I resisted Jack White for an awfully long time.

While I try to hear everything I can, I have an inborn resistance to things I’m “supposed” to like. By that I mean music that seems to grab the critical consciousness in a choke-hold, music that seems to get universal support from all the right corners at the same time. Right now, for instance, I’m “supposed” to like Tune-Yards and Andrew Bird and the National. I only really like one of those, and I’ll leave it to you to guess which one.

I’m honestly not a natural contrarian. I sincerely want to like everything I hear. The problem sometimes is getting me to hear something that has attained such a level of hype. If the noise drowns out the music, my natural instinct is to wait until the noise dies down. At the risk of ruining the mystery of the last paragraph, I’ll tell you that I avoided Tune-Yards’ Whokill like it could give me herpes. It took a while to get me to even sample the band, so deafening was the hype, and when I did, I found something pretty terrific. Merrill Garbus is a bit of a genius, and her new album Nicki Nack is even better and more focused.

This is the way it usually works. I’ll stay away from something I’m “supposed” to like until I feel comfortable approaching it, and then I’ll kick myself for not sampling it earlier. However, I know myself well enough to know that if I had tried Tune-Yards in the midst of the critical tsunami, I would have let my own irritation color my first experience. I try not to do that, but in cases like this, it’s usually better if I wait it out a little bit.

So back in 2002, the White Stripes were a band I was supposed to like. And I didn’t. At all.

“Fell in Love With a Girl” was absolutely everywhere that year, and I hated it. Simple, punky, sloppy, tuneless, pointless – it just annoyed me to no end. The fact that the Stripes were part of a garage-rock revival at the time, leading the way for boring blah merchants like the Hives and the Vines, only served to repel me further. I didn’t buy White Blood Cells that year, and in fact I stayed away from Elephant the following year too.

It took a kind correspondent and some free copies to get me to try the Stripes in 2005, and when I finally did, I heard something pretty magical. Get Behind Me Satan was exactly the kind of diverse work I needed to feel like there was something worth investigating here. Since then, I’ve been a fan, and I’ve watched as Jack White let his genius out slowly. His pop collective The Raconteurs were nothing like the Stripes, and his dirty blues tribe The Dead Weather like neither of them. He chose fascinating artists to produce, from Loretta Lynn to Wanda Jackson to Jerry Lee Lewis, and with Third Man Records he’s been a key component of the current vinyl revival.

And now he’s released Lazaretto, his second album as a solo artist, and it may be my favorite of his things. Like everything he’s done, it’s steeped in history – White is a man who knows his old blues and rock and roll – but this is the fullest flowering of his new-old-sounds approach. It’s also his most complex and all-over-the-map record, and it seems like while his bands usually stick to one or two squares, when White records under his own name, he feels free to wander around the chessboard. Lazaretto sounds like nothing he’s done, but it sounds like everything he’s done, all tied up in a neat bow.

Of course it starts with blues-rock, because that’s his home base. “Three Women” is a hilariously clichéd blues lament – “I got three women, red, blonde and brunette” – that he updates for the iPhone age: “It took a digital photograph to pick which one I like.” The rowdy “lordy-lord” that makes up the refrain is insanely catchy, and it’ll probably take you a couple listens to realize that White isn’t playing any guitar on this tune. It’s fueled by piano and organ, with some nifty pedal steel by Fars Kaplin. “Lazaretto” follows the same path – it starts with a synthesizer bass groove, and the guitars don’t really kick in until the 43-second mark. When they do, though, they’re massive, and his Jimmy Page-style solo is a facemelter.

Had this been just another rock record, it probably would have been fine. But White pulls out all the stops, filling these 39 minutes with every influence in his toolbox. Lillie Mae Rische plays sweet fiddle and sings on the country-blues “Temporary Ground,” and comes back for the tumbling instrumental “High Ball Stepper” and the quick barroom pop throwdown “Just One Drink.” “Would You Fight for My Love” is a true epic in 4:09, Brooke Waggoner’s piano leading the menacing charge. “I know that you want more, but would you fight for my love? And I’ve hurt you before, but can you ignore, my love?” The song takes half a dozen fascinating detours before coming in for a grandiose landing.

“Alone in My Home” is folksy, and “Entitlement” is even folksier, with harp playing by the great Timbre Cierpke (whose own new album should be coming soon). While White seems to be pulling a Kanye West throughout the latter song (“I’m sick of being told what to do”), he rights himself at the end: “Not one single person on God’s golden shore is entitled to one single thing.” “I Think I Found the Culprit” is a minor-key wonder, Waggoner’s piano again taking the lead, and brief closer “Want and Able” finds White playing all the instruments to tell a winding fable over simple chords. It could be 200 years old, this song.

I quite like Lazaretto, particularly for its expanded palette of musical colors. While Jack White has contributed to many single-mission bands, he seems to feel fully unfettered when recording under his own name, and that’s a treat to listen to. Sure, I resisted for a while, but in my defense, had he sounded like this in 2003, I would have been much more interested. I still feel like I’m supposed to embrace his work, and I’m still pulling back from that a little. But if he keeps making records like Lazaretto, I won’t be pulling back much longer.

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While we’re admitting things, I’ll say here that I do get a slight thrill out of liking bands that I’m not supposed to. Anyone who has been reading this column for any length of time can probably name many I’ve championed through the years, from Hanson to the Click Five to Kip Winger to Coldplay. It’s not intentional – I’m not forcing myself to like these bands just to be contrary. But when I do end up liking something that I know will send a tremor through the Force, it makes me devilishly happy.

Linkin Park is definitely one of those bands. Back in 2010, I included their tremendous fourth album, A Thousand Suns, in my top 10 list. It’s a record I still listen to regularly – I’d never much liked the band before Suns, but the depth and diversity of that work ensured that I’d be paying attention from then on. I still feel like Suns deserved its spot in the list. It revealed Linkin Park as a band unlike any other, with a kaleidoscope of influences and a willingness to take risks. Some of those risks were ill-advised, but still. I’d never thought of them as a particularly brave band until then.

And I’ll admit that they disappointed me with 2012’s Living Things, a record that seemed to retrench around their old sound, disregarding many of the forward leaps of Suns. It was still largely electronic, but it felt a bit like covering Meteora with synthesizers. I’ll also admit that advance press on the band’s sixth album, The Hunting Party, didn’t thrill me. “The guitars will be back,” they promised. “It will be like Hybrid Theory,” they exclaimed. This felt like a full retreat. I almost didn’t buy The Hunting Party.

But goddamn, I’m glad I did.

