Okay, I’m back.

Thank you for indulging my week off. I spent most of it glued to CNN, watching the amazing devastation in Louisiana and the jaw-dropping ineptitude of the relief efforts. I know I’m not running a political blog here, but I found that I did have something to say about the events of last week after all, and you can find it in the archive if you want to. If not, I understand completely.

Anyway, the extra week gave me time to polish up the column I’d already written, and I think it’s a better one now. Here it is, buffed up and shiny and ready for the spotlight. Thanks again, and I’ll be back with all new stuff next week, and every week hereafter.

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And now for something completely different.

When I go to the record store, that’s often what I’m looking for – something completely different. That’s why I buy all kinds of albums, from jazz to orchestral to choral to anything else, even though I don’t usually write about them in this space. I can’t listen to the same sounds for very long. If I immerse myself in an hour-long album with guitars, bass and drums, I need to put on something with a string section or an army of synthesizers afterwards. It’s one reason I could barely get through the Misfits box set.

Here’s a confession for you – lately I have grown pretty sick of guitars. Well, not really. I should say I have grown sick of guitars that sound like guitars, if that makes any sense. The whole “here is my drum beat, here is my riff, here is the moment when the bass, drums and guitar all hit the downbeat,” you know? The rock thing. I’m sick of it. I’ve been listening to OK Computer again, and I’m amazed at how infrequently the guitars on that record sound like guitars.

I’m also perplexed as to why, with the infinite variety of sounds available, 90 percent of bands and artists stick with the basic four-piece rock band thing. I have a lengthy history of being satisfied with that if the songs are good, and some of my favorite albums of the year stay within those parameters, but the best records, I think, are ones that make use of what’s available. I hate to keep bringing up Sufjan Stevens, but just listen to the panoply of sounds he’s conjured on Illinois – strings, horns, pianos, banjos, drones, all manner of voices. I like the Foo Fighters, but Sufjan makes them sound like they’re asleep at the wheel.

Similarly, I can’t stand most rap, because it’s lazy. Take a canned 4/4 beat, add a sample, rhyme over it about your bitches, cars and money, and you’re done. No variation in style or sound, just calculated simplicity. And if the focus is supposed to be on the lyrics, then why are they uniformly uninteresting? There are rap outfits like De La Soul (still going!) and the Roots that try to break out of the rut, but as of yet, no one has released a rap record that takes full advantage of sound and scope. There is, in short, no hip-hop Pet Sounds, no elaborate masterpiece that raises the bar.

If I were to nominate one, though, I would probably name Late Registration, the second album from Kanye West. In a lot of ways, West is his own worst enemy – no one could possibly be as good as West thinks he is, which would be fine if he’d shut up about it. He’s his own maelstrom of hype, and often what he says gets more attention than the music he makes. Just last week, his “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” comment made headlines, and very few of the people who fell all over that story are talking about what an achievement Late Registration is.

This album, despite its lame title, is so far ahead of the rap mainstream that it’s coming around for a second lap and ready to pass it again. It is the first rap album since OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below to accelerate the artform – though, to be fair, there are very few rock, folk or pop albums that accelerate their respective artforms, either. But the genius of West’s album is that, unlike OutKast, he doesn’t abandon rap for other forms of music, he brings other forms of music to rap. Late Registration builds on rap music the way the Beatles built on pop – they brought in blues and cabaret and Eastern influences, but never abandoned their pop and rock roots.

West made a lot of fascinating moves on this record, but perhaps the most inspired one was enlisting Jon Brion as co-producer. Before Late Registration, Brion had exactly no rap experience. He’s a former member of the Grays, and has produced the likes of Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann. He’s also written scores for films like Punch-Drunk Love and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Brion has a reputation for chamber-pop played with odd, vintage instruments, and he’s part of a collective of Los Angeles-area musicians that revel in low-key, melodic melancholia.

So he’s not the first person I’d have thought of to produce West’s follow-up to the mildly overrated The College Dropout, but the pairing turns out to be miraculous. West lets Brion do his thing – he plays dozens of instruments, arranges strings and horns, and fills every second of these songs with fascinating, glorious sound. West is likely responsible for most of the beats and samples, but it’s a testament to the unlikely match-up here that you can’t tell where West’s work ends and Brion’s begins. It’s a total collaboration, and it’s unlike anything I’ve heard.

Late Registration is about bringing diverse elements together, and with that in mind, the list of collaborators includes the usual suspects, like Common and Cam’Ron, but also Adam Levine of Maroon 5, and Jamie Foxx. (The latter does his Ray Charles impression on “Gold Digger,” augmenting a sample of the real deal.) He even enlists both Jay-Z and Nas, the famously feuding emcees, on adjacent tracks, and it’s debatable which one got the better song to rap over.

While the record starts strong, and there isn’t a weak track to be found, it ends even stronger. West and Brion save their finest work for the last five songs, a stretch that includes “Diamonds From Sierra Leone,” a furious track that draws a line through the drug trade to the music business. “We Major” is a tour de force, a seven-minute groove that erupts with horns and strings, but even more effective is “Hey Mama,” a tender ode set to a sweet beat and a cavalcade of beautifully arranged voices. The album concludes with “Gone,” featuring perhaps Brion’s best string arrangement here – cellos wobble in place of bass notes, violins swoop and dive, and the whole thing works like magic.

I will always be more interested in rap for the music, rather than the lyrics, but West doesn’t disappoint with his words here either. He equates selling CDs with selling drugs in “Crack Music,” a fascinating comparison, and takes on his personal compulsions in “Addiction.” Nothing here is on the level of some of his contemporaries, like Common, but he steers clear of the usual guns and pimps and Bentleys that populate too much of modern rap. West is constantly trying new things on Late Registration, and even when his lyrics fall short, at least you can hear him attempting to innovate, instead of purposely stagnating.

I feel bad for the multitude of hip-hop producers who will have to measure up to Late Registration – West and Brion have made the whole of contemporary rap sound like the walking dead. Similarly, I feel bad for West, who will have to top this next time out. I count it a success if a rap album doesn’t make me want to shut it off after 20 minutes. With this astoundingly imaginative record, Kanye West kept me enthralled from first track to last. I don’t make Beatles and Brian Wilson comparisons lightly – Late Registration is the hip-hop Pet Sounds, the rap Revolver. It may not be as good as West thinks it is, but it is damn near terrific.

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“Something completely different” could easily be the motto for Joy Electric, one of the most idiosyncratic and misunderstood bands I’m aware of.

I wrote a lengthy column about Joy E last year, so I’ll summarize quickly: Joy Electric is Ronnie Martin, singer and songwriter. He composes melodic pop songs, ones that would not sound out of place on the radio, were he to perform them with guitars, bass and drums. Instead, Martin arranges these songs for vintage analog synthesizers. The result is often described as video game music with hooks, which overlooks the works of classic synth-pop pioneers like Gary Numan and Kraftwerk. It’s from this tradition that Martin draws, but he does it better and with more commitment to pure sound than anyone else.

Martin’s music is so singular that it almost makes no sense to compare it to anything but itself. One could say that, yes, this stuff is different from anything on the radio, and expand on that, but all of Joy Electric’s 17 releases are different from anything on the radio in the same ways. The truth is that even within his pocket universe of knobs and wires, Martin has developed a widely diverse catalog, pushing himself at every turn to deliver something different each time out.

Last time, he made a masterpiece – a minimalist, punky wonder called Hello, Mannequin. It was the third volume of what he’s calling his Legacy series, and so far, the sequence is living up to its lofty title. The three Legacy albums have varied in tone and complexity, but all of them stand head and shoulders above Martin’s previous work. Beginning with 2001’s The White Songbook, Martin took his signature sound and exploded it, adding progressive rock influences and an intensity absent from his earlier, poppier efforts.

And now here’s The Ministry of Archers, the fourth Legacy volume, and easily the prickliest and most difficult of the bunch. Where Mannequin was a fully realized, relatively welcoming collection of pop songs, Archers is an abrasive, complex suite that stands with folded arms, daring you to unravel it. At first glance, it seems underwhelming – 10 songs, three of which are instrumentals, in a mere 32 minutes. But keep listening, because Archers slowly reveals itself as a daring experiment gone wonderfully right.

The first thing longtime Joy E fans will notice about Archers is the thick, menacing sound. Martin bought himself a Moog synthesizer, coincidentally releasing this first album featuring it in the same month as the death of the instrument’s founder, Dr. Robert Moog. Martin has used the instrument here to add chunky, wavery bass lines and piercing synth leads, and an overall sense of creeping darkness. Archers is the album that finally turns the Joy in Joy Electric completely ironic – there is very little hope to be found on this record, musically or lyrically.

There is, however, a phenomenal variety of tone and texture, as if Martin perceives a rut and is railing against it. The prog-rock overtones of The White Songbook are here, with synth lines snaking in and around the melodies, but they’re met with noise-solo detonations and some of Martin’s wildest playing. They’re also supporting some of his most inscrutable songs, many of which, for the first time, seem tailor-made for their synthesizer arrangements. The three instrumentals, of course, could not have been played any other way, but the piledriver “A Hatchet, A Hatchet” masterfully navigates its dynamics with cluster-bomb drums, and even a mid-tempo pop song like “Quite Quieter than Spiders” shimmers on its shaky synth groove.

It’s the closer, “Can You Refrain,” that provides the biggest surprise. Here, for what I believe is the first time in 10 years, is a repeating drum machine pattern on a Joy E song, supporting a keyboard figure that sounds like 1980s Doctor Who music. Here also is an extended jam coda full of oscillating dissonance, rounding off a pounding beast of a melody. Martin even makes his breathy quiver of a voice sound threatening: “Unable to socialize, sleep deprived, sloping countenance…” It’s a pretty amazing finish to a slow-build of an album, one that sounds transitional yet somehow fully formed.

Joy Electric is certainly not for everyone, but the musically adventurous should find much to love here. Martin continues to expand and grow the Joy E sound, and he’s restlessly creative – he’s already written all the songs for his next album, tentatively called The Memory of Alpha, and he has a new EP ready for release in November. I said this before, and I’ll likely say it again – there is no one I’m aware of who is making the kind of music Ronnie Martin is making. He’s in a class of one, the best there is at what he does, and even still, he’s never satisfied. He keeps exploring and refining, taking his sound to new places. Martin is something completely different, and that’s exactly what I’m looking for.

Go here to try and buy.

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Next week, the age-old Beatles vs. Stones debate continues.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I am a pretty emotional person.

I wanted to say that right up front, because this is probably not going to be as measured a response to Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath as it could be. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say yet, but I’m offering fair warning that it might turn into a rant. If you measure this in death toll and sheer size of the area affected, the disaster on the gulf coast is much larger than 9/11, but unlike that catastrophe, I don’t personally know anyone who lost someone last week. So my response to this is really limited to what I read and what I see on television. Anyone who wants to disregard my thoughts on those grounds is more than justified.

But here is what I’m thinking.

We are, as a country, in worse shape than I thought we were.

It’s been four years since Islamic extremist terrorists crashed two planes into two buildings in New York, four years since President George W. Bush was granted enormous power and freedom to launch his homeland security initiatives. And as we, the voters, handed over the keys, we gave him one mandate: make us safer. Some of us were even willing to give up and renounce some of our most basic American freedoms for this cause. In the days and weeks after 9/11, a shattered and broken America pleaded with the guy in charge. Make us safer.

Four years later, I’m not even sure they know what “make us safer” means. Part of becoming safer, I think, revolves around actually having a plan in case of emergencies, and executing it with the precision we should expect from the greatest nation on Earth. Imagine, for just a second, that Al Qaeda decided to blow up the levees in New Orleans. The resulting devastation in that city would have been pretty much the same. The only difference between that and what happened is that Hurricane Katrina let us know she was coming, a week or two in advance.

And we still had no plan.

Thousands of people died, many of them unable to leave their homes. What evacuation efforts did take place found thousands more people packed into the Superdome, with no food, no water, no medical supplies and no promise of escape. Anarchy descended on the region, in the absence of authority figures. I heard tales of people being turned away at the bridges, or lied to about phantom rescuers. I also heard plenty of stories of looting, and of victims turning their firearms on rescue helicopters and hospital vehicles, which makes no sense at all to me.

The pictures coming in from New Orleans last week could have been from the Sudan, so desperate were the images. It was heartbreaking. The hurricane hit Monday morning. Through Thursday, the question remained unanswered: where the hell is everyone? Why aren’t they coming with food, with medicine, with a way out?

There’s plenty of blame to go around, and some of it has to land on New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, who called for an evacuation with no coherent plan to carry it out. Some of it has to land on Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, who supported said evacuation without, seemingly, assisting with its execution in any way. But in my world, being the top guy means you have to take the responsibility when things go wrong, and that’s why I think the lion’s share of the anger, recrimination and resentment must be directed at our president and his gang of idiots, who dropped the ball so completely that it was shameful.

Where the hell is everyone? I can tell you where our president was on Monday and Tuesday as thousands of people were dying. He was on his vacation. Week five of his vacation, to be precise. I can also tell you where our secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, was on Wednesday night. She was on Broadway, taking in a show. On Thursday, as Ray Nagin was giving his famous radio rant excoriating the federal government for its slow response, Rice was shopping for expensive shoes. What I can’t tell you is where our vice president, Dick Cheney, was. I don’t know. Last I heard, he was on vacation, too.

