewing Zappa this week, I’m reviewing this:

* * * * *

The music biz is, at its best, completely random. The record companies may like cookie-cutter acts with similar sounds and images, but the best stuff, to me, always seems to have sprung from the earth fully grown, the product of a weird mixture of cross-pollenated seeds and freak weather patterns that created some oddly deformed, yet entirely wonderful thing.

Nellie McKay is such a beast. Men in suits could not have dreamed up McKay in a million years, nor would they want to. Imagine someone with the piano skills of Diana Krall, the voice of Doris Day, and the artistic temperament of Johnny Rotten, back when he was punk. Now imagine that girl grew up listening to ‘80s pop and Eminem, in equal doses with jazz balladry and Patsy Cline. And now imagine that she became a whiz kid in the studio, a record maker that recognizes no boundaries, takes no orders and produces her own stuff.

That description still won’t prepare you for what McKay actually sounds like. Her 2004 debut album, Get Away From Me, leapt gleefully from show tunes to piano-pounding pop to profanity-laced rap and back again, its 18 tracks spread over two discs like a traditional vinyl double album. It was quite unlike anything else on the stands at the time, and it still is – irreverent, obnoxious, arrogant and strangely brilliant.

The same could be said of her real-life antics, which earned her the hard-to-shake label of “difficult artist.” Her contentious relationship with Sony Music reached its peak last year, when McKay delivered her second effort, Pretty Little Head. She envisioned another double-disc affair, this one 23 songs and 65 minutes, but the label wouldn’t hear of it, and against her will, they edited it down to 16 songs and 48 minutes. This pissed McKay off, and depending on who you ask, she was either dropped from the label or left of her own accord. And she took Pretty Little Head with her.

It’s a Ryan Adams-style rock star story the likes of which some artists would kill for, but it naturally leads to an important question – is the album itself worth all the fuss? Pretty Little Head was finally released last week in its full two-disc form, on McKay’s own Hungry Mouse label, and dolled up in a fab little package, likely a nicer presentation than Sony would have given it. Everything is the way McKay wanted it in the first place, so it’s a perfect opportunity to see if the full Pretty Little Head was worth sticking up for.

To start off, Head is another remarkably odd album. McKay has largely abandoned the more jazzy and Broadway-leaning material of Get Away From Me in favor of quirky piano-pop, but she once again leapfrogs genres and sounds as if she’s compiling a mixtape. The record is more sedate and, dare I say it, mature than her debut, but it still includes a sweet gay marriage anthem (“Cupcake”) that name-checks Gertrude Stein, a rant against animal cruelty (“Columbia is Bleeding”), and a rap about her mother (“Mama & Me”) that ends with her screaming for a suicide pill.

It also includes lovely ballads like “There You Are in Me” and “Long and Lazy River,” and surprisingly effective duets with both Cyndi Lauper (“Beecharmer”) and k.d. lang (“We Had It Right”). As with her debut, these songs are all over the place, and never quite cohere into a solid album, but each track has something to recommend it, and by the time it’s over, Pretty Little Head has delivered a fairly comprehensive picture of Nellie McKay’s wonderfully warped mind.

For those who have been following the saga, special attention will no doubt be paid to the seven songs that Sony cut from their version of the album, the numbers McKay demanded they include. By themselves, they don’t seem all that worth going to court over. Four of the seven are less than two minutes long, and most of them are silly little ditties. “Yodel,” for example, is a brief piece based on (you guessed it) a yodeled chorus, and “Pounce” is 56 seconds of McKay imitating a cat. The best of them, the small but striking “Swept Away” and the sung-in-French “Lali est Paresseux,” could be b-sides next to some of the finer material here.

But that’s not the point. Those seven tunes add so much character to this album that McKay would argue (and I would agree) that cutting them saps Head’s personality. Cutting these songs is like telling McKay to behave herself and act lady-like in public. Sony’s version is a serviceable collection of quirky pop songs, while McKay’s is a more complete picture of what she offers. The album would survive without the not-so-magnificent seven, but it wouldn’t be as sprawling, as strange, or as much fun.

