I love lists.

I love making lists. I love reading lists. There’s something about the ranking of these things over these things, of discovering someone else’s subjective ordering of the universe – or imposing one’s own. When I was a teenage metalhead, my friends and I would sit around and rank Megadeth albums, or guitar players, or caterwauling vocalists. We’d then compare lists, and we’d nearly come to blows over them.

“Dude, there is NO WAY that Lars Ulrich is a better drummer than John Bonham. No WAY!”

“Say that again, man. I’ll beat your skinny ass.”

“Dude, Lars Ulrich is a pussy. Dave Lombardo’s the best drummer who ever lived.”

And on like that. Many times, these lists were composed while driving around town, doing what we called the Franklin 500 – from Stop & Shop up to the Ben Franklin bank in the center of town and then back down, over and over until we ran out of gas. Which, incidentally, only cost about 80 cents a gallon back then…

Anyway, the love of list-making has never left me, and often I’m challenged by other music fanatics to rank and order preferences – best Beatles album, or best Terry Taylor song, or something like that. I ordinarily jump at the chance to participate, although I have to say that I take these lists insanely seriously. I will pore over my choices for days (or in the case of my annual top 10 list, months), making sure that each seemingly insignificant ranking is exactly where I, in my heart of hearts, believe it should be.

I know. Obsessive.

So when Dr. Tony Shore posted on his blog his list of the top 50 albums of all time, and then issued the same challenge to me, I was taken aback. When I was younger, this is the type of thing I would have jumped right into, full bore. (And Megadeth’s Rust in Peace would have been in the top five, too…) But now, I’m more wary of lists like this, and the permanence of the Internet. I make fun of magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone when they do their Best of ALL TIME lists, so how can I do one?

The answer, of course, is that I can’t, even under Tony Shore’s rules. His list is proudly subjective, full of little pop gems that few have heard – Toy Matinee, for example, is a wonderful album that came and went with practically no fanfare, and Daniel Amos’ Doppelganger is also several shades of amazing. He tops it off with 90125, Yes’ gleaming pop sellout record, and though he’s been saying the same to me for years, I think it takes guts to go ahead and publicly call that his favorite record of all time. Kudos, you crazy, crazy bastard.

So Shore’s list is quite plainly his favorites, not any stab at an objective best (as if that were possible), and even so, I can’t bring myself to do it. So I decided to go another way.

Below you’ll find 10 records that changed my life. They’re not in any real order, except I’ve tried to keep them in the sequence I first heard them. I’m doing it this way partially because ranking these 10 (and 40 more, to meet Shore’s challenge) would take me the better part of a month, and it would still be wrong. But I’m also going about it like this because of a few conversations I’ve had recently, with people who don’t feel the way I do about music, and don’t understand the impact albums like the 10 below have had on me. This is a painfully flawed and ultimately futile attempt to explain.

And there are many, many more records that have rewritten parts of me, some that should probably be here instead, but these are the first 10 I thought of, which I considered the most honest way to do this. It’s not Andre Salles’ 10 Favorite Albums OF ALL TIME, but it is, hopefully, a little glimpse at what music means to me, and what it does to me.

Anyway, here goes. 10 records that changed my life.

* * * * *

1. The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

There were others before this one, certainly. My parents had a vinyl copy of Led Zeppelin IV that I would play over and over again as a small child, and even then I knew that “When the Levee Breaks” was an amazing song. We had Eat a Peach by the Allman Brothers Band, and I loved that as well. I started buying tapes pretty early on, and nearly wore out my Pet Shop Boys and Huey Lewis albums.

I loved music before I heard Sgt. Pepper. I just didn’t really know what it could be.

I was 15. I’d heard about this record from my older friends, many of whom were much more literate than I was. I had read the album’s title, written in reverence, in many reviews. I had heard the Beatles, too, but nothing prepared me for listening to Sgt. Pepper front to back that first time. Here was something grand and melodic and important, but also silly and hummable. It was fun music that took itself seriously – or the other way around, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I couldn’t get “Fixing a Hole” out of my head, and I was mesmerized by “A Day in the Life,” an epic unlike anything I had heard before.

Sgt. Pepper still does it for me. It’s pretty much flawless, I think, a perfect record from start to finish. And the Beatles never made another one like it. Everything from A Hard Day’s Night on was buildup to Sgt. Pepper, and everything after it was a comedown. It is the benchmark by which I judge pretty much all pop music, and in a lot of ways, my constant search for great new stuff is just an endless attempt to replicate the giddy joy of that first time through this album, when I was 15.

2. Metallica, Master of Puppets.

But of course, at the time, I was a teenage metalhead. And this album is one of the main reasons why.

As a good Christian boy, I was scared of Metallica. Their record covers just looked evil, like the sort of thing my pastor would tell me to stay away from. So my immersion in the world of Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett was tentative, but once I dove in, I was hooked.

Master of Puppets is still one of the best metal albums I have ever heard. The metal years, for me, were a passing phase, but while bands like Overkill have gone by the wayside in my collection, the good stuff – early Megadeth, Sepultura, Anthrax – still gets me. And the three records Metallica made with Cliff Burton still rank as the best of the best. As a young kid, I was struck by the extraordinary power of Puppets, from the opening barrage of “Battery” to the furious finale of “Damage Inc.,” and also by the relevance, the importance, of the lyrics. The album attacked unjust wars, drug addiction, mental illness and shady evangelism with blunt force. When I was 15, these words Meant Something, and demanded attention.

Nowadays, I am still impressed with the progressive nature of this album, and always struck anew with just how melodic it is. “Orion” is even kind of beautiful. Every once in a while, I will pull this out, and remember what my long-haired teenage self heard in it. The band has gone steadily downhill since, like almost all of their ‘80s metal brethren, and Master of Puppets represents this odd little golden age of my youth, and a doorway to the more complex stuff (Dream Theater, for example) I have grown to love since.

3. The Cure, Disintegration.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say this – Disintegration saved my life.

Without this album’s glorious sadness to fall back into, I don’t know that I would have made it through high school alive. I spent a lot of time as a kid brooding, exploring my own melancholy, and hanging on to my depression. And Disintegration was the soundtrack for a lot of that. Never before had I heard an album that depicted my own loneliness the way I heard it in my head. I identified with Disintegration, but more than that, I was able to lose myself in it, and come away strangely hopeful.

Even now, it is one of the richest albums I own, especially the extended soundscapes on the second half. I don’t listen to it very often, because the shimmering depression of “The Same Deep Water as You,” for example, brings me right back to my worst days as a teen. It is a testament to the record, however, that none of its dark poetry seems silly to me now. It still strikes me as honest, powerful, and enveloping, both in Robert Smith’s words and in the band’s sheer sound, massive and fragile at once. But then, it’s hard for me to objectively judge an album like this, one that had such an impact on the way I saw the world for a while.

4. Queen, A Night at the Opera.

While the Cure was capturing my own sense of isolation in song, Queen broadened my musical horizons like almost no other band. Freddie Mercury could play and sing anything, and he often did within the space of 40 minutes. I had never heard another band with quite the amazing range Queen effortlessly displayed.

This album, despite how cliched it would quickly become thanks to Wayne’s World, was my favorite. What other band would open with a kiss-off like “Death on Two Legs” and then segue into Mercury’s old ragtime piece “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon”? The second half knocked me out, jumping from the sludgy “Prophet’s Song” to the sweet “Love of My Life” to Brian May’s jug band wonderama “Good Company,” and then to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” What a range.

And as a young kid still trying to work out the ins and outs of audio production, A Night at the Opera offered exploding vistas of sound, from the astonishing opera smack in the middle of “Rhapsody” to the guitars-as-brass-band of “Company.” Sure, it’s over the top, but the musicianship and the sheer amount of work and time put into the production is still impressive to me now. Queen also managed to be diverse while still making coherent album statements, something that few bands can manage even now. They were silly and campy, but man, they were good.

And Mercury’s death from AIDS in 1991 offered me my first experience with loss, in an artistic sense. Here was a guy still making great music – Innuendo is an underrated album – and in a heartbeat, he was gone, and the band was over. I didn’t know him, I’d never met him, but his music meant something to me, and his death truly affected me. Not to get melodramatic about it, but in a way, Mercury’s passing prepared me for every time it’s happened since, from Elliott Smith to Johnny Cash.

5. The Choir, Circle Slide.

What can I say about Circle Slide that I haven’t said before?

I heard it in high school, just as I was in the midst of rejecting religion and its pat ideas about life. The Choir is the band that convinced me not to reject the spiritual altogether. Here was deep belief tempered with deep doubt, all wrapped up in an unbelievably beautiful sound. Here, in short, was art about God, and it came along at a time in my life when I was drawing an inviolable line between the two.

In the intervening years, Circle Slide has gained more and more significance to me. I hear something new in it every time, and familiar lines strike me in newly resonant ways. An example – just last week, I spun the album again, and a line in “About Love” jumped out at me: “You threaten my dreams.” What a thing to say to someone, but yet, what an honest assessment of a relationship. Love, when it’s real, redraws your plans and reimagines your dreams, threatening the old ones, no matter how long you’ve held them.

Circle Slide remains one of the most important albums, personally speaking, that I own. I have been listening to it regularly for 16 years, and I’ve never grown tired of it. And it opened the door to an entire corner of the music world I might never have explored – without Circle Slide, I may never have heard Daniel Amos, Adam Again, the 77s, the Prayer Chain, Starflyer 59, or numerous other amazing bands that are unjustly ignored because of their spiritual content.

For these and a hundred other reasons, I will be eternally grateful that I took a chance on that artsy-looking cassette with the tire swing on the cover back in 1990. It’s an album I believe I will still be listening to in 30 years.

6. Human Radio.

This record was the first forgotten masterpiece I ever discovered, and I remember feeling indignant, angry even, that it wasn’t more popular. Human Radio is the only officially released album by this group, led by a great songwriter named Ross Rice, and its 10 songs are all little wonders, melodic and witty and brilliant. It contains a couple of songs (“Hole in My Head,” “Another Planet,” “I Don’t Wanna Know”) that rank among my very favorites – when I try to write songs, these are the kinds of songs I try to write.

Human Radio was recommended to me by a record store clerk, the same one who had once applauded my purchase of Queen’s Innuendo, so I knew he and I had similar tastes. This clerk called Human Radio’s lack of universal popularity “one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century,” and while I would never go that far, I admit that I do secretly consider it criminal that this band, and this album, didn’t set the world on fire. This is not inaccessible stuff. This is a great pop album that slipped through the cracks, when it should have launched four hit singles and several careers.

As I said, it was my first brush with that feeling, and it hasn’t gotten any easier as time has gone by. Instead of being heralded as one of the best songwriters we have, Ross Rice has gone on to make only a handful of subsequent records, and to live the life of an unknown working musician. It’s an old song, and I hear it all the time – my CD collection is now full of bands and artists that deserve better than they got. Every serious music collector has that one album that introduced him or her to the concept of unjust obscurity. This was mine.

7. Jane’s Addiction, Ritual de lo Habitual.

Speaking of injustice, this album was my first brush with censorship and the very real threat it poses to artistic expression. The front cover of Ritual was meant to be a photo of a sculpture, one that depicted three people in a naked embrace. But Warner Bros. wasn’t having it, and forced Perry Farrell to change it. Instead, he replaced the original cover with a black-on-white reprinting of the First Amendment, and in the process, became my hero.

As a young boy, I was stunned and dismayed to learn that often, artists are not allowed to make the art they want to make, and that companies and governments would stifle people who said things they didn’t agree with. But I was also heartened to learn that in this country, we have a law that, at its best, prevents such stifling. I’ve since dedicated much of my life to exercising the right that law guarantees, and supporting artists and politicians that work to defend it.

But beyond all that noise, Ritual de lo Habitual is just a really great record. Take a California funk-metal band, and give them a huge dose of ambition, and what you get is a 10-minute epic about sex, a wild violin-fueled waltz about slapping your own face, some great Zeppelin-esque mini-suites, and, in “Been Caught Stealing,” one of the most jubilant songs of the ‘90s. It was, in my teenage estimation, art worth standing up for, and even now, when standards have relaxed to the point that the widely available original cover art seems tame, the story behind it makes me smile.

8. Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes.