Some of you are writing this off already as a partisan rant. It isn’t. This isn’t about left and right, it’s about complete failure of leadership. I’d be saying the same things if Kerry had won last year, and if his response to this crisis was as lackadaisical and careless as Bush’s has been. I personally don’t think it would have been – Kerry, at the very least, would have been able, through sheer presence and articulation, to appear concerned and on top of the situation, something that eluded Bush throughout this crisis. Bush is approaching the aftermath of Katrina like a public relations problem, not a national emergency.

Seriously, take a minute and read this.

It’s from a leftist website, true enough, but everything there is sourced and linked. It even points out something that not a lot of people are talking about – the very moment when Katrina and her aftermath became the federal government’s problem. That would be Saturday. That’s right, Bush, DHS and FEMA took complete responsibility for mobilizing aid to New Orleans two days before the hurricane hit.

But that can’t be, you’re saying. I’ve heard FEMA head Michael Brown, and DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay blaming the local governments for not asking for assistance earlier. You’re right, they have been saying that. And they’re wrong, plain and simple. The local government should have had a plan in place, but at least Nagin and Blanco knew they couldn’t handle the situation, and they asked for help. And they received a federal promise.

On Saturday the 26th.

You’ve also, no doubt, heard Chertoff and Brown expressing surprise at the size and the effects of the storm, saying that no one could have known what would happen. No one could have foreseen the levees overflowing, the flood walls breaking. This is patently untrue. For one thing, Nagin and Blanco seemed to have foreseen it, because they ordered the evacuation. The National Hurricane Center knew about it, too, and they told Bush, Brown and Chertoff. And you know, that’s kind of what experts are for – to tell you that these things might, and probably will, happen. It helps if you listen to them.

But Brown and Chertoff seemed thoroughly oblivious through this whole thing. Brown said he only learned about the evacuees in the Superdome on Thursday, after they’d been there for three days. I knew about it before the head of FEMA, and I found out by switching on CNN. That scares me, that I can find out about a national emergency situation from Wolf Blitzer before Michael Brown hears about it. Where the hell was he?

But the complete lack of a coordinated response doesn’t bother me nearly as much as our beloved administration’s refusal to accept an iota of responsibility. On Friday, Bush flew into Louisiana for a series of photo ops, shutting down the airport from which food and water was being delivered. It was then that he delivered his famous speech about Trent Lott’s house, and said that Michael Brown was “doing a heck of a job.” He also seemed as defensive and cavalier as always, betraying no sense that he understood or felt the scope of the disaster.

Soon after that, the effort to blame the locals kicked into gear, with the administration blithely glossing over a couple of big facts: Blanco called for and received a state of emergency on Saturday, and much of the national guard needed for a rescue effort in New Orleans now resides in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no doubt that more could have been done over the last 20 years to strengthen the flood walls and fortify the levees in New Orleans. There is also no doubt that once the storm breached those walls and levees, none of that mattered.

Or it shouldn’t matter, to an adult. But then again, the adult thing to do last week would have been to stay on top of the situation and offer well-coordinated aid. Failing that, the adult thing to do would have been to admit it, come clean, say “I screwed up, America, and I’m sorry.” But the finger-pointing and name-calling have all but drowned out any contrition that may have existed. Meanwhile, the bungling continues – a thousand or so volunteer firefighters and rescue workers have responded to FEMA’s call, and they’re sitting in a convention center in Atlanta, learning how to hand out flyers and getting sexual harassment training. Seriously.

The name-calling is happening on both sides, too. I can’t think of a single emergency situation that Jesse Jackson has ever made better, but there he is, throwing around charges of racism. I think all of the talk about race and economics is largely a red herring – with no evacuation plan in place, of course the poorest residents were the ones who couldn’t get out, and that a vast majority of them happen to be black is beside the point. I agree with Kanye West that George Bush doesn’t care about black people, in that I think George Bush doesn’t care about anyone besides himself and his buddies, but I also think that making race the focus of this issue diverts from the more serious charge of dangerous incompetence.

Bush is incompetent. Chertoff is incompetent. Brown is incompetent. And what’s worse, they don’t seem to care that they’re incompetent, and they blame everyone else for their own catastrophic blunders. With that attitude, there is no way any of them will be able to keep Bush’s promise, given four years ago this month, to make us safer. Thousands of people died, and they’re more worried about covering each other’s backs. It’s shameful.

I believe in leading by example, even when one isn’t in a position of leadership. I’m just a guy, a regular voter who pays his taxes and plies his trade. But I’m willing to take up my share of the responsibility here. Thousands of people died, and I let them down.

We let them down.

By electing this administration, and turning a blind eye to their incompetence and their shell games, we made a bad situation worse. By not holding their feet to the fire and demanding accountability from them, we exacerbated the situation. When the time came for decisive action, Bush failed spectacularly, but he wouldn’t have been able to fail if we’d refused to re-elect him, or at least kept a close, watchful, discriminating eye on his administration. It’s our fault.

And only we can make up for it.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I think I may need a new term to replace “pop music.”

I’m not really a genres guy, as a casual perusal of this website will show, and new split-off categories like emo and hick-hop and crunk and whiney-core mumble-prog-salsa or whatever else will have cropped up by the time I finish this sentence give me a rash. Music is music. It’s just that if I’m going to explain the appeal of something, I kind of have to give it a name, one with associations. Otherwise, you’ll have even less of an idea what I’m nattering on about than usual.

And “pop” is just a term that fills me with dismay. I love pop music. I’m sure there are bigger Beatles fans than me in the world, and probably in the metropolitan Chicago area even, but I wouldn’t bet my paltry freelancer check on it. While I admire all kinds of albums from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, it’s the pop records that do it for me more often than not. I all but worship bands like Jellyfish, who worked their asses off in the early ‘90s to create two perfect albums full of joy and wonder. I love the Kinks, I love XTC, I love Elvis Costello and Sloan and Brian Wilson and Ben Folds.

To me, that’s all pop music – melody-centric, hummable, catchy and accessible. The problem is, pop as a term has come to mean sugary radio crap, and only sugary radio crap. The definition expands beyond Jessica Simpson and the contestants on American Idol, but that’s what the word has come to mean. The narrow purview of pop, defined by radio and MTV and marketing departments, leaves artists like Aimee Mann and Supergrass without a home.

Pop is not a word that really applies to most of what I love, anyway, because originally, it was short for “popular.” Thanks to the industry’s marketing machine, intelligent pop music hasn’t had a shot in hell of being popular in decades. I think the Beatles changed the established idea of what popular music can sound like, but they were astoundingly popular to the last, whereas artists that have taken from their lesson book remain marginalized, unable to pay their rent. I’ve just been reliably informed that the Dissociatives, whose excellent debut album was released in the U.S. in March, have sold less than 3,000 copies. It’s pop, but it sure isn’t popular, at least on these shores.

With all that, though, we are in something of a pop renaissance right now. My favorite album of the year so far, Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, wears its Brian Wilson influences on its sleeve. There’s a new crop of brilliant melody makers taking the reins from the old Brits, like the aforementioned Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright, but even beyond them, there’s a rejuvenated sense of song craft in some of the most celebrated young bands these days.

If there’s anyone in the indie scene that seems willing to grab the mantle of pop genius from the likes of Costello and Ray Davies, it’s A.C. Newman. Back when he was Carl Newman, he was one-fourth of Canadian popsters Zumpano, but he’s better known now as one of the guiding lights of the New Pornographers. The band took their name from Jimmy Swaggart’s oddball quote “Music is the new pornography,” and it’s less a band than a loose collective revolving around Newman, but also featuring singer Neko Case and Destroyer guitarist Dan Bejar.

Their third album is called Twin Cinema, and it’s their best and strangest work. It’s also the perfect opportunity for me to hopefully dispel this misconception that I’m anti-indie. I have been accused before of hating the indie sound, and while there’s some truth to that – I do like intricate productions and big, full sounds – the songs are much more important. Twin Cinema sounds like it was recorded in the same garage the White Stripes use, the occasional mariachi horn notwithstanding, but the songs are amazing, so it doesn’t matter. The problem I end up having with a lot of Pitchfork-recommended discs is that the songwriting is just as ramshackle as the guitar tones.

Not so here. Newman has proved, over two previous New Pornographers albums and a great solo disc (last year’s The Slow Wonder), that he just never runs out of melodies. Previous New Porn records have focused on short bursts of electrified pop, and while they’ve been catchy as all hell, I am happy to report that Twin Cinema takes it the next step. Newman displays an uncanny ability to write an epic track in less than four and a half minutes here, and his best songs infuse this album with a newfound serious side.

That’s not to say it doesn’t rock, because it does. “Use It” proves that the New Pornographers are the band Spoon thinks they are, and the spunky title track is delightfully trashy. But the best moments on Twin Cinema are the more bizarre ones – Case’s angelic vocals and Dave Carswell’s slide guitar on “The Bones of an Idol,” for instance. “The Bleeding Heart Show” starts as a light ballad, but ends up with an anthemic choral finale that reminded me of Dream Academy. (Remember them?) “Falling Through Your Clothes” spins about on a missed-beat refrain that sounds, on first listen, like your CD is skipping, while “These Are the Fables” lightly pirouettes its way into an unexpected piano-pounding coda. Newman’s songs (12 of the 15) are his most intricate, yet all are hummable and infectious.

Bejar takes three tracks here as well, and acquits himself nicely, particularly on “Jackie, Dressed in Cobras,” all stuttering stop-time beats. He’s not quite at Newman’s level, which weighs the album down a tad, but doesn’t kill it – he’s Colin Moulding to Newman’s Andy Partridge, if you will. His songs do bring up an interesting point about this band, though – they are such a democracy that they sometimes risk not having a solid identity. There are four singers, counting Nora O’Connor with Case, Bejar and Newman, and often the voices intertwine. Although most of the songs are Newman’s, no one personality steps out.

The upside of such collectivism is that the focus remains on the songs, where it ought to be. Twin Cinema closes with “Stacked Crooked,” a layered masterpiece of collapsing vocals and triumphant horns that fades out too quickly. But really, if that’s the worst complaint one can levy against this album, that it ends too soon, then Newman and company must be doing something right. In fact, after a few listens through this scuffed-up jewel of an album, I’d have to say that they’re doing something extraordinary.

But is it pop? I think it is, but many critics would come up with some other genre to place it in, or make up some cross-hybrid box for it. The definition of pop seems to hew closer to something like the Boston’s The Click Five, a group that touts itself as “new school power pop.” That description fits as well as anything, but to my ears, it’s just pop. It’s glossier, hookier and scrubbed a lot cleaner than the New Pornographers, but it’s pop, of the freewheeling and slightly cheesy variety that many will see as another hit to my already shaky credibility.

Yes, the Click Five are silly. They dress in matching suits, they have mop-top haircuts, and they look like teen idol models on the cover of their debut album, Greetings from Imrie House. The album comes with one of five randomly inserted trading cards – there is one for each member. Yes, trading cards, with bio information on the back. I got keyboardist Ben Romans, who apparently has blue eyes, likes baseball and went to see Weezer for his first concert. (I mentioned this to a friend of mine, and she said, “That makes me want to die.”)

Are they serious? Of course not. It’s a gimmick. But don’t let that keep you from the music, which is insanely catchy, gloriously cheeseball pop perfection. They went to the right collaborators for this fun little gem – Boston producer Mike Denneen (Guster, Aimee Mann) worked the boards, while the band co-wrote songs with Kiss’ Paul Stanley and Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger. (Schlesinger wrote the single, “Just the Girl,” the video for which depicts the band descending by helicopter to the roof of Paul Stanley High School. Uh huh.) Fountains is a good touchstone for this stuff, but unlike that band, which tends to orbit around silly pop with an ironic flair, the Click Five dives right in.

These songs are stupid, let’s get that out in the open. You cannot like this and still maintain a detached air of musical superiority. The Click Five will not make you cooler. Every song is about love and heartbreak, in the simplest, most ‘70s radio-rock way. But in embracing that, the band has delivered something borderline brilliant. This is steeped in decades of fun power pop, full of huge choruses, swirling vocals, driving guitars and pristine production. Anyone noting a heavy Cars influence would not be blowing smoke, but there’s more hiding behind these delirious harmonies. It’s very much like the 2005 version of the 1975 version of the 1962 Beatles, if that makes any sense.

The hooks on this thing are everywhere. I heard it once, and couldn’t stop humming it for hours, until I just had to hear it again. I didn’t want to – I tried to make myself hate this album, because it’s so syrupy and goofy, but I couldn’t. It’s impossible to object to this on purely musical grounds. The whole thing is so well-written, so perfectly disposable and effervescent. In fact, its disposability would be the most glaring drawback, if the band hadn’t so fully embraced it and made it the feature of the record. These songs will not change the world. These songs are not important. But they are super-groovy nifty-keen.

The Click Five are gimmicky, but they’re not prefab. “I’ll Take My Chances” is like the best prom theme you’ve ever heard, and one definitely gets the sense that these five could have chosen to write any type of music, and they picked prom themes. But by God, they wrote the hell out of them. There’s a sly nod in “Chances” to the Beatles’ “Across the Universe,” which I think is telling. Six songs later, they’re crashing through a great cover of the Thompson Twins’ “Lies,” which just shows the huge range of pop influences they draw from.

