I hate the White Stripes.

If you know me, you know that’s just something I take for granted, like saying George Bush is evil, or Coke with Lime is the best drink ever. Simple truths, certain in the unshakeable opinions and impressions that have formed them. I hate the White Stripes. I hate Jack White in his stupid hats with his stupid goatee, I hate his sister-slash-girfriend-slash-who-gives-a-shit Meg White, with her vacuous look and elementary skin-pounding. I hate the two of them together, with their red and white color scheme and their unwillingness to get off my television.

But perhaps I’m just feeling a little more reflective as I get older. I never used to do this, form such adamant opinions without fully exploring the band in question. And I take other people to task for doing the same thing – rejecting bands I love because one word in one song put them off, or because they don’t hear them on the radio enough. I’ve given bands far less acclaimed than the White Stripes chance after chance to impress me, but as of this morning, I’d only heard three full songs by Jack and Meg more than once. Still, I felt like I had the right to express venomous hatred towards them.

And that’s just not right.

I’ve never really given them a chance, which many of their fans will delight in telling me. I first heard them when most everyone else did – when “Fell in Love With a Girl” became obscenely popular in the midst of the garage band revival. I didn’t like the song, and I didn’t understand the acclaim, so I never bought White Blood Cells. Same with Elephant – I heard “Seven Nation Army,” didn’t like it, and never heard the record. This happens a lot – I didn’t like the Backstreet Boys singles, either, so I didn’t bother buying those albums. I don’t feel guilty about that.

The Whites scored the apathy hat trick with me when “Blue Orchid” hit the airwaves. I didn’t like it, so I haven’t bought Get Behind Me Satan, despite dozens of four-star reviews. I did give a cursory listen in the record store, but let’s be honest – “cursory” is a kind way of putting it. I skipped around, hearing the first few seconds of five or six tracks, and nothing reached out and grabbed me. But honestly, what was I expecting? I have been dismissive and judgmental, no question. If there’s a reason for all the acclaim the Stripes get, I’m not going to hear it by intro-scanning around one of their records. I need to immerse myself in the White Stripes.

Of course, the prospect of that is akin to eye surgery for me. The Stripes have five albums, totaling more than three and a half hours. This would be an endurance test, but a good one, one that challenged my assumptions and exposed me to new sounds. Perhaps it would enlighten me regarding the endless oceans of hype that surround this band – are all the four-star reviews wrong? Are they right? Could they be? Could the band that wrote “Fell in Love With a Girl” actually make a four-star album (or three)? What are these people talking about?

Here’s where my faithful friend and correspondent Erin Kennedy comes in. Erin lives just outside of Detroit, and for the year and a half I’ve known her, she’s been positively evangelical about the White Stripes. I’ve been amusingly puzzled by the fact that, despite being a Stripes fan, she has otherwise excellent musical taste. The question, then: what is she hearing in this band that I’m not? So, at my request, Erin burned the five Stripes albums for me. She noted that I “seem to have already made my mind up,” of course, but she did it anyway. I promised to listen with an open mind, and admit I was wrong if I ended up liking the CDs.

Anyway, here goes. I’m writing this real-time, as I listen to the Stripes records, one right after the other. Perhaps not how they were intended to be heard, but I’m on a tight deadline – I have a week-long music festival to get ready for, and no time to wait for new releases on Tuesday. It’s Jack and Meg or nothing. Who the hell will be interested in reading this, I’m not sure, but here’s a peek inside my head as I give the White Stripes the old college try.

* * * * *

I am nearly done with the self-titled debut – I wrote the above while listening to it. I was sort of surprised to learn that they had two unheralded releases before White Blood Cells, which tells you how little I know about the band. Anyway, I’m impressed – the thing lumbered to life with “Jimmy the Exploder,” and has lurched forward on monumental blues riffs ever since. This can’t be the same band – “Fell in Love With a Girl” represents a huge downslide from this record. Their version of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breakin’ Down” is a monster, and the dirty blues of “Suzy Lee” works well.

There’s an energy here that I feel like I’m hearing for the first time, too. They sound like a garage band warming up while they wait for their bassist to arrive, true, but Meg obviously comes from the John Bonham school of drum-mauling – quarter notes as hard as you can, with both hands – and Jack can really play those old blues progressions. His voice is, to put it kindly, unhinged – he sometimes sounds like he’s just escaped from Bellevue, but it works in this setting. The whole record is badly produced, full of tape hiss and amplifier hum, and all it would need is pops and crackles to sound like an old 78.

Nothing here is groundbreaking, or worth the hype, but it is enjoyable. Jack slips into the old spiritual “John the Revelator” on “Cannon,” he does a fine job with Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee,” and he acquits himself pretty well on piano on “St. James Infirmary.” The whole thing is like an old-time blues rock band just waking up. Needless to say, I like this one. So far, so not bad… on to De Stijl.

* * * * *

The second Stripes album has a Dutch name, De Stijl, which means “the style.” It doesn’t start too well – “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)” is depressingly boring, but “Hello Operator” has the energy of the debut. Still, already, something’s missing, and I don’t know what it is. It could be that the budget obviously has gone up. I don’t know.

Whenever I ask someone why they like the White Stripes, I always hear the same word: “minimalist.” It’s true, so far – Jack plays the bluesy riffs on guitar while Meg bangs the drums, and that’s it. I just wonder when minimalism became a virtue, when spending a weekend on your album became a goal. I’m having a difficult time thinking of these finished White Stripes recordings as anything other than demos, because that’s how they sound. They’re incomplete.

And that’s probably just me. I don’t consider Led Zeppelin II to be incomplete, but it’s just as raw and unpolished. (I have to stop here and say that “Little Bird” is undoubtedly the best thing I have heard so far, all slide guitar and kickass riffs. Really cool.) I wonder if these songs would work as well with full production, and I don’t mean glossy shine, but just a full sound that doesn’t feel like it was recorded live with a four-track. Just based on the first two albums, they probably wouldn’t – the moments of fullness, like the piano on “Apple Blossom,” are pleasant surprises because they contrast with the loud, sloppy remainder. (And oh yeah, the tape hiss is back in full effect. Maybe the budget didn’t go up that much…)

There’s what sounds like a violin on “I’m Bound to Pack it Up,” but without liner notes, I can’t be sure. I’m on song five, and no two songs sound the same – a far cry from the numbing sameness I was expecting. Again, this sounds like a different band than the one I profess to hate. I’m on their run through Son House’s “Death Letter” now, and it’s also pretty cool, though after two songs full of other sounds, the guitar-drums thing does feel a little limited here. I think I like Jack best when he’s playing slide. He’s a really hot bar blues player.

“Truth Doesn’t Make a Noise” really reinforces my point. It’s a decent little song, with a cool lead guitar line and some pounding piano, but the recording is slipshod. Meg loses the beat a couple of times (which is nothing new for her), and the whole thing sounds like a demo. A simpler, bluesier song like “A Boy’s Best Friend” works better, because you can’t imagine a fuller, better-sounding version. But “Truth” is trying to be an ornate pop song, and it’s not working. De Stijl is crumbling a bit near the end – it doesn’t sustain the unflaggable energy of the first one.

Jack and Meg get back to bluesy business by the finale (“Let’s Build a Home” rocks), but it’s clear this is their sophomore slump. There are things I admire about De Stijl, especially in the first half, but the core sound is straining already. Which doesn’t bode well for White Blood Cells, as it contains at least one song I know I can’t stand.

* * * * *

The third album starts like Black Sabbath, moves into the Byrds and then lands on down-home hootenanny rock. That’s just the first couple songs. The variety doesn’t necessarily mean I like the songs – “Hotel Yorba” sounds like the soundtrack to a night of cow-tipping and sodomy. Already the simple songs have gotten simpler, and three songs in, the blues influence (my favorite part of the Stripes sound thus far) is all but absent. The best thing about “I’m Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman” is its title – the song is classic rock of the easiest kind. And “Fell in Love With a Girl” is next.

Yep, I still hate it. Thankfully it’s less than two minutes long. The interesting thing to me, now that I can contextualize “Fell in Love With a Girl,” is that the Stripes got caught up in the garage band thing when they, at least to this point, had little in common with it. “Fell in Love” is an anomaly – a rushed-together (well, more than usual) burst of simple-minded punk. It sounds like an afterthought, especially in contrast with the first two albums.

But White Blood Cells is continuing in the straight-ahead rock vein, instead of the bluesy one. Half of the first side is filler, the other half is uninspired. There is another song I know – “We’re Going to Be Friends,” which was in a commercial, I think. I had no idea this little ditty was the White Stripes, but it wouldn’t have convinced me to check them out if I had. “Offend in Every Way” is the first song here I really like, and it’s at track 10. I like it mostly for the always-moving guitar line.

Jack and Meg got their shit together by the finale – the drama of “I Think I Smell a Rat,” the actual chorus and harmonies on “I Can’t Wait,” the blues lament of “I Can Learn.” In the end, though, White Blood Cells has too much filler, and too much bland rock. When the Stripes play that sort of thing, they sound like a second-rate Nirvana, and I have little patience for first-rate Nirvana. Most of this record sounds like Jack White pretending he can’t really play, for some reason. Odd that this is the album that started all the hoopla, because it’s my least favorite of the three so far.

* * * * *

Elephant opens with “Seven Nation Army,” and what sounds like bass guitar. I like it a bit more than I did on first listen – the riff is kind of cool, but it is repetitive. The Stripes seem to have settled on a blues-punk sound here, but what’s striking immediately about Elephant is that it sports that fully produced sound I alluded to earlier. There’s overdubbing, vocal effects, and an overall crispness to the sound that’s like a whole new thing. The Queen harmonies on “There’s No Home For You Here” made me sit up and take notice. The song is simple, but the arrangement is surprising, especially coming from a band known for its minimalism.

They’re obviously trying everything they can to shake things up, and I admire that. I wonder if Burt Bacharach has heard their slam through his “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself.” Meg takes shaky lead vocals on “In the Cold, Cold Night,” a return to the bluesy stuff, complete with organ. “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket” is a sweet folk song, all Jack, and it finds him reaching for a falsetto he doesn’t quite have. And “Ball and Biscuit” is kickass and bluesy, with some killer leads, but way too long.

That brings up a problem I’m having with Elephant – this one is the most restrained, energy-deficient Stripes album I’ve heard, and part of that may be that every song goes on about minute too long. The songs on the first two albums all hovered around the two minute mark, and they were all pretty much the right length. Songs on Elephant average around three and a half minutes, except for “Ball and Biscuit,” which leaps over seven. This just isn’t a band that can carry seven minutes. They need to jump in, kick ass, knock some tables over and go home in 120 seconds or less. I’m on “Little Acorns” now, and it’s interminable at four-plus minutes.

Yeah, Elephant isn’t really doing it for me. The Stripes sound caught between making a major-label studio record and trying to maintain their raw, minimalist thing. I admire some of their choices, but as a whole, this record is too long and too shaky to work. The last few tracks are good, especially “The Air Near My Fingers,” but it’s not enough to redeem the dead spots. I like about half of Elephant, and if they’d saved the half of White Blood Cells that I liked, too, and made one record out of it, I might really enjoy it.

* * * * *

Which brings us to Get Behind Me Satan, the fifth album, released earlier this month. Named after something Jesus said while being tempted, and made in two weeks – it would be easy enough to see the Satan in the title as their own escalating popularity, and this album as a big middle finger to it. I’ve been spoiled a bit, so I know to expect a departure in tone on this one, in the form of more pianos and toned percussion. And I’m glad I know that, because it opens with “Blue Orchid,” the very definition of more of the same.

But then… man, this record just takes off, in some surprising ways. “The Nurse” is off-kilter and captivating, full of marimbas and short bursts of guitar. “My Doorbell” is too much fun (at least for the first two of its four minutes), silly and piano-driven. “Forever for Her” is kind of a Meat Loaf ballad, and it takes some neat turns. “Little Ghost” is as hayseed as “Hotel Yorba,” but a lot cooler, with vocal overdubs piled atop one another until Jack and Meg sound like a revival band.