This is Linkin Park in full risk-taking mode, but it’s a completely different risk than Suns. This is, for the most part, Linkin Park’s version of a full-on metal album. Drummer Rob Bourdon and guitarist Brad Delson take center stage here in a way they haven’t since the early days – this record could be seen as an apology to both of them for the past four years of electronic experimentation. But this isn’t the melodic nu-metal of last decade. This is huge, thudding, almost old-school metal. This is some old-Metallica thrash metal shit. It’s louder, more aggressive and more hardcore than anything they’ve done.

And they’re still Linkin Park, so they’ve worked in a liberal amount of those electronics and Mike Shinoda’s rapping, sitting alongside Chester Bennington’s full-throated screams. “War” may as well be the Stooges, so unstoppable is its punk-rock groove, but it leads directly into “Wasteland,” a showcase for Shinoda that sounds like a heavier Fort Minor track. “Guilty All the Same” initially underwhelmed me – I had no idea the whole record would be along these lines – but now it knocks me flat. It’s a six-minute metal workout that somehow makes room for a verse from Rakim, without ever sounding like Limp Bizkit.

This is an angry record, and the band has kept the political focus of Suns, raging against the futility of war throughout. Bennington is a hell of a singer, and when he’s not shouting his throat raw here, he’s providing moments of sweetness amidst the din. “Until It’s Gone” is a four-minute cliché lyrically, but it’s pretty awesome musically, full of organ-and-keys interludes and big-big-big choirs. “Mark the Graves” may be the record’s high point, a mid-tempo thrash epic that gives way to a lovely sea of a verse and a hummable riff. But then, the high point may be the piano-led instrumental “Drawbar,” or “Final Masquerade,” an atmospheric pop song the equal of anything this band has done.

The closer, “A Line in the Sand,” is an epic among epics. It starts with a slow burn, Shinoda singing about surveying the aftermath of a battle, but it soon explodes in a volley of Megadeth-worthy riffs and beats. (This is actually much, much heavier than Megadeth’s last record.) Throughout its six minutes, it keeps cycling back to that lovely opening melody, while building on it. Bennington screams his head off, and then the song collapses into a slow rapped section that shouldn’t fit as well as it does. When it returns to that swell melody at the end, it feels like they’ve crafted the metal monsterpiece of 2014.

All by itself, “A Line in the Sand” would justify this change in direction. And make no mistake, this is a massive change. This is not a return to the Hybrid Theory/Meteora nu-metal sound, and at this point, I don’t think they’re ever going back there. I’m going to get a ration of shit for recommending Linkin Park again, but I really like The Hunting Party. For one thing, it scratches my old-school metal itch, but for another, it offers further evidence that Linkin Park is much more than their reputation would suggest. They’re not afraid to take a hard right turn like this and leave their fanbase in the dust. For sheer ballsiness, The Hunting Party gets a nod from me. The fact that it’s a killer record only seals the deal.

* * * * *

Next week, back to the beautiful with First Aid Kit and The Wild Life. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So. I’m 40.

It is sort of hard to believe. Back when I was in high school, 40 seemed unimaginably old. I mean, my parents were in their 40s. I couldn’t even see that far into the future. And now that it’s here, I honestly don’t feel any different than I did 10 years ago, except for an overall surplus of confidence and comfort in my own skin. (Well, more than I had at 30, certainly.)

At 40 years old I own my own home, I have a pretty amazing job, I’m down to a weight I haven’t been since I was 19, and I have far fewer bouts of sadness. (Or at least far fewer bouts that sadness wins.) I have some amazing friends, far more than I ever expected I would, and I feel a real sense of home where I am. I make enough money to buy all the damn music I want, and I still love doing this silly little column every week, for whoever is still reading it.

In short, I quite like my life. And talking with my friends of a similar age, that seems to be the consensus – by the time you’re 40, it gets easier to love your life. Recently another 40-year-old and I were involved in a conversation with a couple friends of mine who had just started their 30s. This talk drove a few things home for me, most importantly the fact that I loved my 30s. You couldn’t pay me to do the 20s again, but the 30s were one high point after another. I spent them all in one place, as opposed to the state-hopping I did in my 20s, which certainly helped. But I’ve wrapped that place around me, and it’s become part of me in a way I never expected.

Here’s one thing my friend and I agreed on. In your 20s, you’re obsessed with making these life-changing decisions, with composing a list of things you want to do with your life and working hard to make sure you get to them all. But in your mid-30s, you realize that you’ll never do everything on that list. And you’re 100% OK with that. In fact, you’re happier – I sometimes find myself looking back on that list and wondering why I wanted to do those things in the first place. Some of them are downright silly, and some of them would have led me very different places. Given where I am now, that could have been tragic.

I know 25-year-old me would cringe at the above, and call me a sellout and a settler. But 40-year-old me really doesn’t see it that way. 40-year-old me loves his life, and the people in it, and realizes that a fine afternoon spent in the company of good friends is far better than whatever crazy thing I thought I’d be doing at this age. Life is short, and getting shorter all the time, and there’s nothing better than joy, wherever you find it. And often, the simplest pleasures are the best ones.

Thank you to everyone who helped me celebrate this momentous birthday. I love you all. And now, back to a simple pleasure that continues to bring me joy.

* * * * *

My father told me on my birthday that 40 is the new 20. I replied to him that 70 is the new dead.

I may be a tiny bit sensitive about my age. People keep telling me I don’t look 40, which always makes me think about how damn old 40 is supposed to look. I certainly feel like my best days are ahead, despite the sheer number of candles on my metaphorical cake. (No literal cake. Cake has carbs.)

As usual, music has proven a fine comfort in my declining years. Some of the finest musicians I know are still churning out fine, fine work, even after turning 40. Prince is 56 years old, and have you seen that guy? More to the point, have you heard him? He’s still one of the most badass guitar players on the planet, and one of the funkiest people alive. The youngest guy in Marillion is 53, and they made perhaps their finest record last year with Sounds That Can’t Be Made. Steve Hindalong is 54 and Derri Daugherty 55, and the new Choir album is amazing.

The indomitable Bob Mould is now 53 years old, but you’d never know it listening to his new album, Beauty and Ruin. Mould has taken some detours in his career, but 2012’s Silver Age found him picking right up where Sugar left off nearly two decades ago, stomping through some incredible (and incredibly loud) pop tunes with an almost adolescent energy. Mould pioneered this sound – sharp melodies drowned in simply massive electric guitars – and though he’s dabbled in electronics and stripped-down arrangements, that sound is still where his heart lies.