It’s hard for me to measure the impact that Little Earthquakes had on my life. For a while, it was all I wanted music to be. I was searching for honest, searing beauty, music that would make my heart stop and my soul melt, music that would force me to sit down and take it in, and leave me a different person when it was over. Tori Amos’ first album was all that and more.

Little Earthquakes grabbed hold of me from its first line – “Every finger in the room is pointing at me” – and wouldn’t let go. Here was an artist of amazing talent, gifted with a voice that could part the seas and a piano style that was both technically complex and emotionally rich, and rather than just rely on that, she bared herself completely on this record, daring you to look and making you feel her pain. One moment she’s filling you with fury (“Precious Things”) and the next she’s nudging open your heart (“Winter”). And near the end, on “Me and a Gun,” she chills you to the bone, almost literally.

I’m using this phrase a lot here, but in 1991, I’d never heard anything like this. This album made me feel like few before or since, and even now, moments of it (the chorus of “China,” the bit in “Winter” when all time everywhere stops as Amos breathes in) move me like almost nothing else. Amos has gone downhill considerably since her first three records, but it’s the extraordinary power of Little Earthquakes that keeps me coming back, hoping she’ll deliver something as naked, intense and graceful as this again.

9. Jellyfish, Spilt Milk.

When people ask me for my favorite concert experience, I still say it was seeing Jellyfish with Chris L’Etoile at Club Babyhead in Providence, Rhode Island in 1993. It was the first show I’d been to where I knew all the words to all the songs, and watching this group of guys recreate two of my then-favorite albums was an incredible experience.

Jellyfish was one of the first new bands I fell in love with. I saw the video for “That Is Why” on MTV – and as a slight aside for the kids in the audience, there was once a time, lost in the mists of history, when MTV actually played music videos, like, 24 hours a day – and immediately had to have the album. The harmonies, the melody, the everything, it was just awesome. The record was called Bellybutton, and it was delightfully silly and surprisingly dark and every bit the work of genius I was hoping. I quickly became a Jellyfish evangelist, and I pretty much wore out my cassette of that first record.

Spilt Milk, the band’s fantastic follow-up and swan song, marked the first time I bounced a check to buy a piece of music. I knew I didn’t have the money for it, but I had to hear it. Spilt Milk and Tori Amos’ Under the Pink the following year were the first two albums I can remember being almost insanely excited for before they were released, a pattern that has continued at least once a year since. And Spilt Milk lived up to my wildest hopes for it – it was bigger, more intricate, and somehow better than Bellybutton. It was a perfect pop record, the kind they just don’t make anymore.

Spilt Milk has ruined me for most modern pop. I honestly thought that I would never hear a pop album like this one outside of the Beatles collection, but Jellyfish showed me that it can be done. You can do something new and astonishing within these parameters. It’s just that nearly everyone else simply doesn’t.

10. Brian Wilson, SMiLE.

Simultaneously the oldest and most recent piece of music here, SMiLE arrived when I needed it most. It came out two years ago, when I was at my lowest point. My life had fallen apart, and I was feeling hopeless, directionless and lost. And then this gorgeous thing arrived, this perfect album with its attendant tale of redemption and joy, and I suddenly found it impossible to spend my days moping.

The story is common knowledge by now – Wilson intended SMiLE as the follow-up to the Beach Boys’ masterpiece Pet Sounds, but allowed himself to be convinced that it was as bad as his bandmates told him it was. Nearly 40 years and one nervous breakdown later, Wilson went back and finished the piece, then recorded it with his new crack band at the age of 62. The final SMiLE is unequivocal proof that the other Beach Boys were dead wrong – this album is pure joy captured on disc, and one of the best things I have ever heard.

And it just seems to be the way of things with me and music. The right records come along just when I need them. In September of 2004, I desperately needed SMiLE, and thank God it was there for me. Its very essence surges with hope and love, two things I can never have enough of, and just as Disintegration’s grand sadness got me through a rough time 16 years ago, so did SMiLE’s boundless, childlike bliss enable me to move on from the worst two years of my life. I’m doing pretty well these days, and I can’t help but think this album’s timely arrival helped me get where I am now. SMiLE is still one of the best albums I own, and I remain grateful that I lived to hear it, and that I heard it when I did.

* * * * *

As I said, there are many, many more, and this barely scratches the surface of what music has meant to me, but it’ll have to do for now. Special thanks to Dr. Tony Shore – go and read ObviousPop. It’s good stuff.

Before I go, I need to mention this, because I haven’t yet made a big deal of it, and I should. On August 29, Brian Transeau (better known as BT) will release a project called This Binary Universe that looks like it’s going to be amazing. Longtime readers will remember that BT’s last album, Emotional Technology, made my top 10 list in 2003 for its dynamic synthesis of pop melody and intricate electronic textures, and since then, he delivered a terrific score for the Charlize Theron movie Monster that I should have reviewed.

But this looks like Transeau’s most impressive project yet – it’s a 74-minute album, but it’s also a film. Transeau asked animators from all over the globe to create short movies for the album’s seven tracks, and the CD comes with a DVD of the film, mixed in surround sound. Essentially, he’s created his own Fantasia here, and the snippets I have seen and heard are fantastic. Here, check it out for yourself.

It arrives on the 29th along with new ones from Ty Tabor, Bob Dylan and Dream Theater, as well as a 2-CD set of lost Black Crowes tracks. Good week, man. Good week.

Next week, Eric Matthews, I hope.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

We’re more than halfway through, and it’s looking like 2006 is one of those periodic down years, musically speaking.

Not to say that there hasn’t been good stuff this year, or that there isn’t good stuff on the way. It’s just that the energy seems to be lacking. This is one of those years in which there seems to be no momentum, no rising tide of excellence that carries everyone along. There have been just as many disappointments this year as there have been works of genius, and many of the artists that made 2004 and 2005 such winning years seem to have taken 2006 off, or released so-so stopgap records.

This list includes Sufjan Stevens (although The Avalanche is very good, and we can’t expect him to drop another platter like Illinois so soon), Bruce Cockburn, Muse, Guster, Tool, Beth Orton, and the second of my two review subjects this week. My hopes are high for upcoming records by Eric Matthews, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., Starflyer 59, the Decemberists, Beck and Jeremy Enigk, to name a few, but I’m not getting too thrilled just yet. And the news that Aimee Mann, one of the best songwriters currently working, will release a Christmas record, of all things, this fall doesn’t make me jump for joy, either.

This happens from time to time, and it’s nothing to worry about. But it does take a toll on my excitement level. I still buy just as many records, but fewer of them have really stuck with me this year. No slight intended to the likes of Keane, Mute Math, David Mead or any of the other acts that have knocked me out. It’s just that the overwhelming majority of 2006’s musical offerings have been mediocre-to-good, not fantastic.

It may come down to what I want out of music. I’m looking for craft and passion, of course, but mostly I’m after an individual vision, fully realized, that I can follow and explore. Because of the way the industry works, such visions are rare, especially when extended over an entire career. I have seen it happen too many times – a band is on a creative musical path, and they stop it short because the label doesn’t like it, or the commercial concerns intervene. (I call it the Monster Effect, after R.E.M.’s disastrous 1994 album. That record abruptly ended the fascinating journey the band had been on, one which had led to the amazing Automatic for the People two years before.)

Art vs. commerce is an old topic here at tm3am, but I firmly believe that the only way for an extended artistic vision to fully flower is for it to be fully funded, with no outside interference. The artist writes and records, the label releases the product untouched, and everyone sinks or swims on the merits of the music. This hardly ever happens, of course, but it’s worth celebrating when it does. The most compelling musical journeys, for me, occur when artists are allowed to do whatever they want, whenever they want. The results are not always successful, but they are always interesting.

Off the top of my head, though, I can only name a few prolific artists doing things their own way, on their own dime, with no interference at all, and at the top of the heap is Ani Difranco. Since day one, Difranco has been releasing her stuff on her own Righteous Babe Records, and she’s responsible for everything, from track selection to artwork. Over time, she has grown into a model of self-reliant creativity – she rarely does the same thing twice, and you can be sure that every album she puts out is exactly the way she wants it to be.

One thing Difranco does better than most anyone else is packaging. Righteous Babe started with black-and-white cassette inserts and home tape duplication 16 years ago, and Difranco’s whole system of distribution was her touring van. These days, she puts her heart and soul into the look and feel of each record, and even her official bootleg series has a neat, interlocking design to it.

Her latest, Reprieve, is no exception, and currently has the prize for best packaging of the year. It comes in a cardboard slipcase that depicts, raised and embossed, a photo of a tree taken in Nagasaki shortly after the bomb dropped. Pull the digipak out, and you get another tree motif, in raised and embossed cardboard, and a vertically opening case that includes an impeccably designed art object of a booklet. This type of attention to art design has become par for the course with Difranco, and it’s almost worth buying her annual records just to see what she’s done with the trappings.

Lately, though, she hasn’t been lavishing as much attention on the music inside these glittering packages. Difranco is a restless artist, and just when you think she’s hit her stride, she’ll push off in another direction entirely – just ask the legions of fans who have abandoned her in recent years, due to her refusal to make another Out of Range or Little Plastic Castle. For half a decade, she worked with a jazz horn section and an amazingly tight band to produce several massive, difficult records, culminating in 2003’s Evolve, on which she finally sounded absolutely comfortable.

So, of course, she ditched the band right after that and set off on another journey. This one seems to be more introspective, less grand – her first album after Evolve was Educated Guess, which she made entirely by herself, with limited success. After a brief sojourn into more elegant accessibility with Knuckle Down last year, she’s back to quiet near-minimalism on Reprieve, easily the most atmospheric collection she’s ever recorded.

The difference is, this time she’s made a masterpiece.

Although I’m still not sure why I think so. The songs on Reprieve are little more than sketches, fragments of thought and melody that waft in and out. Difranco is still using her de-tuned guitar as the primary instrument, with its slack tones and sometimes off-key fumbles. The only other musician is bassist Todd Sickafoose, who adds a jazzy feel here and there. Otherwise, the sound is as it was established on Educated Guess.

But in retrospect, where that record set the style, its follow-ups have been attempts to decorate it, to place it in new settings. Reprieve uses ambient synthesizers, nature sounds, electric pianos and sound effects to paint a mood, one that lends these scattered thoughts the feel of a 48-minute song. From the start, the atmosphere is king – “Hypnotized” opens with a minute-long stand-up bass solo that congeals into a verse and chorus so gradually that you barely notice it. From there, guitars glide in and out, and Difranco’s voice coos and snarls, but the record barely gets above a whisper.

It’s an incredibly compelling whisper, however. Difranco balances internal and external concerns throughout, starting the album with four songs about attraction and transitioning into angrier, more political territory around the halfway point. But Reprieve merges the two so completely that they feel like different sides of the same thought. The vitriolic “Millennium Theater” drifts across on a soft and gentle bed, Difranco calling out Enron and Halliburton while calling for President Bush’s impeachment while the music chimes and ripples beneath her, and immediately after that, “Half-Assed” marks the most frenzied moment of the album, with personal lyrics about regret and enjoying each second.

In truth, these songs can’t stand on their own too well – there’s no melodic hook that will stick in your brain, no standout track like “Studying Stones” or “As Is.” But somehow Difranco has turned these half-realized tunes into a fully realized album, despite including no drums and no easy entry points. The album carries you from first note to last, and when she brings it home with “Shroud,” a classic old-time folk anthem about tossing off the shackles of modern life and selfishness, the moment is transcendent. Yes, the song sounds out of tune, and yes, by itself it’s no great shakes, but at the end of this record, it’s like a great moment of waking, a powerful dawn.

This is another album that any label with any sense would have tried to convince Difranco not to make, and it’s definitely another step towards something greater down the line. But not only do I love seeing Difranco’s process laid bare year after year, I love it when her experimentalism yields results, as it has here. I can’t explain the spell that Reprieve casts, and I’d have a hard time naming these 13 among her best songs, but I can’t help thinking of this as one of her best records. It is a quiet triumph, a creeping and moody work that gets under your skin in the best way. Fans of the old, folksy Ani may not enjoy it, but for those who love to watch restless artists dig their way in and work their way out, Reprieve should prove captivating.

* * * * *

If there’s anyone who looks ready to rival Ani Difranco for Most Prolific Artist, it’s Matthew Friedberger. As the male half of the Fiery Furnaces, Friedberger has co-written and produced five full-lengths since 2003 with his sister Eleanor, and now, mere months after the 72-minute Bitter Tea, he’s unleashed his 105-minute solo debut, Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School. It is simultaneously the sixth and seventh album of his brief career, and proof that someone needs to tell him no once in a while.

