I’m back. I don’t even have to ask if you all missed me – I got half a dozen concerned emails from regular readers, wondering if I had died or been deported or joined a monastery or something. It’s the first week I’ve taken off in almost two years, and you’d think the world ended.

Seriously, thanks to everyone who wrote inquiring about my health. I’m fine, I just took a weekend and went to a pair of concerts in Minnesota. If you’d like to read all about my exploits, I detailed them in the other column I posted this week, which should be in the archive.

But this column is for business, so let’s get started with a look at new releases through the end of the year. It’s pretty slim pickings, and I think my top 10 list is fairly well set in stone right now, unless something comes along and surprises me. December, in particular, is the most barren final month of any year I can remember, populated as it is with dismal rap records and best-ofs. If you’ve been breathlessly awaiting that new Bow Wow, well, then December is the month for you. But if you’re a Bow Wow fan, I can’t imagine what you’re doing reading this in the first place.

Starting with next week, there’s Endless Wire, the first Who album in a quarter-century. I’m half-surprised to not find a cover of Spinal Tap’s “Gimme Some Money” amongst the tracks here – it would fit right in with this cash-grubbing effort. What I have heard is simply godawful. Roger Daltrey can’t hit any of the notes he’s aiming for, and Pete Townshend, bless his heart, ran out of good melodies decades ago. John Entwistle probably would have added some class, but alas…

Anyway, also out next week is the second album from jazzy upstart Nellie McKay, the new one from the Deftones (produced by Bob Ezrin, the guy who made The Wall), guitar workout discs from Joe Satriani and Phil Keaggy, and the new Copeland, which I’m excited about. Also out is Willie Nelson’s umpteenth album, but this one’s special – he created it with Ryan Adams producing and the Cardinals as his backup band. Should be an interesting listen.

November 7 sees Frank Zappa’s Trance-Fusion, one of three unreleased albums he finished before he died. This one’s a collection of guitar solos, focusing on his final tour from 1988. (The others, by the way, are Dance Me This, a synth-symphony album, and The Rage and the Fury, a collection of Edgard Varese pieces Zappa conducted.) That week also will see Skin and Bones, a live acoustic album from the Foo Fighters. I quite liked the quiet half of In Your Honor, so this should be at least enjoyable.

November 14 boasts a number of minor releases, the most important of which (relatively speaking) is the new And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, So Divided. What I’ve heard of this has been excellent, with the band expanding the sonic palette they tried out for Worlds Apart. New ones by Damien Rice, Joanna Newsom and Mark Knopfler, as well as the debut from Army of Anyone (Filter’s Richard Patrick with Stone Temple Pilots’ DeLeo brothers), round out the week.

But hark! November 21, the last big week of the year, gives us a Sufjan Stevens box set! Five CDs! Of Christmas songs! I’m not kidding! Stevens never does anything small, so his homemade yuletide discs from the past five years are coming out boxed together, in a lavish package, just in time for the shopping season. A likely more interesting box set comes from Tom Waits that same week – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards is part rarities collection, part new album, with 54 tracks separated into three categories.

Finishing us off are new ones from Spock’s Beard (self-titled, and sounding much more progressive than they have recently) and Loreena McKennitt (sounding exactly the same as she did when her last record came out, 10 years ago). And after that, nothing interesting at all until the Shins’ Wincing the Night Away in January. If anyone knows of anything else I might be interested in, something to fill those winter doldrums, let me know. And no funny emails recommending Bow Wow, you hear me?

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With all that, I think I can safely call Jeremy Enigk’s World Waits the last major new album of the year.

Enigk is the much-respected mastermind behind Sunny Day Real Estate, one of the best and least-remembered groups of the ‘90s. Over four albums, they perfected a dramatic, melodic style, the ripples of which can still be felt in the modern rock pool. Since 2000, when SDRE released The Rising Tide, their final and most complete-sounding album, Enigk has been laying low. One album with the Fire Theft (3/4 of SDRE) in 2003, and that’s been it.

The title of Enigk’s new solo album is a cheeky one, but the record is, blessedly, another grand slice of dramatic rock. This one is more toned down, more restrained and more traditionally beautiful than much of what Enigk has given us in the past, but it’s no less a work of art. And Enigk’s voice remains a singular instrument, floating and wailing and carrying his melodies, and in fact the whole album, on its back.

The record begins with, fittingly, “A New Beginning,” a textured instrumental that leads into the chiming, clean guitars of “Been Here Before.” That song is a mini-masterpiece, and in its melody and 7/4 beat betrays a surprising influence – Peter Gabriel. At numerous points on World Waits, Enigk brings Gabriel to mind, both vocally and instrumentally, something that will no doubt cause the fans of Sunny Day’s first two albums to recoil. But the dramatic organ break in “Been Here Before” is simply irresistible, and should bring those folks back.

For all its grandeur, most of World Waits is fairly simple. “River to Sea” is a sweeping folk waltz, the strings and backing chorale bringing it to life, and “Canons” follows its repeated piano figure into melodic bliss. The biggest surprise is “City Tonight,” which draws on U2’s Pop period for influence – it is by far the most “normal” song Enigk has ever leant his voice to.

The second half brings the majesty, even though tempos remain sedate throughout. “Damien Dreams” is low-key and suspenseful, the rumbling cello filling out the bottom end while Enigk reaches for the sky vocally. “Wayward Love” is a progressive collage of vocals and acoustic guitars, while “Dare a Smile” adds mandolin and Brian May-style guitar harmonies to an otherwise simple piece. And in the title track, Enigk has crafted one of the year’s best songs, a mix of Gabriel and Death Cab that works surprisingly well.

World Waits is not the unbridled hunk of brilliance some may have expected from Jeremy Enigk after so long, and its quiet tones and textures don’t quite match up with the power he wielded in SDRE. But give it time, and the subtle beauties begin to present themselves. In a year marked by underachievers, Enigk’s commitment to drama and melody, no matter how sedate the trappings, sound refreshingly complete. The world was waiting, and Enigk has delivered.

Next week, a bunch of reviews, including Ben Folds, Deftones, Copeland and others. Thanks again for all the letters of concern – I’m back, and here to stay.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So you know how Muslims are supposed to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives? Well, if music is my religion (and many who know me would agree that it is), I may have to start making regular pilgrimages to Dr. Tony Shore’s music room.

Yes, the man has an entire room set aside for music, for the collected spoils of decades of obsessive fandom. Three of the four walls are covered, floor to ceiling, in CDs, be they singles, albums or box sets. His closet is stuffed with vinyl and other collectibles. He has pictures of himself with his heroes, and framed gold albums that he worked on and helped promote during his years in the music industry.

I could have spent all weekend in there, easy, just pulling out and listening to the albums I hadn’t heard. (Thousands of them – there’s nothing like finding an even more obsessive music fan to drive home just how much you have to learn and hear.) But that wasn’t why I was there.

No, Dr. Shore and his wife Sara graciously opened their home to me for two reasons – Frank Zappa and Jars of Clay. It’s not often that you find a fan of both FZ and Jars, since they seem to operate on opposite ends of the musical and lyrical spectrum, which makes Dr. Shore and I two specimens of a rare breed. So I made the six-hour trek to Minnesota last weekend to join the good doctor and revel in our shared love of all kinds of music, and to see two concerts that undoubtedly drew none of the same fans, except us.

Zappa was first – the aptly named Zappa Plays Zappa show at the Orpheum in Minneapolis. First of all, it’s a beautiful venue, just breathtaking. Every major city should have at least one old stage-show theater like this, perfectly preserved and ornate while still being cozy. It’s the kind of place that elevates the artistic merit of whatever’s being performed on stage, and encourages people to remain seated, which is exactly the way Frank Zappa liked it.

How to explain Frank Zappa’s music to people who’ve never heard it? His work was complex (some would say impossible), yet earthy. He was a master of many different styles of composition, and he combined them all – he brought jazz structures to rock music, composed orchestral pieces and then transformed them into guitar workouts, took everyday events from the lives of those around him and crafted progressive epics about them, and slathered everything with a crude sense of comedy and attitude. He was a rock star with the brain of Stravinsky, and a guitar player the likes of which the world has rarely seen.

Zappa died of cancer in 1993, 17 days shy of his 53rd birthday. In his wake, he left one of the most extensive and rewarding catalogs in modern music, spanning more than 60 albums in fewer than 30 years. I am one of those Zappa fans who feels that it’s all worth hearing, that it all contributes to one long, cohesive album (a phenomenon Zappa called “conceptual continuity”). Zappa never got his due as a composer, and I think it’s because he never adopted a self-serious attitude about his work. Even his magnum opus, a two-hour orchestral piece called Civilization Phaze III, is about people living inside a piano and talking about pigs and ponies.

But if you want a case for why Frank Zappa should be revered, you couldn’t do much better than catching a Zappa Plays Zappa show. This is Frank’s son Dweezil’s labor of love, his way of turning more people onto his father’s genius. It’s three hours and 20 minutes (at least, the show I saw) of Zappa songs, played to perfection by an incredible band, and featuring some special guests. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

There were two things I worried about before seeing the show. First, I was afraid that Dweezil and his band would pick the easiest numbers, and we’d get an evening of “Dinah-Moe Humm” and “Camarillo Brillo.” Not so. While they didn’t get into “Sinister Footwear” or “G-Spot Tornado” or anything like that, the band did bite into some seriously difficult pieces, like “Inca Roads” and the great “Cheepnis.” They did the “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” suite, but skipped all the easy parts, diving right into “Father O’Blivion.” I could not have been happier with the song selection.

My second worry was Dweezil himself. For whatever reason, I’ve never had much time for Dweezil Zappa. I’ve heard his five solo albums (including the decent new one, Go With What You Know), and his two records with Z, featuring his brother Ahmet. But I’ve never thought him up to the level of his father, and hence dismissed him, without really considering that very few people are up to Frank’s level.

But man, this was a whole new Dweezil. His guitar playing was perfect, especially in the long solo sections, and his skill as a bandleader was extraordinary. While Frank’s shows had a hint of a sneer to them each time out, Dweezil, with his laid-back demeanor, fostered an atmosphere of love for the music, and it was contagious. There are three guitar pieces that Frank bequeathed to Dweezil upon his death, requesting that no one else play them. Dweezil performed one of them that night, the bluesy “Black Napkins,” and if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine Frank up on stage, so exact was the tone and phrasing.

In short, Dweezil did a swell job – reverent and exacting and still boatloads of fun.

But the special guests made the evening. On vocals for most of the show was Napoleon Murphy Brock, the voice of the early 1970s Mothers of Invention. Brock sang and played flute on some of Zappa’s most beloved albums, including Roxy and Elsewhere and One Size Fits All. The man has to be in his 60s, but he was a boundless reserve of energy, and he hasn’t lost a note. His voice was crystal clear the whole night, and he performed some of Zappa’s trickiest vocal pieces (like the first half of “Inca Roads”) brilliantly. And, he never stopped moving.

Roughly halfway through the show, Terry Bozzio made his way out. This guy’s a legend, one of the finest drummers you’ll ever hear – he played this massive drum kit that encircled him on all sides, little toms and cymbals surrounding him. And as he did with Zappa’s bands, not only did Terry play like a madman, but he sang lead vocals while doing so. I was stunned to hear a full rendition of “Punky’s Whips,” one of the most difficult pieces of Zappa’s late-‘70s canon. It’s a labyrinthine piece of work, on which Bozzio sang and played up a storm.

And then there was Steve Vai. I’ve never seen Vai play before, but he’s been one of my favorite guitarists since I was 15. No one plays like Vai. His tone is otherworldly, and he’s able to make his six-string (and sometimes seven-string) talk, sing, wail and weep. He came out to help perform “The Black Page,” a percussion-led piece that got its name from the amount of notes on the sheet music – it looked like a black page. Needless to say, it’s nearly impossible to play correctly, but the band nailed it.

So I got to hear Steve Vai and Dweezil Zappa trade leads on an extended, amazing “Montana,” and I got to hear one of my favorite (and often forgotten) Zappa tunes, “Village of the Sun.” Dweezil and the band stretched out on a 10-plus-minute “The Torture Never Stops,” and encored with “More Trouble Every Day,” which in my world is an enduring classic. And then Dweezil nearly choked up while talking about his dad and his music, then left us with “Regyptian Strut,” a fine and glorious fanfare. It was easily one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

One thing I will say, though, is that the Zappa family could be a little better at self-promotion. Their merchandise booth held no music at all, not even the posthumous Frank albums that you can’t get from any other source. This has been a good year for Zappa fans, with the dizzying live document Imaginary Diseases, and the forthcoming four-CD Making of Freak Out box set. But the capper is Trance-Fusion, one of three records Frank finished before he died. It’s out now through the Zappa family, and you’d think that Dweezil might have mentioned that from the stage or something. But no.

Trance-Fusion was expected in stores on October 24, but it’s been pushed back to November 7 for some reason, even though it’s been finished and awaiting release for 13 years. The Zappas just this week posted information about it to their website, but it’s not comprehensive in any way. People who wander to the site and don’t know what Trance-Fusion is won’t find out from the so-called official source. Additionally, I and many others have already pre-ordered the Freak Out box set, for $75. The release date has been pushed back twice, and we still don’t even know what’s on this thing – there’s no track list available.