The bottom line is, I think this is wonderful. It’s not about the suits, the trading cards or the video, it’s about the songs, and the Click Five have written an album full of sparkling, feel-good winners. Some may have to let go of the notion that music has to be Serious and Important to be worthwhile, but hell, there’s pop for those tastes, too – the New Pornographers are well on their way to becoming one of the most important bands of the decade. The Click Five will never be taken that seriously, nor should they be – they just make good, fun pop music. They’re a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.

So, do I need a new word that can encompass both A.C. Newman and the Click Five? I don’t know, I’m open to suggestions on that. I’m also open to the idea that pop represents music so joyous and unrestrained that there isn’t a word that can encompass it. Someone once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, which means that mere language can’t adequately quantify it. Good pop music puts that big dumb grin on my face like nothing else, and if I ever come up with a word that fully describes that feeling, I’ll let you know. But I doubt I will.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to stretch a wedding-themed narrative device to its stupid limits. We’re all here, so shall we begin? The sooner we start, the sooner we get this obviously lame idea over with. Here, then, are something old, something new, something borrowed, and something… well, you’ll see:

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Something Old

For a guy who’s been around forever, Richard Thompson doesn’t get a lot of respect. Even from me, apparently – I’ve started this review by, in effect, calling him old.

But hell, Thompson is in his fourth decade as a recording artist, beginning with Fairport Convention in the 1960s, then with his ex-wife Linda, and finally on his own. His roots are in English folk music, but in the decades since striking out as a solo artist, Thompson has displayed an amazing talent for blazing electric guitar. For a while there, every note he played sounded like a smirking middle finger to Eric Clapton and those who think he’s the best of the middle-aged British guitarists. Just listen to the fiery solo that concludes “Hard on Me,” from 1999’s Mock Tudor, for a sterling example of what I’m talking about.

But at heart, he’s never really altered what he does – he tells stories in song, with his rich, resonant voice, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to call pretty much everything he’s ever done folk music. Thompson has been consistent for so long that it’s hard to imagine that he’ll ever expand his audience much further. Like Bruce Cockburn, Thompson has probably gone as far as he’s going to go, from an industry standpoint, which explains why Capitol Records dropped him in 2001 after more than 12 years of releasing his records. He’s on tiny Cooking Vinyl now, and barring a late-in-life Johnny Cash-style renaissance, he’ll probably stay beneath the radar for the rest of his life.

The news is not all bad, though, because the small label and the lack of commercial pressure has brought out the best in Thompson. It’s doubtful that Capitol would have even released Front Parlour Ballads, his new album – at the very least, they would have asked for a fuller production sound and a radio single, not realizing that the very sparseness of this record is what makes it special. Ballads is almost entirely acoustic, the first time Thompson has unplugged for an entire set of songs since the second disc of You? Me? Us? in 1996. It was recorded in his home studio, and it features only one other musician, percussionist Debra Dobkin.

It’s precisely that intimate, ramshackle quality that sets this record above most of his Capitol output. For starters, the man has a great voice, one that never sat too comfortably atop some of the poppier production of his ‘80s albums. Here it’s the focus, and it allows Thompson the performer to come out. He leads you through his tales, giving you insight with his inflections, and striking at the heart with songs like “Cressida.”

His ability to put the listener in the skins of his characters is a double-edged sword, as always, because Thompson’s songs are often bitter and disturbing. Ballads contains a song about blackmail and adultery (“Should I Betray”), one about how awful it must have been to be on a slave ship (“Row, Boys, Row”), and several about cruel women and the morons who love them. It closes with “When We Were Boys at School,” which concerns the birth of a monster: “All he ever wanted to do was harm, all he ever wanted to be was cruel, at 12 years old Fate marked his brow, and he said, ‘I have a mission now’…” It’s chilling.

There’s very little to conceal the darkness this time – only two songs contain electric guitar, and most of the rest are just Thompson and his acoustic. Such sparseness makes for an extremely effective downbeat record, but a downbeat one nonetheless. Thompson’s fans, however, are used to his fascination with the underbelly of human nature, and will lap this right up. The acoustic work is excellent, the melodies are haunting, and Thompson’s voice is as powerful as ever. Front Parlour Ballads is a superb folk album, the most mesmerizing, captivating work Thompson has released in ages, and though there’s very little light within its black heart, its surface is beautiful and prickly.

And though I’d like to hear Thompson pick up an electric again, I’m glad he’s in a position now to make and release records like this one. He sounds reinvigorated, invested in these songs, and I can’t help but think that it’s down to the nature of the recording, and the freedom from interference it represents. This is how he wants to sound, not how Mitchell Froom and Capitol Records want him to sound, and you can hear it in his voice and his fretwork. It would be a stretch to call this record joyous, but as bitter as the songs are, their author sounds contented, even thrilled, to be playing them. With nearly 40 years of such songs behind him, that’s saying something.

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Something New

This year has been a good one for surprising new discoveries. There’s Sufjan Stevens, of course, whose Illinois continues to make the rest of the year’s music sound uninspired, but he’s been around a while, and it’s only my ignorance that kept me from praising him earlier. But 2005 has been full of new bands that deliver, like the Dissociatives, the Click Five (more on them next week), Mute Math and Waking Ashland. And here’s another one to add to the list: Marjorie Fair, whose debut album Self-Help Serenade is a dreamy triumph.

Though you’ll probably find Marjorie Fair’s album filed under F at your local record store, if you find it at all, it turns out that the name is a cover for singer/songwriter Evan Slamka. (Hey, it’s a better pseudonym than Badly Drawn Boy…) I’m not sure how he did it, but Slamka has assembled quite the cast of musicians to help him out with his debut. It’s produced by Rob Schnapf, who did Elliott Smith’s later records (and, coincidentally, Richard Thompson’s Mock Tudor), and it features contributions by Jon Brion, Patrick Warren, Jim Keltner, Billy Preston, Joey Waronker, Roger Manning, Kim Bullard – basically a who’s who of behind-the-scenes pop talent.

With all those names aboard, you might expect old-timey chamber pop, but Slamka has other ideas. Self-Help Serenade is a slow collection of atmospheric guitar-ballads with rich, simple, anthemic choruses. Nearly every song is set to a lazy simmer, which lets the waves of sweet, ringing guitars and rolling backing vocals expand them like sponges. In many ways, Marjorie Fair is reminiscent of Elbow, another band that uses production to explode their small, slow-moving songs, but Slamka doesn’t have the same hangdog sense as Guy Garvey. His world is much brighter.

Still, there’s nothing special about Slamka’s songwriting. His tunes do take some unexpected turns sometimes, like the chorus of “Stare,” but mostly they stick to the basics. No, this album is about performance and sound, and on those scores, it’s sweeping and full and lovely. Slamka’s voice is high and yearning, without slipping into emo territory, and his playing is laced with feeling. But it’s the production that wins half his battles for him. Every song is a glorious burst of color – even something as low-key as “Please Don’t” has ripples of guitar and keyboards behind it, forcefully nudging it.

I don’t mean to suggest that Slamka would be lost without his more seasoned cohorts, because that’s not the case at all. The songs would still be pretty good, and his voice would still soar. It’s just that this record, without the musicians and Schnapf’s wizardry, would merely be good. Instead, it’s extraordinary, a late-night firelight wonder. Just listen to the awesome guitar tones on “Stand in the World,” and then try to imagine the song without them. It would still be good, but not this, and this is great.

So the test will be Marjorie Fair’s second record, or whichever one finds Slamka branching out and producing his own work. If it turns out that he doesn’t have a second Self-Help Serenade in him, I won’t be overly surprised. I will be depressed, though, because this album is pretty damn good. It’s a sterling example of how to make a remarkable record out of less than remarkable songs.

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Something Borrowed

I love the Cowboy Junkies, but I always kind of forget about them.

Since I started the online version of this column in late 2000, the Junkies have released two studio albums and two live documents, one with an excellent DVD, and I haven’t reviewed any of them. I’m not sure why that is, but I have a theory: the Junkies are such a low-key band that their records never really stand up and call attention to themselves. They have a quiet beauty about them that, unfortunately, sometimes just slips right past me.

That’s not to say that what they do isn’t memorable or engrossing. Margo Timmons, all by herself, is reason enough to buy all of their records – her smoky voice is full of mystery and feeling, and it manages to be the center of whatever the band is doing, despite her rarely taking it above a low mumble. The rest of the band, including Margo’s brothers Michael on guitar and Peter on drums, is similarly reserved, and the songs they write are almost always bare-bones, traditional-sounding things. The end result is either quietly captivating, if you like it, or lazy and boring, if you don’t.

I like it, or at least I like it well enough to own everything they’ve ever done, although I rarely pull their albums down off the shelf. When I’m not listening to the Junkies, I can’t think of many reasons why I like their work, but while one of their discs is playing, I can’t think of many reasons why I wouldn’t enjoy it. They’re a performance-based group, no doubt, and their best records have been the ones they’ve done quickly, playing live. Something about the way they play together casts an odd sort of spell, and even when they’re waltzing through the simplest three-chord folk song, I’m taken in.

Seventeen years ago, the Junkies camped out in an old church for a night and recorded what many still consider their best album, The Trinity Sessions. It was mostly composed of covers, and the band even scored a minor hit with Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane.” I don’t think Trinity is their best, simply because over the years, the Timmonses have grown immensely as songwriters and record makers – parts of 2001’s Open, for example, are as creepy and moving as anything on Trinity. But there’s no doubting that the Junkies put their own distinctive stamp on every song they cover.

So why has it taken 17 years to try that experiment again? In our sequel-happy society, you would think that The Trinity Sessions II would have been a no-brainer, but to their credit, the Junkies conducted an idiosyncratic and original career from that point, rarely resting on laurels or slipping back into old tricks. That’s why I don’t mind that their new one, Early 21st Century Blues, is essentially a follow-up to Trinity – it was recorded quickly, played live, and it’s almost all covers.

It’s also a fascinating political statement from a band not known for them. The nine covers and two originals dissect war and its horrors from many different angles, and while the outer slipcase contains a painted peace sign, the actual front cover is a white-on-black quote from Timothy Findley’s book The Wars. Devotees of the band will recognize some of the usual suspects here (songs by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen), but some of the choices are surprising, and all of the performances are terrific.

While Dylan’s “License to Kill” and the Grateful Dead staple “Two Soldiers” are done well, the album doesn’t really kick in until “December Skies,” the first original song. It’s here that the Junkies switch on the foreboding atmosphere that they do so well, electric guitars creeping along beneath Margo’s husky vocals, and they keep that minor-key tone going for most of the record. Springsteen’s “You’re Missing” is a devastating highlight, and the band strips George Harrison’s great “Isn’t It a Pity” down to the bone.

But the real surprise is hiding at track 10. What’s billed as a cover of “I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier,” one of John Lennon’s most embarrassingly forthright and repetitive songs, actually is a full-fledged folk-rap reinvention, complete with programmed drums and rhymes by a guy named Rebel. Here is the most openly political volley, with jabs at our “installed” president and the lies woven to justify his war. It’s actually pretty good, once you get over the shock of a Cowboy Junkies hip-hop song.

The Junkies conclude this record with a reading of U2’s “One,” which is quickly becoming that band’s most enduring standard. From Bono, it sounds specific, as if written to one person, but in this context, it’s universal, an impassioned cry for peace: “We’re one, but we’re not the same, we have to carry each other…” It’s a great capper on a stirring record, and while I don’t hold out hope that it will change anyone’s mind, I applaud the Junkies for taking this project on. It’s a surprising act of defiance from a band that many accuse of being too quiet, and I’m glad they made their voices heard.

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Something Belew

Get it? “Something Belew.” Heh. Credit to Dr. Tony Shore for that one. I was originally going to talk about some crappy album here, and call the segment “Something Blew,” but I liked Shore’s pun so much that I had to use it. I’ve been putting off buying the latest solo work from King Crimson’s Adrian Belew for a while now, and this gives me the perfect opportunity to check it out.

Belew is known as an experimental guitarist – you don’t come up with King Crimson by churning out power ballads – and while a lot of his solo stuff has been poppy and catchy, a lot more of it is dissonant and churning, and quite difficult for non-Crimson fans to get into. The more radical side of Belew is in the fore of his new project, a three-album set titled as three sides to the same record. Last year saw Side One, which found Belew jamming with Primus’ Les Claypool and Tool’s Danny Carey, as the trippiest power trio in the history of everything. That album had some beautiful moments, but flew off into atonality more than once.

And now here’s Side Two, a beast of a different color entirely. The whole thing is tricked out with electronic beats and textures, and a clarity of tone that was missing from Side One. It’s not necessarily better, but it is a more pleasant listen – you can hum most of these tunes, especially the spry “Face to Face,” and Belew rarely steps off the reservation into the stuff that makes my fillings hurt. “Asleep” is probably the closest to that Belew here, and it changes and morphs within itself often enough that it’s engaging anyway.

Side Two is mostly instrumental, with what lyrics there are inspired by the form of haiku – short and abstract. There’s a fair amount of odd filler here, too – “Happiness” is kind of useless, as is “Sex Nerve,” and “Then What” is damn annoying – and on a 33-minute album, that’s unfortunate. But here’s the thing – I get the impression that Belew is not considering Side Two a 33-minute album, but the second part of a 100-minute whole. I feel a little premature judging each of these records on their own without Side Three, which should be out this fall.