No question, the Friedbergers have quickly amassed one of the most idiosyncratic and original catalogs you’re likely to hear. But so far, I’ve been able to roll with it – I remain unimpressed with the flat blues-rock of Gallowsbird’s Bark, but the twisty, garage-proggy Blueberry Boat and Bitter Tea are little wonders, and I’m one of the few that considers the Friedbergers’ rock opera about their grandmother, Rehearsing My Choir, one of their best.

And maybe it’s just overexposure, but I’m finding Matthew’s solo album to be impenetrable. It’s as if I’ve reached my tolerance for quirky keyboard rock operas – this sort of thing should probably only be attempted in small doses, but here are two complete albums of thumping pianos, cheap-sounding synths, odd electronic percussion and stop-on-a-dime arrangements. I’m not sure what my problem is, because by all indications Matthew is just as much of a nutty genius as ever, and very little of these two albums sounds out of character with his main band.

Maybe it’s just that I miss Eleanor’s pretty voice. Matthew has a low near-monotone, which works for backing vocals and for contrast on Furnaces albums, but has trouble carrying 100 minutes of material on its own. He talks his way through most of Holy Ghost Language School, definitely the odder of these two discs, and I found myself hoping for a vocal melody to latch on to.

Winter Women, the first of these albums, is marginally more song-oriented, and worlds more melodic. A song like “Up the River’ is actually sort of hummable, although Friedberger makes it more difficult here to find the melodies than on Furnaces albums. He employs Tortoise’s John McEntire on drums, and instructs him, apparently, to fill the spaces with random pounding. He drowns the record in odd sounds, some forwards and some backwards, that only serve as distractions.

Friedberger plays all the instruments on Holy Ghost Language School, a supposed conceptual suite about a businessman who sets up a school for speaking in tongues (I guess). At times sounding like Frank Zappa’s 1980s work with the synclavier, this album is a keyboard-fueled nightmare of self-indulgence. And while I admire it, I find it difficult to listen to all the way through. It just seems too random, too quirky-for-quirky’s-sake, with no real grounding.

The lyrics don’t help matters, and here is where Eleanor’s presence is truly missed. Her crystal-clear tones help sell the bizarre concepts that float through every Furnaces record, adding a depth and earthiness to them. Matthew on his own just sounds like he’s reciting the words, especially on the more novelistic Holy Ghost. It’s unfortunate, because some of the tunes on Winter Women are worth saving, and perhaps turning into full-fledged Furnaces songs, but it’s difficult to hear that potential in their current state.

And for the first time, the Matthew Friedberger sound feels like a parody of itself – he needs to open up the floodgates a little more, and perhaps break away from the same machines and pianos he’s been using. I predicted some of his arrangement tricks on this album – “Oh, here’s where he will drop everything and switch to dissonant left-hand piano chords,” for instance, or, “Here comes the backwards sound effect.” Enough of these records remain surprising to keep it from being a disaster, but it might be time for another seismic shift in the way Friedberger does things.

All of this is just an attempt to explain why I am disappointed in something that meets my criteria for engaging art – it explores a singular vision, follows it to its fullest extent, and seems thoroughly un-meddled-with by the industry at large. And yet, I think Friedberger needs to slow down a little, and let the inspiration rise up again. Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School only exists in the form it does because no one told him it shouldn’t, and maybe in this case, a little oversight might not have been a bad thing.

But Friedberger remains a stone genius, a musician with few peers in his field, and if he needed to get this sprawling mess out of his system, then I’m glad he did. Ani Difranco has made a few sprawling messes of her own (Up Up Up Up Up Up, anyone?), and they were all steps to something greater. I can only hope that Friedberger learned whatever he needed to learn about himself and his process by putting this thing together, and that the next Furnaces album will find him renewing his focus.

Next week, any number of possibilities.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I got the word this week that once again, the greatest musical genius of our time would be gracing our shelves with a new record.

And it’s about time – it’s been three years since the pop culture has taken its regular and well-deserved spanking from this guy, who has proved over more than 20 years to be just what the pompous and over-inflated music scene needs. He’s a devastating satirist, but he’s also a terrific musician, and his band is among the best group of pure musicians you’ll find anywhere.

I am, of course, talking about “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Go ahead, laugh – that’s kind of the point. Yankovic is all about taking the piss out of pop music, and the more self-serious the artist he’s lambasting, the sillier the parody he comes up with. But make no mistake, the guy’s a deadly talented musician – just check out “Genius in France” off his last record, Poodle Hat. It’s a brilliant pastiche of Frank Zappa’s sound and style, and just as complex as anything the man himself might have foisted on his backing band. Plus, it’s funny as hell.

So yeah, “Weird Al” Yankovic will return on September 26 with a new record called Straight Outta Lynwood. You can see the cover here. Not included, because of a dispute with Atlantic Records, will be Al’s James Blunt parody “You’re Pitiful,” but you can download that for free from his site. It’s not a home run, but it is pretty funny.

I think it’s appropriate to start this week’s column with Yankovic, because the rest of it concerns Serious Artists, those guys out to Make a Statement and Do Something Meaningful. Yankovic has made a career out of poking holes in music that goes beyond its station as entertainment, but I think there’s a huge difference between the type of empty, ego-centric pop Yankovic slams, and honestly ambitious art. And while these things are all subjective, I think the three albums I have on tap this time are examples of the latter, not the former.

But let’s see, shall we?

* * * * *

Ambition is a funny thing.

For many critics, all it takes is the word “ambitious” to spark a rabid, frothy rant about how music shouldn’t be pretentious and all “arty.” The truth is, though, I like ambition, especially if the artist in question has the chops to pull off an extraordinary vision. I give musicians points for even trying to accomplish something beyond the norm, and if they actually do accomplish it, well then…

Those moments are kind of what I live for.

Ace Enders, for example, is an ambitious guy. Until a few months ago, I had never heard of Enders or his band, the Early November. They’re on tiny Drive-Thru Records, and their previous output has consisted of fairly average post-punk guitar rock with some sweet acoustic overtones. Their debut full-length, The Room’s Too Cold, had some good moments and some not-as-good ones, but it was overall pretty enjoyable.

But it’s the kind of thing I probably would have ignored completely and never heard, under ordinary circumstances. Enders hooked me, however, with news of his band’s second album, The Mother, the Mechanic and the Path. It’s a triple-disc affair, a two-plus-hour rock opera about dysfunctional family relations. That’s right, a triple album. The kind of thing that can either be a self-indulgent mess that goes on forever, or an artistic triumph of style, song and theme.

Even the idea of an album that can’t be contained on one or two discs excites me. I’m always interested in possibly discovering something brilliant, something that catches a wave of inspiration and explores it to its fullest. At the same time, I’m always morbidly fascinated by potential train wrecks, especially ones that reach for the stars and fall depressingly short. Even those projects, however, get credit for trying to step out of the typical, the average, and really Say Something.

The Mother, the Mechanic and the Path is somewhere in the middle, a fantastically ambitious record that ignores boundaries and really goes for broke in terms of its concept. And it’s largely successful, but its occasional missteps and backslides into clichéd territory keep it from being the masterpiece Enders obviously wants it to be. But the thing is, he’s so committed to this thing, so immersed in its possibilities, that he gets me on his side right away. I really like this album, despite its shortcomings.

The album is broken up into threes, and each disc gets its own title. (Go to the head of the class if you guessed them.) The first two are the more traditional – 11 songs each, connected by thematic threads, but not a straight plot. The Mechanic starts things off with a bang – the first three tracks are melodic rock of the highest order, especially “Decoration,” which may be one of my favorite songs in this style.

The Mechanic is the rock disc, told from the point of view of a father working hard to raise his son, while falling out with his wife. “Money in His Hand” sets the tone with a snarling guitar riff and the refrain, “It’s not the heart that makes the man, it’s the money in his hand.” The lyrics explore emotional disconnectedness and communication breakdowns, even if they do so in fairly typical ways. The music stays within well-defined boundaries, and some songs, like “The One That You Hated,” slip into tedium.

But it ends well – “The Car in 20” is a propulsive rocker with a great lead, and the graceful “Figure it Out” concludes the proceedings with sweetness. Enders has said that The Mechanic is the single album the band almost made, and while it’s pretty good, and fans of the band’s earlier material would certainly not have been disappointed with it, I’m very glad they went further.

The Mother is the quieter, more romantic record, opening with the piano piece “My Lack of Skill,” and it’s the superior group of songs. It is, naturally, from the relationship’s other perspective, and is the loving and painful response to The Mechanic’s anger. “Hair” is a world-class pop song about the lies that prop up domestic life, while “Driving South” is a lovely and difficult poem about emotional distance.

There are some missteps here, too, like the overly long “Is It My Fault,” but like The Mechanic, it rebounds by the end. Enders has an appealingly average voice, but he occasionally pushes it into more emotional terrain, as he does on “The Truth Is.” The song’s lyrics describe its music, the singer quivering and demanding more support from the ever-unfolding backing tracks. Only when the band is in at full strength does the mother feel confident enough to speak the truth – “I love you so much it hurts.”

The disc ends with “1000 Times a Day,” a romantic look back at the start of the relationship, and while Enders can’t quite bring himself to switch up the pronouns and take on the part completely, it’s a great summation of the mother’s point of view. The Mother is a superb companion record to The Mechanic, and though with a little trimming they would both have fit on one disc, I find surprisingly few of these 22 songs fit for the bin.

But wait, there’s more. The Path is easily the best and most creative of these discs, an old-fashioned rock opera told from the point of view of this family’s only child. Unlike the other two records, this one is full of dialogue that explicitly spells out the story of the album, interspersed with smaller songs and interludes that explore unfamiliar territory with surprising eloquence. It’s obvious that Enders has listened to a lot of Who albums – this is something Pete Townshend might have done in his younger years.

The album details a series of sessions between the main character, Dean, and his therapist, and maybe it’s my advancing years, but I found a lot of this dialogue trite. The story is like something out of a 20-something’s journal – my dad treated me badly, I ran away, became a father myself and now I’m making the same mistakes my dad made. It’s not like this is a subject that doesn’t deserve exploration, and for the most part Enders explores it well, but it’s the work of a young man in a young band, and it doesn’t quite speak to me. But then, it’s probably not supposed to, and I’m glad Enders got these thoughts out now, before he outgrew them.

Musically, though, The Path is terrific and unpredictable. The Townshend reference is perfect for “Runaway” and its sequel, first-person declarations of independence with furious acoustic guitar backdrops. We get blues (“You Don’t Know What It’s Like”), acoustic folk (“Never Coming Back”) and jazzy cabaret (“Guess What”), but we also get a mock-up of bad teen pop and a punked-up version of “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.” Really. And it works. The instrumentation is wide and varied, with strings, horns and banjos all over the place.

The Path ties it all together thematically as well – many of the dialogue sessions are backed by instrumental versions of other songs on The Mechanic and The Mother, and we get a swell cello version of “Decoration” at a perfect moment. It’s obvious Enders knocked himself out on this third disc, and aside from a needlessly metaphysical conclusion, his efforts have resulted in something kind of extraordinary. It’s especially fascinating since he’s working in a genre that rewards the appearance of ambition, but never gives due to the real stuff. The Path is genuinely ambitious, and could have been embarrassing. Instead, it’s a spellbinding listen, well worth the time it obviously took to complete.

So what’s the verdict? As befitting a three-disc album, The Mother, the Mechanic and the Path is a solid triple, with bonus points for even conceiving something this grand and sweeping. Enders is out on a limb with most of this album – his open sentimentality will be slammed for its triteness, and while at times it’s a fair criticism, his work here is also boldly naked. This is the kind of record that makes or breaks careers, and despite its flaws, I’m glad to support something that takes as many musical and thematic risks as this album does. Ace Enders has me on his side, and I’m excited to see where he goes from here.

* * * * *

But enough of Americans with ambition, how about those Europeans?