It’s obvious that Dweezil and the family care about Frank’s music. But they need to learn to channel that care into regular information and customer service, or the fanbase is going to go elsewhere for their Zappa fix. And we don’t want to do that. We’d rather buy it from the family, especially a family that creates something as magical and loving as the Zappa Plays Zappa show.

Anyway, rant over. The next night was utterly different – we segued from the author of “Bobby Brown Goes Down,” the guy who led crowd chants of “ram it up your poop chute,” to a quartet of devout and thoughtful Christians named Jars of Clay. Jars played at Northwestern Bible College in St. Paul, a thoroughly different atmosphere than the Zappa show, but a moving one nonetheless.

Of course, Dr. Shore insisted on wearing his Zappa Plays Zappa t-shirt to the Jars show, which earned him a bunch of dirty looks. But that was okay, since Shore promoted the boys in the band when he worked for Essential Records, and he knows them pretty well. We got to slip backstage and meet the band, which was a nice experience. They seem like sweet guys.

I have a hard time explaining to people what I see in Jars of Clay. I have that same problem with most of the Christian bands I like, because people really get caught up in the Jesus angle without listening to the music. I play people Jars of Clay, and they listen for the J-word, almost hoping to be turned off by it. It’s strange, because musically, they’re a top-notch pop-rock band, and lyrically, they’re deeper and more thoughtful than 90 percent of what gets marketed as Christian music.

Case in point – backstage, the band members were complaining about a magazine review they just received, one which concentrated on the Christian angle and ignored the artistry. “You’d never hear them say, ‘You know, for an atheist, this guy plays guitar well,’” six-stringer Steve Mason said, and he’s right. It’s a strange bias, but it’s there, undeniably.

Adding insult to injury, that particular review was for Jars’ new album, Good Monsters, which is quite possibly the best thing they’ve ever done. After two records of low-key, acoustic folk-pop, Monsters is a loud, explosive piece of work, storming out of the gate with “Work” and “Dead Man,” two of the catchiest songs they’ve written. The whole thing sounds live and full of energy, more so than any previous record of theirs, and the lyrics follow suit, with tales of doubt and faith that find new ways to explore old themes.

That energy translated to the stage – they slammed through the first three tracks on Monsters right off the bat, opening with the third, a powerful rendition of Buddy and Julie Miller’s “All My Tears.” They played almost the entire new album, and the surprising highlight was the extended, poetic coda of “Oh My God,” a prayer of repentance and despair: “Hospitals that cannot treat, all the wounds that money causes, all the comforts of cathedrals, all the cries of thirsty children, this is our inheritance, all the rage of watching mothers, this is our greatest offense…”

They cranked out some old classics, of course, like “Flood” and “The Eleventh Hour,” but to be honest, the new material just blew the old stuff away. It wouldn’t quite be right to say that Jars remembered how to rock, because they have never rocked like this before. They’ve made a lot of good albums (honestly, all you doubters, they have), but Good Monsters may well be their first great one.

The biggest surprise of the night for me, however, was the opening act. The sports editor at my newspaper, Dave Parro, got me into the music of one of his friends, Matt Wertz, earlier this year. Wertz plays an amiable mix of acoustic pop and Motown soul, and he has a great voice, if a generic way with words. His new album, Everything In Between, was scheduled to come out on Nettwerk in September, and I’m not sure what happened, but it never materialized.

But lo and behold, there was Matt Wertz taking the stage before Jars, playing a strong set of fun acoustic tunes. The audience loved him, and frankly, he’s pretty lovable – he has a winning sense of himself, and a self-deprecating demeanor on stage that gets you on his side immediately. He conducted singalongs for several songs, and invited Mason on stage to join him for “Carolina.” His sweet disposition followed him off stage, where he wandered the lobby, introducing himself to people and shaking hands.

And of course, he had Everything In Between with him. It’s a short disc, barely half an hour, but it is sonically his biggest record, and his most varied. It contains “Heartbreaker,” a shuffling, bouncing song that stands as my favorite of his, but also whispery ballads like “5:19” and the closing “Capitol City.” “The Way I Feel” is soulful, while “Over You” is a straight-ahead rock song. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but the album is just as likeable and pleasant as Wertz himself.

You can hear it and buy it here.

Many thanks to Dr. Tony Shore and his family for letting me stay the weekend. It was a blast. You can read the good doctor’s blog here. He said he’d have something up about the Zappa show before I did, but as of yet, no dice… But what else should I expect from a guy who won’t acknowledge Steve Hogarth’s brilliance. (“Post-Fish Marillion,” he insists on calling it…) Seriously, thanks again, Doc.

This is one of two columns I’ve posted this week. The other is a more traditional tm3am, with a review of Jeremy Enigk’s long-awaited new solo album. I’ll be back on track after that, one a week for the foreseeable future. That’s right, you’re all stuck with me…

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’ve got a bunch of reviews this week, and almost no time to crank them out. And since I’ve already gotten shit about it, we may as well start with Weird Al.

I honestly, sincerely, and with no irony intended whatsoever believe that Weird Al Yankovic is a musical genius. He’s often dismissed as “just a parodist,” as if clever and funny parodies were easy to begin with, but his talent runs considerably deeper than that. Very few humor acts have produced a catalog with the breadth and punch of Yankovic’s, and there’s a reason his career has lasted more than 20 years while other Dr. Demento favorites have delivered their one novelty hit and disappeared.

And here is that reason – Yankovic understands music and its impact on American culture. He’s not just some guy who rearranges the words to pop hits, he knows what makes those pop hits tick, and he’s able to effortlessly (or so it seems) assimilate the musical sensibility of just about anyone, while skewering their place in the zeitgeist.

Yeah, I did just use the word “zeitgeist” in a Weird Al Yankovic review. And yeah, it’s easy enough to listen to his new album, Straight Outta Lynwood, and just laugh your head off, because it’s very funny. But that only hits one or two levels of what Yankovic does. Just about every song on Lynwood can be seen as social satire, gently barbed for your protection. No one would ever call Yankovic vicious, of course, and he’s not trying to smack anybody down with this record, but Lynwood is clever and pointed, all the way through.

It also makes me feel very old. This is the first ever Weird Al record for which I had to do research – I had never heard three of the five songs he parodies here, a sure sign that pop culture is finally starting to pass me by. To be fair, Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’” wasn’t exactly a worldwide hit, but oddly, its unfamiliarity only adds to the success of Al’s parody, “White & Nerdy.” It maintains the bravado of the original rap, but trades its thugs and hoes for pocket protectors and Klingons.

But that’s just the start. “Pancreas” proves once again that Yankovic is a master mimic, able to take on the musical persona of just about anyone. Here it’s Brian Wilson that gets the treatment, as bits reminiscent of “God Only Knows,” “Wind Chimes” and “Good Vibrations” weave through this loving tribute. Al and his crack band (the same three amazing musicians that have played with him since 1984) busted out dozens of odd instruments for this one, and the lyrics, praising the titular, overlooked organ, are no sillier, really, than a lot of Wilson’s work. (“Vege-Tables,” anyone?)

“Canadian Idiot” takes Green Day for a ride, delivering an attack on our northern neighbors that really says more about American arrogance. “I’ll Sue Ya” is a subtler “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” imagining an angry white boy wielding the legal system instead of a nine-mil. (“I sued Coca-Cola, ‘cause I stuck my finger down in a bottle and it got stuck! I sued Delta Airlines, ‘cause they sold me a ticket to New Jersey, I went there, and it sucked!”) And “Weasel Stomping Day,” believe it or not, has the same theme as Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”: traditions gone awry. This time it’s disguised as a children’s theme about… well, a day in which everyone stomps weasels. The sound effects are delightfully sickening.

Parodies of Usher’s “Confessions” and Taylor Hicks’ “Do I Make You Proud” stumble around a bit, but Yankovic scores with “Trapped in the Drive-Thru,” a 12-minute takedown of R. Kelly’s already hilarious “Trapped in the Closet” epic. Here, Yankovic details his adventures (or lack thereof) in the takeout line, which ends up being more interesting than Kelly’s guns-and-gay-men fiasco. Yankovic mirrors Kelly’s vocal acrobatics, his ridiculous “soulful” emoting, only this time, the action is centered on whether the drive-thru clerk will remember not to add onions.

But he saves his best shot for last – “Don’t Download This Song” is a “We Are the World”-style ballad about the evils of illegal downloading. It perfectly skewers both the all-join-hands, sappy sentiment of all-star benefit songs, and the fearful stance of the record industry in the face of a digital future. I can honestly see big-shot record execs dreaming up a song like this to convince people that “the record store’s where [they] belong.” The song is, quite simply, amazing, and in a final twist of irony, Yankovic is offering it as a free download at his MySpace site. (Listen closely during the fade at the end for the funniest line…)

If I have a complaint about Straight Outta Lynwood, it’s that Al doesn’t mess with his formula at all – here are six new originals, five parodies and a polka, just like always. But hell, why change something that’s working? Weird Al remains one of our best cultural lampooners, and given the pomposity of pop in general, we need someone to skillfully let the air out of the balloon now and then. Straight Outta Lynwood is another winner in a string of them, and with it, Yankovic proves again that he goes well beyond just “comedy music.” It’s satire, it’s social criticism, it’s the last three years of pop music all chewed up and spit back. But best of all, it’s really funny.

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I know I’ll get even more shit for this, but you just read the most positive review of the week. My other contestants include three guys that are often called geniuses, and I usually agree, but not this time.

First up is Beck, whose third album in 18 months is called The Information. This record reunites the chameleonic wunderkind with Sea Change producer Nigel Godrich, but if you’re expecting anything along the lines of the glorious, otherworldly sadness of that album, you’ll be left wanting. The Information is Beck’s attempt to bring it all together – here’s hip-hop, funk, acoustic blues, ethereal harmonies, cheesy synthesizers right alongside celestial ambience, and a bevy of nifty pop choruses.

So why is the cover art the most interesting thing about it? I’m not sure. But the packaging is awesome – The Information comes with a blank J-card insert, and a sheet of bizarre stickers, so you can design your own artwork. It’s a great concept in the age of personalized, interactive music. Create your own cover, then rip the songs to your iPod and shuffle them to create your own album, Beck seems to be saying.

And you may as well, since The Information offers no album-length journey, just a series of 15 songs. That in itself isn’t a bad thing – A Hard Day’s Night is just a collection of songs – but about half of these tunes are forgettable. As a whole, the album has a muted spell that works, and I find myself alternately bored with it and drawn into it, but 10 minutes after it wraps up (with a three-part collage that includes Dave Eggers talking over an endless synth wash), I don’t really remember much of it.

It’s taken a few listens to cull the good stuff, but “I Think I’m in Love” stands as perhaps the best of the bunch, with its skipping beat and jaunty melody. “Strange Apparition” sticks out simply by being the most traditional of these songs, a piano-led blues that plays it straight. “Nausea” picks up some of the whip-smart acoustic work of Guero, while the title song is a blippy success. But for every song that sticks, there’s one that just drifts in and out, like “Dark Star” (not the Grateful Dead song) or “Movie Theme.”

Godrich does his job admirably, stuffing The Information with details and darkening the corners with waves of sound. I just wish Beck had done his a little better this time out. He’s apparently been working on this material for years, recording Guero while on a break, but it’s strange just how much better last year’s album is than this year’s. I need to spend more time with The Information, but as of now, I’m ready to call it a strange experiment, and only a semi-successful one.

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Colin Meloy of the Decemberists has fewer acolytes than Beck does, but they’re no less fervent in their devotion. Meloy has been an indie it-boy for some time, a strange status for a guy more inspired by 18th century British folk music than anything the 20th century dished out. His band dresses in Civil War-period outfits and traffics in pirate tales and war ballads. Their last album, 2005’s Picaresque, includes a 10-minute sea shanty that defies description, and boasts no ties to modern music at all.

So, upon listening to The Crane Wife, the Decemberists’ major-label debut, one could be forgiven for wondering what happened. The signs of success are all there, at least in my world – The Crane Wife is a loose concept album that finds the band exploring different sounds and styles, and fully utilizing that major-label budget. They re-teamed with Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, the man behind the boards for Picaresque. This should have been a home run.

But it’s not. The main problem with The Crane Wife is that, for all Meloy’s fascination with period pieces and folk tales, the band has never sounded more modern, and by extension, more normal. This record is glossy and full-sounding, but what always made the Decemberists interesting was the implied creak of the ship’s wooden decks as the waves hit, or the atmosphere of an old English pub, that radiated off of their work. The songs on The Crane Wife, barring some exceptional exceptions, are all pretty average indie pop tunes, and they provide an ill-fitting bed for Meloy’s talespinning.

Meloy himself remains the same, blessedly, his high, nasal voice defining the band here more than anything else. The album opens with “The Crane Wife 3,” built around an overused chord progression and not much of a melody. It starts acoustically, but builds to full Pete Townshend splendor before crashing into the album’s most smashing success, a three-movement suite called “The Island.” This song is breathtaking, betraying a strong Jethro Tull influence in its second movement, “The Landlord’s Daughter,” and providing the album with its most heartbreaking moment in its third, “You’ll Not Feel the Drowning.” It is one of Meloy’s best songs, bar none.