I don’t even mind that the Stripes have completely given up on their guitar-drums duo sound here, because they’ve finally broken through and found a new place to go. There’s a gospel influence here, some Prince, a little Little Feat, and a whole lot of very cool rock. The songs are just as simple as they’ve always been, but the new settings have invigorated Jack and Meg, and it was always the energy that mattered. I know I’ve only been listening for four hours, but I feel like I’ve taken this six-year journey with the band, and arrived here, and it’s not a bad place to wind up.

The most surprising moment? When “Instinct Blues” kicks in – it sounds like the bluesy, powerful stuff on the first couple of records, just what I was looking for then, but it feels so out of place on this one. This is such a strange little album, very reminiscent of early Fiery Furnaces, and even though some of the same weaknesses are here (simple songs that go on too long), the vibe is very different and much improved. I’m on the mercurial shifts that make up the chorus of “Take Take Take” now, and if the band keeps this up, this will be my favorite White Stripes album.

(Waits 12 minutes.)

And they did. The slide guitar blues of “Red Rain” is what pushed it over – ironic, because it’s the same type of song as “Instinct Blues,” except this one explodes and implodes at regular intervals, and includes a toy piano. It’s strange and compelling, probably the apex of their blues-rock stuff. The piano-vocal “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” is sweet, but almost an afterthought, and Jack still can’t rock the falsetto. But yeah, this is a really good White Stripes album.

So it worked. I quite like the first and latest records by this band – if I had been a fan from the beginning, I might have dropped off during the middle, but I’d have been right back with Get Behind Me Satan. The Stripes will never be my favorite band, and I wouldn’t award any of these albums four stars, but I can understand now what everyone’s been talking about. And who knows, I may actually buy the next one…

It’s official. I no longer completely hate the White Stripes.

* * * * *

Next week, my report from the Cornerstone festival. Big thanks to Erin Kennedy for making this week’s ramble possible.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s been brought to my attention that Spin Magazine just published another of those lists I hate.

This one isn’t likely to get the same venomous reaction from me as the Rolling Stone lists of last year, in which the writers purported to rank the best albums and songs OF ALL TIME. Spin has limited theirs to the 100 best records of the last 20 years, something I’ve been tempted to do at one time or another. And I agree with their top choice, Radiohead’s OK Computer. I proclaimed it the best album of the past 20 years when it was released in 1997, and I haven’t heard anything as ambitious, melodic and brilliant since. (Not even from Radiohead, who tunneled up their own arses immediately thereafter.)

These lists are silly, of course, and only good to you if you like pointless arguing. I do, as long as it’s about the music and not about the cultural significance of same, which is my big pet peeve with these lists. And illustrating the point, as ever, is goddamn Nirvana at number three. You can read my earlier rant about Nevermind and its Jedi mind trick-like ability to convince otherwise knowledgeable critics that it’s, like, the best record ever here. I repeat myself too much as it is.

But Saint Cobain’s post-mortem ascendance to Rock God status brings up an interesting question. Suppose, just for a second, that it had been Billy Corgan and not Cobain who took his own life at the height of his popularity – say, in 1996, after Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, but before the unfortunate downslide of Adore and Machina. And suppose that Cobain had lived on, taking Nirvana through another three albums of diminishing quality and then launching a solo career that tarnished his legacy even further. Do you think Siamese Dream or Mellon Collie would be in Rolling Stone’s top three albums OF ALL TIME? ‘Cause I do.

I also think they’d deserve it more than Nevermind. Say what you will about Corgan, but he’s a talented guy, pulsing with vision, and when the Pumpkins were at the top of their game, they delivered. Even the 700 or so B-sides from Mellon Collie were pretty much terrific, and it’s a shame that he hasn’t hit a productive period like that since. Corgan will never attain Cobain status, simply because he went on past his cultural sell-by date, and had Cobain done the same thing, he would be nowhere near these lists.

The tragedy of Billy Corgan is that he still wants that level of adoration. He takes himself so deadly seriously that his posturing overshadows his genuine skill. I praised Zwan’s one album, Mary Star of the Sea, for not being the self-important solo record that Corgan could have released after the Pumpkins broke up. That record bounced along with a more carefree spirit, and it seemed to bode well for Billy’s big bald ego. Damned if I can remember a single song from it now, though, which puts it in the same company as the Pumpkins’ last efforts.

Zwan soon imploded, and Corgan seems to have taken it personally – witness his whining blog, which I refuse to link. He’s aired his dirty laundry, and taken out full-page ads begging the Pumpkins to reform. The latest chapter in his oddly public slide towards complete irrelevance is the solo album that Zwan blessedly delayed. It’s here now, it’s called TheFutureEmbrace, all one word, and it features Billy the Hairless Wonder on the front cover, doing some sort of dance with his hands. I’m sure it has some kind of Zen significance, some symbolism, but I can barely look at it without being creeped out. Something about his icy stare, his “aren’t I strange, yet brilliant” demeanor… it’s just freaky.

The cover art is, sadly, the most memorable thing about this record. The least successful thing about it is its sound: Corgan uses older synths, crappy electronic drum beats and over-reverbed guitars to approximate 1985 – odd for an album with the word “future” in its title. The drums blip and ping, and the synths would be neat if not for the endless swamp of monotone guitar noise over them. The whole thing is a badly mixed mess, and Corgan’s signature pinched whine doesn’t help matters. Only rarely does he break out of this template – closer “Strayz,” complete with “kewl” spelling, is actually a subdued whisper of an outro, and the best thing here.

The sound may have been interesting if Corgan had wrapped it around any good songs, but he’s failed on that front, too. I’ve listened to this thing three times, and looking over the track list, very few of these songs are coming to mind. “The Camera Eye” is perhaps the closest Corgan comes to crafting a melody here – the rest is just as dull as every song he’s written since Adore. Tempos mesh, the guitar drowns everything out, and it all sounds the same.

Corgan’s lyrics do nothing to aid the situation. In the booklet, seemingly random phrases have been printed in all caps, which only draws attention to their banality: “Can I give my old heart TO YOU?” “I need pain TO CHANGE MY LIFE.” “YOU ARE REAL TO ME.” It’s all so dismal, with nothing to emotionally connect you. It’s like strangely depressing static. Honestly, when the most clever line on your album is “On the ninth day God created shame,” you may want to give those lyrics another polish.

So we’ve got the melancholy, and now for the Infinite Badness. There is one song that sticks in the brain, because it’s so amazingly ill-advised that it sounds like a joke. Corgan does an echoed-out, totally serious version of the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody,” with, of all people, Robert Smith on backing vocals. To say this is a low point for both singers is just obvious. The saddest thing of all is that, while this track is too stupid to entirely work, it’s probably the best thing here, because it’s the only one with a memorable melody. If the best song on your record is one that Michael Bolton has also covered, well… I don’t know what to say.

I can’t imagine any new artist getting a contract on the strength of this record – it’s only out in every record store in the country because its author is Billy Corgan. But somewhere around 1997, his songwriting skills just… vanished. He got by on ambition and clever marketing for a while, but even that is absent from TheFutureEmbrace. It’s the shortest album Corgan has delivered since the Pumpkins’ debut, Gish, and it’s still way too long. I don’t know what he was trying to do with this album, but unless he was going for a forgettable, artless disaster, he failed miserably.

But people forget the law of diminishing returns, and the fact that it happens to most artists over time. Most likely, it would have happened to Cobain, had he lived – Nirvana would have petered out, the culture would have moved on, and Kurt would have run out of zeitgeist to hold on to. Corgan’s fate could easily have been his, sliding into self-parody and redundancy, and no amount of idolization would have stopped it. Because we have so little of his output to judge, people assume everything Cobain did later would have meant what the three Nirvana albums mean to them now.

But people thought the same thing about Elton John, and Paul McCartney, and the Rolling Stones, and all have, over time, dimmed their own lights. Billy Corgan’s journey is not a new one, just a sad one. Part of the problem is that he bought into his own hype – Corgan obviously believed the Pumpkins meant something more than their music, and encouraged that belief, so now, when all we have are a bunch of songs on a record and no Church of Corgan in which to pray to them, they seem even less than they are. And when the next generation hears Nevermind, they’re going to wonder what the big deal was, and why Siamese Dream isn’t considered at least as important. Because music is music.

And here’s some blasphemy for you: I think Dave Grohl has the right idea. He gets a lot of undeserved flak for not being Kurt Cobain, but in his post-Nirvana career, Grohl has shown a healthy, easygoing attitude about his work. He knows it’s the songs, not the angsty, artsy posing that accompanies them, and he also knows that his songs are not the world’s greatest. He would not be surprised at all to note that none of the Foo Fighters albums appear on Spin’s list. He knows he’s not important, and doesn’t cultivate an image. He is what he is.

And the Foo Fighters are what they are – an occasionally very good rock band. They have made well-crafted records (The Colour and the Shape) and forgettable toss-offs (One By One), and with their latest, In Your Honor, they’re back to making good ones. It’s an 84-minute double record, mind you, but it’s one of the most unassuming double records you’ll ever hear. 20 songs, split up into loud and not-so-loud CDs, and no filler.

The first disc (the loud one) sounds like every other Foo Fighters record, only a bit better than anything since The Colour and the Shape. The title track kicks things off with an aggressive, near-thrash beat reminiscent of Grohl’s Probot project, but the melodies storm in with the next track, “No Way Back.” “Resolve” strums along effectively, and closer “End Over End” impresses with its circular refrain. Still, nothing here is too praiseworthy – it’s just decent, radio-ready rock, led by Grohl’s everyman voice. Even when he screams, he sounds like your next door neighbor, the one who started a band.

The second disc (the not-so-loud one) is better. Grohl whips out his chamber-pop influences on several tracks, tossing in strings and mandolins here and there, and turns in another set of reliably solid tunes that don’t need distortion to hide behind. He includes “Friend of a Friend,” a Nirvana-esque song he wrote while still with that band, but the other nine show how far he’s come since those days. Especially effective is “Over and Out,” a moody quicksand pit of a song that drags you down with it. Norah Jones joins in on the graceful “Virginia Moon,” and closer “Razor” spins a web of acoustics for a fine finish.

While the idea of an acoustic Foo Fighters album may seem odd, remember that Grohl came up with the ‘90s Seattle bands, and those guys did that sort of thing all the time. See Alice in Chains’ EPs, or even Nirvana’s appearance on MTV Unplugged. Nothing here is groundbreaking, and in fact the lyrics aren’t much better than Corgan’s, but they’re delivered with such a breezy weightlessness that you barely notice them. Dave Grohl knows what he does, and he knows why people respond to it. His work will never be revered, but it will be enjoyed, and that’s what matters to him. He has such a lack of ambition that when he achieves something moderately special, as he has on In Your Honor, it’s almost revelatory.

It’s a secret Grohl seems to instinctively grasp, while Corgan struggles with it. If you set yourself up as an Important Artist with Something to Say, you have to live up to it each time out. If you tie yourself to the identity and personality of the masses, you’re going to lose that identity and personality when the times change, and you’d better have some great, timeless work left in you. But if you walk out with nothing but a guitar and some well-made songs, and let people discover them, then you’ll be set.

Next week, a re-examination of the White Stripes.

See you in line Tuesday Morning.

So I finally saw Crash.

If you’re not familiar, Crash is the directorial debut of Paul Haggis, the guy who wrote last year’s Best Picture winner, Million Dollar Baby. In structure and tone, it’s like Spike Lee does Magnolia – a series of interlocking stories, all of them dealing with race relations in modern Los Angeles. It features a cast of about 400, most of them (except for Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon) experienced character actors, which means you know the face, but probably not the name.

The movie is anchored by the great (let me repeat that – great) Don Cheadle, who seemingly can do no wrong. He picks great roles, and plays them with depth and grace, even when they’re as slight and goofy as his parts in Ocean’s 11 and 12. But the film also finds great roles for Ryan Phillipe, Thandie Newton, William Fichtner, Larenz Tate and Terrence Howard, among others. The biggest surprise, though, is the terrific acting debut of Ludacris (here billed under his real name, Chris Bridges). He’s riveting, and a joy to watch.