I credit Dr. Tony Shore a lot here, but he deserves it. It was his recommendation (passed along from Tooth and Nail’s Jim Worthen, if I’m not mistaken) that I pick up Mew’s second album, Mew and the Glass-Handed Kites. As with most of Dr. Shore’s recommendations, I resisted initially – this time I was put off by the title, the astonishingly cheesy cover art, and the few seconds of “Circuitry of the Wolf” I listened to. But when the album received a stateside release last week, I picked it up, just so I could rib Shore about his lousy taste.

I am a silly, silly man.

Mew plays an expansive, grand form of space-rock, I suppose, although I don’t know quite how to describe the dramatic, fantastically melodic stuff that fills this album. Mew is from Denmark, and maybe that explains it – I am completely ignorant of the music scene in that part of the world. But this is unlike anything you will find over here.

Glass-Handed Kites plays like a single 54-minute song, one that never seems to run out of surprising melodic shifts. Imagine a Fiery Furnaces album as played by some 1970s art-rock band with Brian Eno on keyboards, maybe. I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t stop singing “The Zookeeper’s Boy,” with its circular harmonies, or “Special,” with a chorus to die for. Most of these songs would need some more fleshing out to work on their own, but as parts of a 14-chapter whole, they work brilliantly, smaller bits like “Fox Cub” passing the baton to larger epics like “Apocalypso.”

The record ends with two lovely bits of piano-synth drama, “White Lips Kissed” and the breathtaking “Louise Louisa.” This is one of those albums that makes you feel like you’ve been somewhere when it’s done, and I’m not sure what kind of audience (besides me) there is for a hugely produced hour-long seamless epic piece, but I hope they find this record, because it’s excellent. I’m honestly not sure what I can relate this to – at various times I hear bits of Sigur Ros, Bjork and (in the voice and melodies) the Pet Shop Boys, but that could be just me. You’ll likely hear something completely different.

Also making their U.S. debut is a band I turned Dr. Shore on to: Pure Reason Revolution. They, too, have produced an album-length suite with The Dark Third, which refers to the 33 percent of our lives we spend asleep. Their sound’s a little easier to encapsulate, being a mix of Pink Floyd and the Beach Boys, primarily. But the female singer, the Rush-like riffage here and there, and the overall melodic scope of this thing defy such easy categorization.

The Dark Third glides to life with “Aeropause,” a very Floydian instrumental which segues into “Goshen’s Remains,” adding melody without sacrificing atmosphere. There are prog-like tendencies all over this thing, but mainly, PRR makes space-rock that actually gives a real sense of floating through space. “The Bright Ambassadors of Morning” is the standout, slipping from its winningly harmonized refrain to its pure rocking coda over 11 grand minutes.

PRR is a British outfit, picking up a long and somewhat proud tradition of progressive music from across the pond, and complementing it with traces of American folk and pop music. It’s one of those cases in which a band takes the literal meaning of progressive – music that takes elements from the past and makes something new of them, moving things forward. It’s something we don’t do very often over here in the U.S. of A. – recycling is more our thing, at least musically speaking.

But both PRR and Mew belong to a new wave of musicians, Americans included, eager to push themselves into new areas with challenging compositions and ambitious arrangements. From the aforementioned Fiery Furnaces to the Mars Volta to Sufjan Stevens to Tool to Pain of Salvation to Ester Drang, there’s a whole new crop of bands that expect their audience has the patience and desire to listen to complex, cohesive, lengthy suites that stretch to album length. And it’s refreshing and encouraging – the only sane response for lovers of the album in this age of iPods and single-song downloads is to make albums, ones that can’t be split up or taken apart.

In the end, this is why I love the Early November’s record, and Mew’s, and Pure Reason Revolution’s: they respect the album format, and give me something I can sink my teeth into, thematically speaking. Pretentious artists, to me, are the ones who waste my time. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are pretentious for thinking I would want to sit through two hours of their fair-to-middling California rock. But I would listen, and have listened, to TEN, PRR and Mew again and again, because there’s so much in these records. They demand more of my time, but they reward it.

Next week, Ani Difranco and Matthew Friedberger, speaking of ambitious artists.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

And I thought I was a big Joss Whedon fan.

I just got my DVD copy of Done the Impossible, a documentary about the fans of Whedon’s show Firefly and the movie it inspired, Serenity, and I have to say, the producers and stars of this flick put me to shame.

I am addicted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show that never gets old no matter how many times I watch each episode, and I think Firefly is the best science fiction show to ever grace the airwaves. I did a few dances of joy when Serenity was greenlit, and saw it opening weekend. I ended up seeing the film four times in the theater, and I bought the DVD. I preach the Gospel of Joss to pretty much everyone I meet, and have received many odd looks and derisive scoffs for my efforts, but I don’t back down – I think Buffy is one of the best television shows ever produced, and Angel and Firefly aren’t far behind, and I’ll tell that to anyone.

But watching this movie gives me the sense of this fanbase, and how committed they are, and how passionate. Whedon’s literate, imaginative, deeply emotional work inspires this in people, all the time, and here are stories of fans who started websites, signed petitions, created communities, hatched guerilla marketing schemes, evangelized, bought multiple copies of a not-inexpensive DVD set just to give away, and did everything they could to spread the word.

These are the fans of Firefly, a show that didn’t have a chance in the world to capture mainstream, prime-time attention. The show was too good, too thought-provoking, too well-crafted to last long on Fox. It premiered in September of 2002, and was dead by December of that year, partially due to the network’s inexplicable decision to shelve the pilot (seriously… the damn pilot) and run the episodes out of order. But it’s also not the kind of show that resonates with everyone – it’s an outer space western with rich characters and no aliens or easy bad guys.

But the people this show connected with turned out to be resilient, tenacious, and probably more committed to Firefly than I have been to anything in my entire life. Usually a show like this gets canceled and that’s it, but that wasn’t the case with Firefly. Fox aired 11 of the 14 episodes before yanking the thing, but endless letter-writing and fan campaigning convinced them to put out a complete series DVD set. And then the fans bought that in such amazing numbers that Universal gave Whedon a shot at a feature film.

That’s right – fans supported this canceled show so much that it became a movie. Tell me the last time that happened. (As I understand it, it was a little show called Star Trek…)

Done the Impossible is the story of that struggle to bring Firefly back to life, told from the fans’ perspective. It was made by fans, too – Jeremy Neish, one of the movie’s producers, is on camera for a bit where he tells about flying from Utah to California for a casting call for extras in Serenity. He then flew back to Utah, then hopped another plane to Cali a week later to be in the movie, and he got paid a grand total of $70 for his trans-continental adventure.

As the film plays, you follow the rise and fall and rise of Firefly through the eyes of the fans, and it’s an enjoyable trip. The filmmakers scored interviews with Whedon and several cast members, including the always-hilarious Nathan Fillion (and why isn’t he a movie star yet?), and the whole thing is narrated by Adam Baldwin. But the stars are the fans, often identified by both their real names and their online-community screen names, and while there’s an occasional hint of obsession, mostly these are just people who have been touched and affected by a great work of fiction.

Serenity spoiler ahead – I’m impressed that the movie doesn’t shy away from documenting the fans’ negative reaction to the resultant Big Damn Movie, in which Whedon killed off two of Firefly’s core cast. I know some fans who felt like they’d been stabbed in the heart, who felt betrayed after all the work they had done to keep this story going.

It was bold of Whedon to choose the story over the fans, and the deaths work perfectly in the context of the narrative. But still, for a fanbase that had modeled itself on this family traveling in space, losing one of their own was obviously painful. Here is one woman who cannot even bring herself to say “Wash was killed,” and here is another who asks, “What was the point of making the movie if you’re just going to kill off characters?” And here, as well, is Alan Tudyk, the actor who plays Wash, taking us through his process of anger and acceptance.

But Whedon never gives you what you want, only what you need, and redemption through pain is one of his major, ongoing themes. In a way, the final arc of Serenity mirrors the fans’ journey as well – they got their victory, but had to suffer first. I know I’m making a melodrama out of it, but at several points during this documentary the point is made that this is not just a TV show for these people, and watching their stories and their testimonies here, I believe it. I love this show, but it’s obvious that for the fans depicted in Done the Impossible, Firefly is much more, and its that passion that allowed Whedon to break the rules of two mediums and continue his story.

The movie concludes on a hopeful note, with an original song called “(We Want Our) Big Damn Trilogy,” and I can only nod in agreement. And if these fans have anything to say about it, we’ll get one. Done the Impossible is a portrait of unbridled fandom, but unlike something like Trekkies, it doesn’t poke fun, it celebrates and validates the passion it depicts. Whedon has said that Serenity is the fans’ movie, and while that’s true, in a sense, Done the Impossible is truly the fans’ movie, a big wet kiss to those who, as Whedon says, believed beyond reason.

You can order the DVD here. And if you haven’t seen Firefly and Serenity, well, I can’t recommend them highly enough.

* * * * *

A quick look ahead before we pack it in for the week. I’m really tired – had a couple of exhausting stories this week, but next week should be lighter. Which is fitting, because there’s no new music next week worth writing about. I’ll be catching up with the Early November and Pure Reason Revolution reviews I promised last time.

We have two huge release dates coming up, though, and the first is August 8. We’ll get new ones from Ani DiFranco and Matthew Friedberger (of the Fiery Furnaces), as well as an EP from Sigur Ros and the next wave of double-disc reissues from the Cure. The other big date is September 12, when we’ll see (deep breath) the Mars Volta, Starflyer 59, TV on the Radio, Barenaked Ladies, Shawn Colvin, John Mayer, Basement Jaxx, Yo La Tengo (the awesomely titled I Am Not Afraid of You, and I Will Kick Your Ass), and the great Roger Joseph Manning Jr. of Jellyfish fame. Oh, and a nine-disc box set from Robert Plant.

In between those two, we’ll get records from Outkast, Starsailor, the Black Crowes, Dream Theater, Bob Dylan, Audioslave, Hem and Iron Maiden. And after the 12th, look for the Indigo Girls, the Feeling (thanks, Dr. Shore!), the Decemberists, Robert Pollard, Sparta and Unwed Sailor, as well as a b-sides box set from Tori Amos. As she once said, pretty good year.

Thank you for your kind attention. Next week, ambition reigns.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I am disappointed all the time.

It’s the nature of my life. I always have the next few months mapped out – I know what CDs will ship when, often half a year in advance, which gives me plenty of time to raise my expectations beyond sane levels. I’m always looking forward to things, and as is the way of the world, most of those things fall short of what I hope they will mean to me.

Music is tough to pin down anyway. What works for one person won’t work at all for another, and just as I find that most of the highly touted and massively hyped bands these days leave me cold, many of my favorite albums are greeted with a shrug and a yawn by most everyone else. No one’s right or wrong in this scenario – what’s disappointing to me could very well make your year.

So take the following reviews for what they’re worth. The albums below all come from alumni of my top 10 list, one of the determining factors behind my ever-ratcheting excitement. A new record from any artist that has previously made my list gets top priority with me, even though the odds of any artist catching lightning twice are slim. Following up a masterpiece is apparently damn difficult, if the relatively tiny number of winning streaks is any indication, but even the most disappointing album is fascinating to me – I love digging into seemingly godawful works and trying to hear where things went wrong.

None of this week’s contestants are that bad (well, one is), they’re just little letdowns. But in a year already filled with them (Guster, Tool, Beth Orton), it’s a shame to have to add a few more. And here they are:

* * * * *

I have never heard a bad Bruce Cockburn album.

Cockburn (pronounced COE-burn) is a legend in his native Canada, perhaps that country’s best and most literate songwriter, but a virtual unknown here, despite having recorded more than two dozen terrific records since 1970. Part of the reason is his all-encompassing worldview, an international conscience that refuses to be edited down for radio consumption. He’s had a few minor hits, but not many, preferring to focus on an expansive catalog of fully satisfying albums.

So yeah, Cockburn records come in two varieties – good and amazing. And his last three times out, Bruce has given us amazing, beginning with The Charity of Night in 1996. His last proper album, 2003’s You’ve Never Seen Everything, is a front-to-back stunner, and made #2 on my list that year. It’s a fathoms-deep meditation on greed and anger, with perfectly placed glimmers of light, and stands as one of the most complete statements of his long career.

So it’s little surprise that the follow-up isn’t quite as superb, although it offers its own pleasures and wonders, to be sure. For instance, there’s the fabulous title, Life Short Call Now, the perfect name for a record that discusses the insanity of the modern world. The title song opens with a typically wry observation (“Billboards promise paradise, and tattoos ‘done while you wait’…”) that sets the tone for an album about trying to find beauty amidst the chaos.