Also, Sony’s version ended with “Tipperary,” a cute little tune, whereas McKay’s ends with “Old Enough,” a brief yet heartbreaking statement of peace that provides a much more satisfying conclusion. “Never thought I’d live to be old enough, to be old enough to feel like this,” she sings, and you may need to remind yourself that she’s barely in her 20s. In fact, this whole remarkable album sounds like the work of someone much older, with many more productions under her belt.

So few artists develop such a complete self-concept over their whole careers, never mind by album number two, which makes McKay a rare breed. Any record that gives a fully rounded picture of such a magnificently weird and dazzlingly talented human being is worth fighting for. I can’t say that Pretty Little Head is a surprise – it’s just as good as McKay’s debut, and if she can keep standing up for her own delightful perspective on life and music, then she’s bound for a rewarding career, and we’re in for a fun ride.

Next week, probably Joanna Newsom, among other new records.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So I just got back from a quick trip to the comic book store. Since I order all my books from the fantastic Casablanca Comics in Windham, Maine, I don’t find myself in my local shop all that often, and I never buy anything, which annoys the proprietors no end. So my visits are usually quick, and fueled by curiosity more than anything else – “Wow, so that’s what that book I’ve already paid for looks like,” like that.

Today’s visit was shorter than usual, on account of the pontificating nerds at the counter. My little hobby suffers under the weight of so many stereotypes that it’s just crushing to run into those cliches in the flesh. After a quick round of name-dropping (“Hey, I know Jim Lee!” “Oh yeah? Well I met George Perez!”), they launched into their critique of modern comics. I swear to you, one of them actually said this:

“I like good stories, with good dialogue. That’s why I read New Avengers.”

Convincing people that there are well-crafted, literary comics that don’t include a single muscle-bound moron or overly well-endowed bimbo in tights is hard enough without people like this running around, seriously believing that New Avengers is the pinnacle of the medium. And when they got around to the topic of super-hero movies (“Elektra’s not bad at all!”), I had to bolt. I’m a snobby snob, I admit, but jeez…

Anyway. I have a rare day off today, so I’m taking advantage of it, in the hopes of snagging a free weekend. Reviews in a second, but first, one very important addition to last week’s column, specifically the list of new records I’m looking forward to. I completely forgot the November 20 release of Raising Your Voice… Trying to Stop an Echo, the new one from the amazing Hammock. Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson make some of the prettiest noise you’ll ever hear, and their second full-length is being released by Darla, the home of Cockteau Twin Robin Guthrie, so that’s all good. Sorry for forgetting, and thanks to Chris L’Etolie for reminding me.

Now, onward. This week’s column is brought to you by the letter W:

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So the biggest news of the week, music-wise, is undoubtedly the release of Endless Wire, the first new album by the Who since 1982’s It’s Hard. Cash-grab reunion tours are nothing new for the Who, but this is the first time in more than two decades that Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey have made a whole album together under the band’s name, and even with the undercurrent of filthy lucre, I was still interested to see what they came up with.

Now, I’ve never been on the Townshend train as much as many of my fellow critics. I like the Who, but I’ve always found their work to be both simple and overblown, if that mixture makes any sense. Tommy and Quadrophenia are both massive conceptual pieces, true enough, but the songs that comprise them are little more than ditties most of the time, and the lyrics are almost amusingly blunt. In short, subtlety, thy name is not Townshend.

Still, I was fascinated to hear what a 21st Century Who might sound like. Dr. Tony Shore (him again!) got an early version, and warned me away from Endless Wire, telling me in no uncertain terms that it sucked out loud. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Your Who collection will be complete without needing to buy this.” But did I listen? Of course not.

As much as it pains me to say so, Dr. Shore was right. Endless Wire is terrible.

I seriously believe that any positive review of this record is tempered by affection for Townshend and Daltrey. Half of the original band is now dead, and the two survivors are coasting on a tremendous amount of good will for this project, but honestly, by no objective standard is this a good album. It doesn’t deserve the four stars it’s getting in most major publications. It doesn’t even deserve two.