But don’t let it make you too hopeful. “Yankee Bayonet,” a duet with Laura Viers, is blah acoustic pop, and “O Valencia” betrays its Romeo-and-Juliet theme to a bouncy pop song that sounds like half a million other bands. “The Perfect Crime #2” is a nifty shuffle that ends up going nowhere, and I would like Meloy to tell me how the melody of “When the War Came,” a noisy and repetitive stomp, isn’t a direct rip-off of “No Quarter.” Neither murder ballad “Shankhill Butchers” nor wispy pop number “Summersong” make much of an impression, despite some nice production on the former.

And then you get another multi-parter, “The Crane Wife 1 & 2,” that’s really just two uninspired songs stitched together. The second part is leagues better than the first, thanks to Meloy’s lovely vocals and words, and the band’s understated accompaniment. But unlike “The Island,” this just drags on too long without doing much to keep your attention. And finale “Sons & Daughters” is a nice round-robin coda, but not the full redemption this record needs.

So what happened? I have no idea. With a band this singular, though, the only fair comparison is to their own previous work, and The Crane Wife doesn’t hold a candle to Picaresque. It’s bigger, sure, and “The Island” is a masterpiece, but there’s nothing here as beautiful as “The Engine Driver,” as striking as “The Infanta,” or as jaw-droppingly insane as “The Mariner’s Revenge Song.” It’s a definite step back, a definite disappointment, and I hope the major label had nothing to do with it. Here’s hoping that next time out, Meloy and his merry band remember what it is that makes them special.

* * * * *

And then there’s Lindsey Buckingham, a guy who may as well have “forgotten genius” tattooed to his forehead. In the 1970s, he and Stevie Nicks reinvented Fleetwood Mac, taking them from their blues roots to a layered pop sound that’s rarely successfully imitated, even now. He’s always been my favorite member of that outfit – I vastly prefer his songs to the earth-witch-spirit-goddess pabulum of Stevie Nicks. Buckingham is also a criminally underrated guitarist and producer. He does things with an acoustic guitar that sound impossible, and he does them live.

So the prospect of an acoustic album from Buckingham had me all excited, but Under the Skin is a bit of a letdown. One reason is the vocal production – Buckingham is gifted with a strong voice, but he’s chosen to close-mike most of this record, singing in a breathy half-whisper that doesn’t suit him. The title song goes for an extraterrestrial atmosphere, but falls woefully short, and I never thought I’d prefer the Rolling Stones to Lindsey Buckingham, but his version of “I Am Waiting” doesn’t quite work.

Once you get used to it, the album does weave its own kind of spell, and Buckingham’s guitar work is always excellent. The opener, “Not Too Late,” marries the most confessional lyrics of Buckingham’s career with some of his most precise and difficult playing, and “Show You How” sounds like it could be the start of a winsome pop song – you can hear how cool it would be, even if all we have here are the acoustic bass and vocal tracks.

But it’s a long haul from there to the next successful track, “Cast Away Dreams,” and you have to get through a cover of Donovan’s “To Try for the Sun” first. But “Dreams” is worth the wait, the only half-whisper tune here that really works. “Shut Us Down” is nice, in a bargain-basement Elliott Smith kind of way, but the album only really lifts off one more time, with the echo-laden “Someone’s Gotta Change Your Mind.”

Word is that Buckingham has another album in the works, this one a fully-produced pop platter in the vein of 1992’s swell Out of the Cradle. I’m already excited for that one, and hopefully it will make Under the Skin seem like the experimental diversion it is. But since it’s been 14 years since the last Lindsey Buckingham solo record, Skin can’t help but feel like a misfire. Buckingham is too talented to make albums like this one.

* * * * *

Ordinarily, I like to end these longer, multi-review columns with something sparkling and beautiful, just to leave you on a high note. Sadly, that treasure eluded me this week, but hopefully the bounty of the coming weeks will make up for it. We’ll get new ones by Jeremy Enigk, Unwed Sailor, Sparta, Ben Folds, Copeland, Deftones and some band called the Who, as well as Christmas albums (!) from Aimee Mann and Sufjan Stevens.

Next week, I am driving to Minnesota to accept an invitation from Dr. Tony Shore – he and I are going to see the Zappa Plays Zappa show, which is Dweezil, Ahmet, and numerous former Mothers of Invention playing three hours of Frank’s music. Should be a grand old time. I will try to get a column done before then, but if I don’t, then I won’t post one until the following week. I’ll have a full report on the show, of course, when I get back.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So my computer’s still broken, and this column is coming to you courtesy of pure human kindness.

It’s been an interesting week, trying to get half a dozen similar problems resolved while working on a couple of pretty major stories, and watching our local boy, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, fall apart. It was a local story on a national scale – Democratic challenger John Laesch, whom I have met three or four times, was on Hardball on MSNBC this week, fielding questions about, of all things, whether gay people should be allowed to serve in Congress. Way to completely miss the issue, guys…

Anyway, I run three miles every morning on my treadmill, and ordinarily, I’ll watch an episode of something, usually Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while exercising. But my computer is also my primary DVD player, and with that broken, I’ve been forced to watch television. So I’ve been checking out VH1’s selection of music videos, just to keep up with popular culture, and I’ve decided once again that popular culture truly sucks.

First off, there’s the Killers, who seem to be everywhere these days. “Overhyped” doesn’t even begin to describe the reaction to Sam’s Town, the band’s second album, and I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. I’ve seen the video to “When You Were Young,” the repetitive single, probably four times this week. Right around the third time, it hit me – if this exact same song were performed the exact same way by, say, Bon Jovi, all the alterna-kids would hate it. Seriously, it sounds like Jersey-style heartland rock, like right out of the Bruce Springsteen playbook. Why is this considered revolutionary?

Then there are the ridiculous new singles from Janet Jackson, Beyonce and Justin Timberlake that crop up on my TV every morning at the same times. Come on, people, these are not even songs. These are beats. Beyonce’s “Sound the Alarm” even reduces her vocals to a percussion instrument. I feel like there’s a war on between melody and mindless rhythm, and rhythm is winning. I think Gwen Stefani should be tied up, thrown in a car trunk and driven off a cliff, but I prefer her clubby drivel to these three half-assed efforts. I honestly couldn’t believe it when I first heard “Sexyback” – is this really what people have been raving about? Really?

It’s not just the computer-generated pop that sucks, though. Witness Hinder, a band VH1 assures us we “oughtta know.” First I suffered through the generic interview clip, where the tattooed bad boys in Hinder announced their goal to “bring back real rock.” And then came the actual video, for a song called (I shit you not) “Lips of an Angel.” And I was dumbfounded. Can this actually be a major-label band? Night Ranger never wrote a power ballad this bad. Poison would reject this song as too sappy and too silly.

It’s really just third-rate Nickelback, and just to prove it, VH1 played the new Nickelback clip soon after. I hate to admit this, but “Far Away” is my favorite of the videos I’ve seen this week. It’s a short film about a woman waiting to hear whether her firefighter husband/boyfriend (it’s not clear) survived a massive forest fire, and it’s almost affecting, in its way. But if fucking Nickelback is the best we can do, then I think pop culture needs an enema in the worst way.

Nickelback’s from Canada, one of many musical cancers our neighbors to the north have inflicted on us, but I can’t complain too much, because they’ve given us just as many great bands. Which is a clumsy segue into this week’s topic – sweet, sweet pop from other countries.

I hate import prices, and most of the time, I refuse to pay them. Why spend $30 on a CD that I can get for $12 if I wait for a domestic release? But more and more often, the good stuff just isn’t coming here, or its appearance on these shores is delayed by a year or more, for reasons unfathomable. Most of the time, I’ll wait – I bought Starsailor’s third album, On the Outside, when it was released here in August, not when it hit the U.K. in 2005. (And I haven’t listened to it much since.)

But sometimes I just can’t hold out. Some bands are so good that I can’t wait for them to sort out their U.S. distribution deals. I have to have their new record now. So I bite the bullet, I pay the inflated price (thanks to an underperforming dollar), and then I pay the additional charges to ship the damn thing over international borders. (I know, I know – I could download it from any of a number of international iTunes stores, but I’m old-fashioned, and I like to have the physical CD in front of me when listening. It’s a context thing.)

And then I wait. It takes a minimum of a week to get something from the U.K. to Illinois, which makes sense, but it also takes about two weeks to get something from Canada, which makes no sense. I’m less than a day’s drive from the Canadian border. I could physically go to a Canadian record store and buy what I want in much less time than it takes to ship it here.

Case in point – it took 16 days for Maple Music to get me my copy of the new Sloan CD. I meant to write about it last week, and I honestly expected it to arrive in time, but no. It just barely made the cutoff for this week’s column. But Sloan is one of those bands I can’t wait for. I’ve been a fan since high school, when my friend Chris (who now, oddly enough, lives in Canada) included “Underwhelmed” on a mix tape for me. It was snarky, funny and clever, and I immediately bought the album, Smeared, and pretended to really like it.

But I didn’t. “Underwhelmed” is great, “I Am the Cancer” is neat, but the rest of it was drowned in Kevin Shields-style guitar, and the band didn’t wear it well. It wasn’t until their third record, One Chord to Another, in 1997 that they truly found their sound – ‘60s-inspired melodic rock with hooks galore. And of course, they subsequently lost their U.S. record deal, forcing me to keep up with them via imports from then on.

But I’m glad I have. The scrappy Halifax foursome has never let me down, although they’ve never done the same thing twice. Recently, they’ve swung from the shiny, well-produced pop of Pretty Together to the gut-punch rock of Action Pact, two records the likes of which they’d never made before, and now they’ve gone to a whole new place with their new one.

Reviewers like me love it when a band provides a hook for them to write about. Nothing is harder to describe than a 12-track CD of regular old songs, especially one that doesn’t break any new ground for the band. No worries on that score – Sloan’s new record is a 30-song, 76-minute extravaganza that plays like the second side of Abbey Road. It’s a classic rock double album, by far the lengthiest and most ambitious thing they’ve done, and they’ve even given it a cheeky, self-aware title: Never Hear the End of It.

Sonically, this is a return to the sound of One Chord and Navy Blues – they recorded much of this record in their rehearsal space, and recaptured the vintage tones they used to do so well. But this is no rehash. This is a whole new thing – a 76-minute song suite, a marvel of editing, a rushing hurricane of melody that screams by at a breakneck pace. Only three songs here break the four-minute mark, and most hover around two, but none are fillers. Each song, even the 52-second “I Can’t Sleep,” is exactly as long as it needs to be, and each moment moves the album forward.

And I think that may be what I like most about it – Never Hear the End of It is defiantly an album, full of transitions and fragments that serve the whole, but wouldn’t stand alone. It’s also a statement of unity from the long-running quartet, featuring songs from each of the members. (Action Pact included nothing from drummer Andrew Scott. Here he gets equal time.) It’s a varied record, in many ways the group’s White Album, but it’s also a cohesive one, perfectly sequenced and solid straight through.

Pressing play, we hear from each member in rapid succession – guitarist Jay Ferguson sings the second verse of “Flying High Again,” the brief opener, before other guitarist Patrick Pentland crashes in with his “Who Taught You to Live Like That,” a pounding rocker. Scott takes center stage for “I’ve Gotta Try,” one of his trademark melodic stompers, and then bassist Chris Murphy grabs the spotlight for a minor-key stunner, “Everybody Wants You.”

And on it goes like that. Pentland’s “Listen to the Radio” is an epic strummer with great backing vocals, while Murphy’s “Fading Into Obscurity” runs through four tempos in as many minutes. Relatively longer tunes like the riff-heavy “Ana Lucia” and the great “I Understand” flow beautifully into minute-long segue-songs like “Something’s Wrong” and “Golden Eyes.” It’s a flood of song, and the melodies never falter. The record is sequenced for the vinyl release, with four equal-length sides, but you’d never know it listening to the CD, and they have some fun with the song orders, following Murphy’s groovy “People Think They Know Me” with Scott’s response song “I Know You.”

This album has everything, all compressed into an hour and a quarter, from the punky explosion of “HFXNSHC” (Halifax, Nova Scotia Hard Core) to the clever rhymes of “Someone I Can Be True With” to the laugh-out-loud throwaway humor of Scott’s “Living With the Masses.” The amps are cranked for much of the running time, but pianos slip in here and there, and the tempos slow down in the final fourth, with a trio of sweet ballads at tracks 27, 28 and 29. The album ends with “Another Way I Could Do It,” finishing the trip with a lovely vocal tag.

This is an album the likes of which I figured we’d never see again, in this age of the digitally delivered single, and God bless Sloan for remembering how cool something like this can be. Never Hear the End of It is pretty much the last thing I expected from this band, but then, I never know what to expect from this band. I just know they never let me down, and this is one of their best efforts, a virtual torrent of riffs, melodies and harmonies. It’s a classic.

But Sloan isn’t the only band plying a sound influenced by decades of melodic rock. I have Dr. Tony Shore to thank for turning me on to The Feeling, a new sensation from the U.K. Their debut album, Twelve Stops and Home, was scheduled for release in the U.S. last month, but alas, it never happened, so I paid in British pounds, and a week later, received one of the sweetest and best pop records of the year.