That’s the money-hungry genius behind this project, and part of the reason I can’t recommend it. It’s clear by this point that Belew is releasing everything he recorded during these sessions – and if he isn’t, I would hate to hear the tunes that didn’t make the cut – and he would have been better off with one consistent hour-long disc. Instead, we have three half-hour excursions, each in its own packaging, for full price. Belew fans are probably going nuts over everything here, and the good stuff on Side Two is certainly worth hearing, but I can’t help thinking that the three-record concept has a lot to do with the $40 or so you’ll have to pay to hear it all.

As I said, though, Crimson fans don’t care – they happily pay for dozens of live recordings and four-disc sets of rehearsals, just to experience Belew and Fripp jamming. In comparison, Side One and Side Two are polished, accomplished works, and Belew is undoubtedly a fantastic guitar player and producer, so if you’re planning on buying the whole trilogy (as I am, admittedly), I can’t blame you. I just wish there was more genius and less filler on these discs to justify their individual existences.

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You may kiss the bride. We’re done. Time for cake and dancing!

Next week, pure pop with the New Pornographers and the Click Five.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I first heard about My Date With Drew about two years ago. There was a brief mention in Entertainment Weekly or someplace about this guy who’d made a movie about his quest to meet Drew Barrymore, and I thought it sounded like a cute idea. And then I heard nothing about it again, and assumed it had fallen prey to the ravages of the Hollywood system. Ninety percent of the good ideas never seem to make it past the development stage, whereas it sometimes seems like producers snatch up any bad idea they can find, and the worse the idea, the better.

It turns out, My Date With Drew has been done for a couple of years, and has played to festival audiences since then, looking for a distributor. I heard about it again last month, from my friend Mike Lachance. As fate would have it, Mike knows Brian Herzlinger and his Drew Crew cohorts, and has been urging his friends to see the film. Happily, I complied this week, and I have to say, it’s a cool little flick. It’s also, in its small way, a pretty inspiring one.

Here’s the back story. Brian Herzlinger has had a crush on Drew Barrymore since both of them were in grade school, and he counts her among his inspirations to move to Los Angeles and pursue a film career. So here he is, broke and floundering, when he wins $1,100 on a game show. (The winning answer? “Drew Barrymore,” of course.) He figures he can spend the next month as he is now, or he can take that 1.1 grand and do something fascinating. He decides to give himself one month to get a date with Drew Barrymore, and to document the whole bizarre process.

Why one month? That’s the funny part. Herzlinger and his friends can’t afford a video camera, so they go to Circuit City and take advantage of their 30-day return policy. They buy a camera on credit, planning to return it 30 days later, hopefully with the movie completed. It’s that kind of weird ingenuity that powers the film, as Herzlinger tries every avenue available to him (and some that aren’t) to snag a date with Drew. Watching their increasingly desperate tactics is often hilarious, but never less than fun.

Whether or not you respond to My Date With Drew will depend on two things. First, you have to like Brian Herzlinger, since he’s in every scene, and he exposes his life and personality in great detail. I found him charming and funny, but I can see how some would find him irritating. Second, I think it helps to have a dream of your own, since that lends resonance to Herzlinger’s quest. On one level, Drew is a film about a regular guy who wants to meet a movie star, and makes it happen. On another, though, it’s the story of a regular guy who wants to be a movie star, and against even greater odds, he makes that happen, too. Brian and his film are easy to relate to, and by the end, you’re sharing in his dream, and pulling for it, and your own, to come true.

Check out the site here.

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My afternoon showing of Drew, for which I was the only attendee, was preceded by literally 20 minutes of trailers. I don’t mind that – I would sit through two hours of trailers, provided that some of them at least are for interesting films. This time, though, I suffered through sneak peeks at one painful-looking pseudo-comedy after another, full of groin kicks and forced jokes. That is, right up until the last one – my first big-screen look at Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown.

I am now jazzed beyond belief for this film.

I can’t explain my love for Cameron Crowe’s movies. It’s an intangible, non-quantifiable love. But here’s one way to put it, one that will undoubtedly kill all my credibility. You know that feeling you get after a particularly great, moving trailer? That goosebumpy, spine-shivery, bubbling, giggly sense of anticipation? Crowe is one of the only directors I have encountered that can extend the trailer feeling to his whole movie. He’s been off before – Singles and Vanilla Sky are certainly not his best – but when he’s on, he speaks right to that warm, beautiful center of people. I can’t imagine movies more in love with life than …Say Anything and Almost Famous, so grateful and generous and free of falsehood.

And it looks like Elizabethtown is another home run. It’s been a while since I’ve responded emotionally to a movie trailer, but I’m already in love with this film. If the movie is as heartfelt and funny as the preview, it will be my favorite of the year, hands down.

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Tribute albums are a bad idea.

That’s one of those universal truisms. I don’t know who came up with the idea of tribute records, but they’re an inherently strange concept: We will honor this band and their songs by taking obviously inferior cracks at performing those songs ourselves, even though the band’s catalog is, in most cases, readily available. They’re only useful as gateway drugs – fans of whatever pop-punk group is in the charts this month might try out a tribute because they’re on it, and through that purchase, they may get turned on to the honoree’s original albums.

But buying tribute albums expecting free-standing, engrossing listens in their own right is a fool’s game. Very often, the participants will have an overwhelming affection for the band being honored, and will attempt note-for-note covers that only highlight how much better the originals are. Either that, or the cover versions will so reinvent the originals, in an attempt to avoid that comparison, that they become unrecognizable, and then, what’s the point? I have bought a few good tributes here and there, but the lion’s share I have heard are pretty much useless.

With that in mind, though, I’m going to recommend Killer Queen, a self-explanatory tribute that just came out this week. There was no question that I was going to buy this – those who know me can attest that I am an enormous Queen fan. I have every album memorized, and I even wrote a massive, melodramatic farewell to Freddie Mercury when I was 18. My high school band recorded it with such a somber, self-serious attitude that I can’t help but think Mercury would have hated it to bits.

While a lot of attention was always lavished on Mercury’s flamboyant nature and stage presence, he deserves a lot more respect than he gets as a musician and songwriter. The Queen catalog is full of brilliant, difficult, melodic songs, and most of the best of them are Mercury’s. They were certainly over the top, campy, and dramatic, but the core of Queen was superb songs and arrangements. Their use of layered vocals and guitar choirs became their trademark, and they did that sort of thing so well that, listening to their stuff, you get no sense of just how hard it is to sing and play all those parts, especially over such tricky chords.

It’s no surprise that guitarist Brian May’s songs get nearly equal billing with Mercury’s on Killer Queen – they rock harder, and they’re easier to play. Los Lobos, for example, simply slam their way through his bluesy “Sleeping on the Sidewalk,” and Floridians Shinedown rock “Tie Your Mother Down” like they’ve been playing it for years. (Which they may have been.) The record closes with all-female folk-rockers Antigone Rising taking on “Fat Bottomed Girls,” a funny twist that is nevertheless played straight. Well, as straight as a song called “Fat Bottomed Girls” can be played, at any rate…

Mercury’s more popular numbers get workouts here, of course. Sum 41’s “Killer Queen” is amazing, simply because it sounds nothing like Sum 41. There are two takes on “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one by American Idol contestant Constantine M., and one by the Flaming Lips, and as much as I hate to praise anything that has to do with Simon Cowell, I like Constantine’s much better. First off, he can handle the vocal parts, and lead Lip Wayne Coyne can’t, at all. Second, the arrangement of “Bohemian Rhapsody” is nigh-on perfect just as it appeared on A Night at the Opera, and Constantine sticks closer to it. Still, neither of these versions can hold a candle to the original.

So why am I recommending this? Because hiding between the obvious choices are some genuine surprises, some new takes on forgotten favorites. Jason Mraz, for example, dances his way through “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy,” one of Mercury’s best show tunes. Rooney does a smashing version of “Death on Two Legs,” even capping it with a snippet from “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon.” Breaking Benjamin take “Who Wants to Live Forever,” one of my personal favorite May songs, and strip it of its orchestral colors, but not its melodic power. Even Be Your Own Pet’s punky slam through “Bicycle Race” is nifty.

There are missteps – Gavin DeGraw opens the record with a hoarse take on “We Are the Champions” that sounds anything but triumphant, and Josh Homme joins Eleven to slow down and all but ruin “Stone Cold Crazy.” But those are balanced out with winners like Jon Brion’s characteristically quirky version of “Play the Game,” and Joss Stone’s soulful rewrite of “Under Pressure.” Perhaps my favorite inclusion is Ingram Hill’s folksy, perfect read of “39,” a song that would have been thoroughly overlooked on most tribute records.

Most of all, though, this record just drips with love for Queen and their music, and since I have a fair portion of that myself, I respond to it in these versions. Is any of this essential listening? Of course not. But it’s a lot more fun than I expected, and if it gets even one Gavin DeGraw or Sum 41 fan to pick up some Queen albums, then I’m for it. I expected to agree with Killer Queen’s existence, but I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I do.

I have one quibble, and I’ve kept it until the end, so as not to spoil an otherwise positive review. The liner notes, in their apparent zeal to promote the new tour with Paul Rodgers and the continuing commercial viability of the band, refer to Mercury as Queen’s “original singer.” I’m sorry, but no way. He is their only singer – without Mercury, it’s not Queen, and now that he’s gone, the best thing May and company could do is lay the name to rest. Rodgers may try on Mercury’s spangled jumpsuits for this tour, but he will never, ever be Queen’s singer. No one else will, and even suggesting that Mercury’s place in the band is one that any other musician could simply step into is insulting.

They were great. For more than 20 years, they were great. Killer Queen and the current tour may give you some inkling about how great they were, but seriously – accept no substitutes. If you haven’t heard the Queen catalog, you owe it to yourself as a music fan to find out what all these artists on this tribute album are talking about.

* * * * *

Quick apologies to Melissa Maxwell – she was looking forward to my take on the new Richard Thompson, as promised last week. I’m still absorbing it, and I should have a review ready to go next time. Also on the horizon, the Cowboy Junkies, the New Pornographers, Death Cab for Cutie and Joy Electric.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m not one for celebrity culture.

I watch a lot of movies, and I honestly couldn’t care less which movie star is sleeping with which other movie star, or which ones are getting divorced or having kids or converting each other to Scientology. It’s all about the work, not the personal lives of the artists to me – it’s the kind of attitude that lets me continue my Woody Allen fandom in blissful ignorance. Likewise, I listen to a lot of music, and I only care about the private lives of the musicians if they invite me to, by writing songs or albums about their relationships or their kids. But even then, it doesn’t matter – Trent Reznor claims to write about his personal pain, but he’s probably full of shit, and I don’t mind. He writes good songs.

There is one bizarre exception, though: I can’t seem to mention either Michael Penn or Aimee Mann without bringing up the other. It’s just a fascinating relationship to me – how often do two like-minded songwriters of the caliber of Penn and Mann get married, remain happy, and refuse the temptation to write songs about each other? They have so far spared us what could be a Buckingham/Nicks situation by keeping their private lives private. They play on each other’s albums, and they obviously push each other to keep writing great tunes.

This year, Mann and Penn have done something so interesting that it’s impossible not to mention them as a pair: they released his-and-hers concept albums. Mann led it off in May with her amazing The Forgotten Arm, the tale of a boxer who returns from war to a faltering relationship and a battle with alcohol. And now, here’s Penn with Mr. Hollywood Jr. 1947, his long-gestating fifth album, and surprise surprise – it’s conceptually based around people living and loving in post-war California. Penn’s record is not as tightly plotted as Mann’s, but both seem to have found themselves needing to invent characters and weave stories in order to keep writing their trademark sad songs. That’s right, they’re that happy together.

I’m just kidding, of course, but both albums are chock full of morose lyrics, supported by classic chamber-pop melodies. There is another similarity, too – after two underperforming albums on Epic, Penn has followed his wife’s example and started up his own label, Mimeograph. (Penn’s label is distributed by SpinArt.) The process of leaving the majors and setting up his own home may explain the long wait between albums – Penn’s last was MP4, in 2000, which came and went with barely a whimper. At least, I hope that’s what took up all the time, because there’s little evidence of that half-decade on Mr. Hollywood Jr.

I always hate having to write bad reviews of albums I have been eagerly anticipating, but Penn’s latest is sadly underwhelming. Here’s a guy who has made a name as an albums artist – every song on his first four records is good. March remains his most successful, thanks to his only hit, “No Myth,” but those who bought the album found a tone-setter for Penn’s career. Every album features winding melodies that take two or three listens to sink in, but once they do, they’re impossibly catchy, and they leave you wondering why you found them so impenetrable in the first place. His sound is guitar-driven, yet almost patchwork in the way it makes room for drum loops, retro-sounding keyboards and harmonies, shifting on a dime.

Perhaps he considered such consistency a rut, but Hollywood is Penn’s spottiest recording to date. It’s doubly unfortunate when you consider that the album is a mere 38 minutes long, counting the unlisted acoustic bonus track. It starts off strong – the first four songs, in fact, are classic Michael Penn. “Walter Reed” is a slow builder, but the deceptively jaunty chorus leads to the hook line, “Every good thing I had abandoned me.” Hummable melodies supporting lyrics full of misery is a Penn (and Mann, for that matter) trademark, and he carries it through the sad goodbye of “Denton Road,” the broken hearts of “Room 712, The Apache” and the deceptions of “Pretending.”

At this point in my first listen-through, I admit that I was clearing space on my top 10 list for this record. But with track five, Mr. Hollywood Jr. just goes off the rails, and only rarely does it right itself. While the packaging may promise 12 new Michael Penn songs, three of those listed tracks are minute-long interludes, and they’re almost one right after the other. “The Television Set Waltz,” at least, has notes and a melody, but “The Transistor” and “18 September” (the date the Department of Defense was formed in 1947) are formless noise. The latter two are separated by “Mary Lynn,” an experiment in repetition and drum loops that just doesn’t work.