Beauty and Ruin is a fitting sequel. It returns to that same soundscape, and delivers with the same explosive force. It’s an angrier record, darker and less infectious, but it’s only the slightest of steps down from Silver Age. Opener “Low Season” is something of a tease, a trudging dirge that might make you think you’re in for a slog. But then “Little Glass Pill” breaks down your door, and “I Don’t Know You Anymore” dances in the wreckage. Together, these songs are barely five and a half minutes, but they’re awesome. The latter track in particular is a Mould classic, and it’s simply unstoppable.

Every song on Beauty and Ruin save the opener stays south of four minutes, and the whole thing barrels through in 36 minutes. There’s a punk edge to tracks like “Kid With Crooked Face” and “Hey Mr. Grey,” an attitude that Mould hasn’t embraced like this since the glory days of Husker Du. The latter song is about cranky old people, and how great the world will be when they all die out. That’s kind of perfect.

Beauty and Ruin is a more diverse album than Silver Age, too. There’s a light touch to “Forgiveness,” a pop dreaminess to “Fire in the City,” and a delightful acoustic break on “Let the Beauty Be.” The downside is that many of these songs, like “Nemeses Are Laughing,” skimp on the immediate hooks. (They’re there – that song’s “doo-doo-doo” refrain is as pop as anything Mould has done – but you have to hunt for them.)

Still, I’ll take that if it means we get an album this assured and alive from Bob Mould. On songs like “Tomorrow Morning,” he looks forward with an almost boundless optimism, and on the powerhouse closer “Fix It,” he shouts, “Time to fill your heart with love, time to find out who you are.” What a great sentiment for someone who has been where he’s been. If Mould can make an album this youthful, this superb at 53, then 40 doesn’t seem so old after all.

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A quick postscript: Part of my birthday celebration was a show by Texas wunderkinds Quiet Company at the Beat Kitchen in Chicago. I’ve said this before, but you won’t find a better live band anywhere. (They’re all nice guys, too.) The band played a few songs from their upcoming fourth album, Transgressor, and they sound terrific. If you’re thinking about best-of-the-year candidates, put that one on your list. More when I hear it.

Next week, Jack White, Linkin Park and/or the Antlers. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This week, I’m looking forward to the reissues of the first three Led Zeppelin albums. And it’s got me thinking about blues bands versus bluesy bands.

I’ve never been a big fan of blues. Like country, I have a greater appreciation for the earliest material, the true bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Skip James. There’s a heart and soul to this howling, dusty music, one that is impossible to replicate. And yet, blues musicians have been trying to replicate it for a hundred years. The entire genre has ossified, to the point where “authenticity” means you need to repeat the same old chord cycles again and again, and sing about the same things your idols did, in the same way.

So that’s blues, and there’s no arguing the fact that it’s a vital and important part of music history. Every brand of rock and roll owes its very existence to the blues. But I need my music to grow and change, and since “blues” has come to mean just this one thing, done just this one way, we need a new term for those who are trying to incorporate the blues while pushing it forward. That’s where “bluesy” comes in.

You can make a strong argument that Led Zeppelin was a blues band, at least at first. They covered Willie Dixon twice on their first record, stole Muddy Waters’ (by way of Dixon) “You Need Love” for “Whole Lotta Love,” and swiped lines from Albert King, Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf for “The Lemon Song.” They were always steeped in the blues – in later years, they developed an epic 11-minute take on Blind Willie Johnson’s “In My Time of Dying,” and later, a reinvented version of Johnson’s “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.”

But no one remembers them as a blues band. That’s because they took that firm foundation and built a skyscraper on it – Zeppelin dabbled in folk, reggae, prog and dance, all with the thunderous power of pure rock. They’re known as one of the best rock bands ever, with one of the most diverse and fascinating catalogs. And through it all, they remained bluesy. Not blues, but bluesy. They maintained their sense of history, and constantly acknowledged their debt to the blues, while building on it and creating something new.

That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in. Both of the bands I have on tap this week do the same thing, to varying degrees. Both are neck-deep in the blues, but you won’t find either one angling to be on Alligator Records, or share the stage with the likes of Buddy Guy and B.B. King. They know where they come from, where the cornerstones were laid, but they’re both consciously working on new buildings.

That’s certainly true of the Black Keys, who began their career self-producing ramshackle records chock full of the blues. The first two tracks on their first album, The Big Come Up, are blues covers: one by R.L. Burnside, and the other by Junior Kimbrough. In 2006, they even recorded an entire EP of Kimbrough songs. But at the same time, they were also covering the Beatles and the Stooges. Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach have always been more than blues disciples, and impressive rock records like Magic Potion proved it.

And then they met Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse. He’s produced every one of their records since Attack and Release in 2008, and while the pairing produced some interesting left-field results early on, it’s clearly run its course. The Keys’ new album, Turn Blue, goes so far beyond boring that you could fill your prescription for Ambien with it. Everything is smoothed out and slowed down and glossed up – they barely sound like they’re alive, let alone awake.

Lowlights are many. Opener “Weight of Love” crawls in on its stomach, and keeps on crawling for an endless seven minutes. Auerbach’s guitar has never sounded tamer or safer – it’s like he took lessons from John Mayer in syruping up his sound. The title track is clearly going for some kind of smooth blues shimmy, but it’s so inconsequential that it wafts in and out without leaving a mark. “Fever” shows signs of life, with its pumping organ, but “Year in Review” buries its groove beneath layers of strings and production gloss, and the absolutely awful “Bullet in the Brain” wastes whatever good will the previous two songs built up.

And on it goes like that, the Keys submerging everything that used to be good about them beneath stifling overproduction and a lack of memorable… well, anything. The record ends with a song produced by the Keys themselves, “Gotta Get Away,” but it’s perhaps the most boring thing here, a middle-of-the-road rock number that does nothing imaginative or original. It does sound like blues-rock, in a way that most of this confused mess of a record doesn’t, but when said blues-rock is this hackneyed and typical, that’s not a virtue.

If Turn Blue proves anything, it’s that the Black Keys/Danger Mouse partnership has reached the point of diminishing returns. This is, by far, the worst product of that partnership, and one of the worst records the Keys have made. It’s time to reconsider just what they want this band to be, and they need to start by getting someone else to sit in that producer’s chair. I’d hate to think that they could make something blander and lamer than this. Let’s hope they turn it around.

* * * * *

So let’s say you bought Turn Blue, hoping for a strong and smart bluesy rock record, and you found it just as stultifying and dull as I did. If you’re looking to trade up, you could do a lot worse than the self-titled debut from Noah’s Arcade.

Full disclosure: I know these guys. I’ve seen them play probably a dozen times, and I’ve talked with them all about this record, both before and after I heard it. Noah’s Arcade is a three-piece from Aurora, Illinois (natch), consisting of guitarist/singer Noah Gabriel with the best rhythm section in the city, bassist Chad Watson and drummer Justin O’Connell. Over the past couple years, I have watched them evolve from a solo act with a backup band to a truly organic unit, bringing out the best qualities in all three.