The Feeling combine 40 years of British pop into one sunny sound. Elements of the Kinks, 10cc, Supertramp, ELO, Queen and even Coldplay and James Blunt wind their way through these 13 easygoing, windows-down melody-fests. These are songs that promise big choruses, and unfailingly deliver them, and this is a record so well-produced and lovingly crafted that many will hear processed and corporate, when it’s anything but.

This is music created with pure love of pop in mind. How can anyone think that a Steely Dan meets Supertramp number like “Never Be Lonely” was written with super-stardom in mind? (It’s apparently happened across the pond – The Feeling is a smash success in their home country.) And how could anyone do anything but smile uncontrollably when it cascades into its fantastic chorus? I don’t know, but I’m unable to control the idiot grin. “B-b-b-baby, I think I’m going c-c-c-crazy…”

The album opens with “I Want You Now,” a classic pop tune if I’ve ever heard one – this is the sort of song the greats write, the kind of barnburner that would flow from the pen of a Ray Davies or a Todd Rundgren. The sound is shiny and balanced, which some will decry as too glossy, but this record sounds as good as anything Jellyfish might have turned out, and I have been known to call that band’s records unassailably perfect.

“Fill My Little World” stands as the most fun song of the year so far for me, the one I can’t resist singing along with. Right behind it is the Cars-esque “Love It When You Call,” a song that could have been a dismal failure in lesser hands. Contrary to popular belief, good pop music is not easy to write, play or record, and very few bands do it well. The Feeling does it well – better, in fact, than 90 percent of the new bands I’ve heard since Ben Folds Five broke up. Even the slower numbers are delights – “Kettle’s On” is oddly affecting, and “Sewn” is a masterpiece, a triumph of melody.

The album does drift into self-important balladry by the end, which is unfortunate. “Same Old Stuff” is a nice, Lennon-esque song that can’t withstand the epic Oasis-style treatment the band gives it, and “Blue Piccadilly” has shades of Paul McCartney’s less successful solo work. But don’t despair – sandwiched between them is a cheeky wonderama called “Helicopter” that sounds like nothing else here. And bonus track “Miss You” is as lovely a piano number as one could hope for.

There’s nothing earth-shattering about what this band does – the lyrics are simple and direct, the melodies right out front, the influences proudly worn. Which is why it’s mystifying that so few groups do this sort of thing this well. Despite a couple of well-intentioned missteps, Twelve Stops and Home is a terrific pop record, one that fills me with silly joy, and it will undoubtedly find its way into my top 10 list at the end of the year.

Speaking of that list, here (one week late) is my third quarter report. Truthfully, I was waiting for this week’s contestants to arrive, both of which pleasantly surprised me and made it into this draft of the list. I should stress once again that this is just a draft, and not the finished product. A lot can happen in three months. I should also point out that the top two trade places on an almost daily basis (and I did just see my current #1 choice live, and they were amazing), but they may not appear in the same order in three months. But they’re probably the top two, unless something else knocks me out of my chair.

With that in mind, here’s how my top 10 list looks at the beginning of October:

#10: Quiet Company, Shine Honesty.
#9: The Alarm, Under Attack.
#8: Roger Joseph Manning Jr., The Land of Pure Imagination.
#7: Sloan, Never Hear the End of It.
#6: David Mead, Tangerine.
#5: The Feeling, Twelve Stops and Home.
#4: Grandaddy, Just Like the Fambly Cat.
#3: Ross Rice, Dwight.
#2: Keane, Under the Iron Sea.
#1. Mute Math.

And with that, I bid you farewell. Next week is another big ol’ slew of reviews – this stuff just keeps hitting stores, and I’m almost drowning in new tunes. And how about that Lost premiere? As Frank Zappa would say, wowee zowee.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s a best-laid-plans kind of week.

I intended to write about two sweet pop records that are, as of now, only available in other countries – one from Canada and one from the U.K. However – and I really should have seen this coming – neither one made it to the United States in time for me to fully review them. As far as I know, both are still in transit, perhaps on an airplane somewhere, and perhaps that airplane is full of snakes, which would explain the delay. In any case, plans fell through, so I have to come up with something else.

Also, my computer has decided to die on me. The problem, apparently, is the graphics card – I spent hours on the phone with Dell tech support, in the mistaken belief that it was the graphics card driver. I’ve been through three support technicians now, because I can only work on this issue an hour at a time, due to my insane schedule.

So I’m writing this at work, and hoping nobody notices. But I’m glad that writing is my job, and not a suspect activity here in the office…

I do have something to review this week, but before we get to that, a quick note about something you can find in your record stores right now. I have previously gushed about Mute Math’s self-titled debut, which took its spot in the top two of my 2006 list pretty early on, and has yet to relinquish it. As I’ve mentioned, the band self-released Mute Math on their own Teleprompt label, selling it online and at shows, following a dust-up with Warner and Word.

Well, the bridges have been mended, the band is back on Warner, and Mute Math is finally on CD racks everywhere, as of this week. This would be unqualified good news, except for one thing – they messed with it, and the Mute Math you can find at your local Sam Goody is vastly inferior to the original version.

What’s different? Well, first, they took off one of the best songs, the amazing “Without It.” (They also omitted its drum-break coda, “Polite.”) Why, I don’t know. Then they added three songs from last year’s Reset EP – the three best, no doubt, but none of them are worth losing “Without It.” Finally, they shortened some of the longer songs, all but killing the atmosphere. The worst offense: the glorious “You Are Mine,” which spread its enveloping texture over 6:17 on the original release, is now a radio-ready 4:43. “Break The Same” also has had more than a minute trimmed from its whirlwind outro.

I know this seems picky, but with the three new songs and the edits, Mute Math is an entirely different record. It now has a weak song, “Plan B,” in place of a masterpiece, and the second half feels like a bunch of singles instead of a coherent whole. “Control,” the excellent opener from Reset, now sits between the truncated “You Are Mine” and the dazzling “Picture,” two songs which flowed perfectly on the original release.

The only longer song that remained untouched is “Stall Out,” the original closer, but the band have found a way to screw that up too, appending the instrumental “Reset” to the end of the disc. The album’s conclusion, once graceful, is now abrupt and uncomfortable. The sad part is, with this release, you can’t get the original Mute Math anymore – the band isn’t even selling it. The new bonus live EP, while nifty, does little to make that situation better.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying you shouldn’t buy Mute Math, or that it’s not still an amazing album. It is. But in its original form, it was perfect, one of the finest debuts I’ve ever heard, and in this new incarnation, it’s just… not. It’s still fantastic, it’s just not perfect, and there’s no good reason why they messed with it. If you don’t have Mute Math, by all means, buy this version. But if you want the real deal, track down the original.

* * * * * *

Of course, I’m about to praise and recommend something that is basically a rearrangement and re-editing of, in some cases, perfect albums, so you might not want to listen to me. But then, most of my rules and pet peeves go out the window when I’m talking about Tori Amos.

Tori was quite possibly the first artist to completely rewrite my idea of music. At the time, I’d never heard anything quite like Little Earthquakes, her incredible first album. There were songs on it that resembled others I’d heard, but I’d never encountered pop songs delivered with such depth and emotion, such personal nakedness. And then there were others, ones that featured just Amos and her chilling, moving voice, and these were like nothing I’d ever imagined music could be.

My friend Chris was even more into Amos than I was – he scoured CD shops looking for every single he could find, tracking down all of her elusive b-sides. For good reason, too, because her non-album songs were often the equal of, and sometimes superior to, the ones that made the cut. And she released a lot of them – two or three brand-new tunes per single, as well as some breathtaking reinventions of songs like “Angie” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

But I had neither the money nor the resources to buy every Tori single, so I didn’t, and I watched as Chris’ collection grew. But ah, patience is rewarded, because out this week is A Piano, the five-disc box set that finally (finally!) collects almost all those b-sides and alternate tracks, as well as some new things and a liberal collection of Amos’ best tunes. And it comes in a box shaped like a piano, with real-looking white and black keys.

So I bought A Piano for the b-sides, but listening through it, I’m finding that I’m reliving the last 15 years in my mind. It’s astounding to me how much of my personal soundtrack can belong to just one artist. I’m remembering where I was when I first heard each of these songs, and how I felt listening to them for the first time. It’s been a heady experience.

A Piano also illustrates Amos’ bizarre and rapid decline in miniature – the first two discs are great, the third not as much, and the fourth is mostly bland, featuring songs from her three worst records (1998’s from the choirgirl hotel, 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk, and last year’s execrable The Beekeeper). It’s unspeakably sad to relive the artistic demise of one of my all-time favorite musicians, but after A Piano, there can really be no argument – she is not as good now as she was then.

So let’s start with then. The first disc here is called Little Earthquakes Extended, and is a thorough examination and restatement of her landmark 1992 debut. As Amos explains in the lavishly designed liner notes, Earthquakes went through several permutations, and was submitted to Atlantic Records three or four times. Hence, the b-sides from these sessions were really a-sides that were nixed by the label, which explains why songs like “Flying Dutchman” and “Upside Down” are just as beautiful and revelatory as anything on the record proper.

This new Earthquakes starts with “Leather” instead of “Crucify,” which means the first line on the album is now “Here I’m standing naked before you.” Somehow, this is more fitting, because this album is one of the most naked and deeply felt things I own, still. Here is “Silent All These Years,” the first Tori song I heard, its piano and strings and powerful lyrics standing out from all the soulless rubbish on MTV in ’92. Here is “Precious Things,” still one of the most searing and pure outbursts in my music collection. Here is “Winter,” which I played over and over again my freshman year of college, trying to find comfort.

And here is “Me and a Gun,” an a cappella confession that still makes time stop, and remains among the most intimate and brave things to come out of any artist I’m aware of.

I remember playing Earthquakes to death, wearing out my cassette copy – it still doesn’t quite play right, but that’s okay, because with my CD copy and A Piano I’ve effectively bought the album twice more since then. I also remember being unable to sleep on the eve of her 1994 follow-up, Under the Pink. I was a sophomore in college then, and I’d cultivated a small group of Tori fans who were equally (well, almost) excited to hear what she’d do next.

We weren’t disappointed. Pink, represented nearly in its entirety on this box set’s second disc, is a very different album from Earthquakes – more joyful, more sexual – but its equal in nearly every way. I devoured this album in ’94, and I found listening again that I know every detail of its contours. I am glad Amos included all nine minutes of “Yes, Anastasia,” still one of her most ambitious and successful pieces. I’m also glad that “Honey” is included here, instead of with the other b-sides – it belonged on Pink, as its author says in the liner notes.

I could not have predicted Boys for Pele, her 1996 excursion – it’s a difficult and painful listen, but ultimately a rewarding one. Here Amos tried new things – harpsichords, programmed beats, brass sections, more complex structures, and an unrestrained vocal timbre that grated on first listen. Pele was the first album I reviewed for Face Magazine, way back in the day, and I remember still struggling with it at the time.

And those feelings came rushing back as I dove through the back half of disc two here, and the first part of disc three. Here are nine of Pele’s 18 songs, many in intriguing alternate versions, but in any order, these recordings practically bristle with rage and pain. Pele is a daring, uneasy album, the kind that very few artists are courageous enough to make, even though in disconnected pieces, as it is here, the full effect doesn’t quite come through.

“Professional Widow,” perhaps the album’s most explosive song, is here twice, and neither one is the album version – here Amos is bellowing it live over just an organ, and watching herself get spindled and mutilated in Armand van Helden’s remix. Here as well is a Pele outtake, “Walk to Dublin,” and sadly, it was rightly cut from the album. But here are my favorites from the record, “Marianne” and “Doughnut Song” – oddly, the more traditional numbers. “Marianne” in particular is the only piano-and-strings song on Pele, the only real connecting thread with Earthquakes and Pink.

But after figuring Pele out, and learning to love it, I figured Amos would never stun me like that again. I was wrong – choirgirl hit in 1998, and it was easily the weakest and most banal thing she had done. Gone were the progressive structures, but also gone was any sense of deep feeling in the tracks. Amos has defended the album, which she recorded in the wake of her miscarriage, but the five songs on disc four here tell the story. They’re not bad, just not very good.

It was the start of a downslide from which she has still not recovered. Disc three contains seven songs from To Venus and Back, her half-studio, half-live endeavor from 1999, and they’re interesting, and certainly better than the stuff on choirgirl, but still not up to the bar she set early on. Both “Concertina” and “1000 Oceans” are winners, though. There’s nothing here from 2001’s covers record, Strange Little Girls, which is probably for the best.

Then came Scarlet’s Walk in ’02, and The Beekeeper in ’05, and the less said about either of them, the better. Sprawling records full of boring songs drained of all passion, these two misfires are represented on disc four with a mere six songs between them, as if Amos knows they are not up to par. Here as well are some newly uncovered songs from those sessions, including “Not David Bowie” and “Zero Point” and something called “Ode to My Clothes,” and none rise above the muck to make much of a mark.