But the real star is the script, one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. It finds room for each character to come alive, and plays its string of coincidences as a natural progression, rather than a disbelief-stretching jumble. Each main character is given a moment to show us his/her prejudices, and another moment to change them. It sounds preachy on paper, but it’s the furthest thing from that on the screen, and not all the changes are for the better. It’s just a phenomenally moving film, the best thing I’ve seen yet this year. It’s June, which means this movie will be ignored come Oscar time, and that’s a shame – Cheadle deserves one, if not Haggis and most of the rest of the cast.

* * * * *

Anyway. Since we’re talking about prejudice and social issues, we might as well segue into the Indigo Girls.

I first heard Amy Ray and Emily Saliers the same way most people did – on the radio. “Closer to Fine” was a huge, huge hit my sophomore year of high school, the Girls completing the unlikely pop star hat trick with Tracy Chapman and Edie Brickell. Yes, Virginia, there was a time when a well-crafted, folky, socially conscious song like “Fine,” or like Chapman’s “Fast Car,” could attain massive popularity. This was around the time that R.E.M. signed to Warner Bros., and “alternative” still meant something. It was, in that long-gone time, okay to have a brain and a radio hit simultaneously, something that has happened very rarely since.

“Closer to Fine” was an unabashed singalong about opening one’s mind, sung by two women who were obviously born to harmonize together. The rest of their self-titled debut was similarly folksy and beautiful, and though some wrote them off as a hippie novelty, the Girls spun that sound into a nearly 20-year career that’s still going strong. Along the way, they’ve brought attention to issues close to their hearts, like Amnesty International, Honor the Earth and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. They are hippies in the best sense of the word – they imagine a better world, and work towards it, not just with music but with real actions.

As far as this column’s concerned, it’s the music that matters, and on that front, the Girls have never disappointed. They started expanding their sound on 1992’s Rites of Passage, and exploded it with 1994’s Swamp Ophelia, cranking up the distortion and the rage. The push-pull of Ray’s volatile anger and Saliers’ more meditative joy provided a compelling contrast on subsequent records, and even though they’ve pulled back into more acoustic and pop realms recently, their albums are still full of great songs. And as always, there’s the voices, strong and clear and intertwining. The Indigo Girls catalog has been a joy to follow.

It’s the end of an era, though, as the Girls have just wrapped up their major-label contract with Epic Records. It figures, since they haven’t had a hit since “Galileo” in ’92 – there’s just no room on radio for what they do anymore. Luckily, indie distribution and the internet have evolved as mainstream radio has devolved, and the Girls are considering options (including starting their own label), many of which would not have been available to them 10 years ago.

Their final Epic release is a fitting overview called Rarities, including non-album tracks ranging from 1986 to 2004. It’s an uncommonly generous collection – 18 tracks, more than 75 minutes, and a non-chronological sequence that flows like a proper album. With only a few exceptions, everything here is good enough to have been included on the “real” records – there’s very little of the spottiness associated with these compilations, more treasures than you’d expect, and nothing that could be termed embarrassing.

Best of all, to me, is that the consistent quality of this record points to the same consistency in the Girls’ catalog as a whole. They’ve never had a sell-out period, never did radio pop because their label asked them to, and never incorporated rap or other trendy styles to seem more hip. For their whole major label career, they’ve done their thing, and done it well. Every album is worth hearing – there’s no precipitous drop in judgment, no fallow period. The Girls are so quietly excellent that even long-time fans (like yours truly) can forget just how solid their output has been.

I sound like I’m eulogizing Ray and Saliers, and I’m really not, but I think their achievements as songwriters and recording artists go unrecognized, and now that they’re off of a major label, that’s unlikely to change. It’s just that I’ve been looking over my Indigos CDs in preparation for reviewing Rarities, and trying to find songs I hate, or even dislike, and it’s tough. Even the simplest of their songs are elevated by their voices and skilled arrangements, and the direct, genuine honesty that pumps through their catalog like life’s blood.

Here, then, are the cover versions and live readings and unreleased gems put to tape around and between the nine albums. We have contributions to tribute albums, like their takes on the Clash’s “Clampdown” that opens this set, and their great version of the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band.” We have unreleased wonders like “Winthrop,” intended for The Shaming of the Sun but never included, and here in a Saliers-only piano-vocal incarnation. We have “Free of Hope,” their Vic Chestnut cover from the Sweet Relief benefit, that finds Ray laying on the feedback and howling in despair. And we have “It Won’t Take Long,” a cover of a Ferron song that is a late-album highlight.

We also have a track from 1986, “Never Stop,” recorded for the Girls’ first ever EP. We have a remix of the rocking “Shed Your Skin,” mutilated by Audioslave’s Tom Morello. We have songs featuring Michael Stipe and Ani DiFranco, the latter a Woody Guthrie tribute. We have a demo of “Ghost,” still to my mind the most beautiful song these two have written. (I remember how proud I was when I figured out, by ear, how to play the tricky bridge section.) And we have live takes of songs familiar and unreleased, stretching back through their entire career.

This is the 12th new Indigos record I have bought, counting their two live albums, and I’ve even bought several of them twice, upgrading from cassettes to CDs when the re-releases hit a few years ago. I’ve never regretted forking over my money for their work, not once, and that’s something I’ve just realized. I hardly ever think of them in this category, but they’re one of the few long-running acts I know of that’s never made a bad album. The Indigos have forged a career in the background of popular music, always there and yet not, and they’ve built a fanbase that should follow them wherever they head to next.

They’ve also been an influence on many vocal-driven folk-rock acts that have come up in their wake. The final track on Rarities, a cover of singalong “Finlandia,” features one of them, New York trio Girlyman. I raved about Girlyman earlier this year, after my friend Mike got me their debut CD, Remember Who I Am, for Christmas. Sweet, simple songs delivered by three of the finest harmonizing voices you’re likely to hear outside of… well, outside of the Indigo Girls, actually.

The Girls have championed Girlyman, inviting them to tour with them and signing them to Amy Ray’s record label, Daemon. As the Girls are wrapping up their recording contract, Girlyman are starting theirs – their second album, Little Star, is in stores now. If you’re new to the group, don’t worry – they haven’t suddenly taken a huge leap into unexplored territory. Little Star is just like the debut, only more so, and makes a fine first Girlyman record for the uninitiated.

The same strengths and weaknesses remain here, too. The biggest strength, the primary reason to listen to Girlyman, is the three intermingling voices – two female, belonging to Doris Muramatsu and Ty Greenstein, and one male, owned by Nate Borofsky. They’re each good singers on their own, but when they harmonize, they’re amazing. Just listen to opener “On the Air,” and dig the countermelodies and whispering webs of vocal weavings, then thrill as they come together. The sound is almost unearthly, and spine-tinglingly wonderful.

All three Girlymen write songs for the group, but you won’t be able to tell just from sound and style which song is whose. The songs on Little Star are breezy, easy, folksy and often surprisingly deep, but they mostly stay within the boundaries erected on their first record. That’s not much of a criticism, since great little numbers like Muramatsu’s “Speechless” and Greenstein’s “Young James Dean” live quite comfortably within those bounds.

They do take a couple of risks this time, which bodes well for their long-term prospects. “Commander” is an especially dark tune, with pointedly anti-Bush lyrics by Greenstein: “When the war came, you ran for your life, as your businesses dried… you were bad fruit, they knew you wouldn’t ripen on the vine, and they made you commander…” Right after that, Muramatsu’s “Bird on a Wire” takes them into Norah Jones territory for the first time, and they manage it nicely.

Sonically, this album is a little richer than Remember Who I Am, owing partially to the presence of Ani Difranco Band keyboardist Julie Wolf on nearly every track. But fear not – the focus is still on those incredible voices, as it should be. Little Star is a step up for Girlyman, but a small one, and it will be interesting to see if they evolve into or out of their strengths. If they’re looking for a good role model for a lengthy and vital career, though, they could do a lot worse than their label boss and touring mates. Hopefully one day I’ll be writing a review of the 12th Girlyman album, like I’ve just done for the Indigos.

* * * * *

One more thing I wanted to mention, musically speaking. I’m always looking for music that busts down barriers, that kicks open doors between audiences, and I’ve recently found a really cool one – the new album by Paul Anka.

Yes, that Paul Anka.

His new disc is called Rock Swings, and it features big band versions of ‘80s and ‘90s hits like “Black Hole Sun,” “Wonderwall,” “Jump,” “Eyes Without a Face” and, yes, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” There’s no rock here, just big, brassy horn sections and swinging beats. And it’s fantastic. The arrangements are top notch, staying true to the originals while knocking down the genres they’ve been boxed into.

The closest comparison is Pat Boone’s In a Metal Mood, from the late ‘90s. That was cool (honest, it was), but this is better, and here’s why:

1. Paul Anka is a much, much better singer than Pat Boone.

2. There’s not an ounce of parody or camp to this album. These songs are treated as standards, and played and sung with respect.

3. Anka takes from a much broader range of songs. Where Boone stuck to Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper and other hard rockers, Anka does songs from Spandau Ballet, Bon Jovi, Soundgarden, and Michael Jackson. (“The Way You Make Me Feel,” and that one swings.)

4. Did I mention Anka’s voice? It’s as swell as it’s ever been.

All in all, a fun listen, especially for fans of that big band sound, and for those who like to see preconceived notions of what makes a song (the production, the marketing, the video) shattered. A good song is a good song, and records like this prove it. Thanks to Mike Lachance for the tip – check out his blog here.

Next week, we Fight some Foo. Or something.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Well, there’s no hiding from it anymore. I’m officially in my thirties.

My early thirties, mind you, but still… I’m bloody old. A disturbing number of my friends are married, or parents, or both. Kids I went to high school with now have kids of their own, and houses, and corporate jobs. For a while now, I’ve been saying that I want to get to 30 and then stop, and stay that age forever. Well, there goes that plan…

The birthday was good, though. Thanks very much to everyone who sent good wishes, and to Gary and Lee for coming out to the midwest to celebrate with me. And just so you know, I’m banking the week off that I usually take, to be used at some future date this year. I’ll let you know.

Anyway, onward.

* * * * *

It’s always my pleasure to introduce readers to obscure little bands they might not have heard of before. Coldplay (I know, it’s not a name that screams “superstars,” is it?) is a British quartet that’s trying to make a go of it here in America. They play winsome piano-led pop music, and in Chris Martin, they have a singer that would probably cause a bit of a splash, if radio and MTV were to give him a chance. They’re on their third album now, after experiencing some modest success with their second, and though you may have trouble finding their CDs in your local record outlets, they’re worth tracking down.

Mark my words, though – Coldplay could be huge. You heard it here first.

What’s that? You’ve heard of them before? Maybe it was the THREE MONTHS of inescapable hype surrounding their new CD, X&Y, that did it, huh? The endless messianic pronouncements, the appearances on every television show that has any relation (no matter how tangential) to music, the ubiquitous photos of Martin and company that line window displays and magazines and, if they could afford it, the insides of your fucking eyelids? There are five large mirrors in my house, yet I think I have seen Martin’s face more than my own in the past 90 days.

They even got VH1 to revive a cancelled television show (Storytellers) by telling them they wanted to appear on it. That’s some influence, right there. Maybe if they’d volunteered to make a cameo or something, they could have saved a doomed show like Firefly, or Wonderfalls? Perhaps they were too busy REDEFINING THE VERY MEANING OF ROCK! Their music can HEAL THE BLIND! It can CURE CANCER! Bet you didn’t know that, huh? Women line up for days just to touch the hem of Martin’s stylish garments, for his essence has restorative powers, and his very gaze (those deep, crystal eyes!) can mend the soul. Truly, Coldplay are gods among men, and we are grateful for them.

That’s kind of what it feels like sometimes, with all the breathless Saviors of Rock crap that surrounds them. It’s hard to blame the members of Coldplay for it – they’re as caught up in the maelstrom as anyone, and probably 99 percent of it is out of their control. It sort of makes you understand what would make Thom Yorke want to commit critical suicide with Radiohead’s post-OK Computer output, even though the joke was on him – critics adored Kid A and Amnesiac. And the same is happening with X&Y – it hardly matters what’s on the record. The corporate critics will love it, the indie critics will hate it. You could write the reviews months in advance and still be mostly right.