Unfortunately, he’s explored that theme to greater effect on other albums, and Life Short, for all its virtues, is merely an average Cockburn disc, weighed down with instrumentals and repetitive tunes. For every inspired moment (“See You Tomorrow”) there’s a middling chunk of blah, like “Mystery,” an overly long folk lullaby that never really grabs my attention.

Additionally, while You’ve Never Seen Everything offered a sense of consistent vision from beginning to end, Life Short feels cobbled together, bouncing from a grand political epic like “This is Baghdad” to an acoustic instrumental like “Jerusalem Poker” and then into a brief pop song like “Different When it Comes To You.” As I will no doubt mention later on in this column, it is the gulf between a collection of songs and a unified statement that often means the difference between a good album and a great one to me.

And Life Short Call Now is a good album, no question. It’s a gentler work than Cockburn has given us recently, and he stretches out with the addition of a 27-piece orchestra on several tracks. He verges into Duncan Sheik territory on the sublime “Beautiful Creatures,” straining his falsetto to deliver a haunting melody over the strings, but brings it home with the excellent “To Fit In My Heart,” the last proper song here. As the violins weep, Cockburn offers hope and spirituality: “God’s too big to fit in a book, but nothing’s too big to fit in my heart.” (If only he’d ended the album there, instead of tacking on the cheesy bossa nova instrumental “Nude Descending a Staircase.”)

By far the most successful track here is the one you’d least expect – “Slow Down Fast” is a wrist-breaking acoustic half-rap, the only tune here that brings the rage: “Oil wars, water wars, TV propaganda whores, fire alarm met with snores, no one gets what’s gone before, slow down fast…” It even contains a killer trumpet solo. This is the kind of thing I’d like to hear more of from Cockburn, although the languid tones of most of Life Short are enjoyable in their own right.

It’s odd to call an album with more than half a dozen great songs disappointing, but Cockburn has thrown off his own curve with album after excellent album over the last three decades. This new one is very good, like a B minus at worst, but when you’re used to astonishing, the merely very good is kind of a comedown. But don’t let that stop you from checking out Cockburn’s work, if you haven’t already. He’s one of the best you’ve never heard.

* * * * *

When “Supermassive Black Hole” hit the internet last month, I thought it was a joke.

There’s no way, I thought, that this groovy, sexed-up ditty could possibly be the new Muse single. It’s practically a dance track, with “ooh baby” lyrics that lead visionary Matt Bellamy croons in a Prince-like falsetto over a thumping electronic beat. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun, something this self-serious band has never really been before. Could they be taking the piss? Would this song really be on the new album?

Well, here’s Black Holes and Revelations, the fourth Muse platter, and there it is, “Supermassive Black Hole,” at track three. And amazingly, it’s one of the least surprising things on this epic hodgepodge of an album, a headscratcher of gargantuan proportions. This record is either a mess or a masterpiece, and even after hearing it a dozen times or so, I’m still not sure which one I think it is. While this British trio’s last album, the crushing Absolution, left me with my jaw on the floor, this one elicits a befuddled head-shake and a couple minutes of silent pondering each time through.

Let me try to explain. Muse is the kind of band that aims for otherworldly drama, and achieves it nearly every time. They’re on a mission to make the biggest, boldest sounds they can, with endless reserves of earnestness and instrumental prowess. Bellamy sounds like Jeff Buckley’s more emotive brother, shooting his powerhouse voice to ever more dramatic heights – there is no amount of bombast the band can lay down that Bellamy cannot top with his force-of-nature vocal acrobatics.

In short, this is exactly the kind of music that ambition-hating indie-lovers can’t stand. Muse are huge and heavy and intricate and massive, and yet they are capable of quiet beauty. They are the standard bearers for OK Computer Radiohead – while Yorke and his boys have been wandering the electro-ambient wilderness, Bellamy and his have picked up the multi-layered prog rock baton and run with it. But despite the tricky riffs and elaborate soundscapes here, there’s no hiding for Muse – you can tell they throw their hearts and souls into this stuff. Absolution was a metallic powerhouse, but also a highly emotional work.

So what to make of this new one? Muse have decided to make a Queen album this time out, in which no two songs sound alike, and each song tries to go further over the top than the last. The production is suitably operatic, with thick guitars and dancing synth lines and swarms of backing vocals and trumpets and string sections and smatterings of electronic beats as garnishes. It’s enormous, and this go-for-broke philosophy has accentuated the strengths of the band, but also magnified their weaknesses.

The main one is Muse’s over-reliance on their arpeggiator, which makes the synths do all those quick runs up and down the scale. They use this thing like it’s a way of life here, and while it was a neat touch on Absolution, it’s reached its saturation point on this one. “Take a Bow,” the typically epic opening track, is almost entirely arpeggiated synths, and if they were going to do that, they should have left it alone instead of slathering the same sound over the whole album. It’s nitpicking, I know – I don’t complain about them using guitars all the time – but it became kind of a joke for me after a while, like, spot the arpeggio.

But that’s not what has me scratching my head this time. It’s the songs. Bellamy and company obviously felt the need to stretch out here, and they concentrated on making each song a stand-alone monster. But the album as a whole suffers from that – these 11 songs do not belong together, and there’s virtually nothing (except the arpeggiator) that connects them. “Starlight” is breathtaking melodic pop, but “Map of the Problematique” is clubby techno, “Soldier’s Poem” is a Freddie Mercury-style waltz, and “Assassin” is thunderous metal.

The quality goes back and forth, too, depending on the experiment. While the aforementioned “Starlight” may be one of Bellamy’s most indelible melodies, “Invincible” is pretty much the worst song the band has ever written, a droning there-there ballad that inspires little more than snores. When Muse sticks to what they know best, as on “Exo-Politics,” they surprisingly turn in the most rote, flat-sounding stuff, whereas a massive excursion like the spaghetti western closer “Knights of Cydonia” is amazing, moving from surf rock with trumpets to Queen-style vocals to a great Rush-like riff-o-rama finale.

All in all, Black Holes and Revelations sounds transitional, like a band searching for a place to go next. After an across-the-board success like Absolution, that’s no surprise – Muse are restlessly creative, as you can hear in every spit-shined note of this new record, and all they need is direction. Black Holes suffers because it tries to go 11 different places at once, and while individual songs rank with the biggest and best work they have done, the record as a whole sounds oddly scattered and unsure. Hopefully they are on their way somewhere, though, and their report from their next destination should be worth checking out.

* * * * *

The packaging for Thom Yorke’s first solo album, The Eraser, is unique and nifty. It’s a cardboard fold-out poster that extends to about two feet long, and printed on both sides is a four-foot drawing by Stanley Donwood that depicts a storm devastating a city. To the left (and on the front cover, when it’s all folded up) is a man in a fedora and a trenchcoat, arm extended – he is either causing the storm or trying to hold it at bay. The CD itself is nestled in a removable slipcase, which means you don’t need to take the poster-thing with you in the car, either. It’s practical and kind of beautiful.

I’m mentioning the artwork right up front because that’s pretty much the best thing about this record, a jittery waste of time and talent that continues Yorke’s downward slide into pretentious annoyance. It’s hard to say I’m disappointed by anything Radiohead-related anymore, because I haven’t been thrilled by anything they’ve done in nearly 10 years. I had no expectations for The Eraser, and it still dashed them.

I’m so off the Radiohead train at this point that fans of the band can safely ignore and dismiss my opinion. I haven’t been swept away by their chilly atmospheres and meandering songs for some time, and the new ones I’ve heard (they’re playing them on the North American tour right now) are just as pointless and boring as anything on Amnesiac. If anything, The Eraser shows just where this formlessness is coming from – Yorke’s album is all blippy beats and repetition, with the main man’s caterwauling on top.

Yorke’s voice is actually the best thing about this album – he’s not as annoying as he can sometimes get when he has no melody to work with. The album starts strong with the title track, which contains an actual chorus and a few chord shifts. But don’t get used to that – the only other song with a memorable melody is “Harrowdown Hill,” at track eight. In between, you get icy grooves that are interesting for a few seconds, but each one repeats with little variation for the length of the song, Yorke gobbling up the space on top with directionless wailing.

I really can’t see any reason why I would listen to this again. I’ve heard it three times, trying to find the hidden virtues, and they remain elusive. I’m sure I will get a number of emails telling me I’m missing the boat on what is, no doubt, the most brilliant release of the year, if not the century, but I’m not hearing anything here that’s worth hearing again.

* * * * *

Which brings us to Sufjan Stevens, and seriously, who does this guy think he is?

Okay, no question, Illinois was brilliant through and through, one of the finest records I have heard in years. For once, the big-name critics and I agreed on something, too – Illinois was last year’s best-reviewed album, with many calling Stevens a genius, and hailing his 50 States project as one of the most fascinating undertakings in the music world. I joined the chorus, calling the album a masterpiece, and naming it the best album of 2005.

But honestly, as good as it was, who wants to hear a 76-minute collection of outtakes and extras from the Illinois sessions? That’s what The Avalanche, Stevens’ new record, purports to be – a bunch of tracks that didn’t make the cut on Illinois, which reportedly was supposed to be a double before Stevens reined in his plans. But the question remains: if the songs weren’t good enough to be released last year, why would I want to hear them this year?

How about because most of them are awesome?

The Avalanche is a big ol’ mess of music, assembled with little rhyme or reason, but it cements Stevens’ reputation as a wunderkind. Roughly half of these 21 tracks are outstanding – the title song is a lovely acoustic-and-woodwinds lament, “Dear Mr. Supercomputer” makes the oboes rock out, “Adlai Stevenson” has a great melody, as does “Saul Bellow,” and songs like “No Man’s Land” and the astounding “Pittsfield” could have fit on their parent album with ease. These songs are in the same style as Illinois – kind of a mix of chamber-folk and community theater, but much better and grander than that makes it sound.

So what’s the problem with The Avalanche? Well, the other half. Despite all of Stevens’ arrangement skill, this record still plays like a collection of outtakes, and it’s overloaded with instrumental interludes and half-baked ideas. On Illinois, those interludes made perfect sense, adding to the immaculate flow of that album, but here, they just weigh it down, especially overly long trifles like “For Clyde Tombaugh.” Additionally, there are three embryonic versions of “Chicago” here, and while it’s a great song, and I enjoyed the glimpse into Stevens’ process, the repetition sinks The Avalanche’s replay value.

Which is a shame, because had Stevens just released a regular-length album of the best songs here, he’d have another slam dunk. What made Illinois such an amazing work was its flow, the sense that it was all one huge song presented in several movements, and Stevens could have worked similar magic with the 12 or so best numbers here. Instead, we get a dumping ground, which isn’t bad in and of itself – for process junkies like me, it’s great, because I can hear why many of these tracks didn’t make Illinois. But it isn’t something you’re going to want to play over and over, and in fact, it will probably just make you want to listen to Illinois again.

Still, songs like “The Pick-Up” and “Carlyle Lake” are more than worth owning, and “Pittsfield” all by itself makes The Avalanche worth buying. Expecting an outtakes album to be as good as Stevens’ best work is a fool’s game anyway – this is highly intelligent and wonderful pop music that’s better than most anything else you’ll find at the record store, and for a collection of also-rans, it’s pretty great.

* * * * *

That should do it for me this week. I know this column has been too short and very late recently, so hopefully this one should make up for at least the first of those complaints. I love writing this thing, I just have to work harder at finding the time. Thanks for your patience and indulgence.

Next week, a bit about ambition with the Early November and Pure Reason Revolution.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I have a lot I could write about this week.

We’re in the middle of the summer tidal wave, and I’m practically inundated with new tunes. Just from the last week, I have the new Muse (scattered and bizarre), the new Sufjan Stevens outtakes album (fantastic, if a little less fantastic than its parent record), and the solo debut of Thom Yorke (pretty awful). I’m also still forming my opinion of one of the year’s most ambitious projects, the new triple-CD from the Early November, a band I’d previously ignored. This is good stuff, though, a big leap from their prior records, and all wrapped in a neat concept, even if the execution is a little cliched.