But the fifth disc is the real prize – a 22-track journey through her b-sides and lost tracks. Here is “The Pool,” a haunting mélange of overdubbed vocals that works magic. Here is “Daisy Dead Petals,” and “Black Swan,” and “Bachelorette.” Here is “Sugar,” in its burbling and oddly moving synthesizer rendition. Here is “Cooling,” one of Amos’ best songs, which for some reason never found a proper home. And here is “Here In My Head,” a song for which I would probably have paid the full box set price.

Granted, here as well are her takes on “This Old Man” and “Home on the Range,” as well as trifles like “Toodles Mr. Jim,” but you take the good with the bad when the good is this extraordinary.

At this point, who can tell if Tori Amos will ever make another record as important, as devastating and as obviously personal as her first three. A Piano certainly makes the case that her talent has failed her – few artists have recovered from a decline like the one detailed on this box set. But if anyone could do it, Amos could. Listening to A Piano in order, I fell in love with Amos’ work all over again, as if I’d forgotten just how compelling and powerful her work once was. And of course, I will buy everything she does until one of us dies, in the hope that she can recapture what she’s lost.

For Tori virgins, A Piano might be all you need. It’s certainly all you need of her last few discs, although I would recommend getting the first three anyway – you must hear Little Earthquakes in its original order. But if you want to know what all the fuss is about, and at the same time hear all her important non-album tracks (and trust me, they are important), then you could do worse than dropping $75 on this thing. With a few exceptions (“Space Dog,” “Not the Red Baron,” “Black-Dove,” etc.), it’s every reason I love her, all in one box.

Next week, I swear, sweet pop from other countries. Really.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s a pretty big one this week, folks – I scored one of my rare days off this week, so I had some extra time. Hope that’s okay with everyone. This is where I play catch-up on a flood of recent releases, some good and some not so good. The flood continues next week , and the week after, and basically all through October, so any chance to gain some ground on the ever-growing tower of CDs on my desk…

First, though, an installment of Things I Didn’t Think I’d Like:

On a recommendation, I picked up the new Black Keys album, Magic Potion. The Keys are a guitar-drums duo, and just that combination is enough to put me off, but I’m very glad I bought this beast. It’s pretty great – dirty blues recorded live, with 1970s equipment. A lot of this sounds just like Grand Funk Railroad’s first few records, minus Mel Schacher’s bass playing, and it’s all raw and soulful. It’s the kind of blues that one of this week’s main contestants could learn a thing or two from…

I also bought Blood Mountain, the new Mastodon, thanks to some prodding by Andrew at my local record store. And man, this thing is awesome. I missed out on Leviathan, the band’s previous effort, even though many consider it a classic. And now I’m going to have to go back and get that one, too, because Blood Mountain is extraordinary – progressive metal that never lets up, and never sacrifices melody, and brings in a dozen different musical styles as window dressing.

It’s simply excellent, if your ears can handle it, and it contains a contribution from The Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala that’s a hundred times better than anything on his band’s new album. It also has amazing, detailed cover art, apparently a Mastodon tradition. Just an all-around fantastic metal record.

All right, no more metal for this week. Bring on the pop-rock!

* * * * *

I will never hate the Barenaked Ladies.

This is official. I discovered it this week, as I listened to their latest attempt to turn me into an ex-fan. It’s called Barenaked Ladies Are Me, and it’s the weakest thing they’ve done, not counting that awful Christmas album from a few years back.

Let’s back up. I’ve been a BNL fan since Gordon, which hit back when I was in college. Maybe it was just the right time for me to hear a fun little ditty like “If I Had a Million Dollars,” but I was hooked pretty much immediately by the band’s sense of fun. Their live shows have a carnival atmosphere to them – they’re loaded with improv, jokes, fake songs, and impromptu vaudeville routines. Some bands play concerts, but BNL puts on a show.

I’ve seen them live probably six times now. Back when I worked for Face Magazine, the band played an acoustic show at a club called Asylum. It was the kind of show you had to win a radio contest to get into, unless you were one of the bigwigs at the city’s only music mag. My old friend Meg and I went, and as I recall, the tickets they gave us to get in read something like this: “Official I-Don’t-Need-To-Win-No-Contest-Because-I-Am-Special Ticket.” I still have it somewhere.

The point is, I love this band, and I think I always will, no matter how lame they get. And Barenaked Ladies Are Me is pretty damn lame. The first problem with it is that it travels even further down the mature adult-pop pathway blazed by 2003’s Everything to Everyone. I dug that album, but even I noticed that it was more reserved than prior records. BNL is often written off as a novelty band, and they’ve always been deeper than that, but they’ve also always been a lot of fun – even when they’re about autoerotic asphyxiation, their tunes are a blast.

Barenaked Ladies Are Me is the first BNL record that isn’t any fun at all. Leave it to Ed Robertson to deliver the wittiest thing here: “Bank Job” is about a failed caper, used as a metaphor for a failed relationship. And he’s right – how do you plan for a bank full of nuns? “Bank Job” has fun lyrics, but the banal music drags it down, and the rest of the album has a kind of low-key wispiness. The sound is great – the guitars punch, the accordions and horns are nice touches, but overall, there’s very little here that’s memorable.

If you’ve heard the first single, “Easy,” then you know what to expect – simple acoustic songs with bland melodies and only the faintest hint of the sharpness Robertson and Steven Page usually exhibit. Oddly, the two best songs on the album come from keyboardist Kevin Hearn. “Sound of Your Voice” is a rousing singalong, and “Vanishing” is decidedly creepy, one of the band’s finest examinations of jealousy and loss. Unfortunately, Hearn himself sings that one, and his thin voice doesn’t quite do the song justice. Bassist Jim Creeggan sings his own “Peterborough and the Kawarthas,” and he fares better, although with a title like that, you’d expect a quirkier song.

But no, Barenaked Ladies Are Me is almost entirely devoid of quirk, and is the band’s most “normal” album to date. It’s all pleasant, like a Gin Blossoms album, but there isn’t much here to satisfy long-time fans. And yet, here I am, listening to it again, and I swear – I will never hate this band. Just the mixture of Robertson’s playing and Page’s singing takes me back to age 20, and it hardly matters how lame the songs are. I’m even singing along with a song called “Rule the World With Love,” which may be a sign of mental illness. Barenaked Ladies remain a band I love, even as they’re boring me to tears.

* * * * *

BNL may have let me down, but the prize for Most Crushing Disappointment of the Year goes to John Mayer.

Here’s the thing – Mayer is really, really good. He’s a good songwriter, and an amazing guitar player, and I’m tired of having to defend him against his own work. “Daughters” drove me insane. It’s easily the most banal song on Mayer’s second album, Heavier Things, and so of course it became the smash hit, and the one that everyone’s heard. I mention that I like John Mayer, and nine out of 10 people will sing “Daughters” back to me, laughing at my questionable taste.

I honestly thought those days were over, though. Last year, Mayer released Try, a live album with his kickass trio, which included him on guitars and vocals, Steve Jordan on drums and Pino Palladino on bass. Those two guys have been around forever, and they’re great players, but Mayer matched them lick for lick on Try, a rough and tumble blues excursion that finally – finally! – showed off just how good the guy is. At the same time, he announced that Jordan and Palladino would be featured on his third album, Continuum, which he promised would be a quantum leap from his older records.

But now Continuum is here, and I feel like I need to defend Mayer again. Honestly, he’s much better than this, trust me.

The biggest problem I have is that Continuum never, ever rocks. Not once. Mayer is able to kick over the chairs and rip bluesy solos with the best of them, but you’d never know it from this merely pleasant effort. Leadoff track “Waiting on the World to Change” is perhaps the most upbeat thing here, and it’s an old-time soul ballad, like something Marvin Gaye might have done. It’s enjoyable – hell, this whole album is enjoyable, in a sense – but it’s not the full-on journeyman rock album Mayer led us to expect.

No, this is an adult contemporary album through and through. Much of it sounds like Sting, and a lot of it sounds like the lamest of Eric Clapton’s smoothed-out solo work. “Belief” sounds so much like the former Gordon Sumner that I had to check and see if he had a co-writing credit (he doesn’t), and “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” could easily be a Slowhand track. All the rough edges are sanded off, and spit-shined. Mayer’s lead guitar is all over the album, thankfully, but only in clean, miniature bursts that don’t call attention to themselves. He only gets to show off on the Jimi Hendrix cover “Bold as Love.”

There are certainly good things here, and interestingly, some of the slower ones are the best – “The Heart of Life” deserves to be a hit, so engaging is its acoustic lope, and “Stop This Train” takes some delightful melodic detours. The final track, “I’m Gonna Find Another You,” is a swell, soulful coda to the enjoyable “In Repair.” But the whole thing smells like safety, like Mayer was told to make an album that wouldn’t upset the radio programmers who have to slot his new stuff alongside Phil Collins and whoever it is that just won American Idol.

That’s my real problem with this otherwise competent and well-crafted album. Listen to the trio album – Mayer basically had Cream in the studio with him, and he decided to skip that phase of Clapton’s career and make Pilgrim instead. The best thing you can say about Continuum is that it’s a nice album, and it is – it’s got some sweet ballads on it, and some smooth blues like “I Don’t Trust Myself With Loving You,” one of the highlights. But it should have been so much more, and it should have rocked.

And so here I go again, defending him against his own work. Continuum isn’t bad, but John Mayer is capable of so much better. Let’s hope he figures that out someday soon.

* * * * *

Jason Martin hopefully needs no such convincing of his own skills. For more than 10 years, he’s led his band Starflyer 59 through half a dozen genres, writing one great little song after another, and toiling in obscurity all the while. But for those of us who have discovered Martin (and his brother Ronnie, of Joy Electric), his yearly missives are things to look forward to.

This year’s is called My Island, and it follows up Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice, one of the best records Martin’s ever made. Talking Voice was an immaculately produced gloom-pop powerhouse, with an incredibly full sound and some of the catchiest melodies of Martin’s career. Rather than try to top that by moving even further down the studio wizard path, though, he’s decided to pull back and make a guitar-heavy rock album.

And it’s pretty great. Like most Starflyer albums, the worst thing you can say about My Island is that it’s too short – it’s 10 songs, running a meager 32 minutes. The sound is slightly stripped back – guitars, bass and drums, for the most part, with some great keyboard textures – and the songs have taken on an energetic, angular new-wave quality. Standout “Nice Guy” starts off with a cheesy piano intro, and then jumps right into a Clash-style bass-heavy groove that, quite simply, rules. Martin’s baritone sounds menacing here, and the whole thing works.

“I Win” is a keeper, one of several rockers with memorable melodies here, and the keyboard figure after the chorus will make its home in your head without much effort. “Division” could almost be a Talking Voice outtake – it’s perhaps the darkest thing here, and loaded with texture. And the title song is right out of prime 1980s Daniel Amos, with Martin paying homage to Terry Taylor, one of his admitted heroes.

Still, there are missteps here, whereas on Talking Voice there were none. “Mic the Mic” is too repetitive, as is “It’s Alright Blondie,” though the keyboard motif on the latter track is enjoyable. Despite these minor hiccups, My Island is another in a long line of very good records from Starflyer 59. Jason Martin’s catalog is too extensive and too excellent to go as unnoticed as it has. On the final track on My Island, Martin sings, “My ideas outweigh all the talent I have.” He’s never been more wrong.

Check the band out here, and buy their stuff here. And watch for The Brothers Martin, coming soon – it’s a collaboration between Jason and Ronnie, and it dives further into new wave waters. Hear some of it here.

* * * * *

If you’re in a band, and you have an album coming out, and you’re trying to come up with the year’s best title for it, don’t waste your time. That honor’s already been won by Yo La Tengo – their 10th album is called I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.

Game, set, match.

As you’d expect, the album cannot possibly be as good as its title, but anyone who wrote off Yo La Tengo after their last two records, the lazy And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out and the shimmering Summer Sun, may want to reconsider. I Will Beat Your Ass is another sprawling piece of work – 15 songs spanning 77 minutes – but it returns to the band to its greatest strength: its wild diversity. None of these songs sound anything like their neighbors, and yet they all sound like Yo La Tengo.

The album opens with “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind,” an 11-minute guitar freakout over a repetitive backdrop, and it represents the first time frontman Ira Kaplan has really kicked out the jams in six years. It ends with another one, “The Story of Yo La Tango (sic),” as if to bookend the songs in between. And those 13 shorter tunes are some of the most elegant of the band’s career, from the bouncy pop of “Beanbag Chair” to the falsetto soul of “Mr. Tough” to the orchestrated balladry of “Black Flowers.”

Of course, vocals have always been Yo La Tengo’s Achilles heel, and they’re as weak here as they’ve always been. Kaplan has a thin, wavery voice, and all the pitch control of Wayne Coyne, though he is complemented well by his wife, drummer Georgia Hubley. The pair spin little webs of fragile harmonies that decorate the sweeter tunes, but they fall short on the harsher ones, like the percussion-fueled organ jam “The Room Got Heavy.”

But it’s the eclecticism that will keep you coming back. The gem of the album is the nine-minute instrumental “Daphnia” – sandwiched in between two folk-pop ditties, its slow walk through a frost-covered landscape truly stands out, and the piano work, dripping like melting icicles over Kaplan’s understated guitar, is exceptionally beautiful. It’s the only song like it here, and it plays like intermission music, with the second act heralded by the rambunctious “I Should Have Known Better.”