So what’s a quiet, unassuming little band like Coldplay to do? Expectations for X&Y were either unreasonably high or unreasonably low before they even started recording. It has sometimes seemed that the entire music industry is riding on the success of this record – a lot of pressure for what is essentially a group of modestly talented lads who write pretty little ballads. All they could do was duck their heads down and make the best record they could. They had to find a way to evolve without losing their core sound, to make something artistically satisfying that would also please the shareholders in Coldplay, Inc.

I shouldn’t need to point this out, but I wouldn’t be dedicating this much space to this band if I didn’t think they were, musically speaking, worth writing about. I quite liked A Rush of Blood to the Head, their insanely popular second album (number five on my 2002 Top 10 List), and I think the core U2-with-pianos sound is a good one, and worth exploring. I know the four guys in Coldplay aren’t a soulless, moneymaking machine, even though they sometimes have to make decisions like one.

And where A Rush of Blood betrayed no sense of the pressure they were under when crafting it, one cannot say the same about X&Y. The album is, quite literally, half-great. Six of these 12 songs (not counting the bonus track) burst forth from the Coldplay template, taking the sound in some compelling new directions. The other six sound like Coldplay by the numbers, mostly – safe, predictable, and entirely listenable, yet not exciting.

Oddly enough, the band has taken the interesting step of neatly subdividing their album, putting all the experimental songs in the first half and all the hits, as it were, in the second. The packaging even splits it up evenly, calling the first six X and the second Y. (Ooh! It’s like vinyl!) The record slowly pulses to life with “Square One,” a song that really lets the U2 influences show, and by the time the song kicks in, it’s the heaviest thing Coldplay have yet done. It ends with an acoustic coda, which glides into “What If,” the blueprint for the next generation of Coldplay ballads. This one builds with an otherworldly force.

And then come the killers. “White Shadows” takes their U2 and blends it with a new wave influence, but not an obvious one. It also has an unstoppable chorus, and a guitar sound that often reminded me of Dave Sharp, six-stringer for the Alarm. “White Shadows” has an extended coda, as well, that blends with the opening of “Fix You,” the most affecting ballad here. This and “What If” are the next steps that the band needed to take, and if anything in the excellent first half has a chance of becoming a massive hit, it’s “Fix You.” It’s like taking the quiet sounds of Rush of Blood and moving them from the theater to the stadium. It’s marred only by Martin’s rubbery, almost-but-not-quite-on-the-note falsetto, but the lovely Peter Gabriel-esque harmonies in the final minute make up for it.

“Talk” incorporates the lead synth line to Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” for its guitar figure, and how’s that for a non-Coldplay influence? It’s a stomper of a song, too, with a great chorus. The title track has an oddly theatrical melody, one that packs a few surprises, and another in a series of cool choruses with some great guitar-bass interplay. And then the first half is over, and if they’d sustained that level of craft and growth into the second, they’d have had one of the best records of the year. But they didn’t.

The more average Y material begins with the single, “Speed of Sound.” Try this – hum the piano part to “Clocks” over the verses. It’s the same, it’s “Clocks” with a chorus. And though I like that chorus, and I dig this song, the unfortunate and unnecessary similarity really bugs me. It connotes a certain play-it-safe mentality that carries over into the second half. “A Message” is simple and breezy, “The Hardest Part” is even simpler and breezier, and “Swallowed in the Sea” is kind of a lullaby, one that should have been cut entirely. Only “Low,” with its nifty beat (swiped from U2, of course), and “Twisted Logic,” with its Beatles waltz progression and its backwards finale, show glimmers of the originality that sparked the first six songs. The hidden track, “Till Kingdom Comes,” is too boring to even describe.

It’s a measure of how much I like Coldplay that I still consider X&Y a good record. It’s just a shame that a band that so obviously wants to explore new dimensions can’t do so without thinking about the hundreds of people who might be affected by low sales. Given their self-imposed limitations on the second half, it’s amazing that they only stumble once or twice here. The more traditional stuff is still luminous, and there are only a couple of songs I would have excised. Still, you can tell that Coldplay had a fabled Difficult Third Album in them, and this is not it.

I try not to get caught up in the hype surrounding records like this one, but it was so all-pervasive this time that I couldn’t avoid it. Unfortunately, neither could the band – they turned in several of their best songs ever on X&Y, but saddled them with lateral moves and mediocrity. And yet, I wonder if my reaction isn’t somewhat tempered by the promotional buildup, if I’m asking, “That’s all you got?” because I was led to believe there was so much more. X&Y isn’t bad, but it isn’t the second coming. In fact, it’s a more tentative next step than the band should have delivered, but if you go into it knowing that, it’s an enjoyable piece of work.

I do hope this band is allowed to grow and evolve, though. If they can escape the hordes of hypesters telling them that they’re the best band in the world, then they might start to actually become that good. After all the hoopla dies down, what you’re left with is 12 songs on a CD, and the best bands realize that and make those 12 songs as good as they can be. Hype comes and hype goes, but the music lasts.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A quick one this week, ‘cause it’s my birthday. I’ve amassed quite the backlog of CDs I must review, and with Coldplay and Dream Theater next week, I can’t really take a vacation…

The indie hype machine is an amazing thing, and I never seem able to buy into it. This is beyond the journalistic worship of a band like the aforementioned Coldplay, who gets monolithic towers of pre-release adoration built for them by the record company and hundreds of paid shills. The hype surrounding Coldplay has nothing to do with the quality of the record, but rather is all about the constructed importance of the band itself, turning every move they make into an event akin to gods walking among us. It really is worship – they’ve created a religion, and they’re hoping to convert millions of faithfuls by June 7, so that the revelation will be received, and the collection plates will overflow.

No, what I’m talking about is the seemingly personal stake indie hype-sters seem to have in their favorite little bands producing genius works. They grab hold of little bands like the Arcade Fire and the White Stripes and elevate their middling achievements into works of massive importance. And then someone like me listens to the albums, and is left nonplussed. I liked the Arcade Fire record. It was decent. It wasn’t anywhere near the godlike brilliance some have attributed to it. It’s almost as if the critics couldn’t allow it to suck, even a little, or the significance they’ve attached to it would topple and crush them.

Same goes with the new Spoon album, Gimme Fiction. Dig the universal acclaim this record has been getting, in every indie-cred mag and website. Words like “phenomenal” and “brilliant” have been batted about pretty often, from numerous sources. Then dig the record itself, and you’ll probably wonder just what the hell they’re talking about. Even for Spoon fans, this record represents a downshift in quality, a slip into the mediocre. But it’s like people are afraid to say so, because they’ve convinced themselves that the Spoon album just has to be good. It just has to.

Look, I’m a Star Wars fan. I love the movies, I really do, but if I’m approaching them critically, I can admit that they all suck. The dialogue is rotten, the acting is wooden, Jar Jar is the spawn of Satan, and overall the whole thing is silly. I would never say these movies are phenomenal works of art. They’re important to me, I wanted them to be good, and they worked for me, but “phenomenal” and “brilliant” are words you’ll never hear me use in conjunction with them.

I will also readily admit that I might be listening for different things than your average indie critic when I hear Spoon. I’m looking for well-written songs with good melodies, and Spoon has delivered on that before, most notably on Girls Can Tell. This time, not so much. Only a couple of songs stand out – “The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine,” the one here most like recent Spoon, and “My Mathematical Mind,” probably the most successful number. Most of the rest of it shuffles by on pounding pianos and very little musical inspiration.

“I Turn My Camera On” has been fellated on other sites, some calling it a masterpiece, and I’m just not hearing it. It’s two chords, repeated “Bennie and the Jets” style, with some falsetto over it. That’s all. Britt Daniel has forgotten to write melodies this time out, and while the minimalist-with-flourishes production (which has a lot to do with only Daniel and drummer Jim Eno remaining in the band) is nifty, the songs are largely boring. Some hit, like the sweet “I Summon You,” but most miss, like the too-simple “Sister Jack.” And then there’s “Was It You,” the very definition of filler – a repeated synth beat that goes on and on. It makes four minutes seem like 70.

When all is said and done, though, Spoon is just a pretty good band that has made a couple of pretty good albums. Gimme Fiction is not one of their better ones. That’s all there is to say. They don’t represent anything larger, they haven’t rewritten the Book of Rock, and as of yet, they’ve never written a song that can’t be honestly described as a ditty. Rather too much of this record sounds tossed off and slapped together, but the band themselves said it was their best before it came out, and the indie hype machine clicked into lockstep, convinced that Gimme Fiction Means Something. I will probably ask this same question next week about Coldplay, but why can’t it just be music? Why must it be Significant?

It seems to me that there’s an indie hierarchy, based on perceived cool, that is just as exclusionary as the mainstream machine. Britt Daniel is Cool, therefore his band can do no wrong. Rivers Cuomo was Cool once, but isn’t anymore. Jeff Tweedy, however, remains Cool, and thus his craptastic work on A Ghost is Born (which equals Rivers’ recent disintegrations) gets praised and analyzed. The Wilco reviews were hilarious – it’s as if many critics said, “Well, Tweedy hasn’t given us much to work with here, but if we argue his genius enough, we can make even this into a respected record.” The focus isn’t on the work, it’s on maintaining the constructs of Cool that have been built around the work. Tweedy’s a genius, therefore if you think his new record sucks, then it’s your fault. Cover your ears and repeat as necessary.

And I was really hoping to use the new Levellers album as a good example of bands that slip through the cracks in this hierarchy, bands that are not Cool but do deliver solid work. It was a good theory, but the band foiled my efforts by making their eighth full-length a bit of a disappointment. Still, let’s give it a go.

You’re not going to read about the importance of the Levellers on any indie-minded review sites. You won’t see a retrospective of their work, even though they’ve been around since the late ‘80s. They’re known as “that fiddle band” in the U.S., if they’re known at all, and most lost track of them after Levelling the Land, their 1992 sophomore effort. But they’re a better and more adventurous band than Spoon, based on the experimental streak that runs through their catalog, and the surprisingly high success rate of those experiments.

You won’t even find their most experimental (and successful, artistically speaking) album, Hello Pig, in stores here. It’s a studio wonderland, a massive psychedelic pop playground that hits hard when it has to, yet breezes by when it can. It’s the most un-Levellers thing they’ve done, and for such a huge flight of fancy, the band aced the landing. Two years ago, they abandoned that path for the more traditional Levellers sound of Green Blade Rising, kind of a pumped-up Waterboys folk-punk with excellent songs and rousing choruses. I rated it sternly, but only because Hello Pig was such a triumph.

The new one, Truth and Lies, stumbles a bit more than I’d like, and I think the trouble is the production, not the songs. This one has a lot in common with their self-titled album from 1994, in that it’s over-produced and stuffed into a small space. The problem may be in the mix – this sounds like it was recorded inside a three-by-three metal box, and I think a good mixer could give the instruments more space, and turn this into a killer record.

Because the songs are there. Opener “Last Man Alive” rocks, though it takes a few spins to hear the rest of the band under the crushing guitar. There’s more fiddle-and-drum-loops stuff on this record than any since the early ‘90s, and they work on the slow creeper “Confess.” The second half is full of slower numbers that would be affecting if not for the sound. As it is, only “Said and Done” rises above, though expansive closer “Sleeping” comes close. In thinking about it, I wouldn’t mind a live recording of this whole thing, in sequence, because this could have been (and almost is) a great record.

But it doesn’t change the fact that the Levellers are a great band, far more deserving of critical praise and analysis than most of the hipper-than-thous taking center stage at the Cool Conventions. The Levs have never tried to be Cool, never wrapped themselves in an air of mystery and significance. They’re just six ragamuffin Brits with political opinions and great songwriting skills, and they’ve been making superb music for going on two decades, never sitting still. The Levellers were here before Spoon, and will probably outlast them, and they’ll do it without having to tap into the indie hype machine.