I could also talk about the huge number of new records I’m looking forward to, including the new Bruce Cockburn next week, and the August arrival of new ones from Ani Difranco, Unwed Sailor, Outkast, the Mars Volta, Bob Dylan and Ty Tabor. (You’ll probably never see all those names in the same sentence again.) There’s also the double solo record from Matthew Friedberger (of the Fiery Furnaces) coming up, and what I have heard of that is, to put it mildly, insane.

Yeah, I could talk about all of that. But even with all of the amazing music I already have, and the no-doubt amazing music I have yet to hear, I’m probably most excited about a little country record by a bunch of old guys nobody’s ever heard of.

Longtime readers will be familiar with them, though. They’re called the Lost Dogs, and what started as a novelty project for four of my favorite songwriters has turned into a main gig, one with its own history and extensive back catalog. They were the Traveling Wilburys, pop-rockers moonlighting as cowboys, but now they’re more like Crosby, Stills and Nash – three guys who have found a brotherhood and a rare musical harmony with each other.

A quick history lesson. In 1991, four of the best songsmiths to never breach the mainstream decided to take a vacation from their main bands and make a fun record called Scenic Routes. Terry Taylor is the genius behind Daniel Amos, Derri Daugherty is the voice of the Choir, Mike Roe is the blues-loving guitar god who leads the 77s, and the late, great Gene Eugene was the main man in the brilliant Adam Again. If none of those names sound familiar to you, I actually envy you – you have decades of fantastic records to catch up on.

Part of the thrill of Scenic Routes was in hearing these guys pull on their cowboy boots and sing this truly rootsy stuff, this dusty blues and twangy country. Taylor has a history with it – the first two Daniel Amos albums are ten-gallon-hat affairs – but hearing the others in this setting was the best kind of odd. The first three Dogs albums are all over the map, from sweet country ballads to Beach Boys pop to three-chord blues crunchers, and the fun these guys had making them is obvious. With 1999’s Gift Horse, the others took a back seat to Taylor, who wrote nearly every song – that record was more consistent, yet a tad less fun.

And then, in 2000, Gene Eugene died.

And though the Dogs have soldiered on since then, it hasn’t been the same. Real Men Cry, the first three-legged Dogs album, had some great moments, but felt like the trio convincing itself to keep going, and the four efforts that followed have been a mixed bag. Nazarene Crying Towel was a beautiful gospel album, but a live record (Green Room Serenade Part Tour), an album of reinventions of old songs (Mutt), and a diversion into instrumental beach music (Island Dreams) all in a row made the band seem rudderless. None of their material is bad – far from it – but one got the sense that they hadn’t fully recovered from Gene’s passing.

Until now, that is.

I can’t tell you how glad I am to report that their new album, The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees, is their strongest in more than half a decade. In fact, if you draw a line after Eugene’s death, then I would go so far as to say that this is the definitive Lost Dogs 2.0 record. It is the first since Real Men Cry that doesn’t feel like a side project – the guys are obviously committed and dedicated to these 11 songs, and the record positively crackles with energy and flat-out fun.

I’m not sure what to attribute this newfound excitement to, but the most apparent and important change is the official addition of Steve Hindalong as the fourth Lost Dog. Hindalong is the drummer for the Choir, and one of the most original and astounding percussionists you’ll ever see. He’s been playing with the Dogs for years, bringing along his array of bizarre, exotic drums and shakers, and it’s nice to see that his contributions have been recognized with this well-deserved promotion.

I also like that while Hindalong is the first person invited into the fold since Eugene’s death, he’s obviously not trying to replace him. No one could, of course, but many of the suggestions floated through the years (Phil Madeira, Michael Knott, other earthy singer-guitarists) would have seemed like patching a wound, like bringing in someone to stand in Gene’s spot. Hindalong could never be accused of that – he’s the guy in the back, with the mallets, adding something entirely different. It’s an inspired choice.

The band also enlisted Daniel Amos and Choir bassist Tim Chandler, as they often do, and what he brings to the picture is hard to overstate as well. He is one of the four or five best bass players in the world, mostly because he never just supports the tune, he explores it. Chandler has the uncanny knack of filling the spaces in any song on which he plays, adding exactly what’s needed, and never making the easy choice, like too many bassists do.

So the gang’s all here, and thanks to Hindalong’s production, the sound is fantastic, thick and gleaming. But all that would mean little if the songs weren’t there, so it’s cause for celebration that these are the best, most fun, most thoughtful Dogs tunes in ages. Head writer Terry Taylor steps up with some classics, beginning with the opening shot, a sweet lament called “Broken Like Brooklyn.” The structures are all very simple and breezy – these are cowboy songs, after all – but the lyrics are uniformly excellent, and the Dogs sound inspired throughout.

“Broken Like Brooklyn” is about the year the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, a metaphor for loneliness and emptiness, and it sets the tone – much of The Lost Cabin is about yearning, starving for love. The title song is a classic cowboy number about tracking down a missing paramour who went in search of gold. It’s full of lovely harmonies and classic Taylor lines, like when the singer asks, “Did you find your little bit of heaven? Well, I hope that it’s missing one thing…” And his “This Business is Goin’ Down” is a hilarious tale of a failed entrepreneur and his gold-digging girl: “Now that business is in the ground, guess so are we, honey…”

The other Dogs contribute great songs as well. Daugherty and Hindalong’s “Whispered Memories” is plainly about Daugherty’s recent divorce, and as weepy a country ballad as you’d want to hear. And Mike Roe gives us another wonderful Mike Roe song with “One More Day.” But what’s truly fascinating for long-time fans is just how good Taylor has become at writing for his bandmates – he almost out-Roes Roe with “Hardening My Heart,” which Mike steps into like a well-tailored suit, if you’ll pardon the pun.

And then there are the surprises, both from Taylor. “Only One Bum in Corona Del Mar” is a splendid radio play-slash-trash opera, with witty narration from each Dog, and a children’s chorus bringing it home. It is easily the most bizarre thing the band has done, and it’s followed immediately by “Get Me Ready,” the most blazing rocker in their catalog. This is Rust Never Sleeps era Neil Young, explosive and powerful, and it’s easy to forget that half the band is over 50, with the other half right behind them.

Live, this song is a corker. I had the pleasure of seeing the band last week at the Warehouse in Aurora, and they were sharp, funny, and terrific. Their harmonies are always captivating live, and the new lineup has Daugherty on bass and Taylor on acoustic while Roe peals off gorgeous licks on his electric. They even debuted a number of new comedy routines – the Lost Dogs are almost a traveling Vaudeville act, and this time, they brought props. It was a great show, as always, and the new stuff sounds great next to the old classics.

The album concludes with a Dogs tradition, a singalong gospel number. But this time, there’s a twist – “That’s Where Jesus Is” is a stinging indictment of those who would use religion as a political tool, and an urging to follow his example and help the less fortunate. “On the corner ‘round the prostitutes is where He’ll probably show,” Taylor sings. “He gets invited to church sometimes, and sometimes He don’t go…”

I know, I know. A gospel song, that mentions Jesus by name, sung by guys that Google will tell you are Christian musicians. If you’re worried about being preached to – a fear which keeps many away from this spiritual corner of the music world – then let me assure you, I share the same fear, and the Dogs have never made me uncomfortable. I’ve always found them to be about exploring their own faith, not chastising me for my lack of same, and the honesty they bring to their work is warm and inviting.

It is entirely possible that most people reading this will hear The Lost Cabin and not understand why I’m making a big deal out of it. It is, after all, a simple set of traditional-sounding songs, some of which could sit well on country radio. And maybe the charm of the Dogs is lost on those who haven’t followed their careers. I don’t know, but I listen to this and I hear a rebirth, a new lease on life for some of my favorite musicians. They sound comfortable, creative and ready for their second 15 years, and I’m ready for them, too.

The individual Dogs have been experiencing musical rebirths on their own as well. Last year’s Fun With Sound is an amazing new project from Michael Roe, and the new Choir, O How the Mighty Have Fallen, is their best since 1990. There are rumblings of a new 77s and a new Daniel Amos, too, and the last Daniel Amos album, 2001’s double disc Mr. Buechner’s Dream, may be their best ever. They’re getting older, but they’re not going away, and records like The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees are like little miracles to this longtime fan.

Of course, you can’t buy it in stores, but you can get it here. While you’ve got your credit card out, go here, here, and here. For the first time in a long while, the new ones listed above are all the best places to start.

Next week, Sufjan, Muse, Yorke, the Early November, Bruce Cockburn, or, y’know, maybe something else. Who knows?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The front cover photograph of Johnny Cash’s American V is striking.

Where the previous four American recordings sported iconic cover shots of Cash, weathered but still rugged and ready to take on all comers, American V depicts a stunningly frail Johnny, seated and hunched over, recording his vocals for this penultimate album. The picture was taken in between June Carter Cash’s death in May 2003 and Johnny’s passing in September of that year, and the man’s heartsickness is, amazingly, visible.

Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing whether Cash would have wanted this photo published, or the recordings it accompanies released. American V, subtitled A Hundred Highways, is the first of two planned posthumous releases from the Man in Black’s final sessions with Rick Rubin, a partnership that resulted in one of the most incredible late-career renaissances I’ve ever seen. Rubin’s love and respect for Cash is evident and obvious throughout the four previous American albums, and in the box set Unearthed, released just after Cash’s death.

And it’s that very love and respect that one has to trust when listening to American V, one of the most fragile and intimate albums in Cash’s discography. Rubin brought something amazing out of Cash in his final years – the man was always one of the best and most important singers and songwriters ever to grace the earth, but by the early ‘90s, he’d lost his way. The American series is perfect and poignant, an aging Johnny Cash finding his footing as an interpreter of all kinds of songs, produced with respect and reverence.

But we’ll never know what the man himself would have thought of this album, finished years after his death. The vocal tracks for this record (and its successor, American VI, rumored to be released this year) were recorded between May and September, 2003, but the instruments were added later, and the sequence was drafted by Rubin. Who knows if this is what Johnny would have wanted for his final statement.

If you can handle the implications of this (or of any posthumous release, for that matter), then you’re in for a rare treat. This is a snapshot of a heartbroken, yet hopeful Johnny Cash, a once-mighty man felled low by the loss of his one great love. The Cash on American V is fragile and shaky, his voice still commanding, yet somehow weaker. The arrangements are subtle and graceful here, never stealing focus from That Voice, which once moved mountains, and now sounds so oddly small.

American V opens with Larry Gatlin’s “Help Me,” and its withered plea for God’s grace is a stunning choice for a leadoff track. That it’s followed immediately by a whip-smart version of the old traditional “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” is an ironic touch, one Cash might have liked. That’s followed up by what Rubin says is the last song Cash ever wrote, “Like the 309,” a meditation on death and trains. These three songs set the tone brilliantly – American V is concerned almost exclusively with death and God.

Even the love songs here are mournful, and one imagines that they were chosen because they reminded Johnny of June. One of the album’s most emotional moments, believe it or not, is Cash’s read of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” Like a lot of the American series, which found Cash covering the likes of Soundgarden and Danzig, it shouldn’t work, but it does. Here Cash’s voice is at its weakest, choked and wavery, and it’s impossibly sad to hear him struggling with both the melody and his own loss. I’ve never considered how heartbreaking the song is: “And you won’t read that book again because the ending’s just too hard to take…”

Even sadder is “Rose of My Heart,” Hugh Moffat’s country classic, which in other contexts is a wispy trifle, but in this one is an outpouring of love and devotion. I don’t know how to say this so that you’ll understand without hearing it – listening to this song, and Johnny’s shaky yet strong delivery of it, you can literally hear how much he misses June.

Theirs was a love so strong that he couldn’t wait more than four months to see her again, and the songs of death here are little victories, small rejoices. The album ends with “I’m Free From the Chain Gang Now,” which Cash turned into a hit in 1962. He revisits the song as a sweet acoustic hymn, and though the metaphor is obvious – the prison is his body, and this earth, and his death will set him free – it’s also astonishingly powerful.

American V is not a fun listen, and not for those who just saw Walk the Line and want to check out Cash’s work. It’s a difficult album, because it’s so intimate, so unflinching – here is an aging Johnny Cash, a man who once seemed immortal, and by God, he sounds old here. These are the songs Cash chose to mark his final days, and there’s nothing here that isn’t made more significant in that context. Even Bruce Springsteen’s “Further On Up the Road” becomes a song about death, and about meeting June again on the other side.