Other standouts include the trashy rock of “Watch Out For Me Ronnie” and the beautiful gallop of “The Weakest Part” (which includes the best Kaplan-Hubley harmonies on the record), but truly, it’s all pretty good stuff. I have never been on the Yo La Tengo train as much as some of my fellow critics, but I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass is a winner, and if you’ve never heard the band, it’s a particularly good place to start. Plus, as an added bonus, you get to buy and own an album called I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.

* * * * *

Saving the best for last once again, we come to Roger Joseph Manning Jr.

Hell, I knew him when he was just Roger Manning, keyboard player and genius songwriter for Jellyfish, perhaps the greatest band of the ‘90s. No, I’m not kidding – Jellyfish’s two albums are perfect pop platters, and I don’t mean that they’re almost perfect, or that they contain moments of perfection, but that every minute of both albums is absolutely perfect. Don’t take my word for it, buy them for yourself, especially if you like pop music of any stripe.

Since J-Fish broke up in 1994, Manning has kept the busiest. His cohort Andy Sturmer has done some production work, but little else, while Manning has launched two bands – the funky Imperial Drag and the hilarious Moog Cookbook – and played on a couple dozen albums by other artists. So it’s hardly any surprise that he won the race to get a full-length solo record out. The only surprise, unfortunately, is that it took more than a decade.

But it’s here, and it’s called The Land of Pure Imagination. And it’s completely wonderful.

True, this is really just a restatement of his not-widely-available Solid State Warrior LP from last year, but one gets the sense that this is the real deal, the way it was meant to be heard. Manning played every note and sung every line on this album (except for one little trumpet solo), and if the two J-Fish albums weren’t enough to establish him as a pure pop genius, this would absolutely do it. This album is practically swimming in amazing melodies, dreamy harmonies, and quirky-beautiful arrangements. It’s an astounding listen.

This isn’t for everyone. Manning’s voice is high, childlike and eerily precise – great for the oceans of backing vocals that graced Jellyfish albums, but not as effective as a lead instrument. His songs are similarly childlike, as obviously influenced by Brian Wilson as much as by Andy Partridge. This entire album exudes innocence and joy, about as much as you’d expect from a record unironically titled The Land of Pure Imagination, and some will be put off or embarrassed by it.

But not me. I’m on board from the delirious chorus of the title track, an epic that includes some judicious use of toy piano. “Too Late For Us Now” may be the catchiest pop song of the year, and in my world, it’s a hit. “Wish It Would Rain” starts as a lazy waltz, but blossoms into a pop classic, with some gorgeous vocal melodies. “Sandman” could be a great lost XTC track, as could “Dragonfly,” and “Creeple People,” the album’s one stab at rocking out, is a messy, noisy romp. Land concludes with “Appleby,” a left-field carnival of sound and melody, and one of the strangest and coolest things here.

This isn’t Jellyfish, and as such, it’s not perfect. The sound is sumptuous and lush, but occasionally you’re reminded that these are basically home recordings, and some songs (“Pray for the Many,” “In the Name of Romance”) fall just under par. But for the first solo album from one of my heroes, it’s pretty damn terrific, and there isn’t a moment here that doesn’t sparkle with inventiveness and sheer delight. I love this little record, one of my favorites of the year so far, and I’m thrilled to have new Roger Manning music on my shelf and in my life. It’s not a Jellyfish reunion, but it’ll do.

* * * * *

That’s it for this week. Next week, some ‘70s-inspired pop from other countries.

A quick recommendation before I go – Aaron Sorkin coasted back to TV this week with the pilot for his new show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and it was quite good. Not an outside-the-park home run like the West Wing pilot, of course, but full of Sorkin’s trademark banter and wit. And he found a dignified, pivotal role for Judd Hirsch, whom I’ve always liked. We’ll see if this show sticks around – it seems very expensive to produce, and NBC has dumped it on Monday nights. But if you liked Sorkin’s work on Sports Night and The West Wing, this is the goods.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This is the second of two columns on the oh-so-scintillating topic of simplicity vs. complexity. Last week, I took a look at three of the simplest albums of the year, musically speaking, from Peter Mulvey, Bill Mallonee and Bob Dylan. Only one of them, the Mallonee, really does it for me, and I think it’s because the other two rely way too often on pretty standard chords and progressions – what some would call traditional structure.

And I hope you’re not scared away by words like structure and chord, because this week I’m taking a look at the flipside – three of the most theory-heavy, epic and complicated records that 2006 has given us so far. I have to admit right up front that my musical mind gets all excited about these kinds of albums, and the longer and more complex the better. I’m a huge fan of bands like Yes and Spock’s Beard, bands that compose extended suites that stretch out for half an hour or more.

I know, I know. Half an hour? Or more? Is any song worth half an hour or more?

In short, yes, I think so. The trick is to earn all 30, 45 or however many minutes you’re taking up. If you’ve written 10 minutes of song and you’ve decided to just jam or solo for the remaining 20, then you’re eating disc space with not much of substance, because that’s what complex music is about – what have you composed here?

Which leads me to my main issue with this kind of music. It’s no secret that musical complexity edges out emotional connection – the more difficult the song is, the less likely it is that the conduit between listener and artist will be established. You have to turn your head off to respond with your heart, and the more complicated and mind-engaging the music, the less likely it is that you will do that. And the most technical bands don’t even care – they want to engage your brain above all else.

At least, that’s what I think. It is entirely possible that the members of Rush were truly and deeply moved by “2112,” or “Cygnus X-1,” but I doubt it. In the same way that I criticize the most moving of singer-songwriters for not stepping outside the standard three or four chords and 4/4 time, I take the proggers to task for turning out music without soul, music that is concerned only with how difficult it is to play.

Perhaps the standard-bearer for modern complexity is Dream Theater, a band that just celebrated 20 years of jackhammer riffing, stop-time arrangements, 20-minute song-suites and lightning-fast solos. If metal is masculine music, then this is steroid-fueled, muscle-bound bully music – Dream Theater may as well have adopted “Our music can beat up your music” as its official slogan. There are moments of tenderness, but they are all but drowned out by the bombast, and the insanely complex playing and songwriting.

A good summation of their modus operandi to this point is Score, their just-released three-CD live album documenting their 20th anniversary show at Radio City Music Hall in New York. It’s called Score because DT finally succumbs here to the old prog trope of playing with an orchestra, a carry-over from their latest studio album, Octavarium. The 30-piece ensemble joins the band on the second set of this nearly three-hour affair, meant to summarize and cap off DT’s first two decades.

It’s a testament to their skill as players that I scanned the track listing of the first set, which takes up the first disc, and dismissed it as pretty standard stuff. That I can look at a setlist that contains metal monsters like “The Root of All Evil,” prog masterpieces like “Under a Glass Moon” and lengthy workouts like the never-officially-released “Raise the Knife” and think, “Ah, nothing too demanding, then,” just illustrates what amazing musicians these guys are. Just trying to learn the songs in this one set would make most bands faint with fear.

And DT slams through this stuff well, if not a bit by rote. Octavarium was something of a disappointment to me, since it stays pretty much within the standard limits of this band’s sound. “Root” is an eight-minute metal powerhouse, but it sounds like every other eight-minute metal powerhouse the band has written. “I Walk Beside You” is a pleasant bombastic pop song, but it doesn’t break any new ground for them. And the title song, which we’ll get to in a minute, strikes me as a thin idea stretched out to 25 minutes.

So after this pretty standard first disc comes the main event, with strings attached. The second disc starts with “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence,” still the band’s best extended piece. The entire second half of their 2002 double album of the same name, “Six Degrees” is a 42-minute symphony about mental illness, and the orchestra, though not always prominent, really adds to the epic scope of the thing.

Brief interlude “Vacant” is all strings and vocalist James Labrie, who really knocks it out of the park on this whole record. But then we’re onto the songs from Octavarium, and they’re just not up to par. “Sacrificed Sons” is standard epic metal, and the new album’s title track drags on and on, opening with seven minutes of synth-and-six-string atmosphere ripped right out of Pink Floyd. “Octavarium” doesn’t push and pull like “Six Degrees,” it slowly builds and relies on solos, finally climaxing in a full-throttle shout section reminiscent of Tool. Simply put, it ain’t worth 26 minutes.

And that’s really it with this kind of music. If it doesn’t engage my theoretical knowledge, and give me something to figure out every minute or two, then it just doesn’t rank too highly with me, no matter how well it’s played. The technical virtuosity is all a band like this has, and if they’re not using it to its fullest, then there’s little reason to actually listen to it.

However, if you want to hear dramatic progressive metal done properly, there’s pretty much no better band than Iron Maiden. They essentially started the theatrical metal genre (Dream Theater cites them as a major influence), writing long songs about novels and historical figures when their contemporaries were singing about screwing groupies. They’re just as ridiculous as Dream Theater, if not more so, but they’re in on their own joke, as Spinal Tap as they can be. They’re also fantastic players, even though they don’t show off nearly as much as the DT boys do.

About six years ago, Maiden solidified their lineup, reuniting with original singer Bruce “Scream for me, Long Beach!” Dickinson, and launched an extraordinary rebirth. It continues with their recently released 14th album, A Matter of Life and Death, perhaps their most musically intricate and powerful album yet. It’s certainly the best since their heyday, and the secret here is a commitment to a sound that they have honed over two and a half decades.

That sound is reach-for-the-rafters drama, powered by three (count ‘em, three) guitars and Dickinson’s operatic voice. It’s pretty far over the top, but if you’re looking for sincerity and beauty, you’re listening to the wrong band. Life and Death was recorded mostly live, and is powerful and (believe it or not) somewhat restrained. Difficult to believe for an album on which more than half the songs break seven minutes, but this is a mature Iron Maiden effort, bare-bones and tough.

Why do I like this more than Dream Theater’s work? Because I honestly believe that none of these songs are too long, and none of them waste my time. These are progressive compositions that earn their extended running times, with a sense of dynamics and power. The strongest songs, in fact, are the longest – “For the Greater Good of God” runs 9:24, but it flies by, so tight is the writing and playing. The same goes for “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns,” at a quick 8:44.

Don’t get me wrong – I really like this record, and I’ve always liked this band, but I have little emotional connection to this music. It doesn’t touch me to my soul, but it does make the teenage metal fan that lives in my head very happy. Very few bands are able to maintain a 25-year career doing this kind of music, and not become a parody of themselves, but Maiden has blazed a trail here – they are a blueprint for how to do dramatic metal right. And A Matter of Life and Death is pretty close to the perfect Iron Maiden album – fist-pumping head music with a brain.

But both of these bands have long histories with complex music. Let’s take a look at a band like the Mars Volta, one of the front-runners in the new prog movement. They are considered one of the most virtuosic and creative groups to come up in recent years, and they’ve just released their third album, Amputechture. It’s the follow-up to Frances the Mute, last year’s conceptual odd-o-rama, which stretched their funk-rock-salsa sound to its breaking point.

And Amputechture certainly sounds broken. It’s 78 minutes long, even longer than Frances, and it exemplifies everything that’s wrong with complexity for its own sake. In many ways, this is TMV’s least pretentious album, despite titles like “Vicarious Atonement” and “Viscera Eyes,” because it’s all music – the noisy interludes that marred Frances are all but gone. But the music is endless and lifeless and pointless, just a bunch of empty jamming and showing off.

I don’t want it to sound like the Mars Volta guys don’t play well on this record – in fact, judged solely on instrumental skill, Amputechture is amazing. Cedric Bixler-Zavala has never sounded more like Robert Plant in his prime, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is on fire with his explosive guitar playing, and Red Hot Chili Peppers wizard John Frusciante slathers the whole thing in searing leads. The problem is that instrumental skill is all this album has going for it.

Take “Tetragrammaton,” the second track. It drags on for 16 minutes, at pretty much the same tempo, and it goes absolutely nowhere. It’s nearly impossible to sit through, because all the frenetic flailing about can’t replace good songwriting and memorable melody. The whole album sounds the same, and meshes into one big mush, except for “Asilos Magdalena,” a quiet Spanish-language interlude that stands as the album’s best moment.

The rest just crawls on and on, Bixler-Zavala wailing away while Frusciante’s eight-minute solos are presented in their entirety. Nothing stands out, nothing gels, and nothing here earns its extended running time. The ending is actually a perfect metaphor for the whole thing – “El Ciervo Vulnerado” is a pointless dirge that creaks forward for an eternal nine minutes, before it ends abruptly, as if the mixing engineer just decided he’d had enough.

Amputechture is a sterling example of the extreme end of the complexity spectrum. There is nothing here to emotionally latch on to – even the lyrics are gibberish, unless a line like “Because the flies my mouth spill bare the children at play” speaks to you in some way. I doubt it even means anything to Bixler-Zavala, although he whispers it as if it were the secret to the universe. This is music disconnected from the heart entirely, as much as the simplest folk music is disconnected from the theoretical brain.

And maybe that’s the answer, and perhaps I knew that from the start – my favorite music combines the head and heart reactions. If I am not surprised or engaged by the musical choices, the structure, the melody, I will be bored. But likewise, if the music has no soul, and does not move me or make me feel, then I will be equally bored. It’s not about simplicity vs. complexity, but about a melding of both, without stepping too far in one direction or the other.