Yeesh, sorry for the screed. Last rant of my 30th year! Next week, Coldplay for sure.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m a little late this week, I know. I’ve been covering sports, of all things, for the local paper all week, and it’s taken a bit more research time than I thought. I’ve never covered a baseball game before in my life, but I did my level best, using as much subterfuge as possible, to convince the sports editor that I’m a stone pro. Of course, that was before I wrote my stories – he’s probably figured it out by now.

I’m contemplating whether to take next week off, too, for my impending 31st, since I’ll be celebrating all weekend with my good friends Gary and Lee, but the new Oasis and Levellers albums are out Tuesday, so… probably not. If I keep this up, I’ll have banked enough columns to take all of December off, though. Wouldn’t that be something?

* * * * *

I suppose I’m a child of the ‘80s, but musically, I came of age in the ‘90s.

I started buying my own music at 15, in 1989. In high school, I rediscovered the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Queen, and built up a decent base of knowledge to build from. I bought records from bands who were big in the ‘80s, like R.E.M. and the Cure, but I didn’t start obsessively purchasing new music until I was 17 or so. Most of the things I bought in those first few tentative years were new releases by tried and true bands, like Metallica and Megadeth. (Really. At that time, they were tried and true bands, I swear.)

I can clearly remember one of the first new, ‘90s bands that I fell in love with, and it’ll probably surprise some of you. It was Soundgarden. I bought Badmotorfinger in 1991, fully expecting a metal album, but what I got was a slow, sludgy, Zeppelin-esque display of musical strength. The circular riff at the end of “Rusty Cage” blew my little teenage mind, and “Outshined” knocked me out with its building melodies. Plus, it rocked really hard, which was kind of a prerequisite for angry young me. (This was, I should note, a year before Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes, which rewrote my whole musical world.)

I got into Nirvana (somewhat) and Alice in Chains and Mudhoney and Pearl Jam later – the first Seattle band that sparked my interest was Soundgarden, and I still think they were the best of the lot. They were the most ambitious, with their dissonance and head-spinning time signatures, and very little seemed out of their reach. The riff for “Spoonman” is one of the classic rock bludgeons of all time, and the melodies were never left by the wayside. Even their Beatles moment, “Black Hole Sun,” was excellent. And that voice… Chris Cornell could sing anything and I’d listen.

It took a while longer for me to appreciate Rage Against the Machine. I’ve never been a rap fan – I’m too much of a melody addict – and Rage’s thudding, simple riffs and screaming vitriol just got old pretty quickly over the course of an album. But I stuck with them, and soon caught on to the secret – they weren’t a rock band rapping, they were a rap band with guitars. Tom Morello remains one of the most underrated sonic architects in rock, able to twist his tone into a seemingly endless array of unrecognizable shapes. All that got a little lost when Zach de la Rocha was shouting over it, but after a while, the percussive beauty of the whole thing hit me.

Rage will eventually be considered one of the most important bands of the ‘90s, and not just for perfecting the rap-rock thing. They were politically motivated, socially conscious and explosive. We really need a band like Rage these days, in the age of Darth Bush and his Evil Empire, but alas, they broke up shortly after the turn of the century. Ditto Soundgarden, who will never be revered the way Rage will, but who rode the first wave of Seattle mania to its fullest artistic potential. They didn’t even survive the ‘90s, fading when grunge did.

But you can’t keep a good musician down for long, and Cornell, Morello, Brad Wilk and Tom Commerford are very good musicians. With de la Rocha off making his solo record, the three Ragers hooked up with Cornell in 2002, and subsequently picked the worst band name in recent memory, Audioslave. And all four, um, Audioslaves swore that it wasn’t a side project, that it was a full-fledged band.

They were right, of course. The problem is, Audioslave is not nearly as interesting a band as either of the participants’ previous groups. The self-titled debut was good, but somewhat awkward, as Cornell and the Rage boys tried to figure out how to fit around each other. On paper, it shouldn’t have worked at all – Cornell is relentlessly melodic, and Rage was entirely percussive. Audioslave was a feeling-out process, scaling back the core elements of both sides of their sound.

On their just-released second album, Out of Exile, the band has tried to build from that foundation. They definitely sound more confident and comfortable this time out, locking into grooves instead of forcing their way in. The album starts strong, and Morello comes up with another powerhouse riff for the title track, one that lodges itself in your brain. Cornell’s voice is excellent, too, as usual, hitting those high notes with aplomb, and Morello’s unconventional guitar work is on display – check out the faux synthesizer arpeggios in “Your Time Has Come.”

The problem, though, remains that the sum of these parts isn’t as great as it could be. Where Soundgarden’s Superunknown was a rock record with prog-like time signatures and Sonic Youth-style dissonant arrangements, and Rage’s The Battle of Los Angeles was a rock record with rap grooves, fascinating sounds and social relevance, Out of Exile is just a rock record. Occasionally, they hit on something powerful, as they do on the second half of “#1 Zero,” but mostly the album is bland and frustratingly average.

It may not be fair to compare Audioslave with its members’ prior endeavors, but the problem here is that these guys aren’t playing to their strengths. Morello, Commerford and Wilk specialize in punishing, 4/4 bulldozer riffs, delivered with enough power to level mountains. Cornell writes tricky, atmospheric melodies that float and dive, and he’s never met a simple riff he couldn’t complicate. Audioslave finds the foursome compromising left and right – the Ragers have softened up to meet Cornell’s melodies, and Cornell has dumbed down his writing to fit the band’s lock-step assault. I’m sure they were hoping that the result would be worth it, but it’s not.

The best moments, musically, on Out of Exile come when the Rage trio sounds most like Rage, which they do only sparingly. Morello’s textures are always interesting, but the songs they grace are often middling affairs, like “Doesn’t Remind Me” and “Man or Animal.” Final track “The Curse” is so slow and simple that it’s almost immediately forgettable, and there’s very little I can say about first single “Be Yourself” that would be constructive.

Neither side of Audioslave is able to shine under this arrangement – Cornell can’t write his melodic wonders, and the Rage boys can’t kick as much ass as they’re able to. I’ve heard that live, they’re amazing, but I’ve also heard that they fill the set with old Rage and Soundgarden songs. They’d have to – the songs under the Audioslave banner so far have been surprisingly weak. I was forgiving of the first record, since the quartet was just getting its feet wet. But now I’m inclined to give Audioslave one more album before declaring it a failed experiment.

* * * * *

Soul Coughing was another percussive ‘90s band, albeit one that never got as much attention as they should have.

Here was a band in which every element contributed to the groove, from the jazz bass to the odd samples. But the most potent weapon in their arsenal was always singer Mike (M.) Doughty. His voice is indescribable – kind of if John McCrea from Cake decided to become a full-time beat poet. Doughty has the ability to make hooks out of just repeated consonants – his “take the elevator to the mezzanine” from “Super Bon Bon” is a perfect example. It’s just spoken words, but it captures the ear.

Soul Coughing also didn’t survive the ‘90s, but Doughty has launched an under-the-radar solo career that couldn’t be farther from his old band. He’s just released Haughty Melodic, his first solo full-length, on Dave Matthews’ label ATO, and really – who knew the Allan Ginsberg of the alt-rock set had an album of sweet, wonderful songs like these in him? Doughty has abandoned the grooves of Soul Coughing and expanded on the acoustic melodicism of his debut EP, Skittish, and the result is one of the most rewarding surprises of the year so far.

It’s on ATO, and it’s mostly acoustic, but it would be a mistake to lump Haughty Melodic in with the Matthews style. This is a classic pop album, and Doughty has come up with at least half a dozen remarkable melodies to go with his usual grooves. “Unsingable Name,” especially, is one of the best songs of Doughty’s career, all twists and turns. It was produced by Dan Wilson, of Semisonic fame, and he brings his eclectic pop sensibility to the record, especially the five songs he co-wrote. The production is fantastic, with Doughty’s voice front and center the whole time.

And what a voice. Amazingly, I think I like him better as a singer than as a beat poet. His gift for consonant-happy lyrics that make no sense, but sound neat, is in evidence, especially on “Madeline and Nine” and “Looking at the World From the Bottom of a Well.” On that song, he repeats the line, “The only way to beat it is to bat it down,” and it sounds so… cool in his snap-tongue voice. Elsewhere, Doughty gets soft and ballad-like, most notably on “White Lexus,” and his vocals really work – they’re simultaneously raspy and smooth.

But the upbeat, funky ones fare best here. “Busting Up a Starbucks” is a smash-and-grab of lyrical dexterity – at one point he references the “sisters from Sister Sister,” and he spits out the line “the force that’s forcing you to feel” before crashing into the title phrase. Great, great stuff, and the backing groove is huge and chunky. It’s not all cultural wordplay, though – Doughty gets sentimental on “Your Misfortune” (“I can be the right reminder in the meantime, throwing out the lifeline”) and turns in a straight-ahead gospel number on “His Truth is Marching On.” (Well, one that includes the line “I’m fucking starved for love,” so it may not get a lot of play in churches…)

All in all, Haughty Melodic is pretty terrific. Doughty can sell even the simplest material – check out the spherical “I Hear the Bells” for an example – so it’s gratifying that he’s decided to push himself, and write some great pop songs. Doughty isn’t hiding his strengths here, he’s building on them, reshaping them into something new. I hope this is just the first in a long line of solo records from him, and that they only get better from here. He deserves to get out of the ‘90s alive.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

You know, Weezer notwithstanding, this is turning into a great year for new music.

Here’s what I mean. My favorite band in the world, the Choir, released their best album in 15 years last month. You would think it would be all I’d want to listen to, but I haven’t spun it in two weeks. I’ve had so much other great stuff occupying my player, all of which deserves consideration and praise in this column, that I haven’t found the time for re-listening to anything I’ve already reviewed.

To that end, this is my second column of this week. The other one goes on and on about Star Wars, and you can access it through the archive if you want to read it. I just can’t get any further behind the new stuff, especially considering the next few weeks will bring Audioslave, Girlyman, Coldplay, Dream Theater, the Levellers, the Foo Fighters and, as if all that weren’t enough, Eric Johnson’s first album in seven years. And, oh yeah, Billy Corgan, Michael Penn, Dredg, Fountains of Wayne, and on and on. So I can’t skip a week.

It’s especially important to me to pound this column out this week, since all three of the albums I’m reviewing are strong candidates for the top 10 list. I’ve seriously heard more great music in the past three weeks than I have in the previous four months. Here’s what I’m talking about:

* * * * *

I dig double albums.

They make me wish I’d grown up in the age of vinyl. I love the idea of a record in chapters, two sides to each platter, requiring one to physically get up and flip it over. I love the idea of an artist planning his or her record with that in mind – a space between the first and second sides, a different tone, a final song on side one that hangs in the air and makes you want to hear side two. And double albums? Man, four sides. What could be better than that? Musical ideas so huge and rich that they need two whole records to hold them.

Of course, I know that a double album doesn’t mean an abundance of good ideas. If you suck, making a double record only means that you suck for twice as long. Still, I get a charge out of any artist deciding that the single-disc format is too small, that he/she has a story to tell that just needs the extra space. With the advent of compact discs, many of the double albums of old now fit onto a single CD, and in the case of something like Tommy or Zen Arcade or Tusk, I think that’s kind of a shame.

Naturally, the CD has given even more ambitious artists the ability to stretch out even farther. What would have taken three vinyl records back in the day now fits comfortably on two CDs, and what most people call double albums now are really triples. This only raises the stakes – does your concept really need two hours? Really? – and, of course, only excites me more when someone takes advantage of it. It takes a certain amount of hubris to say, “Here are my 30 tracks, take them or leave them, but I needed to release them all.” I love that kind of ambition and arrogance.

The format changes have certainly called into question the definition of a double album. Take, for instance, Ryan Adams, who is marketing his latest, Cold Roses, as a double. In the days of vinyl, he’d have been right – Roses is 76 minutes long, and would take up four sides. It would easily fit onto one CD, however, so his decision to release it on two has to be considered an aesthetic one. The choice becomes clear when you check out the packaging – he’s designed Roses as a miniature vinyl mockup, with cardboard sleeves and raised front and back cover artwork. Even the CD labels look like records.