Their debut album was primarily recorded many months ago, so it doesn’t quite capture that evolution. The songs are all Gabriel’s – he has seven prior albums as a singer/songwriter, ranging from folksy acoustic material to full-band blues-rock, and for long stretches of Noah’s Arcade, it could easily be another of those. But when the band locks in behind him, as they do on fiery opener “On the Run,” and in the more powerful second half of the album, you can hear the potential. Noah’s Arcade is an electrifying live band, and though their entire album doesn’t quite capture that, there are enough moments that do.

“On the Run” certainly starts things off well. It pinches a key riff from Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well” and runs with it, the band jamming with guest organist Jeff Lantz (who is all over this record). There’s nothing particularly original here, but it stomps in, kicks up some dust, and stomps out in two and a half minutes. Boom. Gabriel’s voice is perfect for this kind of thing, husky and full of soul, and his quick solo gives you your first glimpse at his chops. He’s a well-respected axe slinger in these parts, and it’s easy to hear why.

The rest of the first side is slower and moodier than I expected, which takes some getting used to. “East of Midnight” has a pulsing, mid-tempo atmosphere, O’Connell’s tricky beat propelling things forward while Gabriel spins out a sweet and memorable guitar figure. Gabriel and Watson harmonize well on this song and others, Watson taking the higher parts. But the tune’s simple chord progression, which you’ll hear a few other times on this record, keeps it grounded for me – it never quite takes off. “Electric Rain” also dances in place, this time more slowly. It’s pretty for what it is, but it never grabs me.

“Killer’s Role” is the third simple, moody song in a row, but Lantz helps elevate this one, along with some subtle playing from Gabriel. “Here We Are Now” picks things up a little, with an intro that reminds me of the Heartbreakers, and “Hard Times” injects some pure blues into the proceedings. The playing is excellent on every one of these tracks, and Watson whips out his harmonica on “Hard Times,” adding a nice texture. But after that explosive opening, the slow-to-middling nature of the rest of side one is a surprise.

Side two, however, makes up for all of that. “Lovesick Lullaby” is quick – less than two minutes long – and loud, chugging along confidently. “Beggars Never Borrow” sports the most infectious guitar riff on the album, wrapped up in a sweet, folksy number. The jam session that concludes “Of the Engine” is, to that point, my favorite thing on Noah’s Arcade – you can hear the interplay at work, Watson sparking off of O’Connell while Gabriel and Lantz spit fire. This is what they sound like live. I want the entire second Arcade album to sound like this.

Gabriel and the band save the best for last – in a lot of ways, the entire album builds to the final two tracks. “Killin’ Time” takes that chord progression you’ve heard a few times now and puts a new spin on it, slipping in and out of an energetic reggae beat. Watson and O’Connell shine on this one, nimbly skipping through these sections with grace – Watson’s solo section is superb. And “The Love,” the six-minute finale, is the album’s high point. It’s an epic, dramatic trip, starting gently and gathering force as it goes. Gabriel’s voice is at its peak here, and the entire band locks into this song, bringing it home with the power it demands. “The Love” is the best song I’ve heard from Noah Gabriel, and this rendition does it justice.

In some ways, I feel like Noah’s Arcade wraps up just as it truly hits its stride. The album gets better as it goes along, and I could listen to those final four tracks for days. If they make this stretch of songs the starting point for album number two, it will be an order of magnitude better than this already impressive first effort. The three guys in Noah’s Arcade never forget the blues, but they rarely play it straight, preferring to build off of it in some captivating ways. There’s a lot to like on their debut record, and a lot that points to great things ahead.

If they’re playing in your area, go see them. And check out their self-titled album here.

* * * * *

That’s it for this week. Next week, I plan to take my customary birthday break (which I rarely indulge in, honestly) while I turn 40 years old. I’ll be back in June with some reflections on that, I’m sure.

Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

My name is Andre and I like Coldplay.

I know, I know. That’s how you know I’m gay. I’ve heard it. I like a lot of bands that earn me raised eyebrows, particularly from the hipper-than-thou crowd, but few of them make me as defensive as Coldplay. I’ve liked them since their first album in 2002, I liked them when they became international superstars, I liked them even when I couldn’t escape them (the “Fix You” years were difficult), and I like them now.

Hating Coldplay has become something of a sport, with people lining up to throw the first punch whenever Chris Martin and company rear their pretty heads. I’ve never been down with that. It’s not that I don’t understand where people are coming from. Generally speaking, sentimentality is frowned upon, particularly plain-spoken sentimentality. (See also: Keane.) When pretty people sing popular songs about love with no ironic distance, people get wary. They’re not sure they should trust it. For most of Coldplay’s lifespan, Martin has been a multi-millionaire married to Gwyneth Paltrow. We’re supposed to hate him. It’s what we do.

I get it. I just don’t agree with it. If Coldplay were the bland, safe band their detractors think they are, I’d have a bigger problem with what they do. But for one of the most popular bands in the world, Coldplay is decidedly weird. The last time they reliably sounded like Coldplay was in 2005, on the lackluster X&Y. The loud-and-clear message of this record: here’s a band who needs to shake things up. And so they did, bringing in Brian Eno to produce the oddball collage Viva La Vida in 2008, and they haven’t stopped shaking it up since.

If you passed on Viva La Vida and Mylo Xyloto, you missed Coldplay’s most bizarre and creative work. On the former album, they sounded like a band unleashed, bringing in dozens of different influences. They went darker on “Cemeteries of London,” ducked down a prog-rock alleyway on “42,” took a little Talking Heads medicine on “Strawberry Swing.” Most of all, they never sat still – Viva La Vida packs two albums’ worth of strange rock into 45 minutes. Mylo Xyloto was a concerted attempt to bring those all-over-the-place influences back to their pop roots, but in a lot of ways, it’s even weirder. “Charlie Brown,” “Major Minus,” the Rhianna duet “Princess of China,” even “Paradise” – this is the work of a restless band, not content to do what’s expected of them. That they’ve had any radio play at all since 2005 is almost inexplicable.

But those records are feel-good hits of the summer compared with their sixth album, Ghost Stories. It is, without doubt, their most beautiful, a hushed and compact collection of wispy laments and half-remembered dreams. This is an album designed to be listened to front to back, as a single thought. Nearly every song is airy and contemplative, a sad and brokenhearted exhale. Ghost Stories was clearly crafted as a whole, as an experience, and it’s the band’s most successful artistic statement.