But perhaps the centerpiece of the album is Rod McKuen’s “Love’s Been Good to Me,” because of its upfront intention – the song is a summation of life, sung from the point of view of an old man looking back. The best things in his life, he concludes, are the times when he’s been loved. Sounds trite, right? Just listen to Johnny Cash, age 71, sing this little tune, and imagine what he must be thinking as he sings it. It’s just devastating, yet wonderful.

There will be one more in the American series, and then that will be it. Johnny Cash, a figure so imposing that at times it seemed he was music personified, will be gone. But American V (and presumably American VI) is not some cash-in, pardon the expression. It is a lovingly assembled, beautiful and heartfelt tribute to the man, and a revealing glimpse at how he lived his final months. In many ways, it’s the best of the American series, because there’s no time for experiments or whimsy. This is a last will and testament, and every moment counts.

I started this review by casting aspersions on Rick Rubin, so I wanted to end it by thanking him, endlessly, for seeing how important Johnny Cash was to music and rescuing him in the last years of his life. Johnny got to go out on top, with the critical and popular acclaim he enjoyed in his early days, and along the way, he got to make some of the best records of his life. The American series is a monument, a great capper to an amazing career, and there’s no doubt that it wouldn’t have happened if Cash hadn’t found Rubin.

As I said, there’s one left, so it’s too early to sum up my feelings about the series yet. But American V is a heartbreaker, a lovely piece of work all on its own, and if this were it, then it would be as grand a final album as I could hope.

Next week, a dozen possibilities. But probably Muse. Or Sufjan Stevens. Or the Lost Dogs.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

At the bottom of this column you will find my half-year report on the progress of my top 10 list. It’s radically different than it was three months ago, and is half-comprised of records that have come out since March. This is the way it always happens – old favorites are reconsidered (see Belle and Sebastian) and new favorites leap to the top of the heap, waiting for time and perspective (see Keane).

I guess I’m trying to say that it’s not final, and nothing is set in stone. July, especially, is a huge month for new music – we’ve got Johnny Cash, Muse, Sufjan Stevens, Thom Yorke, Bruce Cockburn, the Lost Dogs, Tom Petty, and an ambitious project from the Early November, and then August brings Ani DiFranco, Matthew Friedberger, the Mars Volta, and many others. The list is constantly changing, ever fluid, up until (and sometimes after) I post the final draft in December.

And to kick it off right, I opened my mailbox this morning and found Bill Mallonee’s new album, Permafrost. It’s his first full-band effort (he calls this band Victory Garden) since the Vigilantes of Love broke up. I’m spinning it now, and it sounds like a good one.

But that’s not what I want to talk about this week.

I want to discuss melodies, and their all-important place at the top of my criteria for music I love. I am an avowed melody addict – I can’t explain it. Nothing inspires my love like a well-crafted melody, and nothing sparks my ire (or, more likely, my boredom and apathy) like a lazy song that just lies there. Quite a lot of modern music is based around the sound, the texture, the beat, and while these are all important elements, I feel that they’re the supporting cast, and the star should be the song, the melody.

But really, that’s the wrong film analogy. A good melody is like a good script – you can pump all the money and star power and special effects you like into a movie, but if it doesn’t have a good script, then the actors are going to look silly while the budget tries to distract you from the dialogue. It’ll be empty, no matter how much money it makes, and while the corporate suits will be happy with it, it won’t stand the test of time.

What constitutes a good script is open to debate, of course, but for me, it needs to be smart and confident, setting a tone and sticking with it. And the dialogue needs to crackle, or at least sound like people really talking. The best movies, as far as I’m concerned, contain moments I’ve never seen before, lines I’ve never heard, and layers of meaning that tell me something about the world and my place in it. Some people don’t need that, of course, and will enjoy a movie because it looks cool and expensive. I’m not one of them.

That all sounds so snobby, but the point is this – the core of the movie is the script, the blueprint, just like the song, the words and music written down on paper (sometimes), is the core of music. You can take a good song and put it into nearly any setting, and record it for 10 bucks or 10 million bucks, and it will still be a good song. The execution is its own matter – sometimes cheap recording (or too-expensive recording) can tarnish the finished product. But if the song, the core, is good, it will shine through.

Take Guster as an example. A lot of ink has been spent (even digital ink from this very site) on the way this Boston quartet now records its albums. Guster used to be the only pop band I can think of that exclusively used hand percussion, but with 2003’s Keep It Together, they switched to traditional drums. Some were dismayed, but most heard the quality of the songs on that album, including the fan-bloody-tastic “Amsterdam,” and realized that the switch didn’t matter that much. The bongos were trappings, and the core remained rock-solid.

And that’s the problem with their fifth album, Ganging Up on the Sun. The trappings are the same, if not a little better – Guster still has that appealing Toad the Wet Sprocket sound, only this time the production is glittering and dynamic, including keyboards, mandolins, trumpets, slide guitars, and waves of backing vocals. This album sounds great. But except for a few songs here and there, it isn’t great. The direction and effects are wonderful, but the script is weak.

Ganging Up on the Sun simmers to life with “Lightning Rod,” a whispery number that floats out on an “ooh-ooh” refrain. “Satellite” is next, and is one of the album’s best tunes, a mid-tempo acoustic number that even includes some of the once-trademark bongos. It’s smooth as silk, and goes down easy, but it’s over before it gets anywhere too exciting. “Manifest Destiny” fares better, because its junky Beatles vibe is so unfamiliar in the context of a Guster album, but it doesn’t really stick until the choral finale.

This is Guster’s most sedate album, full of slower songs and atmospheres, and even an obvious single like “One Man Wrecking Machine” is smoothed out. The band takes some sonic detours, like the folksy “The Captain” and the near-psychedelic “Ruby Falls,” but throughout this whole album, they never once hit upon a melody that will stay with you. The energy level is pretty low throughout, too – only once, on “The New Underground,” does Guster the rock band come to the fore.

“Ruby Falls” is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. The sound is very Traffic, with neat guitar chords played slowly over drums and organ, but it never really goes anywhere. It stretches to seven minutes, with a distorted solo in the middle and a horn-fueled section at the end and rippling vocal harmonies, and it’s all very pretty, but it doesn’t do a whole lot. After seven minutes of that, you’d think the band would want to kick the pace up a little, but they sequence middling tune “C’Mon” next, as if they want your attention to wander.

I’m being mean, I know, but this is the first Guster album that never rises above pleasant, and after a string of very good, very melodic efforts, it’s a let-down. By the time it’s over, I’ve forgotten most of the songs, which has never happened with a Guster record before – I can still hum every track on Lost and Gone Forever, their masterpiece. Ganging Up on the Sun isn’t bad, not really, but it just isn’t very interesting. It’s like a pleasant Sunday drive. It beats being at work, but it’s not as much fun as almost anything else you could do with your weekend.

If you want a real melodic pop album, you can’t do much better than David Mead’s Tangerine. If not for Dr. Tony Shore, I’d never have heard of this guy – he urged me to buy Mead’s EP Wherever You Are last year, and I loved it, especially the haunting “Astronaut.” And I went on a mission to find and purchase the other three Mead albums – the great The Luxury of Time, the less-great, Adam-Schlesinger-produced Mine and Yours, and the fantastic, mostly acoustic Indiana. All in all, a great career, and the self-released Tangerine tops them all.

The secret, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is the melodies. Mead writes some incredible melodies, ones that swoop and dive and take hairpin turns and go unexpected places. Each of his albums sounds different from the last – you can’t get much more diverse, sonically, than the stripped-down Indiana, the glossy Wherever You Are, and the delightful chamber-pop of this new one – but the songwriting remains the same, and of the same high caliber.

Tangerine is David Mead’s Great Leap Forward, a pop album so self-assured and perfectly executed that it gives its obvious influences, like Paul McCartney, a run for their money. The album, produced by Brad Jones, is Mead’s most accomplished-sounding work, full of clavinets, percussion, pianos, ukeleles, mandolins, glockenspiels and many different guitars, most of which are played by the artist himself. It opens with a brief instrumental wonderland, then segues into “Hard to Remember,” a classic piece of three-ring-circus music that sways like Jellyfish’s “Brighter Day.”

Other highlights include “Chatterbox,” a thumping monster with a clavinet part right out of “Misty Mountain Hop”; “Reminded #1,” a lovely a cappella tune with a great chorus; and “Hallelujah, I Was Wrong,” a piano-powered delight. But every song here is a highlight in its own right, from the epic scope of “Hunting Season” to the light McCartney-isms of “Sugar on the Knees” to the beauty of the closing ballad “Choosing Teams.” It’s all great. It also does something the Guster album doesn’t manage – it sounds mature without sounding dull.

Throughout, Mead never loses track of his gift for hummable songs with tricky structures. I can’t emphasize that enough – Mead obviously spent a long time crafting the classic pop sound of this album, but even if he decided to just release his acoustic demos, Tangerine would still be an excellent batch of songs. I’m not saying he should have done that, though, because the production is superb, and worth every second of work Mead and Jones put into it. It’s a case of both the script and the direction being just about perfect, like a Wes Anderson movie.

Tangerine is absolutely one of the best records of the year, which means that at least one-tenth of the list that follows is no mystery. It’s also a grower, and it keeps gaining in significance and wonder each time I hear it, so it may even chart higher by year’s end. Or, you know, half a dozen more fantastic albums might nudge it from the list entirely. You never know.

Anyway, here is my mid-year report. The top 10 list, as it stands right now:

#10: Quiet Company, Shine Honesty.
#9: The Violet Burning, Drop-Dead.
#8: Belle and Sebastian, The Life Pursuit.
#7: Paul Simon, Surprise.
#6: The Alarm, Under Attack.
#5: David Mead, Tangerine.
#4: Grandaddy, Just Like the Fambly Cat.
#3: Ross Rice, Dwight.
#2: Mute Math.
#1: Keane, Under the Iron Sea.

Take that for what it’s worth, because I hope it won’t look like that in six months. But every one of those albums are perfect examples of what I’m talking about – their authors value melody and songcraft above all else, and the best of them, especially the top two, use their solid songs as foundations to explore new sonic territory.

And that’s what it’s all about.

Next week, I promise I’ll be a lot less snobby and technical, because I’ll be talking about Johnny Cash’s final album, American V: A Hundred Highways.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Radiohead played here in Chicago this week. As part of their show, they premiered a new song, presumably from their upcoming album. It’s called “All I Need,” and video from the show turned up online pretty quickly. You can find it if you look, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

It’s horrible.

It’s the same repetitive, dull, whoops-we-forgot-the-song-but-aren’t-the-textures-nice crap they’ve been doing since Kid A, and which I’d hoped they’d turned away from with Hail to the Thief. Perhaps this is just an early version, and the finished song will have a melody or something, but I doubt it. It’s possible, like many of their ardent supporters believe, that Radiohead is trying to say something beyond music, something about disconnection and alienation and other, like, really deep themes.

But if so, they’ve forgotten the music, which is to me the most important part. The Radiohead who made OK Computer could have coughed out “All I Need” in 30 seconds, and would probably have rejected it as too musically uninteresting. But the new model Radiohead has turned not trying very hard into an artistic statement – we are ambivalent about our fame, our place in popular culture, and of course, our music, they seem to be saying. And people keep eating it up.

I don’t get that. This may be an old-fashioned notion, but I want my favorite musicians to care about what they do. I want records that sound like their authors loved them, and worked on them and tweaked them and gave them every ounce of talent and creativity they had. If I don’t get the feeling just from listening to the album that the artist cares more about it than I ever could, then what’s the point? If the artist doesn’t care, why should I?

I love music that reaches, that yearns, that looks up an impossible mountain and tries its best to scale it. I would even go so far to say that any musician who doesn’t, when given the opportunity to make a record, aim for the sky and try to make The Best Fucking Album Ever is just wasting time. I hate having my time wasted. There are thousands upon thousands of great albums I will never hear. To me, great music should move you, and should be about much more than selling records or being part of some hipper-than-thou mass art project.

Above all, it should be about the music. My favorite artists are the ones who, each time out, say, “Here are 10 or 12 songs we love. We worked our asses off to make these the best songs we’ve ever done. We hope they change your life.”

And the best ones do.