If you’re expecting something that sounds like the ‘70s, well, you’d be right. Roses is credited to Adams and his band, the Cardinals, and it sounds like an old-time session, like a great rock band recorded live. It’s a nostalgia trip in more ways than one, since it represents Adams’ return to his Whiskeytown sound, all pedal steels and sweet melodies. After the crushing thud of Rock N Roll and the moody drift of Love is Hell, hearing Adams get back to the business of writing great country-rock songs again is invigorating.

And these are great songs, all 18 of them. Cold Roses is Adams’ first top-to-bottom excellent album since Gold, his most consistent solo effort, and rather than sounding like a retreat, it plays like a joyous homecoming. For the first time in years, his prodigious gift for melody never fails him. Just the opener, “Magnolia Mountain,” has more ideas in its five minutes than Rock N Roll and Demolition put together. The band is tight and emotional throughout, especially guitarist Cindy Cashdollar, who also harmonizes with Adams on most of the tracks. She’s not quite Caitlin Cary, but she adds an element that’s been missing since Whiskeytown broke up.

Unlike most double albums, which peter out by the fourth side, Cold Roses stays enthralling throughout. In fact, some of the loveliest songs, like “Blossom,” are at the record’s end, and its closer, “Friends,” is gorgeous. Adams cranks up the amps here and there, most notably on “Beautiful Sorta,” but for most of this album he spins one beautiful ballad after another, and his voice drips with feeling. This is absolutely the album his fans have been waiting for, whether they’ve been waiting since Gold, or Heartbreaker, or even Strangers Almanac.

Ever the prolific little bee, Adams plans two more albums this year, with the tentative titles of Jacksonville City Nights and 29. It’s entirely possible that his lack of quality control has shoved the awful stuff onto the latter two discs, and we can only wait and see. It’s a little scary, though, because Cold Roses has not one spotty moment. It’s his best work in a long time, and even if he louses it up with substandard work before Christmas, this album will still be among the best things you’ll hear this year.

But is it a double album? I’m not sure it qualifies in the digital age, but at least Adams didn’t split the discs over two separate releases. No, that’s the unfortunate tactic System of a Down has taken with their new records, Mezmerize and Hypnotize. Each is projected to run about 35 minutes, and both would fit onto one CD nicely, but they’ve split the tunes into two releases, one now and one in October, the better to get your money twice. If there’s an artistic reason for this, I won’t complain as much, but it feels kind of greedy, and considering the fierce political bent of this band, that’s surprising.

What’s not surprising, though, is that Mezmerize is terrific. (A quick aside: surely such a smart band knows that they misspelled “mesmerize,” right?) System is a heavy prog band, like the Mars Volta, but they never waste your time with 10-minute guitar solos or noise sculptures. Every System album starts with a bang, does the watusi all over your ass, and leaves without bothering to clean up. In a way, the brevity of Mezmerize works in its favor – it’s the fastest, most explosive, most head-spinning record this band has done. It hits like a bullet, and half an hour later, you’re on the floor, trying to catch your breath.

No disrespect to the rest of the band, but this is guitarist Daron Malakian’s album. He wrote pretty much all the music here, and it takes from such disparate sources as Frank Zappa, Slayer, Faith No More, the Clash and, in some of the vocal sections, even Brian Wilson, but it always sounds like System. Very few bands can be this heavy and still switch styles on a dime like System can, mixing in reggae on “Radio/Video” and new wave on “Lost in Hollywood,” and still hitting the old-school thrash on “Cigaro.” Musically, they have very few peers.

Still, the most potent weapon in their arsenal may be vocalist Serj Tankian. He has such complete control over so many different voices that if this rock thing doesn’t pan out, he could have a successful career voicing cartoons. Well, maybe evil cartoons. On Mezmerize he pulls out all the stops, ranting and barking and all-out screaming like a banshee on fire, but he also waxes melodic and subtle here and there. This album, unlike most metal records, is full of powerful, memorable melodies. If not for the last track, “Lost in Hollywood,” on which Malakian gets a case of Noel Gallagher Disease and takes the lead vocal, it would be the perfect System album.

The band’s liberal politics are in full force here, too. Lead single “B.Y.O.B.” (which stands for “Bring Your Own Bombs”) wonders why presidents don’t fight wars themselves instead of sending the poor, while “Cigaro” muses on the, ahem, masculine reasons for wars in the first place. “Violent Pornography” takes on the brainwashing of television, smacking down both the violent programming and the advertisements that support it. And “Sad Statue” imagines the statue of liberty wiping away tears, thinking about the current administration. “What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering,” Tankian asks, and he has no answer.

While I do wish Mezmerize/Hypnotize had been released all at once, whether on one disc or two, this first installment has all but guaranteed that I will pony up the cash for part two. Yeah, they hooked me, but they did it by being a relentlessly original and fascinating band. They are the future of metal. If the members of Metallica can listen to Mezmerize and still think of themselves as in any way relevant, then they’re deluded.

Still, I can’t quite bring myself to call either Mezmerize or Cold Roses a double album, since by the modern definition, they would fit on single discs. No, when I think double album these days, I’m thinking of a wildly ambitious work that can’t be contained to one CD. The trick, the challenge, is to maintain the quality over more than an hour and a half. If you can do that, then you’ve earned my respect. Precious few double album attempts these days manage a consistency of vision and craft. That’s what I’m looking for – the ability to match one’s ambition with skill and artisty.

And honestly, I never thought I’d find something like that from the Eels. There was always something about this band that I liked, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I bought Beautiful Freak on the strength of “Novocaine for the Soul,” but found the rest of the record lacking. I bought Eels mastermind Mark Everett’s solo records, A Man Called E and Broken Toy Shop, and while they were pleasant, they didn’t do too much for me. But I did stick around for the next Eels record, and damn, am I glad I did.

Rarely has an artist come into his own as quickly and fully as E did on Electro-Shock Blues. A searing, quirky, heartfelt portrait of living with death, the album was recorded in the aftermath of Everett’s sister’s suicide and his mother’s death from cancer. The record was even more bizarre than its predecessor, and the whole thing had the feel of an autobiographical indie comic, sketchy and deeply moving. E hasn’t topped it since, although he’s made some corkers, especially Souljacker. The focus has been lacking, though, and some of the latter Everett records have felt a little tossed off.

Well, it turns out that E has been working behind the scenes for four years (!) on an album called Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, so in a way, everything since Daisies of the Galaxy has been a side project. That (ahem) revelation certainly raises expectation for the real deal, and it delivers. This is the ultimate Eels album, a return to the Electro-Shock Blues template, and a true double album – 33 heartbreaking songs in 93 minutes. It’s a beautiful homemade epic, just as rickety and grandiose as E’s best stuff always is, with no filler and a superb sense of flow.

Blinking Lights is a loosely arranged story of one man’s life, from birth through painful adolescence, through love and bitterness, and finally to hopeful old age, regrets and all. It is an album that only E could have made, so personal is the writing and so unorthodox is the sound. Everett crafts his magical lullabies with gently strummed acoustics, vintage keyboards, toned percussion and toy pianos, and yet somehow these simple little structures attain a grandeur that’s inexplicable. Blinking Lights is small and personal, yet sounds important and vast.

These are some of E’s best songs, too, especially the ballads, held together by his gruff, weary voice. They work on their own, but when placed in context, they achieve much more. Only E could write an affecting ballad called “Whatever Happened to Soy Bomb,” and use the metaphor to comment on the ephemeral nature of life and time. That’s the kind of album this is – silly, yet deep and powerful. Like the best works, it takes you on a journey, and by the time E is contentedly sighing the sweet melody to “The Stars Shine in the Sky Tonight,” you feel he’s earned this grace.

There are too many highlights here to mention, most of them simple little ditties that add to the overall picture. E has composed a theme for the album that appears throughout, further unifying the proceedings, and he makes room for cameos by Peter Buck and Tom Waits. But this is his show, and it’s his best since Electro-Shock. It’s not quite as surprising as that record was, and doesn’t pack the same punch, but Blinking Lights is a delightfully sad masterpiece. And like the best double albums, it wraps you up in its storytelling spell, and it’s over before you know it.

I’m not sure what Everett can do to top this. Blinking Lights is the culmination of his singular style, an emotionally naked pop utopia made of broken parts. For such an ambitious project, this album often feels like it would fall apart on contact, and it’s that dichotomy, that otherworldly sensibility, that gives E his charm and his magic. This is not just one of the best double albums of the past few years, but one of the best albums, period.

And with that, I’m off to see Star Wars again.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So. Star Wars is over.

I’ve just returned from the midnight showing of Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. I’m going to refrain from making pompous pronouncements like “The circle is now complete,” or anything like that, even though that’s kind of how I’m feeling. My childhood is officially over – Star Wars was the last of the things I loved when I was six to finish up, and it’s fitting that George Lucas has ended this huge, grand experiment with the saga’s most adult installment. This time, shattered innocence was the point, and while I have issues with the film (like I have with all Star Wars movies), both my inner six-year-old and my outer 30-year-old are satisfied.

I find that I’m not interested in being a Lucas apologist this time out – if you need me to tell you that Star Wars is important, then nothing will convince you. This is a saga that reverberates in the hearts of its fans, to a degree that non-fans (and even casual fans) sometimes find bizarre. If you’re in on it, it’s huge, mythical even. If you’re not, it’s just another loud, flashy summer movie with bad dialogue and wooden acting. I can’t tell you why Star Wars means as much to me as it does.

And it must mean as much to a lot of people, because you can read gripe after gripe about how Lucas has raped the series with the last two films, and yet I guarantee you Revenge of the Sith will be the top movie in the country for the next couple of weeks. The theater I went to this morning showed Sith on five screens, and sold ‘em all out. People care about these movies, and many people (myself included) care enough to go see them again and again.

But just because I care and love these movies, doesn’t mean I think they’re great works of art. Star Wars is based on old adventure serials, like Flash Gordon, and is crafted in a very specific, iconic style. Inherent in that style is some cornball dialogue, some stiff acting, and some simplistic plotlines. Contrary to quite a lot of popular belief, the original trilogy (Episodes IV, V and VI) doesn’t transcend that style, either. They’re all pretty consistent – straightforward, flashy, stilted, kind of silly, and kind of clunky. Even the most successful of the six, The Empire Strikes Back, knocks on the door of greatness and then runs away, more often than not.

But if you buy into them, and let yourself get carried away by them, they breathe magic in a way that no effects-laden blockbusters that have come in their wake do. I think buying into them requires seeing them when you’re young, when your wide-eyed imagination is still able to be influenced. These films have a mythical grandeur, a beautifully romantic sweep, and now that all six are in place, the full scope of Lucas’ hopeful vision is clear. Star Wars is an epic about a very small thing – a son redeeming his father. The massive scale is all metaphor.

Lucas has always been writing for the trade, as the comic book fans say. Many derided Episode I – The Phantom Menace for its innocence and cartoony humor, and they dissed Episode VI – Return of the Jedi for the same reason. But the innocence was the whole point. Of course the good stuff comes in between, when hope disappears, death is imminent and heroes are lost. Both the Gungans and the Ewoks are childhood triumphant, and the cross-galactic celebration that ends Jedi drives that home. It’s simple, yes, but it’s also effective myth-making.

The original trilogy was all about coming out of the dark, and so naturally the prequel trilogy has been all about going into that same darkness. Revenge of the Sith is the final link, the descent into hell that sets the stage for Episode IV – A New Hope. This is the deepest, darkest, most affecting chapter of the saga, or at least, it is if you want it to be. But more than any other Star Wars film, this one is for the fans, the ones who have been following all along and are invested in the fates of Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala and their offspring. For the fans, this one is deeply felt and moving, the fulfillment of the legacy.

For everyone else, though, here is the secret to enjoying Revenge of the Sith:

Don’t giggle.

Not even a little. This is such an earnest, corny, irony-free movie that you have to be swept up in it for it to work. There’s a lot of great stuff in Sith, but this time, the movie revolves around George Lucas’ dialogue the way none of the others (except maybe parts of Return of the Jedi) have. These characters say things like “You’re breaking my heart” and “You underestimate my power” and “Now we will finish this” seriously, and they mean them, and it means something when they say them, but if you’re not invested in this saga, Sith may be the most unintentionally funny flick you’ve ever seen.