It’s also, clearly, the Martin/Paltrow breakup album. If Martin’s lyrics have been a stumbling block for you before, you will want to steer clear of this record. It is his most honest and personal set of songs, which can only mean that Martin’s genuine, rip-your-soul-out heartbreak really is this mundane. Martin spends most of this record feeling sad – he’s sad watching television on “Another’s Arms,” wishing “you were here beside me, your body on my body.” He’s sad waiting for the phone to ring on “Oceans,” he’s sad watching a flock of birds fly through the sky on “O,” he’s sad thinking about that tattoo he now regrets on “Ink.”

Martin’s heartache is straightforward and simplistic throughout Ghost Stories, to the point where I wish he had probed deeper. On “True Love,” he puts his all into the line “tell me you love me, and if you don’t then lie to me.” This has been spoken and sung 20 million times, in many different forms, but Martin treats it like it’s a new thought. And perhaps for him, it is. I know I’ve never been in a situation where I’ve felt like saying that honestly, but maybe he truly feels this way. I’m more inclined to believe that he’s simply an unoriginal lyricist than that he’s aiming for universal and coming up with trite. But trite it is. Ghost Stories needs Martin’s words to tie it together, but you’ll wish they weren’t so pedestrian.

The lyrics bother me on this album more than any other the band has made, simply because the music is so beautiful. I cannot emphasize this enough – listen to Ghost Stories in sequence, all at once. It opens with “Always In My Head,” more of a prologue than anything else. Jonny Buckland’s subtle, ethereal guitar glides in on a bed of atmospheric synths while Martin addresses this album’s subject directly: “you’re always in my head, always in my head.”

This barely qualifies as a song, and it’s more of a lead-in to “Magic,” the sparkling first single. It’s got an R&B beat, some gentle work from bassist Guy Berryman, some lovely electric pianos and a strangely insidious melody line. The song builds gradually, never overplaying its hand, so when Buckland’s full-throated chords come charging in, it feels like something special. “Ink” is slipperier, with its electronic beat and circular acoustic figure. In his worst moment on the album, Martin yells out “Got a tattoo and the pain’s all right.” But the central idea, of regretting a tattoo once the relationship it represents dissolves, is solid.

“True Love” is the album’s one moment of real sappiness, with its Mike and the Mechanics guitars and big synths supporting Martin’s wavery falsetto. But I’m a big fan of the jarring guitar solo, sliding out of nowhere in the wrong key and continuing to dirty up the song as it goes. The band has described this as their favorite song, and it’s my least favorite, so there you go. But I adore “Midnight,” which tiptoes in after “True Love,” as if to signal the start of a darker ride. The band again worked with ambient electronic artist Jon Hopkins, and they crafted a pulsing, beatless wonder. Martin stacks his vocals and processes them, a technique that has reminded some of Bon Iver. But Justin Vernon has never given us a song like “Midnight,” with its shadowy electronic shimmies and supple, chorus-free melody.

“Another’s Arms” picks up the pace imperceptibly, opening with an operatic female vocal and a featherbed of fluttering drums and low-key synths. Buckland refuses all opportunities to show off on this record, preferring to offer accents and atmospheres, and his clean guitar tones make this song. The melody is simple yet insidious. “Oceans” keeps the mood low and melancholy – for most of the running time, it’s played on an acoustic guitar and a beeping bit of electronic percussion. Martin sounds weary here, ready to pack it in, and not even the supple strings can cheer him up: “And to find that you’re alone in this world, to find yourself alone…” Again, this is a song without a chorus, just a lovely meandering melody.

What follows is more than a minute of cloudy keyboards, leading into “A Sky Full of Stars,” the record’s one moment of pure bliss. It feels like new love, like sunshine through dark windows. The song is a collaboration with dance music superstar Avicii, and its booming beat builds organically until it’s almost too joyous. Not much happens in this song, but not much has to – in its place near the end of this record, it does what it’s supposed to perfectly. The album then ends with “O,” a mournful piano piece that seems to put to rest this melancholy mood. It remains low-key and simple, but gorgeous, a fine and fitting end to the band’s most heartfelt record.

Now of course, Martin spends all of “O” ruminating on a flock of birds as a metaphor for lost love. I get it, I really do. I know why people hate this band. But if you can show me another act at Coldplay’s level of popularity and fame that would be willing to make an album like Ghost Stories, in defiance of everything they’re supposed to be, I will be very surprised.

Virtually nothing on this album sounds like the Coldplay that took the world by quiet storm. It is the sound of four people making the most beautiful, heartbroken record they possibly could, regardless of record sales or market expectations. That in itself is something of an act of defiance, but even that doesn’t seem to matter to Coldplay, a band only concerned with how far they can push themselves each time out.

As I said, Coldplay doesn’t have to be this weird. The fact that they are, that they continue to make albums like Viva La Vida and Mylo Xyloto and Ghost Stories, keeps me coming back. Ghost Stories is a strange and wonderful little record, and I am not ashamed to say I like the band that made it. I have no idea where they will go next, and that alone makes me excited to follow what this band does. My name is Andre and I like Coldplay. I expect I always will.

Next week, getting the blues with the Black Keys and Noah’s Arcade. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I caught the first Lilith Fair in 1997.

Sarah McLachlan’s traveling celebration of women in music came at one of those bizarre cultural moments that seem to happen every few years, when we decide that it’s somehow novel that women write and play their own songs. I’ve never quite understood that, having been a fan of most of the women on that inaugural bill for years, but if the culture occasionally catches up to artists like Fiona Apple and Tracy Chapman, there’s nothing bad about that.

I ended up covering the Lilith Fair for Face Magazine, and I used my extended review to repeatedly poke fun at the notion that this tour was something revolutionary. This didn’t win me any friends, and I’ve grown up a lot since then. Were I to cover the tour now, I’d probably write something a lot more straightforward, noting that women songwriters still hold a disproportionately small percentage of the recording contracts, and female artists that are not called upon for their looks remain few and far between.

I didn’t know how things would go, though, did I? I couldn’t have imagined that the Lilith Fair artists would mainly have gone the way of the dodo by now. We haven’t heard from Chapman in six years (longer if you count the last time the world at large paid attention), and she shows no signs of returning. Fiona Apple is still phenomenal, but she puts out an album every five years, and then disappears. McLachlan’s last few albums have found her drifting off into willowy irrelevance. Jewel’s gone pop-country, Sheryl Crow hasn’t made anything worth listening to in ages. It’s pretty bleak.