So all of a sudden, we’re on track nine, the start of a three-song stretch that can best be described as achingly average. There’s nothing wrong with “You Know How,” but there’s nothing right with it, either. It’s perhaps the first Michael Penn song I have heard that just lays there. “A Bad Sign” sounds like it could have been written for Sheryl Crow. “O.K.” is certainly better, but it takes until “On Automatic” for the ship to stop taking on water. That song is another classic, with terrific glimmer-of-hope lyrics and driving acoustic guitars. Less than three minutes later, it’s over, and so is the album, save for a hidden track called “Millionaire” that sounds like a home demo.

Granted, I may need to give this album a few more listens before declaring it a misfire. Also granted, there are moments of brilliance here that rival anything Michael Penn has done in the past. The sound is wonderfully retro all the way through, and the lyrics are full of Penn’s usual wordplay. (“When you think he likes you then you like the way he thinks,” from “You Know How,” is a typical example.) But no other album of his has fallen this flat for me. Regardless of the five-year wait, I wish Penn had taken a little more time on this one, because what’s here is an EP of great stuff and a depressing amount of half-baked filler.

I will also admit a certain level of expectation playing into my reaction. Michael Penn’s throwaway songs would exponentially enrich the catalogs of most other working musicians – he’s one of the best American songwriters, and hearing him rely on simple chords and melodies is depressing to me. I’m sure many will listen to Mr. Hollywood Jr. and find nothing to complain about. For me, though, five years is a long time, and this album should have been a lot better, or at least a lot more consistent. Penn originally announced this record as part one, with a second half coming soon, and I hope that’s still in the cards, because the Michael Penn I know and love is capable of more and better than just this in five years.

* * * * *

I have the same problem with Bob Mould.

The guy’s a legend, thanks to his groundbreaking run with Husker Du in the ‘80s and, to a lesser degree, his power-pop streak with Sugar in the ‘90s. He knows his way around a melody, and he all but redefined the sound of alternative-rock guitar (I hate phrases like that), bringing a stinging depth to his punky pop tunes. Consistency is also a Mould hallmark – after Husker Du broke up, Mould released two fantastic solo records (Workbook and Black Sheets of Rain), then formed Sugar, his most successful project.

And then, somehow, it all fell apart. Mould has had four solo albums since Sugar’s demise, and only one of them (the self-titled effort from 1996) has been worthy of his legacy. He appears to have grown tired of the guitar-rock sound he perfected and explored, as evidenced by the electronics and dance beats of Modulate, his unfortunate 2002 effort. It’s not that I’m against Mould dabbling in electronic textures, but the album simply didn’t work – the songs and their production clashed.

Mould has returned to guitars on Body of Song, his sixth solo album and his first in three years, but the depressing lack of inspiration continues. Mould will never be my favorite songwriter, but he’s better than the simple nothings that populate this record. Sadly, he’s also not yet given up his obsession with dance music, as evidenced by “(Shine Your) Light Love Hope,” an experiment that fails so completely that it’s a glaring embarrassment. It’s essentially one verse, repeated for five minutes in a Cher-like vocoder voice while the drums thump and flail ineffectually. Let’s just say it’s not exactly “Hoover Dam.”

But I do wonder if I would like this record had it come from a guy not enshrined in the pop-rock pantheon. How much of my dislike of “Light Love Hope” is really me wishing he would write something like Zen Arcade again? Am I holding Bob Mould back? If he were not tied to his past, would he be able to really stretch out and make something mindblowing? It’s not like Body of Song is a bad record, for the most part, it’s just not up to par with Mould’s work from the ‘80s and ‘90s. Is that a fair comparison anymore? Can Mould be expected to compete with his 22-year-old self, or even his 32-year-old self?

Taken on its own, Body of Song has some decent bits and some less decent bits, and is all in all pretty average. Good stuff includes “Always Tomorrow,” a slinky, bass-driven nightmare, and “Underneath Days,” a minor-key monster. “Days of Rain” is a Mike Roe-style ballad that fares better than the other torch song, the goopy “High Fidelity.” The record ends with a pair of epics – the dismissible “Gauze of Friendship” (which actually includes the line, “Nothing matters when hearts go pitter-patter”), and “Beating Heart the Prize,” a thundering steamroller of a thing that closes Body of Song convincingly.

It’s about a B-minus, if I were to assign letter grades, and if it weren’t an album by someone with such a vast and influential catalog behind him, I would leave it at that. Is it fair to dock points from Mould for not producing another Candy Apple Grey or Copper Blue? It’s complicated, since the legacy is probably the only reason one would anticipate buying Body of Song. It’s not just an album, it’s the New Bob Mould Album, and if he’s willing to take the sales his name will bring in, he should be ready for the comparisons with his best work. The Rolling Stones, for example, should be prepared for A Bigger Bang to be held up next to Exile on Main Street, a contest the new record has no hope of winning.

Is it fair? Probably not, but there it is. Mould can’t escape the comparisons, he can only make the records he wants to make and hope that people don’t expect masterpieces each time out. So let’s do this comparison thing right. Body of Song is not nearly as good as Mould’s work with Husker Du. It is also not as good as his run with Sugar, or his first two solo albums. However, it does slide nicely into his latter-day catalog, which shines a little less brightly than any of his other music. It’s a valiant effort to steer his electronics obsession into safer, more guitar-driven waters, but it lacks inspiration, and has no defining spark. If you’ve liked what Bob Mould has done for the last decade, you will like this. If you’re looking for something on par with his golden age, keep looking. Body of Song is not it.

* * * * *

Next week, probably Richard Thompson, unless something more exciting occurs to me.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks, it’s that sometimes the system works.

Now, don’t worry, I’m not going to go all rainbows-and-puppy-dogs optimistic on you here, but I have been oddly pleased with the recent fruits of a couple of independent investigations. First and foremost, there’s the Karl Rove thing, in which it was brought to light that the Deputy White House Chief of Staff was responsible for the public outing of a CIA agent. Whether or not it’s eventually proven that Rove undertook this leak with malicious intent (perhaps to get back at the agent’s husband, who decried the Iraq war and debunked some of the false evidence used to launch it), the revelation of his involvement puts King Bush II in an interesting position.

I hope everyone remembers that two years ago, Bush promised to fire anyone in his administration that was found to have facilitated the leak. He’s now amended that to anyone in his administration that is “found guilty of a crime,” which goes beyond Clintonian doublespeak into historical revisionism, but I think we should hold his feet to the fire. Make him keep his word, because honesty and trust are real American values, and our freedom depends on them.

Closer to this column’s purview, however, is the recent settlement by Sony BMG in one of the largest payola scandals since the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll. (Here, read all about it.) People call me cynical for saying this, but of course this sort of thing happens all the time. I’m surprised that Sony would resort to such blatant and obvious payola – there are numerous corporate back room ways to achieve the same results – and I’m also surprised to see that they got caught, but otherwise? No shocking developments here.

Hopefully, though, this is just the first step in a larger investigation that will expose just how entrenched the big labels are within the hit-making machine. Popularity now equals popular immersion, and if you control the airwaves, the video channels and the chain stores, you control what gets heard, and how often. The labels have known this for a long time, and the big radio networks are only too happy to play ball, since guaranteed popularity means guaranteed ratings and guaranteed ad sales. You wouldn’t want to leave that sort of thing up to the whim of the public, now would you?

Anyway, the homogenization and consolidation of radio annoys me to no end, because radio used to be the means by which music fans heard new songs. It just doesn’t work that way anymore – DJs can’t play what they want, and stations are locked into their record-label-devised formats. That’s not yet true of XM or Sirius, but just you wait – they can’t stay corporate-free havens for long. The only recourse is the internet, which I hope will be the Great Leveler that many think it will be. And what’s to stop the labels from paying off iTunes, or other download services, to give their artists prominence? Nothing. They will sue the developers and users of file sharing software while re-making the legal download sites in their image, if we let them.

$10 million is a good start. Keep digging.

* * * * *

People ask me all the time where I find new music worth hearing. In the absence of good independent radio, it’s a fair question, but it is a little like asking a writer where he gets his ideas. The answer, the real answer, is never satisfying – writers, if they’re being honest, will tell you that they write all the time, and the good ideas are difficult to develop. Similarly, finding good music amidst the ocean of crap the labels pump out year after year is hard work. Okay, it’s not as hard as, say, digging ditches or cleaning sewers, but the good stuff doesn’t just fall into your lap, and I can definitely understand not wanting to put the time and energy in to exploring what radio, MTV and your local Best Buy ignores.

Sadly for me, I am like a crack addict when it comes to good music. The amount of my weekly paycheck that goes to CDs is pretty astonishing, especially when you consider that I haven’t had a real weekly paycheck since October. But I’ve been doing it long enough that I have cultivated avenues of information, and networks of like-minded people, all of whom get excited by good stuff and want to share it. I am often practically swimming in recommendations, most of which pay off.

Now, granted, sometimes folks have to bug me and bug me to give something a chance, especially something that strikes me as unlikely. (But then, I bother those same people the same way – “Kip Winger’s solo stuff is actually very good! No, it is!”) Take Dr. Tony Shore, for example. He runs a blog called ObviousPop, and he and I trade tidbits and recommendations all the time. Shore has been after me for a couple of months now to hear a band called the Dissociatives, and I’ve put it off, for a couple of reasons. One, Dr. T.’s track record is not unblemished with me – he is known to become intensely excited over albums I find forgettable. (And vice versa, to be fair.) But more importantly, I steered clear of the Dissociatives because of their frontman.

Daniel Johns was the lead singer and guitarist for Silverchair, a band whose debut album was so derivative of early ‘90s grunge that I won’t even respect their pretentious lower-case-S spelling. They had a major hit (“Tomorrow”) and faded, and shame on me, but I didn’t even bother to keep track of them after that. My bad, because apparently the last two Silverchair albums (Neon Ballroom and Diorama) found Johns maturing into a surprisingly good songwriter. And doubly my bad, because no matter how much Shore tried to convince me, I couldn’t accept that the “Tomorrow” guy could make a great record, no matter what he called the band.

I’m not alone, apparently. The Dissociatives’ self-titled debut came out in Europe and Australia last year, but Astralwerks and EMI dumped it onto these shores in March with little fanfare. The reviews have been amazing, but no one has heard of the band or the record. Which is pretty unforgivable, in my eyes, since this is one of the coolest pop records I have heard in ages.

The Dissociatives are Johns and British techno producer Paul Mac, and what they have done here is nothing short of the perfect electro-pop synthesis. The melodies are classic, catchy and tuneful, but the production is astonishingly modern – the record clicks, clacks and whirs around Johns’ guitars and pianos, and nothing is safe from Mac’s folding, stapling and mutilating, but the songs are never sacrificed. This is not a dance album, this is not a cheesy pop record, but it is one that places its Beatles and Brian Wilson melodies in utterly unfamiliar settings. And my God, does it work.

If you wondered what Radiohead might have sounded like if they’d ventured into electronic textures but kept the songs, wonder no more – opener “We’re Much Preferred Customers” is Kid A done right. If you hate that sound, hold on, because no two of these tunes sound alike. “Somewhere Down the Barrel” is a rocker with some Wilson-esque backing vocals, especially in its grand final third. “Horror With Eyeballs” (what a title) is a 6/4 psychodrama that revolves around the line, “All of this time on my hands so far has gone to feeding my animals.” (Yeah… what?) The song is amazing, twisting up one melodic tunnel to come free-falling down another.

“Forever and a Day” is more traditional, but no less incredible, as Mac uses his bag of tricks to steer the song clear of ballad country. This album has such a surplus of melody that even the instrumental “Lifting the Veil From the Braille” is indelible, which is why the occasional mediocrity (“Thinking in Reverse”) and filler (“Paris Circa 2007slash08”) is unfortunate. But before the album’s end, they score with an epic (“Aaangry Megaphone Man,” with three As) and a prickly lullaby (“Sleep Well Tonight”). All told, this is probably one of the most focused experimental records I have ever heard, with Johns’ strong, clear voice and layered harmonies keeping everything grounded while Mac explodes the world around them.

If you couldn’t tell, I love this record. (And yes, Tony, you can quote me.) I hope this isn’t a one-off, but the start of a fruitful collaboration, one that will completely eclipse Johns’ past. I have the sinking feeling, though, that The Dissociatives is destined to be one of those forgotten classic pop records, like Toy Matinee or Human Radio, loved by a devoted few and never afforded the credit it’s due. For me, this album does what very few others have managed – it updates the sound of classic pop without losing the melodic brilliance that makes it classic pop. It’s a tough little record to get into, but it’s superbly successful at a very difficult trick. I didn’t think it could work as well as it does here, and credit to Johns and Mac for proving me wrong.

* * * * *

Usually, successful recommendations come from one or two people, but sometimes, my whole network buzzes about an album or an artist to the point where I have to check it out, just to see what all these musical minds I respect are going on about. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that buzz as much as I have in the past few weeks, surrounding Sufjan Stevens and his Illinois. Man, people just won’t shut up about this thing, which is funny because the mainstream isn’t coming anywhere near it.