Some time ago, I took a mental inventory of debut albums I enjoyed more than Keane’s stunning first record, Hopes and Fears. I came up with about three. Keane’s an easy target for the too-cool crowd – they are unfailingly romantic, they traffic in big, sweeping melodies, and they sound each time out like they’re trying to write the best pop song anyone’s ever heard. The cynics and critics who think that music should be alienating and obscure and About Something Important just can’t stomach their up-front and obvious search for classic pop beauty.

Thankfully, Keane themselves don’t care. Their second album, Under the Iron Sea, muddies the waters a bit with darker tones and shades, but in the end is an even better melodic tour de force than Hopes and Fears. It is an expansion in every way, a giant leap forward in both sound and song. Best of all, it is obvious from first note to last that the band knocked themselves out – this album is a labor of love, and why some critics are hearing bland, mass-marketed pabulum in the grooves of this fantastic record I will never know.

I’m sorry if I sound defensive here. Under the Iron Sea was greeted by an onslaught of negativity from the arbiters of indie-cool taste, most of whom, it seems, didn’t even listen to the album. “It’s Keane, they had a top 10 hit, they’re British and they use pianos, it must be crap,” they seem to have said. Somehow, they have missed the craft, the melodies, the arrangements – you know, the songs. I don’t know how, but they have.

That being the case, I want to offer the counter-argument, and talk about nothing but the songs.

Under the Iron Sea opens with two tracks that take the Keane formula, such as it is, and set it on fire. “Atlantic” is a deep, slow crawl that builds in menace and atmosphere, sounding very much like a gathering storm, until it breaks into a glorious Rufus Wainwright-esque melody in its second half. It’s a phenomenal tone-setter, Tim Rice-Oxley’s piano providing a base for layer upon layer of keyboard orchestration. This is the new Keane, deeper and more melancholy, and it explodes with the second track, “Is It Any Wonder,” a little bundle of energy and disillusionment.

These two songs also establish one of the most striking things about this album – the physical sound. It’s all Rice-Oxley, layering his keyboards over and over again, and putting his pianos through effects boxes, but you’d never know it. This album makes Hopes and Fears sound like a bunch of four-track demos, and nowhere is that more evident than on “Is It Any Wonder,” which will make you doubt the truth of the band’s no-guitars claim. It’s gritty and thick and powerful and just awesome.

Thankfully, the focus here is still on Tom Chaplin’s amazing voice, front and center as always. His voice is strong and clear, and able to connect even over the cacophony Rice-Oxley conjures. The third song, “Nothing In My Way,” is the first that is recognizably Keane, and the vocal melody just steals the show. The chorus is superb, and it’s one that Chaplin’s contemporaries, like Chris Martin, could not pull off. Chaplin’s voice is stronger, his control more exact, and the tricky intervals here require a singer who can really reach down and belt it out, not waver around the note and quiver.

But forget all that musician talk. These songs have terrific structures, and the performances are impeccable, but that’s not the point. “Nothing In My Way” is just a great tune, hooky and hummable, one that will take up residence in your skull after one listen. The whole album moves like a bullet, one great song after another, one remarkable melody making way for the next. “Leaving So Soon” sounds like it will be the fly in the ointment for a bit, but then the soaring falsetto chorus kicks in and it’s unstoppable. “A Bad Dream” is melancholy, but grand, and rises like a tidal wave.

And then there is “Hamburg Song,” debuted on the tour last year. It starts with an organ and Chaplin’s voice, and throughout, the band resists the temptation to pile on the production. They add subtle piano, a few cymbals, and that’s it. It is the prettiest song they have written, and they were smart enough to get out of its way. When Chaplin reaches the chorus (“Lay yourself down…”), it all comes together, and it’s beautiful.

Under the Iron Sea is most definitely a darker work than Hopes and Fears, the lyrics mainly concerned with dissolution and doubt. The band nearly broke up while making it, and there’s some speculation that the album is the modern Brit-pop equivalent of Rumours – all about the infighting. Specifically, many of these songs seem to be about Rice-Oxley’s anger towards Chaplin, and both “Leaving So Soon” and “Hamburg Song” work under that interpretation. If lines like “You take much more than I’d ever ask for” and “If you don’t need me, I don’t need you” are in fact about him, it takes great strength of character for Chaplin to sing them. But the beauty is that they work as songs about love and loss, too.

“Put It Behind You” is the record’s most optimistic track, and it bops along on a distorted piano Beatles groove until it hits (you guessed it) a great melodic chorus. “The Iron Sea” (not listed on the U.S. version of the album, but included at the end of “Put It Behind You”) is a nifty instrumental interlude that sounds like the incidental music in Das Boot, and it flows perfectly into “Crystal Ball,” perhaps the record’s finest track. My God, the melody on this one – it’s just a juggernaut. It is perhaps the most singable expression of doubt and despair you’ll ever hear, especially the knockout bridge: “I don’t know where I am, and I don’t really care, I look myself in the eye and there’s no one there…”

The final third is more experimental, and a bit weaker, but not much. “Try Again” is lovely, even though it steps the closest to Phil Collins territory. (It even has a Genesis-style keyboard ending.) “Broken Toy,” however, is a masterpiece – jazzy and hooky and sad: “I guess I’m a toy that is broken, I guess we’re just over now…” Dig the bass on this one, played by Rice-Oxley. It thumps and grooves over Richard Hughes’ percussive bedrock. And then check out the amazing distorted piano in the extended instrumental break. It’s a wonder no one has tried this kind of sound before.

Perhaps the record’s only real mistake is in sequencing “The Frog Prince” last. It’s not a bad song – it would be the best thing most bands ever recorded, but it’s an average piece for Keane, all rising melody and pounding piano. Hopes and Fears concluded with “Bedshaped,” a true grand finale, whereas this record just kind of ends. I like the twinkling music box coda, but it’s not enough of a reason to end with this one.

But hell, that’s the only real flaw I can find. Under the Iron Sea is wonderful, magnificent pop music, played with a wide-open earnestness that invites magic. As good as Keane’s debut was, I have heard very few second records that build upon the foundation of a first album as well as this one does, and no other records this year with the quantity and quality of extraordinary songs that this one offers. The naysayers may scoff at Keane’s big heart and unwavering belief in their own melodies, but to these ears, all that passion makes their work shine that much brighter.

If you couldn’t tell, I love Under the Iron Sea. It is the rare example of a band with much to offer actually deciding to offer it, rather than try to hide behind some image-conscious idea of what they’re supposed to be. It is also a rare case of an already brilliant band becoming even more so, and refusing to sit still. It’s an album I can listen to (and have listened to) again and again, and never be bored for a moment.

Most of all, though, I’m grateful that Chaplin, Rice-Oxley and Hughes stayed together, overcame their personal issues and finished this record, and I hope they remain together for many more. It plays like a postcard from the edge, despite its joyous melodies, and seems to depict a band with little grounding. I hope this is not the case, and that Under the Iron Sea will one day be seen as a launching pad rather than a last gasp. There are too many bad bands making too many bad records to lose one capable of making an album like this one.

So, summary. Under the Iron Sea is an even better album than Keane’s debut, a twisty, emotional ride through incredibly singable tales of disconnection and loneliness. It is easily one of the best albums of the year so far, if not the best, and I pity the cynics who can’t see past their own sense of ironic detachment and alienated cool and simply enjoy it. I will take something this delightfully melodic and smart over 100 Kid A-style Grand Artistic Statements any day of the week, and I will die a happier person, with a song in my heart. Albums like Under the Iron Sea just make life more worth living.

Is it really that good? You know what? It really is.

Next week, Guster and David Mead.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Paul McCartney’s birthday is Sunday. He’ll be 64. And while I think he can still feed himself, I have to say that after the terrific heights of his latest album, his best in 25 years or so, we definitely still need him. Happy birthday, Sir Paul.

I make fun of McCartney a lot, especially in light of his mid-period solo fluff like “Ebony and Ivory,” a low point for both him and Stevie Wonder. But it’s easy to forget sometimes the wide-reaching impact his work has had on popular music over the last 45 or so years. McCartney, as far as I’m concerned, is the patron saint of melody addicts, the guy who showed the world that you could have both the strength and the sweetness, the driving rock and the complex, head-spinning tune.

The album “When I’m Sixty-Four” appears on, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, is considered by many (including me) to be among the best records ever made. It’s also one of the silliest – the Beatles were never a group that spoke to the oh-so-despairing soul. But within its passages lie some of the greatest melodies in pop music, and some of the most elaborate and fantastic arrangements, and many of the best of those were products of McCartney’s vision. He’s influenced hundreds of bands and songwriters, from legends like XTC and Jellyfish to lesser-knowns like Eric Matthews and David Mead.

And I have to wonder, when he was laying down the tracks for Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard in 2004, if he became aware of that influence in ways he hadn’t before. It must be difficult to be Paul McCartney, and have everyone expect that you will live up to your own monolithic status every time out. No one could do that, but on Chaos and Creation he came closer than he has since Wings broke up, and it was a wonder to behold. It was like the old Chevy Chase line – that album was like him saying, “This is why I’m Paul McCartney, and you’re not.”

They may not seem to have a lot in common (or, really, anything), but I think the same pressure applies to Sonic Youth. They helped create the sound that later became co-opted and repackaged as “indie rock,” and for many bands, Daydream Nation holds the same status as others bestow on Sgt. Pepper – it’s a revered example of the form, to study and emulate. But unlike the Beatles, Sonic Youth have had to make do with being the unjustly ignored grandfathers, whose grandchildren outsell them 20 to one.

Here’s a shocking moment for anyone who grew up in the ‘80s. Pop open the new Sonic Youth album, Rather Ripped, and wiggle the disc out. Now take a look at the tray-card photo of the band, Thurston and Kim and Lee and Steve, a quartet again after the departure of collaborator Jim O’Rourke. Look at that picture, and take a minute to deal with just how old they look.

Thurston Moore is nearly 50. Kim Gordon is 53. Steve Shelley is the baby of the band at 42. That’s pretty old for a band that keeps calling itself Sonic Youth. Whether they like it or not, they have become elder statesmen, presiding over a scene they helped originate. If you’re listening for it, you can hear SY’s influence everywhere – 200 bands a year copy Moore’s deceptively sloppy quarter-note style, and bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs should be paying Gordon royalties.

Meanwhile, here they are, at the end of their major-label contract with Geffen, and selling somewhere between respectably and miserably. Rather Ripped is album 24 or so, not counting side projects and solo affairs, and it sounds like the culmination of their recent evolution – here is a more subdued, older, more concise Sonic Youth, concentrating on songs and melodies instead of noisy guitar freakouts (although those are here, too). Rather Ripped is perhaps the most adult album they have made, and they still sound like they could beat up half the bands on alternative radio.

As she has on each of SY’s recent records, Kim Gordon steps to the forefront here, turning in some of the best tunes. Opener “Reena” is a perfect example, driving and hummable, but it’s “What a Waste” that stands out, with Gordon coming as close as she has lately to her unrestrained vocal performances of old. Only a couple of songs here blow past five minutes, but the band can still take you on a knotty woodland journey in four, as they prove on “Jams Run Free.”

Of the longer songs, “Pink Steam” makes the biggest impression, remaining a tricky instrumental until around the five-minute mark. But even this one is calmer, more about gentle ripples than tidal waves. The album ends with “Or,” a brief, spoken meditation over a sparse instrumental bed – where prior albums ended with an epic flourish, like “The Diamond Sea” on the incredible Washing Machine, this one kind of dissipates. It’s a remarkably restrained ending to a remarkably restrained disc.

Is this a sign that the Youths are growing too old? Not on your life. In fact, the album’s focus gives it strength – SY’s semi-improvised style can often lead to unfortunate wanderings, but here, everything is tightly wound and purposeful. Rather Ripped is the band’s most direct album in… well, pretty much ever, but it still sounds like Sonic Youth, and the quartet is still running laps around its imitators. Only a band that’s been together as long as SY has can play like this, like one single entity with eight arms and three guitars. The up-and-coming twenty-somethings can’t touch them – they get the garage-band style, but not the complexity, not the skill, and not the telepathic connection between the players.

Of course, they’ll never get the credit or the commercial success they deserve, but isn’t that always the way? At this point, I don’t even know if they want it. But I like them even more now than I did when they were young and hungry – now they are old and wise, making music for its own sake, and while they’re unlikely to cause another seismic shift in the landscape, they’re still living up to their own legacy. Rock stars growing old with integrity – what a concept.

Next week, Keane.

See you in line Tuesday morning.