Even at the time, though, I considered the great hope for female singer-songwriters to be Tori Amos. The first Lilith Fair took place the same year Amos released From the Choirgirl Hotel, a decent but unspectacular record that, as it turned out, was the first sign of the apocalypse. I’ve talked ad nauseam in this column about Amos’ first three unimpeachable albums, and how far she’s fallen since. It’s not worth rehashing. Suffice it to say that when the best record you’ve made in 20 years is a collection of rewrites of classical pieces, something’s gone very wrong.

But lo and behold, it’s like 1997 all over again. While Amos’ 14th album, Unrepentant Geraldines, isn’t quite up to the standard she set with Little Earthquakes and its two successors, it’s my favorite in some time. I initially approached it with trepidation, and if you’ve seen the godawful cover, you know why. And after my first listen, I wrote Geraldines off as just another latter-day Tori Amos album – overlong, overstuffed, full of mediocre songs hiding a few pretty good ones. In many ways, that remains true, but subsequent listens have convinced me that the good songs are actually really good, and could herald a Tori renaissance.

I don’t want to give the wrong idea here. Geraldines contains the usual mix of meandering nothings and a couple of absolute stinkers. I’ll tackle those first, so you know I’m not out to mislead anyone. “Promise,” a duet with Amos’ daughter Natasha, may be the worst song she’s ever written, a bland paean to motherly devotion. It doesn’t help that Natasha sings like she wants to be on American Idol. Seriously, Mariah Carey would be embarrassed to claim this one. It’s immediately followed by “Giant’s Rolling Pin,” another contender for worst ever – imagine a kids’ song about the NSA scandal. I expect that could work, given the right sensibility, but Amos, as ever, remains immune to irony, so the whole thing falls flat.

So ignore those. They’re at tracks eight and nine, so jump over them and listen to “Selkie” at track 10 to hear what’s so very right about this record. Yes, that’s Amos playing the piano and singing, and that’s a sound I never get tired of. Roughly half of this album hearkens back to her “classic” sound, just a girl and 88 keys, and it’s mostly marvelous. “Selkie” certainly is. It’s simple and poignant: “I’ve been waiting on the love of my life to find me… will you make your home in my arms.” I’d forgotten how much I love the sound of Amos just playing and singing. It’s been so long since I’ve heard her spin beauty like this.

“Oysters” might be just as lovely, particularly when Amos belts out the high, one-word refrain. (That word is “turn.”) She’s 50 years old now, but that voice hasn’t lost a note, and when she uses it right, as she does here, it can still sound like the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever heard. I have similar warm feelings for “Weatherman,” which rambles a bit, but is still wonderful, and closer “Invisible Boy,” an impossibly haunting piece of music. “Won’t it all fade away if I’m only made of clay,” Amos sings, and you’ve never heard anything sadder. This is Tori Amos. This is the artist I love. It’s been so damn long.

The fact that these songs are here, and sounding like this, vastly improves my opinion of the rest of the record. The folksy opening numbers, “America” and “Trouble’s Lament,” are well-written and memorable, and get Geraldines off to a sweet, low-key start. “Wedding Day” is pretty middling, but it has a swell guitar line buried in there, and a chorus that, well, sounds like latter-day Amos, but is somehow better for being on this record. “16 Shades of Blue” is pretty boring musically, but has a strong lyric about turning 50, and about ageism in our culture. (“There are those who say I’m now too old to play,” Amos sings, a line that would have been ironic on a lesser record.)

The other half of the album is pretty weak, as usual, but for the first time, I don’t mind as much. I’ll sleep through “Rose Dover,” or “The Maids of Effen-Mere,” or the shockingly normal “Wild Way,” to get to the stuff I love here. Even the lite-funk title track, at seven full minutes, isn’t a dealbreaker for me. Its first half sounds like the worst material on The Beekeeper, all “slinky” bass and organ, but stick with it, because halfway through, Amos sits at a piano and spins gold. That’s this album in miniature – sure, much of it is excruciating, but get through that, and the wonders that lay beyond will enrich you beyond measure.

This isn’t the Tori Amos album I’ve been waiting for, but at times, it sure sounds like it. I’d long ago given up the dream of feeling an emotional connection to Amos’ work, so the fact that she manages it more than a few times on Unrepentant Geraldines is a miracle. Hopefully this is just the first album of Tori’s second wind, and before long she will make a record so powerful, so resonant, so amazing that I can unreservedly fall in love with it. For the first time in a long while, I have hope.

* * * * *

For it to really be 1997 again, though, we’d need Sarah McLachlan to come back with a new album that at least aims for the artistry of her breakthroughs, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and Surfacing. It’s been a long time since she scaled those heights – her last record, The Laws of Illusion, was almost completely forgettable. And you’d be forgiven for not expecting a lot from her new one, given the blander-than-bland title (Shine On) and cover.

But I’ll be damned if this isn’t the McLachlan album I’ve been hoping for. More than anything else, I’ve been hoping she would wake up, invest herself in her songs again, and make a fully committed piece of work. Remarkably, she has – Shine On is a dynamic pop record full of sparkling, melancholy melodies and McLachlan’s strongest singing in ages. Like Fumbling, it opens with a pop hit, but “In Your Shoes” transcends its glossy production to really connect. Every time you think you’ve heard the whole melody, it rises again, cresting a new wave. It’s a great radio song.

And then, we get one organic, well-written tune after another, right through the end of the record. McLachlan’s at the piano for virtually all of this thing, furthering the connection to her best work, and she’s at the center of a real-live band – pounding drums, cranked-up guitars, a sense of vitality that I haven’t heard from her in ages. Let’s not kid ourselves, this is still fairly tame stuff in comparison to actual rock and roll, and the production (mainly by longtime cohort Pierre Marchand) keeps the edges sanded off, but for McLachlan, this is powerful.

It’s also remarkably uplifting, from a woman who elevated self-loathing to an art form. Where Afterglow found her giving herself 40 lashes and sulking, Shine On finds her healthy, strong and sound. It’s a wondrous transformation, and it sounds earned. Even a song called “Broken Heart,” a loping lament to lost love, is optimistic: “We trip and fall and stand again, and go on with our heads held high, we laugh and love as best we can, trying to hold on to the wonder…” A song called “Brink of Destruction” is about the joy of putting your life back together. A song called “Monsters” even finds the bright side of meeting awful people: “Think what your life would be missing if you didn’t have him to sing about.”

When she hits it here, she nails it. “Surrender and Certainty” is a slow burn, piano and drums with some tasty horns, and she sings the hell out of it. “Love Beside Me” is fueled by a distorted electric piano gallop, and explodes into a great chorus. And “Beautiful Girl” is the record’s loveliest piece, McLachlan singing like a bird atop a gorgeous piano part. “There could be winds of change in my auburn hair, but I’ll tie it back for now, and when the bitter breeze carries a trace of fear, we’ll persevere somehow…” I haven’t been this moved by a McLachlan song in years and years.