The first half of the album is simply embarrassing. It opens with “Fragments,” a half-assed “Baba O’Riley” that cops the oscillating synth sound, but none of the energy. The virulent anti-religion ode “A Man in a Purple Dress” is as subtle as getting a cathedral dropped on you, though obviously Townshend thinks he’s being profound. Nearly every song is based on acoustic guitars – only “It’s Not Enough” rocks with any authority, and even that stretches its simple riff to the breaking point.

When Daltrey sings, the material is at least passable, but when Townshend takes the mic, as on “In the Ether,” things turn unlistenable. He’s pretty much lost his tone, and on “Ether” he sounds like Tom Waits with a sinus infection. Townshend also sings perhaps the most sickeningly sweet thing here, “You Stand By Me,” which is obviously a letter to Daltrey – when Townshend was indicted on child porn charges a few years ago, Daltrey became his staunchest defender. But Townshend could have just sent this tune to him in a letter, instead of inflicting it on us.

The second half fares better, but only slightly. It’s taken up entirely by a 10-song “mini-opera” called “Wire and Glass,” and it could have been a bit more mini, to be honest. The opus seems to be about the transformational power of music, but its plot is so silly that I won’t even relate it here. “Trilby’s Piano” takes the award for least likely to inspire repeat listens, but it’s got a lot of fierce competition. The opera even reprises “Fragments,” and it’s just as bad a second time.

Really, this album is pretty awful. I said this when I trashed Weezer last year, but listen to this record, and imagine it’s the demo tape from a new band. Then answer honestly if you think Universal would let this in the door. This only happened because of the music industry’s affection for the Who, even though that band no longer exists. Endless Wire is pretty much awful all the way through, and at 19 songs (plus two bonus tracks), I have to say they got the first part of the title right, at least. Avoid at all costs.

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I cannot, under my own criteria, explain how much I enjoy the Walkmen.

They are a messy, unrestrained, often amelodic quintet fronted by a guy who can’t sing at all, and they make raucous noise full of energy but not much else. And yet, every time I put on a Walkmen album, I’m wrapped up in the spell they cast, the odd house-of-cards atmosphere that surrounds everything they do. Even Hamilton Leithauser, the aforementioned frontman, manages to win me over to his caterwauling each time, somehow.

Still, I thought A Hundred Miles Off, their third album from earlier this year, wasn’t much to sing about. It didn’t have quite the memorable songs ratio that their prior effort, Bows and Arrows, sported, and I never even got around to reviewing it, despite liking quite a bit of it. I was especially fond of the pulverizing “Tenleytown” and the near-awesome “Lost in Boston,” in retrospect, but I just never moved the album to the top of the pile.

So why am I writing about them now? Well, who could have known that their second album of 2006, a song-for-song cover of Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats album from 1974, would be the best Walkmen record yet? I sure didn’t, and I only picked this up for the same reason I bought Endless Wire – I have all the others, and I may as well complete the collection.

But man, I’m glad I bought this one. Pussy Cats is a strange choice for an homage – it was recorded with John Lennon, during the latter’s famous “lost weekend” in ’74 (incidentally the year I was born), and as legend has it, Nilsson’s vocal cords ruptured before the sessions started, but he didn’t want to disappoint Lennon, so he pressed onward. The result is a ramshackle collection of covers and minor originals, and you can hear Nilsson’s voice get progressively worse as the album spins.

It turns out, though, that Pussy Cats is a perfect choice for the Walkmen, and not the least of the reasons why is that Leithauser’s voice already has the ragged quality of the original. Like their first three records, Pussy Cats Starring the Walkmen almost seems to fall apart while you’re listening to it, and the band has captured the spirit of the original record just by being themselves. That said, the variety of styles here sends the Walkmen to new places, and brings new colors to their palette.