Nor will they, I think. I had never even heard of Stevens last month – the first time I can recall hearing his name was at Cornerstone, over the July 4th weekend. How I missed this guy is beyond me, but I feel amazingly stupid. Stevens is an undeniable talent, and, bucking the trend, his album is worth every ounce of indie hype it has received. I will say this now – I don’t believe I will hear a more ambitious or successful piece of work this year.

Ambition is certainly pretty high on Stevens’ list of traits. Two years ago, he embarked on a ridiculous, impossible project – a 50-album travelogue of the United States, one record for each state. Illinois is the second installment (his home state of Michigan was first), and at this rate, the project as a whole will take 100 years. It’s doomed to failure, but it aims high, and I respect that, and perhaps his children and grandchildren will finish it up after he’s gone. I hope he sticks with it, though – I can’t wait to see how he fills a whole album about Delaware, or Rhode Island.

As lofty as this project is, the sound and scope of the record matches it. Illinois (the front cover announces it with the superior title Come On Feel the Illinoise) is 74 minutes long, full of six and seven-minute songs adorned with strings, horns, pianos, choirs, and what seems like a hundred instruments credited to Stevens alone. The record works as a massive suite, almost Rick Wakeman-esque in its grandiosity, but not nearly as pretentiously goofy as Wakeman often gets. It was impeccably produced and arranged by (guess who) Stevens himself, and stands as the work of a major songwriting voice.

It’s also pretty silly at times, with song titles like “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From the Dead!! Ahhhh!” (All punctuation preserved, of course.) The lyrics are chock full of Illinois history, opening with a UFO sighting in Highland and closing with a reference to Chicago’s rich jazz and blues heritage. In between, it touches on Andrew Jackson, Superman, Carl Sandburg and Abraham Lincoln. But the real genius of the lyrics is that no matter who he is referencing, Stevens is almost always talking about himself. Illinois is an incredibly personal record.

Musically, Illinois never skimps. You might think that somewhere, in 74 minutes of material, Stevens would slack off and coast, but no. Every song is a wonder, whether it be an enormous, orchestrated powerhouse like “The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders” or a sad, folksy ballad like “Casmir Pulaski Day.” Every moment of this gigantic work is captivating, and perfectly arranged. Just check out the horn section that disintegrates into strings and piano on “Chicago.” It’s fantastic. At no point during this long and winding road have I yet found my attention wandering, and I’ve heard it five times now. Not many 74-minute albums are in that club. (Hell, not many 34-minute albums are there.)

It’s not all sturm und drang. One of Illinois’ most affecting pieces is “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” which, in the end, becomes about the secrets we all keep: “And in my best behavior, I am really just like him, look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid.” That song is all acoustic guitar and Stevens’ aching voice, and while you’d think it would be overshadowed by the massive monoliths that surround it, it stays with you.

By the time it wraps up (with a superb instrumental called “Out of Egypt, Into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt From My Sandals As I Run” – really), Illinois has accomplished what so few records even try for these days: it has taken you somewhere, and made the trip worth your while. It is theatrical, yet heartfelt, a grand, sweeping opus full of dozens of magical little moments. It is this year’s SMiLE – not in the same league melodically, but it is a perfectly sequenced suite, with Wilson’s sense of dynamics and instrumentation. I will go out on a limb here and say that if Illinois is not the best album I hear this year, I will be stunned. Believe the hype. It really is that good.

That a composer/performer of this stature escaped my notice for so long is just inexcusable. (Illinois is Stevens’ fifth album, and he was in the band Marzuki before his solo career.) But that’s half the fun – now I get to go back and buy his other albums, and compare them to Illinois, and try to trace his evolution. And, of course, I can’t wait to see if he tops this one next time out. (Likely Indiana, if he sticks to the upper midwest.) But his other records notwithstanding, Illinois is a flat-out masterpiece, a project of breathtakingly singular vision and voice. It is community theater performed on a grand celestial stage, quintessentially American music to be sung and shouted in the streets. It is dazzling, flawless, eccentric, sophisticated and amazing. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

* * * * *

Next week, the returns of Michael Penn and Bob Mould.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Los Angeles is small.

This is not the observation I was expecting to make. I just returned from five days in and around L.A., staying with my friends Mike and Kate in their lovely house in Burbank. And I was honestly terrified of going to L.A., having heard about what an enormous mess of civilization it is. I was expecting Chicago times 50, all tall buildings and smog. And what I got was an endless green suburban strip mall. It’s in no way the overwhelming experience I thought it would be. It’s kind of… nice.

I’m certain it’s different if you live there. But the L.A. I discovered was a pretty inviting place, standing in direct contrast to a nightmare like New York. Mike and I went to downtown Los Angeles, where all the tall buildings live, and found virtually no one there. They were all at the shops and eateries that dot Rodeo Drive and Ventura Boulevard and other streets that have been assimilated into popular culture to such an extent that they sound like fictional places. But even the number of people milling about wasn’t stifling – L.A., on first impression, is a city that knows the value of having room to breathe.

I got my first really good look at the Pacific Ocean, too – Mike and I went to Santa Monica, where the houses are $50 million. I feel a bit like I’m cheating on my beloved Atlantic when I say this, but the Pacific is gorgeous. Beautiful waves, clean water – I could live on that beach. I could also live at Amoeba Music on Sunset Boulevard (another fictional street), with its two floors of new and used CDs featuring just about everything that’s ever been commercially available. Remember that bit in Clerks when Randal goes to Big Choice Video, and falls on his knees in reverence? That was me at Amoeba.

We hit the San Diego Comic Con on Friday, to see the Eisner Awards. The Con is always a little depressing for me, since the focus is so removed from comics. It’s harder to take the artform seriously when you have Princess Leia walking around in her metal bikini and a legion of drooling fanboys leering after her as if they’ve never seen a girl before. Actually, I have this theory – comic fans are always saying that comics aren’t considered a serious medium, but I think they are, at least more than they have been. Look at the success of Persepolis and Blankets and the McSweeney’s comics issue.

No, I think that many fans are complaining because their beloved superhero comics aren’t considered great works of art. These are the ones whining that The Avengers doesn’t get nominated for Eisners, and that Batman Begins won’t win Best Picture. You can do neat things with superheroes (see Eisner-winning wonder Ex Machina), but in the end they’re still the adventures of men and women in tights, beating up on each other. Critics are never going to take that seriously – no matter how much pathos you bring to Bruce Wayne, he’s a guy who dresses up like a bat and fights supervillains. Real, serious work is being done in the comics industry, and it’s being recognized, but until Marvel dominates the major awards, I think many fans will still feel passed over, because they want people to take Spider-Man as seriously as they do.

Anyway, I got to meet a whole bunch of interesting people at Comic Con, most of whom could walk down any street in America and not be recognized, and I also got to see the aforementioned Eisner Awards. This year they were half awards show and half memorial to the great Will Eisner, who passed away in January. Everyone who came to the stage had an Eisner story – the man was as beloved as he was talented, and his loss is an incalculable one to the comics industry. My favorite story was from Scott McCloud, who presented the first-ever Digital Comics Award, and detailed his quick conversation with Eisner about online comics. Eisner, who has only known print comics for most of his life, at first dismissed their digital counterparts, but a quick confab with McCloud at a panel convinced him to embrace them publicly. “The industry has taken years to consider digital comics as comics,” McCloud said. “It took Will Eisner about 40 seconds.”

That night, I also hooked up with Kevin Cafferty, a guy I haven’t seen since high school, and it was fun catching up with him. We then visited what is perhaps the most drug-inspired and bizarre idea for a restaurant I have ever heard – a cook-your-own-steak steakhouse. You pay $20, they bring you a raw steak, and you trudge over to this communal fire-pit grill and cook it yourself. Which seems to me to run counter to the whole idea of a restaurant, which is that I am not a good cook, and I have the money to pay someone to be a better cook than me. A fun time was had by all, and I got to drop a reference to Condorman, something I don’t have the opportunity to do very often, so it was a good night.

Mike and I also attended a Dodgers game at their very own stadium in L.A. It’s a very different experience than going to Fenway Park, for instance, or even Camden Yards – it’s more subdued and relaxed, everyone just having a good time. Mike goes into more detail about our time at the game on his blog here. Tell him I sent you.

Overall, a great trip. Many heartfelt thanks to Mike and Kate for putting up with me all weekend, and for cooking a great stir-fry meal on my last day, and for driving me around to every place I wanted to visit. I can hardly wait to go back.

* * * * *

From one coast to the other.

Fountains of Wayne are a defiantly East Coast group. They fill their songs with references to New York, New England and the Atlantic Ocean, and having been an East Coaster for a long time myself, it was always fun to time my trips over the Tappan Zee Bridge with the reference to it in “Little Red Light,” for example. Fountains songs are about their sense of place as much as they are their witty wordplay and their insanely catchy melodies, and Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood are masters at setting a scene.

If all you’ve heard is “Stacy’s Mom,” you may find that hard to believe. Fountains of Wayne is, above all, a fun pop band, but their serious attention to craft often gets overlooked, and their smash hit novelty song from 2003 certainly isn’t going to help that situation. Their breakthrough record, Welcome Interstate Managers, is also their best, and lovely numbers like “All Kinds of Time” and “Valley Winter Song” put to bed the notion that Fountains is a joke band. To put it in Spinal Tap parlance, they’re clever, but they’re not stupid.

Here’s a testament to their skill as songwriters: their new double-disc collection, Out-of-State Plates, is all b-sides and rarities and unreleased tunes, and it’s still the power-pop album of the year so far. It’s a sprawling set, 30 tracks (three of them are non-songs), and the tone is as random as you might expect. It veers from fully produced marvels like “California Sex Lawyer” to demos like “You’re Just Never Satisfied” to live covers of ELO songs, and you can’t escape the clearing house feeling. But very few of these songs are unworthy of release, and as a whole, it’s constantly surprising and fun.

The new tracks are terrific. The set opens with “Maureen,” probably the coolest song I’ve heard this year. It’s told from the point of view of “that guy,” the sweet friend who’s in love with the girl who won’t stop telling him all about her romantic adventures. Disc two’s opener, “The Girl I Can’t Forget,” describes “a night I can’t remember” with the title gal, and while the humor at times dips into Weird Al territory, it’s a rollicking fun tune.

Overall, the lyrics here are snarkier than those of the regular album tracks, which may explain why a few of them were left off. “I’ll Do the Driving,” for example, is about a guy in love with an airhead – “She says she loves Johnny Cash, the man in red, I just shake my head…” In “Baby I’ve Changed,” the protagonist lists the things he will do to help repair a relationship, including “I’ll let you listen to Sugar Ray.” And some of the jokes could use a polish or two, like “Half a Woman,” a romantic tragedy starring a magician and his assistant. (I’m sure you can figure out where it goes…)

But when they turn more serious and quirky, they shine. “I Know You Well,” a Japanese bonus track from their second album, Utopia Parkway, is lovely, as is “Karpet King” (which repeats the line, “Lay it down”) and the sweet “I Want You Around.” Buried at track 29 is “Small Favors,” a perfect example of Collingwood and Schlesinger at their romantic best: “I’ve been carrying a torch around, and I’ve forgotten how to snuff it out…”

The Fountain boys take from so many diverse influences that the range of covers on Out-of-State Plates should be no surprise. Here is their irony-free take on “Baby One More Time,” treated like the great little pop song it is, but here also is Jackson Browne’s gorgeous “These Days,” and the Bacharach/David chestnut “Trains and Boats and Planes.” I know of few bands that would have both Ricky Nelson’s “Today’s Teardrops” and ELO’s “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” in their record collections, but here they both are, performed with respect.

This record is absolutely a stop-gap while the dynamic duo works on their real follow-up to Interstate Managers. But as stop-gaps go, it’s a damn enjoyable one, with very few bum tracks (maybe the three Christmas songs could go…), and a huge percentage of tunes that are good enough to have been on any of their albums. Like They Might be Giants, Fountains of Wayne will probably always be considered a novelty act, and that’s a shame – they’re actually one of the cleverest and best pop bands around right now, and while I wouldn’t recommend Out-of-State Plates as the best starting point, their catalog deserves a closer examination.

Next week, Bob Mould and/or Sufjan Stevens.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I don’t have much time this week, so it’s a short one. Which will probably come as a relief to some of you, after the last two weeks’ behemoths. A quick review, a list, a flying spaghetti monster, and we’re done. I know I promised Fountains of Wayne, but I’m still absorbing it. Next week, I promise.

First, the review. I found my John Davis album, and gave it a few more spins. You’ll remember from last week’s column that Davis put on an excellent show at the Cornerstone Festival this year, and that his self-titled record underwhelmed me when I first heard it, but the concert convinced me to give it another go. And I’m glad I did.

Davis used to be the singer/guitarist for Superdrag, a rocking guit-pop act, and I think I was initially surprised by how little John Davis sounds like his former band. He went all out with the Brian Wilson and Beatles influences here, as well as the blues and gospel elements of his sound, and only a couple of times brought out the Superdrag. I guess I thought the imitations were a little too close, and in some cases they are, but imitating Wilson’s gift for melody is not easy.

The opening track, “I Hear Your Voice,” is classic Brian Wilson – pianos, soaring and unpredictable melodies, and sweet harmonies. “Salvation” hits immediately thereafter, and sounds like the sequel to Sgt. Pepper’s “Getting Better.” These are good songs, but not original ones, and Davis continues in that vein for the whole record, pulling out the power pop (“Me and My Girl”) and the roadhouse blues (“Have Mercy”). It’s well done, but nothing revolutionary.