Things that don’t quite work: Well, there’s the dialogue, particularly any scene in which Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala have to act like they’re hopelessly in love. There’s Ian McDiarmid’s portrayal of the Emperor – he’s all slippery subtlety for the film’s first half, but when he takes on the familiar visage from Return of the Jedi, he becomes a cackling parody of evil. And then there’s Darth Vader’s first appearance, a moment so head-slappingly awful that even the diehards will laugh.

But the things that work, and there are many, bring this series to a close better than I could have hoped. The descent of Anakin, long theorized and imagined, is chillingly plausible, and the final battle between Anakin and Obi-Wan Kenobi packs a surprising emotional punch. Ewan McGregor is terrific as Obi-Wan, and though even he cannot make some of these lines sing, his sense of loss and betrayal is the heart of this movie. Hayden Christensen throws himself into the role of Anakin, and many of his scenes are affecting.

The film is relentlessly dark, as it should be, but I was knocked out by the places Lucas allowed these characters to go. This is the first Star Wars film that really hurts, and even if you’re expecting it, there are moments that will sucker-punch you. Even Yoda, completely computer-generated here, conveys a deep sadness, and you can completely understand his exile to Dagobah and his reluctance to train Luke in Episode V.

Yes, this film is political, showing how freedom can disintegrate when safety is threatened. Yes, this movie is also probably the most beautiful, stunning, heart-stopping CGI display ever seen – nothing I have ever witnessed looks like this film, and in that sense it is Lucas’ crowning achievement. But all that would mean nothing if Sith did not bring closure to the six-movie Star Wars saga in a satisfying way, if Lucas failed to make this film with all his heart.

I think he pulled it off. I was worried after Episode I, and I found that after Episode II I was most concerned with whether Lucas would be able to transform Anakin into Vader. I was so concerned, in fact, that I completely missed the altogether more difficult trick he performed – with Sith, he transformed Vader into Anakin. He redefined the original trilogy – you’ll never watch it the same way again. The stark black and white, good and bad of the original films is now muddied and infinitely more complex.

No sequence in the original is as altered by the prequels as the ending of Return of the Jedi, in which Luke redeems his father. There’s a scene in Sith that mirrors this one exactly, and knowing Anakin’s journey adds layers upon layers to Vader’s blank stare. What is he thinking of? Well, now I think we know, and it wraps the whole saga together in ways I did not expect. Star Wars has never hit me emotionally the way it does now. Vader was pure evil without his backstory. Anakin Skywalker, however, is misguided, lost, and somehow still redeemable, and that makes him a much more interesting, albeit tragic, figure.

For the first time in his scrappy little adventure series, Lucas has engaged my brain as much as my heart. I’m amazed that I’m saying this, but Revenge of the Sith makes Return of the Jedi a better movie. It adds focus and clarity to the story – it’s not about a band of rebels bringing down an empire, it’s about a father and his son. In the end, Anakin does bring balance to the Force, and even if you’ve seen the original trilogy a hundred times, that moment will never hit you the way it will after Sith. It’s all different, it’s all complete.

As I said, I can’t explain what this saga means to me, or why. But I’m grateful to George Lucas for sticking by it, for doing it the way he wanted to do it, and for giving it heart. Star Wars has consumed Lucas for longer than I have been alive, and now that it’s done (barring the inevitable re-releases and endless tinkering), I can see why he dedicated so much to it. If you’re able to accept its faults and its shortcomings, Star Wars is a remarkably beautiful and human story. And if you’re not, well, don’t worry. Revenge of the Sith is a film for the faithful, for the ones who have been on this ride all along, and if the other movies haven’t done it for you, then this one won’t either.

As for me, my friends and I have had this geeky little plan for a long time now. When all six films are available on DVD, we’re going to rent a large-screen television and watch the whole thing, back to front. I was worried about it before, but now I can’t wait. The finished Star Wars is better than I ever imagined it would be, and experiencing it with my best friends in the world seems like a terrific way to cap off my childhood. It’s all over, but just as I’ve grown up with Star Wars, so Star Wars has grown up with me, and with this final piece in place, I know it is a story I will continue to treasure.

See you in line Tuesday morning… and may the Force be with you.

So I was going to talk about the new double albums from Ryan Adams and the Eels this week, complete with the requisite raving and, no doubt, at least one “this will be in my top 10 list” pronouncement. And then I heard the new Weezer album, and hell, it’s been way too long since I’ve really lit into something, but this record deserves it. It’s absolute crap, and if I can, through my meager efforts here, keep just one person from laying down their hard-earned cash for this thing, then I’ll have done my job.

Honestly, I’ve never understood the big deal about Weezer. Somehow, the smirk-pop of their first two records has become, to many, genius-level brilliance. I don’t hear it. Weezer has always been a fun rock band, even when lead basket case Rivers Cuomo was wrestling with his own insecurities on Pinkerton. There wasn’t much to his work there besides “I’m so sad, and unlucky in love,” but I guess that spoke to his fans’ very souls. I don’t know, I’m grasping at straws. Pinkerton just ain’t that good.

There are, it seems, two types of Weezer fans – those who love Pinkerton, and those who dig the Green Album. I’m not even sure, at this point, which one Cuomo likes better – the commercial semi-failure of Pinkerton precipitated his five-year hiatus, and its subsequent lionization has loomed over his head like a guillotine blade ever since. The Green Album, the opening salvo of Weezer Mark Two, presented a different Cuomo entirely, with its 28 minutes of stupid melodic pop that refused to take itself seriously. It was the anti-Pinkerton, in a lot of ways, and I think Cuomo is better when he’s not trying to be the genius everyone seems to think he is.

So I’m a Green Album fan, which right away strips me of credibility to those on the other side of the aisle. Perhaps, they’re thinking, when I say the new Weezer album, Make Believe, is crap, I mean it’s not dumb-pop enough. Perhaps I mean it resembles Pinkerton, which many have intimated, and given that, perhaps I should buy it and see, they’re probably saying. To them, let me say this: Cuomo has delivered an album that, in the spirit of bipartisanship, both sides of this debate can hate equally. If you can listen to this whole thing and still believe Cuomo is anywhere close to brilliant, well, I’ll eat Brian Bell.

Who is Brian Bell, some of you may be asking, and that brings up a terrific point. While there are three other members of Weezer (and Bell is one of them), this band has always been the Rivers Cuomo show. He writes all the songs, provides the whole personality, and even sends the band into extended periods of downtime when he’s not feeling up to being a rock star. In a sense, the other guys get a good deal – they get to be in a hugely popular rock band, and still walk down the street anonymously, ‘cause no one’s paying attention to them. And, if the records suck, they can hide behind Cuomo, because it most certainly is all his fault.

And there’s a lot of blame to lay on Cuomo’s slumped shoulders for Make Believe. Start with the atrocious first single, “Beverly Hills.” Never mind that it pinches the guitar line from the chorus of “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” and never mind that it just repeats the same dumbass riff for its entire running time, the song itself is just stupid. If it’s meant to be ironic, I can’t tell. I’m too distracted by the godawful talk box solo, straight out of “Life’s Been Good to Me,” but not quite as cool. The gang vocals shouting “BEVERLY HILLS!!!” over and over, the sampled female voice DJ’d into every chorus, the asinine lyrics – it’s as if Cuomo took a class on crappy songwriting, and this was his final exam.

Wait, it gets worse. Apparently reversing his determined stance of the past few years, Cuomo has tried to make Pinkerton II here, “opening up” and “sharing his feelings” on most tracks. Thing is, he’s mistaken treacly sentiment and fourth-grade-level poetry for emotional content. He’s also failed to back up these amateur-hour words with music and melodies that may distract you from them, as he did on the Green Album. There are rare cases here where the lyrics ruin otherwise good songs, but for the most part, they’re on the same level. And that level is the basement.

Where to begin? “This is Such a Pity” is an obviously calculated attempt to cash in on the ‘80s new wave boom, so out of place is it with the rest of Weezer’s catalog, and it hinges on the line, “We should give all our love to each other, not this hate that destroys us.” Fine sentiments, Raffi, but couldn’t you come up with some less, shall we say, stupid way of putting it? “Peace” actually contains this couplet: “All these problems on my mind make it hard for me to think, there’s no way I can stop, my poor brain is gonna pop.” Rather than hide the last line’s ridiculous lapse, the band drops most of the music out at that point to emphasize it.

The album also suffers from a plague of power ballads, the curse of Styx and Journey and Air Supply. “Hold Me” fares pretty well, considering, but it’s still a lighters-in-the-air laugh riot – “Take me with you ‘cause I’m lonely” is the most insightful it gets. “We Are All on Drugs” sounds like the title to a pretty neat, funny song, doesn’t it? Wrong – it’s pretty much a straight-ahead Nancy Reagan cautionary tale. “My Best Friend” is probably the funniest thing here, with lyrics that pinch one of Queen’s worst songs – “You’re my best friend, and I love you, yes I do.” Seriously. Even Vanilla Ice picked a better Queen song to rip off. If you can get through “My Best Friend” without giggling, you’re a better man than I.

Is there anything worth listening to on here? Well, sort of. “Perfect Situation” is mediocre piano-pop, but it isn’t embarrassing. Same goes for “Pardon Me,” which hits upon one or two interesting lines – “I may not be a perfect soul, but I can learn self-control.” And “Haunt You Every Day,” the closer, is the best thing here, a power ballad that actually has some power. But that’s really it, and none of what I’ve mentioned approaches the work you’d expect from someone of Cuomo’s esteem. It takes a whole album of bland songs for him to tell us a) “I’m lonely” and b) “Don’t do drugs.”

Which brings me back to my original question. Why do people idolize Cuomo? His work has always been varying degrees of mediocre – Make Believe is his worst simply because his lousiest tendencies have all come to the fore at once, but they’ve always been there. I wouldn’t even care, but this band has the full force of the record company behind them, and goddamn “Beverly Hills” is everywhere, while genuinely good bands go unheralded. I’m trying to be as nice as I can, but I just don’t get why this band is considered worth investing time in.

I also don’t get why critics are willing to give Cuomo a pass. Is it because he’s an interesting person? Sure, he’s elevated quirky-shy oddness to an art form, and he’s fun to have around, but… four stars for this record? Seriously? That just adds fuel to the theory that all the big magazines are in the pocket of the record companies. I plan to use Make Believe as my benchmark for criticism – if you listen to this tripe, give it a good mark and use words like “straightforward” and “earnest” and “plaintive” to describe it, then I don’t even want to deal with you. Just be honest and call it crap.

In a way, this album is Cuomo’s “I’m a uniter, not a divider” speech. With this tedious, disastrous, unbelievably mediocre record, he’s given us something we can all rally against. Democrats and Republicans, pro-choicers and pro-lifers, Pinkerton lovers and Green Album fans, we can all join hands and hate the hell out of Make Believe. It is all the bad parts of all of their previous albums – no matter who you are, no matter what of theirs you’ve liked before, you’ll find something to despise here. It’s a big, thick, goopy mess, and what really bothers me about it is that if some unknown band came to Geffen Records and handed this in as their demo, they’d be laughed out of the building.

I implore you, don’t buy this record. If Cuomo’s attitude towards Pinkerton has taught us anything, it’s that if this album is enough of a commercial failure, he’ll go away and hide for another five years, at least. Perhaps another hiatus will recharge Cuomo’s batteries, perhaps not, I don’t care. All that matters is purging this shite from the airwaves for another half-decade. And in Cuomo’s absence, we can all make believe that Make Believe never happened, and each remember Weezer the way we want to remember them, be it Pinkerton or the Green Album or, hell, even not at all.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Bit of a ramble this time. With spoilers. Just warning you.

So I saw The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this week. Twice.