The covers on Pussy Cats aren’t exactly an encyclopedia of brilliance. The record kicks off with Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross,” and also includes Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Doc Pomus’ “Save the Last Dance for Me,” and the children’s song “Loop de Loop.” But the Walkmen understand why these songs were chosen, and infuse them with just as much frivolous fun as Nilsson and Lennon did. Often, the new covers are note-for-note versions of the original covers, if that makes sense.

Nilsson’s original songs on Pussy Cats weren’t his best, but the Walkmen take on the piano ballad “Don’t Forget Me” like they wrote it, and do wonders with “Black Sails,” a foreboding song that barely seems to fit here. But then, that’s the charm of Pussy Cats – nothing about it seems to fit. It’s a bunch of odds and ends, recorded for the fun of it, and in this new version, the Walkmen haven’t so much constructed a shrine to the album as they have thrown their own Pussy Cats party.

I always thought it strange when bands would choose nearly-flawless classic albums to interpret in the studio. Why would anyone want someone else’s version of The Dark Side of the Moon, for example, when Pink Floyd’s is readily available, if not overexposed? I’ve often wondered why bands don’t take on lesser records, ones that for whatever reason didn’t quite work out the first time, or never got the respect they deserved. With Pussy Cats, the Walkmen haven’t quite done that – the experience of their version and Nilsson’s isn’t that far apart – but they have shone an interesting spotlight on a near-forgotten record, and shown why they love it. Pussy Cats Starring the Walkmen is a surprise, and a delight from start to finish.

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Seeing Woven Hand was one of the most intense live music experiences of my life.

The band is essentially David Eugene Edwards, formerly of 16 Horsepower, and his small armada of stringed instruments, from guitars to dobros to mandolins. Ordy Garrison joins in on drums on some of the more powerful pieces, but trust me that your eyes and ears will be locked on Edwards. He strums and shouts and spits, and all of a sudden, you’re in the deep south in the early days of America, and you’re listening to ballads about hellfire and God’s judgment, and you can feel the flames licking cold stone and the earth beneath your feet as you wrap your flimsy blanket about you and try not to think about where your soul is headed.

Woven Hand makes spooky, spooky music, and their fourth album, Mosaic, is perhaps their most claustrophobic and chilling yet. Edwards is no less intense on record, and the layering of sound a studio allows him only makes his work more spine-tingling. But let’s be clear – this is not Halloween-style silly-scary son-of-Satan stuff here, this is the real thing, fire and brimstone from an evangelical Christian wrapped up in seriously frightening soundscapes.

It’s also amazing, and unlike anything else you’ll hear this year. In the past, Edwards has stuck close to Appalachian folk styles, twisted to his own ends, but here, he’s all over the place, using choirs of backing vocals and pianos to fill out the sound. “Whistling Girl” is one of his finest songs, and one of the few that allows some light to spill in. Elsewhere, though, Edwards constructs elaborate tunnels of sound (“Twig,” “Elktooth”) and preaches over them, his fiery voice cutting through everything.

The lyrics are, as usual, cryptic Old Testament sermons, full of references to thorny woods and thundering skies, signs of God’s wrath. It’s no coincidence that the sunniest thing here, “Bible and Bird,” is an instrumental, and it leads directly into “Dirty Blue,” one of the most explosive on the album: “You’re curled up warm in your own little corner of Sodom, did you agree to believe this fall has no bottom?” The album has an apocalyptic feel to it, and it leaves you drained, physically and spiritually. I’m often interested to get inside the heads of my favorite artists, but I’m a little frightened of what it must be like to be David Eugene Edwards.

Still, he makes captivating music, and Mosaic is his finest achievement yet, the most complete realization of his bone-chilling vision. Unlike most records that promise thrills and chills, Mosaic will scare the bejesus out of you, but it will also leave you in awe of Edwards’ talent and intensity. He’s following his own path through the darkened woods, and though you may not want to follow him where he’s going, you’ll want to hear the songs he sings along the way.

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Next week, new ones from Copeland and Nellie McKay, most likely.

See you in line Tuesday morning.