Shine On ends with a cover, a jaunty Luke Doucet number called “The Sound that Love Makes.” I inwardly groaned upon seeing that title, but the song is a warm, old-school delight. It ends this splendid little record on just the right hopeful note. As with Tori Amos, I had given up the idea of enjoying a Sarah McLachlan album this much again. I’m so glad she proved me wrong, and I’m even more glad that she sounds energized, healthy and ready to make good music again. It really is 1997, at least in my heart.

* * * * *

Next week, Coldplay’s lament. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Have you noticed that albums have been getting shorter?

Sure, you still have your epics every once in a while, but I’ve noticed that most of the records I’ve bought this year hover right around the 45-minute range. If an hour is the exception, not the rule, then the same holds true on the other end – the line between and LP and an EP has blurred into irrelevance.

For me, half an hour is pretty much the shortest length I will accept if I’m asked to pay full album price. But lately I’ve been struck by just how often 30 minutes turns out to be exactly what a record needs, and no more. I have three examples of this phenomenon this week – I came to the end of all three of these albums and said, “That’s about right.” I’m not sure if each of these artists consciously determined the right amount of time people would want to spend in their worlds, but that’s how it feels.

In the case of Swedish singer Lykke Li, drinking in despair for longer than the 32 minutes it takes to listen to her third album, I Never Learn, might be too depressing. Li’s no stranger to heartbreak – her last album was called Wounded Rhymes, for pity’s sake – but I Never Learn is a sustained wallow in the saddest places of her heart. It’s a breakup album, of course, but one of those breakup albums that makes “you don’t love me” sound like the heat death of the universe.

Li’s dramatic pop sound is largely unchanged, just slowed down here. She still bathes her songs in massive-sounding keyboards, and her singular voice still cuts through. In “No Rest for the Wicked” she has written one of her most indelible singles, a simple pianos-and-keys thing that pivots on universal sentiments (“I let my good one down, I let my true love die, I had his heart but I broke it every time”) and magnifies them to near-epic proportions.

“No Rest” and second single “Gunshot” are as upbeat as this record gets. “Gunshot” is similarly terrific, a menacing bit of self-loathing – you’ll be singing along to the chorus before you realize it’s about killing yourself. (“And the shot goes through my head and back, gun shot, can’t take it back.”) It’s no doubt metaphorical, but when she repeats “never get you back” at the song’s conclusion, her ache is real.

But it’s on “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone” that Li truly tears her heart out. It’s a muted acoustic piece with the rawest, closest vocal she’s given us, despite being double-tracked. Her voice cracks, breaks, tumbles apart while you listen, and it’s like tiny knives. The song is a plaintive plea for true, unconditional love: “Even though it hurts, even though it scars, love me when it storms, love me when I fall…” It’s the last moment on the album where she allows herself to hope. The final three tracks are titled “Never Gonna Love Again,” “Heart of Steel” and “Sleeping Alone.” They’re all exactly what you’d expect.

That’s not to say they, and this album, are not great. As sad wallows go, I Never Learn is engrossing, and the huge production makes each falling tear feel like a tidal wave. It is just about the right length, and I think Li knows this. She’s allowed herself 32 minutes to wrap herself in pain and self-pity, and I hope she gets over it by the time she hits the studio again. Even by Lykke Li standards, I Never Learn is heartbroken, and I want to hear her find her feet again. Still, this is a pretty terrific little record.

* * * * *

Justin Currie peddles a decidedly different kind of darkness.

The former Del Amitri frontman has carved out a surprisingly acidic solo career, casting a dim lens on himself the same way Larry David does on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His third solo album is called Lower Reaches, and again combines his way with a subtle pop melody with his penchant for vicious self-reflection. If Currie really is what he paints himself to be, you won’t want to spend more than this album’s 30 minutes in his company.

If you remember Del Amitri, it’s probably for winning pop hits like “Roll to Me” and “Always the Last to Know.” His solo work took a darker path immediately, and Lower Reaches continues that trajectory. Currie is still charming, and still finds a way to make his cynicism hummable. Observe the brief “Every Song’s the Same,” in which he obliterates even the idea of writing songs as emotional expression. (Contrast this with Dan Wilson’s considerably brighter “A Song Can Be About Anything.”) Check out “I Hate Myself for Loving You,” which pinches Joan Jett’s title for an altogether more difficult portrait of pitiful co-dependency: “Loving you is what I gotta do, I couldn’t leave you even if I wanted to, ‘cause it’s the hate that feeds the fire of me and you…”

I should point out that all of these songs are catchy and hummable, clever guitar pop that never overstays its welcome. That remains true when the album slips into still darker territory, like the skipping “On My Conscience,” in which Currie delights in romantically destroying someone for revenge: “Whenever you think of me you’ll wonder whether I was lying, well, I don’t really care just so long as you are crying…” “Half of Me” is a pretty piano piece that leaves you feeling hopeless, as Currie delves deep into his psyche: “Half of me knows that half of me regrets ripping through the years without a hope of happiness, but half of me deserves everything he gets…”

Musically, Lower Reaches is a fine pop record – perhaps not as immediately compelling as it could be, but still fine. Lyrically, it continues Justin Currie’s journey into the pitch-black night, and I hope this is therapeutic for him. It’s sometimes a difficult listen, and I’m glad it’s only as long as it is, but I admire Currie for heading down this path unflinchingly. I’m not sure I’ll reach for Lower Reaches too often, but it’s impressive.

* * * * *

Speaking of records I won’t reach for too often, here’s Cloud Nothings.

Dylan Baldi’s scrappy little outfit was justifiably lauded two years ago for their sophomore effort, Attack on Memory. They enlisted Steve Albini to record it, wrote some gritty and hard-driving songs, and replaced all traces of the cute guitar-pop band they used to be. They were in particularly fine form on the nine-minute “Wasted Days,” which seemed to point to a strong future.

They don’t really get there on their third, the 30-minute Here and Nowhere Else. Throughout this lackluster document, Baldi tries his hardest to capture lightning in a bottle a second time, but the inspiration just isn’t there. And without Albini – the album was produced by John Congleton – the edges feel sanded back off. This album is fine, for what it is – a bunch of mediocre loud guitar-rock songs, screamed by a lunatic – but it never takes off.

There isn’t a lot more to say, unfortunately. The songs here are all pretty obvious three-chord bangers that earthbound, and even the long one this time, the seven-minute “Pattern Walks,” doesn’t whip up the storm you know this band is capable of bringing. Bless Baldi’s heart, he truly gives this record his all, and the band is right there with him, but with material this half-hearted, there’s really nothing he can do. Next time, Cloud Nothings need to keep the energy and attitude, and Baldi needs to write better songs. As it is, there’s barely enough here to fill half an hour, which makes the length of Here and Nowhere Else just about perfect.