Of the six we discussed, I can only unreservedly recommend two – Bill Mallonee’s excellent Permafrost, and Iron Maiden’s forceful A Matter of Life and Death. As for the rest, well, I continue to struggle with these issues, and I strive to find what is good about these records and just enjoy that. Maybe someday I’ll be able to.

Next week, a huge (and hopefully more timely) one, with lots of new ones – Starflyer 59, John Mayer, the Black Keys, the Indigo Girls, Roger Manning, Yo La Tengo, and perhaps more. And Sloan’s new one is on the way to me right now, too. Life is good.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This is the first of two columns in which I am going to try to explore my feelings on complexity in music. I know, I know, that sounds like the driest topic you can imagine spending two weeks on, but I wrestle with these thoughts – they prevent me from trying certain artists, and enjoying certain others, because I reduce music to mathematics in my mind without even thinking about it.

Anyway, for this week, I’ve chosen three of the most traditional, easy records I’ve bought this year (including one that got five stars from Rolling Stone and other arbiters of taste), and for next week, three of the most complex and difficult. The idea is that by exploring the extremes of simplicity and intricacy (within reason), I can figure out what it is I like and dislike about both. And along the way, you’ll get reviews of six new records, which, you know, bonus.

So, to start off, some background. I have an uneasy relationship with simplicity in music, which probably stems from my life as a teenage metalhead. Metal is Manly Music, fast and aggressive and complicated for the sake of being complicated. The harder something is to play, the cooler the musicians who can play it, or at least I thought so when I was 15. Dave Mustaine can outplay Kirk Hammett, who can outplay Scott Ian, and on and on.

I defined “outplaying” as the ability to produce material the other guys couldn’t, perhaps not realizing that not everyone was going for a full display of technical acuity each time out. The assumption was that if Gregg Allman could play like Steve Vai, he would, and he only doesn’t because he can’t. Strange, I know. That’s still a large, lingering part of the reason I can’t stand Kurt Cobain and Nirvana – they couldn’t play nearly as well as the bands they unceremoniously ushered off the popular stage.

I spent so much time as a young man figuring out music, working out how the notes correlated and how time signatures worked and how quickly one had to move one’s fingers to play the blistering solos that made one a real man, that when my first brush with simple, emotional music came along, it bowled me over. And I quickly discovered what I was missing when I tried to play these new songs.

I can play Metallica’s “Creeping Death” – that’s just a matter of knowing the right notes in the right order. One band’s take on it sounds like any other’s, really, and it’s difficult, but practice will get you there.

Likewise, I can play Tori Amos’ “Winter,” meaning I know all the notes in the right order. It’s an easy song. But I can’t play “Winter,” if you know what I mean. And it’s no surprise to me that no one covers Tori.

I think a lot of artists strive for that, and when they strip their music down to its bare essentials, what they’re doing is trying to find the core of what they do. And sometimes it works for me, but just as often, my mind drifts – I’m predicting chords, and groaning inwardly at progressions I’ve heard a thousand times. I know, deep down, that folk music (for one) is not about what’s being played, but about who is playing it, and what personal stamp he or she is leaving on it.

But I’m always happier when folk musicians step up and do something different. Take Peter Mulvey, for example. I first heard him when Eastern Front Records sent me a copy of his 1995 album Rapture, a crazy mish-mash of styles played with a percussive inventiveness and a wide-open spirit. It’s a great record, and for a while there, I was a Mulvey evangelist – he was the best-kept secret in Boston, until he moved back to Wisconsin. I was even there for the premiere performance of “The Trouble With Poets,” still his finest song, at Raoul’s in Portland, Maine.

Lately, though, Mulvey seems to be doing that stripped-back thing, turning out old-timey folk and shuffle tunes that reach deep through the American songbook for inspiration. 2004’s Kitchen Radio is a good folk album, but little more – the sense of adventure is missing, replaced with a deep respect for traditional songwriting. And his new one, The Knuckleball Suite, continues along that path. It is his loosest, breeziest record ever, and yet, in its own way, it’s just as diverse as Rapture.

So why don’t I like it as much? I’m not sure. Mulvey is still an enjoyable performer – his low voice remains commanding, his lyrics just as witty and poetic as ever. The songs, though, seem like tributes rather than originals – “Abilene” is a classic waltz, “Brady Street Stroll” is a light shuffle, “You and Me and the Ten Thousand Things” is pretty typical jazz-folk. Most of The Knuckleball Suite sounds like Peter Mulvey trying to do other artists, instead of trying to do Peter Mulvey. Even the punchiest of these songs, “Girl in the Hi-Tops,” owes a debt to Paul Westerberg.

There are high points. Opener “Old Simon Stinson” is a hoot, with lines like “I was dreaming you were what I was dreaming of.” The record’s sole cover is a complete back-to-basics reinvention of U2’s “The Fly,” which emerges as a dynamite little song when scrubbed clean. And the final few numbers find Mulvey sounding like Mulvey again – the title track is a slowly-building winner, and “The Fix is On” is the album’s best song, a fret-slapping rant about the state of things: “It pays to pay the politician, it pays to pay the politician twice, it pays to be the politician, it pays to be the politician’s wife…”

And of course, Mulvey’s playing is excellent, even on the simplest tracks like “Horses.” Longtime producer and musical partner David Goodrich works his magic all over this album as well, though he’s more reined in than usual – a natural consequence of the material. The two of them really only get to let loose during the extended jam that concludes “The Fix is On,” muted by the coda “Ballymore” that finishes out the disc.

So while this album is not on par with past triumphs like The Trouble With Poets, it seems that Mulvey is on a journey to really explore his sound, and see what he can glean from past masters. I miss the fire, though, the sense of pushing forward instead of reaching backward that infused his earlier work. He probably looks on songs like “On the Way Up” and “Midwife” as naïve now, but to me, they still ring true. That probably says more about me and my maturity than Mulvey and his, of course, and most likely, this is the right path for him to take. I just miss the old spark. The Knuckleball Suite is a sweet record, and an enjoyable one, but it offers nothing you’ve never heard before.

There is some precedent for taking one sound, exploring it over the course of a career, and still turning out excellent work. But I think that’s part and parcel of owning that sound, of claiming it early and indelibly marking it as What You Do. Bill Mallonee, for example, writes great songs, but there’s no doubt he’s been writing the same kind of great songs forever – literate, honest American folk-rock with an occasional twang. He’s just so good at it that I never seem to mind how simple it all is.

His new one, Permafrost, is another nine Bill Mallonee songs, and the only real difference is the trappings. Like last year’s wonderful Friendly Fire, this record is a full-band effort – he’s even named the band this time, calling it Victory Garden. The only thing cheap about it is the packaging. The recording itself is full and beautiful, and these are nine of his most fully realized songs since his obvious high water mark, 1999’s Audible Sigh. It’s obvious that Mallonee blew all his money on the recording – the cover art is one-color and garish, and he has no distribution deal for this one.

But don’t let that stop you. The record opens with “Pour, Kid,” and the full sound, complete with pedal steel guitars and great backing vocals, is like a sigh of relief. The seven-minute “Threadbare” has some Neil Young overtones, but it’s mostly Mallonee, stretching out with some sweet lead work. “Stay With Me” is one of his punchiest songs, and the lovely “Pristine” even makes a feedback-drenched backwards guitar solo work in context. “Flowers,” resurrected from last year’s Hit and Run album, sounds terrific in its full version, the pedal steel and harmonica complementing each other nicely.

Mallonee is a good example of a guy who has been on a quest for fulfillment through simplicity for his whole career, and there are times (like this album) when he finds it. Like much of his recent work, Permafrost is mostly bleak, with moments of hope, but not many. But the music is perfectly realized, and carries the emotion of the lyrics as if there were no barriers between his heart and yours. This is a superb new Mallonee record, a case in which simplicity works wonders, and it captures a sadly ignored and unknown artist in fine form, clear voice, and delightfully dark heart.

You can get the album here.

But if we want to talk about searching for clarity through simplicity, we need to discuss Bob Dylan. His more than 40-year career plays like an Americana songbook, full of folk, blues, country and swing, and while his lyrics are often cryptic, his musical presentation has always been straightforward. It’s for that very reason that I have never really enjoyed his work, and I used to think of it as too simple, but now I consider it so simple that it’s actually beyond me.

Let me explain – I always talk about needing to work my way up to certain musical idioms, like complex jazz and orchestral work. I don’t feel like I’m there yet, and I have a lot of theory left to learn before I can really understand what someone like Duke Ellington was truly up to. But on the other end of the spectrum is someone like Dylan, who has been plying the same chords and the same instrumentation (more or less) for his entire career, and I’m honestly starting to feel like I need to work up to understanding what he’s up to as well. There is something special here, and I’m not always hearing it.

Take his new one, Modern Times. By my count, it’s his 30th studio album, though I’m probably wrong about that, and it’s being billed as the final installment in a trilogy that began with 1997’s Time Out of Mind, and continued with 2001’s Love and Theft. There’s no doubt that these are three of the most fully realized Dylan albums of the past 25 years, and the loose sound of the sessions only adds to the thrill of them.

But the songs are all incredibly simple bits of blues and ballads, sung in Dylan’s new register – low and rumbling and sometimes overly throaty. His band is great, but there’s nothing tricky about making something like “Someday Baby” or “Thunder on the Mountain” work. So with a mountain of five-star reviews of this thing piling up, I can only surmise that I’m missing whatever others are responding to. I like this material, especially the more shuffle-based ones like “Spirit on the Water” and “Beyond the Horizon,” but to consider this genius work is just odd to me.

Some of it is probably the Cult of Bob, claiming everything the man touches as solid gold, but some of it is probably just hearing a guy with so much history and influence cracking open 10 new songs and having fun with them. “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” is certainly fun, and “When the Deal Goes Down” is very pretty, for what it is, but you can draw a straight line from this to Peter Mulvey’s album, and in some ways Mulvey does it better, and you don’t see him racking up the five-star accolades.

But Dylan is still capable of spinning a mesmerizing web, and the final track on Modern Times illustrates that perfectly. “Ain’t Talkin’” is a minor-key acoustic blues that runs for nearly nine minutes, and it’s pure magic. This is the kind of song that Dylan’s ravaged voice is perfect for – he adds a sense of menace and darkness to the song, and his very Bob Dylan-ness lends it weight. The other nine songs on Modern Times are frivolous things next to this piece, the one song here fully deserving of the reverence bestowed on it.

As for the rest… well, I still don’t get it, but I’m working on it. As I said, I have an uneasy relationship with simplicity, and I’m slowly trying to work it out. Why does someone like Bill Mallonee flip my switches, but not someone like Bob Dylan, whom Mallonee obviously draws from? Why can’t I see the recent, more informed and mature work of someone like Peter Mulvey as anything but a backslide? Is it really all about the complexity of the music? Do I have to see art as something monumental and ambitious and inventive to like it? Can’t I just relax and enjoy something like Modern Times for what it is?

And if not, why not?

These are questions I’m sure I will struggle with for the rest of my music-loving life. Next week, I’ll look at the mirror images of these quandaries, as I spin three of the most epic, complex records of 2006. To be continued…

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A quick one, then a long one, then I’m out for the weekend, barring an 8-hour shift at the paper tomorrow covering an immigrant rights march. And funny that I should mention the newspaper, because that leads me right into talking about Steve Lord, his son Bobby, and Bobby’s band Surround Sound.

Steve Lord is an interesting cat. He’s been covering his beat since I was in grade school, and he knows everything there is to know about the county I live in. But he’s also got great musical taste, and he and I have had numerous discussions, sometimes lasting for an hour or more, right there in the newsroom where everyone can hear and be annoyed by them, about this band or that band or whether Paul McCartney should hang it up or just how freaking great David Mead really is. Like that.

And many times in the past, Steve has mentioned his 18-year-old son Bobby, and Bobby’s band. And finally, last week, he gave me a copy of the CD. The band’s called Surround Sound, and the record is called The Sun is On Our Side, and it’s self-produced and self-released.

And it’s quite good.

I have this separate rating scale for friends’ bands, and relatives-of-co-workers’ bands, and things like that, so I was all ready to form an opinion of The Sun is On Our Side based on that curve. But by the third track, I threw out my friend scale and just used my regular one, the way I do with the best musicians I know, like Lost on Liftoff’s Shane Kinney. Essentially, some musicians are just so good that they make me forget that I know them – or, as in this case, that I know their dads.

Anyway. Surround Sound plays punchy, bright power pop, with hooks galore and a songwriting sense far beyond what you’d expect a group of teenagers had in them. Most of the songs are Lord’s, and it’s obvious he’s been raiding his dad’s record collection – here are riffs and melodies straight out of the Kinks and the Raspberries, layered with backing vocals and played with an impressive tightness, especially considering this was a budget-minded production.