But I like it a lot more now than I did before, largely because I’ve seen Davis perform these songs live, and seen how much they mean to him. The album is a definite gauntlet – all the songs are about his newfound faith in Jesus, with very little subtlety or metaphor to disguise their evangelical natures. The lyrics lack nuance, as if they were cribbed from old gospel records, and they’re the sort of thing that’s easily dismissed. I’m afraid that’s what I did the first time I played this album – I heard little musical innovation and no lyrical artistry, and tossed it aside.

And then I saw Davis play “Jesus Gonna Build Me a Home,” and felt how genuine this material is, and somehow, the album has come to life for me. It’s still not an earth-mover, but there are songs I love on it, particularly “I Hear Your Voice” and “Lay Your Burden Down.” John Davis is a definite challenge to fans of its author’s old stuff, but if you can follow him through his still-clumsy faith lyrics and into this new pop-oriented style he’s pursuing, it’s rewarding. I give Davis credit for making an album that obviously came from his heart, and for winning me over with his terrific live performance.

* * * * *

July is barren, empty, worthless. Seriously, I’m buying nothing at all until the end of the month. There’s literally nothing interesting making its way to record stores before the 26th, though I’ll gladly recant that statement if anyone can change my mind. The 26th sees the new Bob Mould, Body of Song, and after his last crap-o-rama, Modulate, I’m not even excited about that. Oh, and Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields releases his Two Chinese Operas, which doesn’t thrill me either.

But August is pretty sweet. We start on the second, with the long-awaited return of Michael Penn. His new one is called Mr. Hollywood Jr. 1947, Part One, and he swears that Part Two is coming soon, despite the six-year gap between this album and his last one. I shall believe that when I see it. Hell, we have a track listing, cover art and a release date for Part One, and I will still be skeptical until I have the bugger in my hands. Anyway, also on August 2 is the new solo album from Doug Pinnick, Emotional Animal. Pinnick is the bassist/singer of King’s X, and their new record has great buzz. They just signed to Inside Out Records, too, which is good news.

Richard Thompson makes an appearance on August 9 with a new acoustic collection, Front Parlour Ballads. He’s an underrated guitarist – much better than his most appropriate comparison, Eric Clapton. (As I type that, I’m already steeling myself for the hate mail…) Supergrass roars back with Road to Rouen, their fifth album, on the 16th. Their fourth, Life on Other Planets, made a strong showing in my 2002 Top 10 List. Also on the 16th is the new Cowboy Junkies, Early 21st Century Blues, and the four-CD Johnny Cash box set, The Legend.

The month closes out with the third album from the New Pornographers, Twin Cinema. I am a recent convert to the pop wonders of A.C. Newman and Neko Case, so I’m looking forward to this one. Also on the 23rd is a box set of live Yes, called The Word is Live. (Ho ho…) Then on the 30th, we get a deluge – the new Death Cab for Cutie (Plans), the second OK Go (humorously titled Oh No), and new records from Joy Electric (The Ministry of Archers) and Our Lady Peace (Healthy in Paranoid Times). I plan to pick up all of those, and the new Iron Maiden live album, which ought to get me some interesting looks from the record store clerk.

September, by contrast, is great. We start the month with Elbow’s Leaders of the Free World, which promises to change not a thing from the laconic, majestic first two records. The following week, the 13th, is like an avalanche. Ready? We have the new Paul McCartney, Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, which he did almost entirely solo (like his first couple of records), with Nigel Godrich producing. We have the second of three planned Ryan Adams albums, called (fittingly) September. We have the new Sigur Ros, which has an actual title this time (Takk), and actual song names. Word is that they ditched their made-up language, too, and sung in Icelandic, not that anyone on these shores will notice the difference.

But wait! We also have the solo debut from Rob “Catherine Wheel” Dickinson, called Fresh Wine for the Horses. We have the seventh Tracy Chapman album, Where You Live, which has some good advance buzz. And we have, finally, the long-delayed release of the new Bloodhound Gang album, which was supposed to be called Heavy Flow. I loved that title, as it refers to both rapping and menstruating, but they have changed it to the similar-sounding Hefty Fine, presumably to avoid the very thing it describes.

We’re not done yet. September 20 sees the new Coheed and Cambria, which sports this ass-acher of a title: Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. I’m serious. That’s really the title. Even Neil Peart would choke on that one, but the C&C guys often live up to such pretensions. We shall see. In direct contrast, we also have Def Leppard, who have given their collection of covers the most concise name possible: Yeah.

Rounding out the month is System of a Down, who hits on the 27th with Hypnotize, the second half of their double record. Also on the 27th is Ca Ira, a double-disc opera (not the rock type) from Roger Waters. It’s all strings and high singing, and it’s about the French revolution, so you can imagine how excited I am to hear it. (Note sarcasm.) I’ll check it out, because it’s Waters, but he needs to do another Amused to Death before he grows too old to be pissed off anymore…

And that’s it, or at least, that’s all I’ve managed to nail down to firm release dates and titles. As usual, this list is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather a small overview of what you can expect to read about in more depth in this very space for the next few months. If you have any recommendations for me of things I might like that I failed to mention, send me an email. If you’re writing me because you’re angry that I’m not going to review Fat Joe or the posthumous Ol’ Dirty Bastard album, don’t waste your time.

* * * * *

And finally, the flying spaghetti monster.

Surely many of you have read about the Kansas school board, and their attempts to get the theory of intelligent design (which they would not like to hear called a “theory”) taught in science classes along with evolution. They have gone so far as to propose changing the definition of science – traditionally, the word has referred to theories based on observable and repeatable phenomena, but the Kansans would like to expand that definition to include religious beliefs as valid alternatives. All well and good, if it weren’t a public school system, and if “science class” were the place to teach, you know, non-science.

Anyway, this is the finest and funniest response I have seen. A flying spaghetti monster is just as observable and provable as an invisible man in the sky, as far as science classes are concerned, so I say equal time for all. Thanks to Chris L’Etoile for sending me this.

And with that, I bid you adieu. Fountains of Wayne next week, honest.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I got a lot of raised eyebrows and half-mouthed chuckles when I told people I was going to a Christian music festival.

Not just any Christian music festival, mind you, but the strangest of the strange. Cornerstone Festival is a gathering of thousands, of all ages, from everywhere. They congregate in the middle of nowhere, Illinois (actually a small farm town called Bushnell), pitch tents and listen to live bands and speakers for five days. It’s covered in dust, usually about 100 degrees, features about a dozen stages and a couple hundred bands, and is an hour from the nearest interstate. Mention all this, and then throw in the Christian thing, and, well… chuckles.

I didn’t get laughs from people I know well – my love of certain bands in the spiritual pop realm is well documented, and I’ve been to Cornerstone before, so my friends know what attracts me, even though most of them wouldn’t be caught dead there. Casually mentioning my plans to attend Cornerstone to those here in Illinois, though, was almost like handing out a Jack Chick tract. People look at you differently, and expect that you’re going to start evangelizing, and speaking in tongues.

Okay, it’s not that bad, but I understand what repulses people. The dark and ugly sides of Christian culture are often only drowned out by the crass and superficial ones, and the latter, at least, was on full display last weekend in Bushnell. Perhaps it’s because I don’t come from a religious background, and I don’t possess what most would consider deep, abiding faith, but I found the marketing of Jesus to be all-pervasive and irritating at this year’s festival.

Part of it is that I had been before – three years ago, I attended the fest to see the Lost Dogs and the Choir live for the first time, and the giddiness of that turned Cornerstone into a magical wonderland for me. The band members just milled about with the regular people, the atmosphere was positive and brotherly, and the thrill of seeing these musicians I’d been enjoying, in many cases, for more than a decade live and on stage was intoxicating. It was a new world.

This year was more of an eye-opener. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have a genuine faith in Jesus Christ and then come to a place where his name is traded for cash on a regular basis. I don’t pray, I don’t go to church, and I have a relatively open view of God and faith, and even I got upset at some of it. It’s been reduced to a marketing demographic. Christian values are now a brand like any other – how else to explain a booth selling underwear emblazoned with the slogan, “You ain’t getting any?” (Of course, I contend that if you’re close enough to read the slogan on someone’s underwear, you’re probably getting something.)

Christian t-shirts. Christian hats. Christian buttons and pins. All of which do to the complexities of faith what George W. Bush does to the intricacies of world politics – reduces them to a sound byte, a slogan, something catchy and memorable that’s all surface and sheen. The same faith-veneer attitude pervaded the bands on the main stage this year (which I completely avoided). “Artists” like TobyMac and Relient K, branded as Christian to target-market their latest big-money venture, pumping out shiny, cheerleaders-for-Christ crap that’s as disposable as anything in the mainstream market. They have nothing to say – their music and lyrics knowingly steer clear of difficult topics and genuine expression, aiming for a particular church-going, middle America demographic that laps it up.

It is possible to go the entire weekend at Cornerstone without hearing a single serious, thought-provoking word about Jesus Christ. That was fine with me a few years ago, when I would try to convince people that the Choir, for example, wasn’t “that Christian.” I have since discovered, of course, that the expression of faith bands like the Choir offer is a large part of what I love about them. The difference between expressing faith honestly, like the Choir, and doing jumping jacks for Jesus, like TobyMac, is like a line in the sand. With a few exceptions, for the main stage bands, Christianity is a business tool. I can’t speak to their personal motivations, but it would be hard to argue against their use of Christianity as a selling point – “Now with 40% more Jesus than before!”

For guys like Terry Taylor and Bill Mallonee, just to name a couple, faith is part of who they are. It runs in their blood, and it comes out in their music because it has to. To do less would be dishonest. But it’s so much a part of them that they don’t have to sing about it all the time. Their songs and records are the furthest thing from calculated, and they’re often about how difficult life can be, which is why you won’t hear them on Christian radio. You also won’t hear them on mainstream radio, because they made the mistake early on of allying themselves with the Christian industry, and no matter what else they do now, they’re considered gospel artists. (Seriously – could anyone in their right mind call the 77s a gospel band?) They share the same fate as most honest artists who don’t calculatedly stake out a demographic – they’re ignored, and their music goes unheard.

Cornerstone is the only gig of the year for some of these bands, and the only place one can go to see them. The over-commercialism is like a buzzing fridge after a while – you just have to ignore it, or you end up railing against it. Perhaps the funniest response I saw came from Nick White, drummer for Colorado jokesters Roper. White apparently found the booth where they were selling pink baseball caps that read, “I Heart Christian Boys,” and he bought one and wore it for the rest of the festival. Too cool. But there were girls wearing those hats seriously, along with boys wearing shirts that read, “I’m in love with a man” on the front and, “His name is Jesus” on the back. I mean, who comes up with things like that?

* * * * *

Cornerstone itself seemed to draw a line between young and old this year, which bothered me a bit. Over time, the festival has skewed younger and younger, and this year the organizers seemed to plop all the long-running bands and older musicians under one tent. Naturally, this is where I spent most of my weekend, away from the glossy pop and screaming hardcore that made up the other 80 percent of the fest. I was disappointed, though, that the schedule often separated the audiences, so that a band like the Choir played at the same time as Copeland, for instance. Copeland is great, but I wish some of the younger fans who saw them play could have seen the Choir. The show would have made new fans of all of them.

I can’t begrudge the new bands, though, because some of them are really good. I discovered a few that I plan to follow from now on. Lovedrug, for example, played the first show I saw, and they were marvelous. They, like their label-mates Copeland, traffic in dramatic, piano-laced rock with swooping melodies and huge orchestration. Their album, Pretend You’re Alive, is excellent, especially “Blackout” and the should-be-a-hit “Rocknroll,” and comes packaged with a beautiful booklet that’s worth the price all by itself. It’s self-consciously arty, but like Copeland’s great In Motion, it delivers.

John Davis, meanwhile, is not a new artist, but for most of the attendees of his Saturday afternoon show, he may as well have been. Davis was the singer/guitarist of Superdrag for most of the last decade, but his self-titled solo album puts his newfound faith in the forefront. (No pun intended, for those of you who follow this industry.) Every song is about Jesus, in the most direct and obvious way, and one might be tempted to classify this record with the DC Talks of the world, if not for its classic pop sound. Still, this album didn’t thrill me upon first listen. (And now I can’t seem to find my copy, so I can’t even give it a second go.)

But man, seeing Davis play this stuff, it’s obvious what it means to him. The songs are mostly Brian Wilson meets the blues, but his performance elevated them to sublime levels. “Jesus Gonna Build Me a Home” was a highlight, as was “Salvation,” and you can’t go wrong with his choice of guitar player – Sixpence None the Richer’s resident genius Matt Slocum. The show made me want to reassess the record, and as soon as I locate it, I will. Davis has slammed some doors with this album – whether Superdrag fans will follow him down this path, a la Neal Morse and his old fans, remains to be seen. But it’s obvious that Davis is doing this because he wants to, which instantly makes it more interesting and genuine.

Speaking of genuine, the most intense show I saw all weekend came courtesy of David Eugene Edwards, also known as Woven Hand. Edwards used to be part of rock trio 16 Horsepower, but his new project is much scarier. Edwards took the stage armed with an arsenal of stringed instruments and a vintage microphone, accompanied by amazing drummer Ordy Garrison (who looks just like Hugh Laurie playing Dr. House), and proceeded to spook the willies out of everyone.