Let me back up. For many, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide books are just silly sci-fi romps, but for me they’ve always held a special place. I talked about my love for Adams’ writing in my eulogy for him, nearly four years ago. I first read the Hitchhiker’s books in fifth grade, and was awed by Adams’ twisting of language into new forms. He did this mostly for comedic effect, but the sentences he conjured made me think about words and word placement and emphasis and double meanings for the first time. I think every writer has that moment when the possibility of language opens up and unfolds, and for me it was the first few chapters of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Specifically, I remember marveling at the sequence in which Arthur Dent, everyman extraordinaire, and Ford Prefect, alien from somewhere in the vicinity of Betelguese, talk the man trying to raze Arthur’s house into lying down in front of the bulldozer, thus preventing the demolition, whilst Arthur and Ford pop down to the pub. It was a deft display of illogical logic, a tone-setter for the book. Plus, it was really funny, even for a fifth grader raised on poop jokes.

That bit is gone from the movie. Or rather, the basic framework of that scene remains, but the central idea is significantly altered – instead of using wit and wordplay to temporarily save Arthur’s house, in the film Ford distracts the construction workers with beer. It’s a lower-common-denominator kind of joke now, but it still sets the tone for what follows. Most of the wit in Hitchhiker’s has been replaced with slapstick, the complex jokes replaced with one-liners, the difficult interactions scrapped for narrative drive and romance. It’s been Hollywood-ized, sanitized for your protection.

The first time I saw the film, all I could think about was how little of Adams’ spirit and style had translated, despite his having written at least one draft of the screenplay. Sam Rockwell is not playing Zaphod, he’s playing some mad cowboy who calls himself Zaphod. The Infinite Improbability Drive doesn’t just change you into things over and over – that’s predictable, and therefore probable, which misses the whole point. Deep Thought does not watch cartoons. Marvin would never say, “I’m a robot, not a refrigerator.” Things like that kept nagging at me, and I couldn’t enjoy what was there on screen.

The second time, I tried to see it as a fun summer movie, and it worked much better for me. It’s still not a great movie, but it does have its charms, and its own funny bits. Roughly half of the film’s plot is new, with fascinating additions like the Point-of-View Gun, and while most of it could have been handled better than it was, it’s a diverting afternoon at the movies. Alan Rickman is perfect as the voice of Marvin, and Bill Nighy nails his bit role as Slartibartfast. The sequences on the Magrathea factory floor are brilliantly conceived as well. I can imagine Douglas Adams falling out of his chair at how beautiful they look.

And the truth is that the Hitchhiker’s story has changed dramatically in each of its incarnations. It started as a radio comedy, and later morphed into the books, a television series, a comic book, a stage show, and a computer game, all of which bear some, but not all, resemblance to the original. Change is the constant with Adams’ work, and if this light, fun movie gets more people to read the books, then that’s fantastic.

But here’s the thing that bothers me. The basic story of the Hitchhiker’s Guide is one that lends itself to weightless comedy pretty easily, and the movie makes a fluffy go at a feel-good sci-fi romance romp. All fine, except that misses the whole tone of Adams’ writing, which is a lot deeper and harsher than people credit it. Adams was a fatalist, his humor dark and depressing, if you stop to think about it. Again and again in the Hitchhiker’s books, the magical and unexplainable is shown to actually be coldly logical and oddly horrible. Just look at the meaning for life on Earth – Do we have a purpose? Yes. It’s to make pan-dimensional mice rich and famous. Life was better when we didn’t know that.

The movie is not fatalistic. The ending is happy – Arthur gets the girl, the Earth is rebuilt just as it was, and though no one learns the Ultimate Question, no one seems to care. The film’s last line seems to suggest that the filmmakers haven’t read the second book, so I wonder what they will think when they get to the end of Mostly Harmless (the fifth and last book) and see that Adams ended his saga coldly, logically, and finally, with a billion questions unanswered.

Which brings up an interesting topic (well, interesting to me) – at what point have you changed the meaning and tone of a concept like Hitchhiker’s Guide so that it no longer resembles the original? The film is quite obviously a Hitchhiker’s movie – we have Arthur and Ford and the Vogons and the destruction of Earth, and all the trappings that one would associate with the book, given a surface-level reading. But in a very real sense, it is not a Hitchhiker’s movie, because the very thing that the books are about is absent from the film. How much can one deviate from the basic idea and still deliver the goods?

Musicians struggle with this idea all the time. Established artists continually balance the desire to evolve with the need to maintain the recognizable core of their work. If you evolve too quickly, you lose your audience, but if you don’t evolve, you get bored and die, creatively speaking. For some artists, that’s not a concern – look at Frank Zappa’s insanely varied career, which jumped from ‘50s doo-wop to dissonant orchestral works to free jazz, album to album. But for some it’s a big deal. Imagine if the new Dave Matthews Band album sounded like Reign in Blood. Even if that’s what Dave really wanted to play, no one would go for it.

Take Nine Inch Nails as a for-instance. When Trent Reznor burst onto the scene in 1989, all fishnets and angst, he brought with him a new kind of industrial music. It can’t be overstated just how important Reznor’s personality and songwriting skill were to the impact of Pretty Hate Machine, as even a cursory jaunt through the scores of imitators that cropped up shortly thereafter will attest. Here was thinking, feeling, bleeding humanity dressed up in machines, a cold and abrasive shell housing a beating, broken heart.

What some seemed to miss was Reznor’s impeccable sonic craftsmanship – he has since dismissed Pretty Hate Machine as low-budget and tinny, and his later records prove him right. He’s been on a constant evolution since his debut, and considering he’s only managed four full-length albums in 16 years, such craft obviously takes time. 1994’s The Downward Spiral made him a star, despite its intense depth, narrative complexity, and experimental nature, and he took that as license to run with the ball.

But 1999’s double-disc opus The Fragile left a lot of fans in the dust. Here was a similar complexity and narrative thread, but here also was the most un-Nine Inch Nails material Reznor had yet released. Ambient instrumentals, marching band music, oceanic ballads, and real push and pull between the electronic and the organic sides of his sound, all wrapped up in impeccably labored-over sonic constructions that puzzle on first listen, but unfold over time. But that’s time that many fans didn’t want to put into this record, and despite a strong first-week showing, The Fragile fizzled.

Thing is, the album was amazing. I liked it for the very reason many hated it – it journeyed well beyond the accepted notions of Nine Inch Nails music. Reznor seemed to have answered his question about how far he could go without shedding his audience, however, and now he’s back with his most musically conservative record ever, With Teeth. And there’s no way that this isn’t a calculated, modulated, graphed-out attempt to regain the Downward Spiral and Pretty Hate Machine fans.

Given that cynical premise, though, the record is actually quite good. As a return to the “classic” Nine Inch Nails sound, it’s a sequel to the first half of Spiral, and had it been released in 1996, it probably would have capitalized on the success of that album. Reznor throws some curve balls – opener “All the Love in the World” is hushed, until it morphs into a disco-beat vocal collage, and “Beside You In Time” manages the neat trick of being a pulsing dirge. But mostly, we get big beats (courtesy of Dave Grohl), loud guitars, and screaming Trent, and if that’s what you’re looking for in your NIN, then you’ll love this.

I don’t love it, but that’s just because the artistic progression Reznor seemed to be on was a fascinating one for me. But then, what was he going to do – a quadruple album with 40-minute songs? Coming back to earth was the right thing, of course. It just shouldn’t have taken more than five years to make an album that sounds like 1994. The disc even closes with the next installment in the “Something I Can Never Have” / “Hurt” saga, “Right Where It Belongs,” and while it’s an affecting little ballad, I can’t help thinking that I’ve heard it before.

There’s another issue, too – Reznor delivered musically, coming up with some of his better melodies and riffs, but once again, it sounds like he scoured Livejournal for lyrical ideas. Stripped of the dramatic flow of his past two albums, Reznor’s words just sound like random bitching here. “The more I stay in here, the more I disappear.” “Feel the hollowness inside of your heart.” “I can feel me start to fade away.” And on and on. He got by with this stuff when he was telling stories, but I just don’t buy it in this first-person confessional sense anymore. Probably the only honest lyric on the record comes on “You Know What You Are,” when he screams, “You better take a good look ‘cause I’m full of shit.”

But NIN fans don’t care about all that. With Teeth is exactly what Reznor said it would be – 13 short, simple songs. The record is so skeletal that he even designed a minimalist package to go with it, the only liner notes being a production credit and a web address. This is Reznor’s back-to-basics effort, and he recaptures the core of his sound well. But he’s also come up with the first Nine Inch Nails album that doesn’t take us anywhere new. After a five-year absence, that’s a little disappointing.

Aimee Mann has the exact opposite problem. Her fourth album, Lost in Space, sounded so much like her third, Bachelor #2, and her work on the Magnolia soundtrack that many critics (including me) accused her of stagnation. Mann’s signature is the well-written sad ballad, and most of her songs are great in exactly the same ways. Even impeccable craft can get boring after a while if there’s no variation – I call that the Rush Principle – and Mann’s craft is always impeccable.

It’s hard not to see The Forgotten Arm, her fifth album, as an attempt to shake things up. Mann is a natural storyteller, having populated most of her songs with desperate characters clinging to each other, so a concept album seems a logical next step. The Forgotten Arm (the title is a boxing term for an unseen knockout punch) is the tale of a washed-up boxer named John, recently back from Vietnam, and the love of his life, named Caroline. The two of them split up, deal with life’s troubles (including John’s alcoholism), and get back together. You got it – it’s two more desperate characters clinging to each other.

Mann also hired guitarist Joe Henry to produce the record, and he gives it a rough, raw feel. This is perhaps the best-sounding Mann album since Whatever, especially when compared to the relatively chilly Lost in Space. The guitars positively crackle, and Mann’s voice is in fine form. Henry helped Mann rework her formula just enough that she sounds revitalized, even though she’s just doing what she does here.

And what she does is write great songs. If you ignore the story (which is easy to do), you’ll find another 12 sad, lovely numbers here that could belong to no one but Aimee Mann. The narrative forces two of the weaker songs to the front – “Dear John” is a slight opener with a decent hook, and “King of the Jailhouse” is just that much too slow that it becomes ponderous. But once you get past them, you’re in a stretch of songs (from track three to track eight) that very few living pop songwriters could match. Elvis Costello, Andy Partridge, maybe Neil Finn, and maybe Mann’s husband Michael Penn, but very few others.

And it’s not like the other songs suck, either. “That’s How I Knew the Story Would Break My Heart” is a lovely piano ballad that comes alive at the second chorus, and “I Can’t Help You Anymore” is another classic. Closer “Beautiful” is just that, even if it ends a little abruptly. But the meat of the album is in that killer three-to-eight stretch, which includes “Goodbye Caroline” and “Going Through the Motions,” two of Mann’s most compelling rockers. It also includes “Little Bombs,” one of the saddest tunes she has written, which centers on the line, “Life just kind of empties out.”

Lyrically, Mann is in familiar territory, but the story she is telling adds focus. “I’ll get a pen and make a list, and give you my analysis, but I can’t write this story with a happy ending,” she sings in “I Can’t Help You Anymore,” and she could be talking about her own work. “Beautiful,” the finale, is gloriously bittersweet, our two protagonists discovering that they’re not meant to be, but they will always love each other. “I wish you could see it too, how I see you,” she sings at the end, and there’s no more to say. Mann succeeds in painting an extended, heartbreaking portrait – so well, in fact, that Paul Thomas Anderson should film these songs.

The Forgotten Arm uses its concept and its punchier production to bring out the core of Aimee Mann’s appeal. She’s changed her modus operandi here just enough that you remember why you loved her work in the first place. While this record doesn’t quite have the 100% success rate of some of her earlier ones, it proves that she’s not in a holding pattern. If you were put off by the icy veneer of Lost in Space, this one is warmer and more immediate, but still wonderfully heartsick and sorrowful at its center. Capturing that is the difference between a great album and a great Aimee Mann album, and she’s managed to evolve without losing that spirit.

At the end of the year, I will not be surprised if I find out that I bought half of my Top 10 List in the last two weeks. I’ve already talked about the Choir, Aimee Mann and Ben Folds, and next week I’ll get to Ryan Adams and the Eels. And after that, Weezer, the Levellers, Audioslave, Girlyman and a bunch of others. No breaks in sight.

See you in line Tuesday morning.