I said before that I stopped grading on a curve with track three, and that one’s called “Wake Up.” It’s a world-class pop song, in my estimation the best thing here, and if Bobby Lord can write more like that one, he’ll be an indie superstar in no time. I occasionally wished his singing voice had a lighter, more confident tone, and that the production was a little brighter, but those things come with time. The Sun is On Our Side is one of the most unexpected, pleasant surprises of my year – I got it for free, just for knowing the singer’s father, but if I had paid full price for it, I wouldn’t feel ripped off in the slightest.

Surround Sound has no record deal, and as far as I know, the only place you can purchase the CD is at Not Lame Records. You can hear some of it at their Myspace site or their own new website.

* * * * *

I get excited easily, especially when it comes to music.

I like concepts, grand ideas, format-shaking visions, and there’s little that gets me interested in a record more than seeing the evidence of years of thought and planning. The Early November announced a triple-CD concept record where each disc tells the story from a different perspective? I was there. Who’s the Early November? I had no idea, but suddenly I was very excited to find out, and it turns out it was worth it – The Mother, The Mechanic and the Path is a swell album.

It’s even more exhilarating when an artist I already know and respect takes that extra step, and puts together something beyond anything in his or her catalog. Such is the case with This Binary Universe, the new album from Brian Transeau, who prefers to go by just his initials, BT. The concept had me salivating before I even heard a note of it – TBU is a seven-song ambient excursion that comes packaged with a DVD containing short films for each of the tracks. Essentially, he composed a suite, and then hired people to make his own Fantasia, and now he’s touring it as an audio-visual experience.

Wow, huh?

BT has always been ambitious. His first album, 1996’s Ima, is more than two hours long, all beats and textures, and though it sticks to pretty traditional trance music throughout, it’s still damn good. But Transeau has proven himself a visionary since then, breaking down musical barriers by bringing in pop singers and acoustic instruments and anything else he thinks will serve the song. His last proper album, 2003’s Emotional Technology, wound up on my top 10 list that year, and I called it perhaps the perfect synthesis of electronic music and pop. It’s not club music with a singer, and it’s not pop songs with an electro-beat. This is something else, and I’m not really sure how to quantify it.

Transeau also scored the film Monster that same year, and his music for that movie is amazing – ambient, creepy, gloriously produced, beautiful and uncharacteristically serene. And it turns out that This Binary Universe follows the same path, only to a bigger and better place. BT has abandoned the manic pop melodies of his last few albums and turned in a 74-minute soundscape record, one that shimmers and flutters instead of gyrating and thumping. There are beats here, but they are mostly subtle ones, and the focus is on mood.

Oh, and one more thing – it’s absolutely fantastic.

Taking just the CD first, This Binary Universe starts with “All That Makes Us Human Continues,” which sounds like a dirge for its first minute or so before morphing into a web of underwater chimes. Roughly halfway through, it sounds as though it’s building to an explosion of beats, but it doesn’t – the intensity is only ratcheted up by a small degree. It’s the tone-setter for the album, and its intricate production is one element that never wavers from track to track. This record sounds incredible, like every BT release, and it’s music you can truly get lost in.

“Dynamic Symmetry” is perhaps the most traditional piece here, with its thudding drums and bass, although the tempo is still easygoing. But then the song flips into an electro-jazz experiment, and it works, though not as well as any other track here. Things get back on course with “The Internal Locus,” as both it and “1.618” shift and change subtly throughout their 10-plus-minute running times, always slowing down at the perfect moments to keep the atmosphere consistent.

“See You On the Other Side” is the longest track at 14 minutes, and it’s the one that never dices itself into some other form – it’s a lovely buildup and breakdown of pure electronic ambience. In contrast, “The Anhtkythera Mechanism” (named after an ancient Greek computing device found at the bottom of the Aegean Sea) is dazzling in its journey, going from purring pianos to full-on orchestral grandeur. And the finale, “Good Morning Kaia,” is perhaps the prettiest thing here, building in scope while never losing sight of the fragile piano melody at its core.

But writing about music like this is like trying to smell colors. I have no idea how to impress upon you the experience of hearing this stuff – it’s all feelings, all little snatches of emotion. I can tell you that “The Anhtkythera Mechanism” feels like the floor giving way every two minutes, or I can say that “Good Morning Kaia” broke my heart, but that tells you nothing. More than any other kind of music, I think, complex instrumental works like this need to be heard first hand. There is so much detail here, and so much emotion, that I’m never going to do it justice.

Similarly, I don’t think I can describe the films that accompany this music any better. Some of them are too abstract for my taste – “All That Makes Us Human Continues” opens the movie with what looks like a fractal landscape that changes color repeatedly, but it’s just a still shot for all eight minutes. Some are more successful, especially “Dynamic Symmetry,” with its undersea robot hummingbird (really) and many-eyed creatures. But mostly the filmmakers concentrated on moods and tones, which accompany the music well – often I couldn’t tell which came first, honestly.

But by far the most moving and successful track, both audio and video, is the aforementioned “Good Morning Kaia.” The film, directed by Transeau himself, is made up of home movies of his daughter, after whom the song is named. The song is the most personal work BT has ever crafted, bar none, and the video just brings it home. This is what instrumental music could and should be. It’s not crippled by its lack of lyrics, it’s free of the limitations of language, and able to express emotion in ways that words simply can’t. There’s no way to come away from this song and film unchanged.

BT is unfairly lumped in with DJs and techno artists all the time, and if Emotional Technology didn’t make it plain that he’s on another level entirely, this album should do the trick. There’s a depth and a diversity to This Binary Universe that you don’t often hear. It’s a big, bold record that draws you in but makes you work for it, and it sparkles with ingenuity and beauty. It is, unquestionably, the best thing Brian Transeau has ever done, but I would also go so far as to say it is one of the finest instrumental albums I own. It’s an immersive experience, one of the most ambitious projects of the year – and one of the greatest.

Next week, we get all proggy on your ass.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m feeling like death right now. I have this painful chest cold, and I’m coughing and sneezing, and I made it one whole mile on the treadmill this morning before I practically collapsed, sputtering and heaving.

So yeah, not feeling well. And I think I’d like to put this week’s column to bed quickly, so that I can put myself to bed shortly thereafter. A couple of quick hits, a review, and we’re done for the week. I know, I know, you miss me already, but that’s just the way it has to be.

First up, the latest in a series of things to look forward to, 2006 edition:

The new Sloan album comes out on September 19. It’s called Never Hear the End of It, and in direct contrast to the brief (yet very enjoyable) Action Pact from 2003, this one has 30 songs and spans 76 minutes. Even so, the majority of these tunes must hover around the two-minute mark, so I’m fascinated to see if the band can make something like that come together. The record is being described as the Halifax Fab Four’s White Album, which could be either good or bad. The Beatles’ White Album is an occasionally brilliant, yet completely unfocused mess, and it will be interesting to see if Sloan follows suit.

The end of the year is shaping up, and some newly announced records could help the so-far struggling 2006 along. The Decemberists return on October 3, as does Beck with an album called The Information that he’s been working on since before Guero. Lindsey Buckingham checks in with an acoustic album called Under the Skin, Copeland comes back with a new one called Eat, Sleep, Repeat, and Sunny Day Real Estate mastermind Jeremy Enigk issues his second solo album (10 years after his first), dubbed World Waits.

Add in new things from Ben Folds, Modest Mouse, Unwed Sailor, the Walkmen and the first album in 24 years from some little band called the Who, and it might not be such a mediocre year after all.

On a completely different note, I want to point everyone in the direction of their local DVD store (or online equivalent), because Kicking and Screaming has finally found its way to digital permanence. No, not the Will Ferrell soccer movie (and I hate that I have to say that now), but Noah Baumbach’s brilliant, touching, and above all hysterical first movie. Baumbach hit last year with a critically acclaimed film called The Squid and the Whale, and while I agree that Squid is the better film, Kicking and Screaming will always be my favorite.

It concerns the year after college, and how that slowly becomes your life, but it does so with a script that I think is the closest I have seen to perfection. Each line is either incredibly funny, or incredibly moving, or often both. I saw it at exactly the right time in my life – during the months after graduating from St. Joseph’s, degree in hand, and living in a crummy apartment while working at a music magazine. It’s one of those films with special significance for me, so much so that I can’t really give you an objective review. I just love this movie to death, and can quote it endlessly.

For 10 years now, I’ve had to watch it on VHS, in a pan-and-scan version that cropped the edges of the screen, because there has been no DVD. Baunbach fans signed petitions, wrote letters, and basically waited for a decade while watching anything and everything (Porky’s II?) make it to disc first. Until Baumbach’s recent success with Squid and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic (which he co-wrote), I was all but convinced we’d never see a Kicking and Screaming DVD.

But here it is in a glittering Criterion Collection special edition, with deleted scenes, interviews, and a whole other short film from Baumbach, and I can’t help but feel that the guy is finally getting his due. The Squid and the Whale proved to the world that he’s a great filmmaker, but after Kicking and Screaming, I needed no further convincing. And if you’re sufficiently impressed by those two, his much-maligned second film, Mr. Jealousy, is also quite good.

Congrats, Noah. It’s about damn time.

* * * * *

If ever there were an album I was too harsh on, it’s Eric Matthews’ Six Kinds of Passion Looking for an Exit.

This seven-song excursion came out last year, after a nearly eight-year drought of new Matthews music, and all I can think is that I just felt it wasn’t enough. I was surprised upon spinning the thing that Matthews’ penchant for chamber-pop, for horns and strings and harpsichords, had all but gone by the wayside, leaving stripped-down melodic pop songs with a few snatches of trumpet here and there. And I guess I had forgotten what an interesting pleasure his voice is, and I was searching for something stronger and higher.

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I severely undervalued Six Kinds of Passion, so it was a treat playing it again recently and discovering what a good crop of songs it is. Eric Matthews hit in 1995 with an album called It’s Heavy in Here, and though he probably will never be recognized for it, he helped spark the new melodicism that grew out of the late 1990s. His sole hit, “Fanfare,” stood out from the crowd in ’95, inspired by the likes of Brian Wilson and Neil Hannon instead of Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain, and the record holds up – it’s a low-key delight.

But after his sophomore effort, the slightly less successful The Lateness of the Hour, Matthews disappeared, emerging most of a decade later with only seven new songs. And I wrote at the time that Six Kinds of Passion was either a curious epilogue or the start of the second phase of his career.

Happily, it’s the latter: Eric Matthews Phase Two continues with the Empyrean Records release of Foundation Sounds, his new album. And where Six Kinds could be rightly criticized for its brevity, this new one is an embarrassment of riches – 17 new songs, spanning more than 68 minutes. It sports the same stripped-down feel, and the same melodic winsomeness – in short, it’s an extension of Matthews’ new sound, which isn’t all that different from his old sound, just a little more raw.

As he explains in the liner notes, sound is a preoccupation on this album, and while budgetary constraints may have contributed to the sparseness, Matthews is also on a quest to find the core of what he does. That’s led him to play every instrument on this album (except for a quick clarinet bit on one song), and he gives himself what I call the Prince Credit: he wrote, produced and performed the whole thing. And amazingly, you’d never know that unless you read the liners – Foundation Sounds is warm and organic, not canned-sounding at all.

The barefaced nature of this record puts the focus on Matthews’ songs instead of his intricate orchestration, and that’s where it belongs. This guy can write a melody, and that gift never fails him here. Foundation Sounds stays at pretty much the same intensity throughout – it’s light and shade over slower tempos and languid atmospheres. None of these songs are easy, but all of them lead somewhere, and given a few listens, you’ll find numbers like “Survive” or “All the Clowns” catchy and irresistible. Emotional songs like “This Chance” benefit tremendously from the renewed focus, too – there’s nothing in the way of Matthews’ voice and melody here.

There are too many highlights to point out each one, but there is one thing I want to mention, since it will probably not be emphasized by many reviewers – Matthews’ bass playing on this record is extraordinary. He counts Colin Moulding and Paul McCartney as influences, and you can really tell – the bass is used as a melody instrument more often than not. His work never calls attention to itself, but it’s very advanced bass playing, and could be a by-product of his orchestral leanings. He knows what notes are needed in what spaces.

But Matthews’ music has always been impeccably arranged, and even though he’s working with fewer instruments here, and playing them all, he’s turned in essentially a series of string quartet pieces for guitars, drums and voice. Everything’s in its right place, and it’s obvious that he labored over this album – it’s easily the best thing he’s ever done, even though I miss the orchestra sometimes. There’s really no one else that sounds like Eric Matthews right now, and he’s made an album here that shines a spotlight not on his penchant for interesting tones and colors, but on his pure songwriting talent.

If you order Foundation Sounds from the label, you may possibly get a limited edition EP with five more songs from the same sessions. There’s no drop in quality here – these five could have been on the album, if the CD format would allow it. “The Boy Made of Clay” may well be the best song out of all 22, in fact, so I’d say it’s worth it. But even if you only get Foundation Sounds, it will be worth your money, and worth the nine years it’s taken Matthews to get a new full-length out.

So here’s to creative rebirths, and to second acts, especially from songwriters and musicians this good. And here’s to peeling back layer after layer until you get to the heart of things, as Eric Matthews has done here. Foundation Sounds is a very good record, and the start of something grand. This time, there’s no either/or about it – Matthews is back in the game, and the game is lucky to have him.

Next week, This Binary Universe.

See you in line Tuesday morning.