Woven Hand’s material is sometimes traditional-sounding, sometimes progressive, and always foreboding. Live, Edwards spits and snarls his words, never moving from his seated position, but firing death rays from his eyes. His lower lip was filled with sunflower seeds, and I was close enough to him that every once in a while, one would fly out and strike me in the face. From that vantage point, Edwards is incredible to watch, and I would bet that you could set him on fire while he’s performing and he wouldn’t even notice. He and Garrison communicated so well, and played so tightly, that I hope the White Stripes were taking notes – this is how to pull off a guitar-drums duo in a captivating way. On record, he’s not as exciting, but his Old Testament lyrics come to the fore, and it’s still scary.

It seems like every time I go to Cornerstone, I discover a new band that smacks me upside the head and makes me pay attention. Last time it was Ester Drang, who this year played an atmospheric set of new songs from their forthcoming Rocinate album. I’m now physically excited for this record – the new songs are dreamier and longer than those on Infinite Keys, but still have the same sense of melody and dynamics. Drang is a trio now, but their huge sound hasn’t shrunk at all. This is going to be a good album.

This time, though, the discovery of the festival was Mutemath, a quartet featuring Paul Meany, singer and keyboardist from the now-defunct Earthsuit. That band was really good, but Mutemath is excellent. Live they sound like Radiohead doing Police covers, with electric pianos, frenetic beats and Meany’s Sting-like voice atop it all. Their show was the last one I saw, and I hummed several of their songs for hours afterward.

Unfortunately, on record they’re not as amazing, but they’re still good. Their debut EP, Reset, features seven songs, and no two of them sound alike. The giant pop explosion of “Control” is probably the best thing here, but the Earthsuit-esque reggae beat of “Peculiar People” and the bizarre instrumental title song aren’t far behind. The sound is a little too slicked up – I’d have loved this if I hadn’t seen them live first, and I hope the imminent full-length captures more of the energy and power of their concert. They played several new songs that were superior to the ones on the EP, so here’s hoping. Even with all the gloss, though, Reset is one of the best things I bought at the festival.

* * * * *

While I always enjoy discovering new music, I went to Cornerstone to see some old favorites, and none of them disappointed.

The Violet Burning always puts on a great show. Michael Pritzl is a born performer, and his emotional songs and delivery just draw you in. He was battling a two-day illness at the time of his Friday night show, but he gave everything he had anyway, and made a bunch of new fans in the process. His new Violet Burning lineup – bassist Daryl Dawson, guitarist Doug Heckman and drummer Jason Lord Mize, all of whom look very similar – manages to capture the fullness of TVB albums brilliantly. The style is straightforward, dramatic and openhearted, so you need that skyward-reaching sound, and this band delivers it.

Pritzl himself is just incredible to watch, whether he’s slashing his way through glam-rock like “Berlin Kitty” or soaring on the beautiful waves of “Slowa.” He puts everything out there, and undoubtedly a show like the one he put on Friday night leaves him drained, but he still spent 45 minutes afterwards chatting with fans. Both the concert and the new live album, The Loudest Sound in My Heart, draw heavily from one of his best (and most neglected) records, Demonstrates Plastic and Elastic, and the concert ended with “Gorgeous,” which was.

Pritzl’s most recent releases display many different sides to what he does, from the computer-rock of The Gravity Show, to the slicker radio pop of This Is the Moment, to the haunting acoustics of Hollow Songs. And now the live album brings another side, more of a classic old-school TVB dramatic edge. Even the newer songs, layered and smoothed out on record, took flight on stage, and they sound great on the live album. (The Gravity Show’s “Aching” steps forward here as one of Pritzl’s best songs.) It sounds like an emotional rebirth for one of this little corner of the music world’s best performers.

The Lost Dogs took the stage after TVB, and brought with them another tale of illness – Mike Roe had apparently spent the night in the emergency room with an inflamed lung. He looked like death, but he played well, and joked along with his usual snarkiness – no one who didn’t know about his illness would have noticed the difference. The Dogs have become kind of the main band for Roe, Terry Taylor and Derri Daugherty (of the 77s, Daniel Amos and the Choir, respectively), and they put on their typically excellent set, playing tunes from their last few records. (Nothing before Gift Horse, unfortunately.)

One of the best choices the Dogs have made in recent years is to bring Choir drummer Steve Hindalong into their ranks. He’s one of the best percussionists you’ll ever see, and he brings an energy to the Dogs live show that seems to invigorate them. The trio has honed their vaudeville act to perfection – Taylor is the cranky genius, Daugherty the meek yet dry one, and Roe the mischievous troublemaker – and it’s to their credit that they’ve made room for Hindalong’s personality. Even if you don’t know the history – they’re the spiritual Traveling Wilburys, coming from respected rock bands to play Americana and folk music – you’ll laugh at their antics.

Their new album, Island Dreams, is a Lost Dogs record in name only. It’s an instrumental collection of beach tunes, beautifully played and recorded, but it bears no resemblance to anything they’ve done. It recalls Roe’s Daydream project, actually – soothing tones, great guitar work, some fine vocals from Christine Glass Byrd. It’s not something I will pull down off the shelf very often, and it was likely made just to have something to sell at Cornerstone, but for what it is, it’s very good. And Taylor’s liner notes are hysterical.

* * * * *

Saturday brought Jeff Elbel to the stage, which isn’t quite accurate – Elbel had been on stage all weekend up to that point, tuning guitars, plugging and unplugging cords, and occasionally playing with other artists. Jeff is everybody’s roadie most years, but this time he was manager of the Gallery Stage (dubbed the Old Farts’ Tent by many). Elbel sported the same haircut and sunglasses he had last time I saw him, three years ago, and he and his band Ping put on another great show. Elbel is obviously influenced by Terry Taylor, and his songs are usually clever and silly.

Ping’s new album, The Eleventh Hour Storybook, was on sale at the festival, but Elbel took the interesting step of giving a copy away to everyone who came to see him play. I’m often afraid that he takes his self-deprecation a little far – he’s much better than he seems to think he is, as the new album attests. “You Little Victim” is a hell of a tune, as is “Getting Ahead of Myself,” and the sweet “All in All” is one of his best. The lyrics to “Goodnight Rabbit” are downright brilliant. Even when he goes novelty, as on “Bark Along With Cody” (a minor hit on the Dr. Demento show, believe it or not), he’s enjoyable. Mostly, Elbel just sounds so grateful to be allowed to make music, and it’s a treat to listen to someone with that attitude.

Bill Mallonee is a little more bitter, but he has probably 20 years on Elbel, and six times as many albums. I got the chance to talk with him at some length – he’s a well-spoken, intelligent guy who’s just been screwed around a few times by life and the music biz. It’s a shame, too, because he’s a terrific songwriter, and an amazingly prolific one. He disbanded the Vigilantes of Love in 2001, and since then he’s released six albums and two EPs. This year alone has seen two full-lengths, with a third on the way by Christmas. He’s trying to outdo Ryan Adams in both the quality and quantity departments, and he may just do it.

His new one, released in time for the festival, is called Hit and Run, and it was recorded in one day. The liner notes compare it to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, and that’s pretty close – acoustic Americana songs about faith and despair, played and sung with Mallonee’s trademark emotion. It was obviously quick – at several points, Bill checks on the recording or announces songs to the engineer – but its snapshot quality only adds to its power. This is perhaps the most up-front and raw document Mallonee has yet released, and its nine songs could have carried a fully produced effort. Writing-wise, this is in no way a toss-off.

It also ably demonstrates the difference between music that expresses faith and music that professes holiness. The first song, “Flowers,” features the following lyric: “We all need new beginnings, first steps make you better, and maybe you’re just a prayer away from getting your shit together.” To me, that’s a very Christian line, a true expression of yearning, but to the operators of your local Family Christian Bookstore, it’s enough to get the record banned. That’s the beauty of someone like Mallonee – he is who he is, and he does what he does, and he knows a great line when he hears one.

Here’s another. During his Saturday night show, Mallonee played several new songs slated for Permafrost, his forthcoming album. One of them included a line that’s stuck with me ever since I heard it: “Make my heart beat in time with yours so I’ll know I haven’t died.” Bill Mallonee keeps coming up with lines like that one, and good melodies in which to set them, and I hope some day he gets his due as a songwriter. As an artist, he deserves much better than he’s received.

* * * * *

Which leaves me with the best show of the weekend.

The Choir took the stage Friday at midnight. Jeff Elbel introduced them as “the band of our dreams,” and I couldn’t have put it any better. It’s no secret that they are my favorite band, bar none, and every concert they play could be their last one – they haven’t been on stage since I last saw them, three years ago. But this time, they have an amazing new album, called O How the Mighty Have Fallen, which seemed to signal a rebirth. The show bore that out.

They opened with new songs, but quickly dug deep into their catalog, pulling out ‘80s classics (in my world, at least) like “Consider” and “To Cover You.” They played “Sad Face,” they played “A Sentimental Song,” they played “Love Your Mind,” and they jammed out my favorite new song, “Mercy Will Prevail.” If I had to devise a dream set for the Choir, one that would please old fans like me and win over new converts (all of which were at the Copeland show, no doubt), it would have been pretty close to this one.

Bassist Tim Chandler couldn’t make the show, so they called on the aforementioned Matt Slocum to fill in on both bass and cello. He was excellent, of course, as was new Choir-ite Marc Byrd, who provided all the pretty guitar noise that Derri Daugherty used to make. Byrd has been playing with the Choir live since 1996 or so, and he adds so much to their sound – Daugherty can concentrate on the rhythm and the vocals while Byrd fills the space with gorgeous atmospherics. They’ve become even more of a pop band through the years, and Byrd lets them strike up the melodies without losing the float music that is their trademark.

After a rousing round of applause, the band came out for the encore, Daugherty quipping, “We were going to come back anyway, but thanks for clapping.” They launched into a huge version of “Circle Slide,” but then took it down for an acoustic finale that included “To Rescue Me,” the final song on the new album. It’s perhaps the finest faith-filled number they have ever written, a beautiful expression of their need, their hunger for grace, and their performance of it left all the so-called worship music I heard over the weekend in the dust. This, this is what I’m after when I listen to Christian music – not the empty praise of God, nor the avoidance of God, but the honest and true prayer, the search for something deeper and more beautiful.

This band should play more often. I would swear to this – there was no better band playing anywhere Friday night. I say this a lot when it comes to the Choir, but I just feel so grateful that I got to experience it. They, along with Bill Mallonee and the Lost Dogs and the other Gallery Stage bands I love, transcend the very idea of Christian music – they’re just artists, and they sing for everyone, not just the faithful. I am living proof of that – I still have not managed the faith these guys have, but their music has spoken to me and meant more to me, spiritually speaking, than any church ever has. The Choir makes me feel closer to beauty, to wonder, to God. What more could anyone ask for?

* * * * *

A couple of quick things before I set this beast to rest. I got the chance to speak with Marc Byrd after the Choir show, and we talked about his new project, called Hammock. This is the most gorgeous float music I’ve heard in a long time – he makes his guitar sound like clouds and stars. If you like Henry Frayne’s stuff, or Sigur Ros, you should love this. Hammock has a full-length called Kenotic, and a new EP called Stranded Under Endless Sky. Both are terrific, and Byrd (the nicest guy in person) says that more is on the way. Follow the link below and hear for yourself.

Even with all the great music I heard, one of my favorite Cornerstone experiences was hearing J. Robert Parks of the Phantom Tollbooth speak about movies. He took aim at so-called Christian criticism, speaking with the understanding that being offended is not a critical response. It was great to hear a critic from a Christian website talk about engaging the films, instead of listing their naughty parts and calling it good. I’ve read some of his work since then, and it’s worth a look. Go here.

Special thanks to my Cornerstone companion, Chris Callaway. I haven’t seen Chris in a long time – I think the last time we spent any time together was in eighth grade – and we’ve both grown up in surprising ways. It was fun reconnecting with him, and we have a lot of in-jokes from the trip that I haven’t mentioned. (“You stepped in vomit!” Pastor Bob’s cheese. Bill’s backpack of lyrics. Econo-Lodge, where you spend the night…) Chris and I were in a very bad band in junior high, but he’s gone on to play bass for a very good one called Crash Orchid. Hear them here.

Additional thanks to all the great people I met, especially my Save the CD cohorts, Dr. Tony Shore and Dave Danglis. Tony, especially, went out of his way to introduce me to people, usually accompanied by a rave about this very site. (Dig his blog, no doubt updated shortly with embarrassing pictures of yours truly, here.) It was also cool to meet Jim Worthen of Tooth and Nail, and Commander Cote, Jiminy Cricket and Woggy from the DA board. (Perhaps a return visit is in order…) And I can’t forget Chris “Grandfather Rock” MacIntosh, DJ extraordinaire. You were all gracious and kind, and I thank you.

Okay, links. If anything above has piqued your interest, here is where you can find it all:

Lovedrug: www.lovedrugmusic.com.

John Davis: www.johndavismusic.com.

Woven Hand: www.wovenhand.net.

Ester Drang: www.esterdrang.com.

Mutemath: www.mutemath.com.

The Violet Burning: www.thevioletburning.com.

The Lost Dogs: www.thelostdogs.com.

Jeff Elbel and Ping: www.marathonrecords.com/ping.

Bill Mallonee: www.billmallonee.net.

The Choir: www.thechoir.net.

Hammock: www.hammockmusic.com.

* * * * *

Next week, something shorter, with Fountains of Wayne.

See you in line Tuesday morning.