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Next week, we take a TARDIS to the ‘90s for surprisingly good records from Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I can’t even pretend to be objective about this week’s review.

Andrea Dawn is one of my best friends. I’ve known her for years, and we talk about pretty much everything. I somehow convinced her to watch all of Doctor Who with me – yes, all 33 seasons and counting – and we’ve been chronicling that journey here. And while I am not involved in her musical career, I do get to hear all about it, so I’ve been keeping track of the creation of her new album, Doll, for a year and a half or so. I’ve also been living with the finished product for months, despite the fact that it was officially released on Record Store Day.

I’m telling you all this up front because I’m going to wax lyrical for a while this week about how good Doll is. It’s an album that will, almost without doubt, find its way into my top 10 list this year, and has already added immeasurably to the soundtrack of my life. I want you to know my biases up front, because I’m going to try to convince you that they don’t matter. Those who know me know to expect a sometimes uncomfortable level of honesty. Andrea knows that if I honestly disliked her record, I would tell her. And I would tell you.

So I’m about to go on, at length, about this extraordinary album called Doll. And I hope you believe me when I tell you that even if I didn’t know Andrea, even if our paths had never crossed, I would still consider this an extraordinary album. I would still have bought it, and fallen in love with it, and let it pull me in and break my heart. Whether you believe me or not, I hope I can convince you give this record a try.

Doll is a portrait of a relationship, from the first flush of infatuation to the bitter, angry embers of separation. In truth, it’s not about any single relationship, but it feels like it is, and it plays like a story – Dawn starts out walking on air, falls back to earth and, in the end, dusts herself off and surveys the damage. This isn’t a revolutionary form for an album to take, but Dawn’s raw honesty makes Doll feel fresh and enveloping. It’s meant to be heard from first note to last, and once you experience it, you won’t want to hear it any other way.

This is Dawn’s second album, following 2010’s Theories of How We Can Be Friends. I liked that record, with some reservations – while it certainly served as a coming out party, there were some timid and ill-considered moments on it. Not so this new album. Every element of Dawn’s sound has grown in leaps and bounds, from the songwriting to the arrangements, and even to her voice. She takes more chances vocally on this record, like she’s less afraid to fail. Her voice is powerful and sultry, and though she is clearly classically trained, she pushes herself here, cracking at the right moments, adding that extra oomph at others.

Dawn follows in the tradition of girl-and-a-piano singer-songwriters – her favorite artist is Fiona Apple, which gives you a hint at what to expect here. Two things set her apart – her songs, which bring together nakedly confessional lyrics with tricky, sometimes elliptical structures, and her flair for the dramatic. Doll sounds like a million-dollar record – it was, in fact, largely paid for through a Kickstarter campaign that raised $5,246, but you’d never know the budget was so small. The sonic detail is impressive, and the arrangements are huge and elaborate.

But for the first time, I feel like Dawn is in control of everything here. Some elements of Theories threatened to fly away from her, but Doll, despite the fact that it is bigger and more ambitious, feels completely within her reach. It’s a sign of how much she’s grown, how adept she’s become at crafting her little worlds. Two of these songs are stark, featuring nothing but piano and vocal, and it’s no accident that they’re the bookends, pulling you into and out of this story. In between there are strings and horns and chimes and mellotrons and operatic backing vocals and vibes and half a dozen other things. So much is crammed in, and perfectly balanced, that you won’t even notice that there aren’t any guitars on here at all.

Doll’s first half focuses on love songs, beginning with the gorgeous opener, “Days Upon Days.” With nothing but a piano and her voice, Dawn sets the stage, reveling in her new love: “I could try to count the ways, I get lost for days upon days upon days…” It’s a song of infatuation, of losing yourself in someone else, and she adds a hint of danger: “He’s got me shaking inside that I might fall apart in due time,” she sings, before convincing herself that “it feels fine.”

She dares him to come after her in “Tameable,” a grand slow burner that brings in the rest of the band. While most of the instruments were played by Dawn and Zach Goforth, the secret weapon of this album is drummer Dan Knighten. He doesn’t so much write drum patterns as he pulls them from another universe – his work is so bizarre that it often takes a listen or two to make sense of it. He’s relatively straightforward on “Tameable,” but so is the song – “If you want me, you must let me know, I won’t always be so tameable,” Dawn sings, before the strings and mellotrons sweep in. The little piano figure that follows the choruses here is one of my favorite things on the record.

Doll follows the same initial structure as Theories, beginning with stark simplicity, ratcheting it up a notch on track two, and letting loose on track three. That third song is “All the Other Girls,” the first single, and it rocks like little else here. Intended, Dawn says, as a song of gratitude for her audience, it still fits in with the narrative, exposing insecurities about those “pretty little girls” who have everything in the verses while taking solace in the choruses: “But they don’t have you, and they’d better not try to, they can have everything else in the world…” Knighten shows off his chops here, and Goforth’s string and vibes arrangements are sublime.

The next two are songs of devotion, and they’re among the prettiest things Dawn has ever written. They’re also songs I didn’t like much upon first listen. “Your Face, Your Shoes” (there’s a long story behind that title) is an amiable ramble that benefits greatly from its off-kilter production. It’s a simple piece, with a simple sentiment: “I wasn’t expecting to, but I think I do, I think I like you.” “Lion Tamer” finds her in full-on love, and the song makes its relative simplicity work for it. Over delicate piano and strings, Dawn gives herself: “I will stare hopelessly at you, there’s not much else I can do…” I initially dismissed “Lion Tamer” in favor of the more complex pieces waiting in the album’s back half, but now I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s perfect.

The title track kicks off the second half, and it’s the trickiest and most oblique piece on the record. It’s a real showcase for Knighten – I have no idea where he pulled this drum part from, but it’s remarkable. It sounds wrong at first, like it’s working against Goforth’s lovely string lines, but once you get used to it, it fits in snugly. This is also a showcase for Dawn’s voice – she’s singing the operatic parts, and when she belts out the melody on the bridge, it’s powerful stuff. “Doll” is a song about using someone: “They’ll call us sinners, we’ll mess around, that’s all I want from you for now.” It’s the first hint that things are about to go south, but the dissolution of this relationship leads to the best music on the album.

“Two Sides,” remarkably, almost didn’t make the final running order. I can’t imagine the album without it. It’s a jolt of energy at a key point – as Knighten’s drums wail, Goforth’s bass line thumps and Dawn pounds away on the keys, she snarls, “I’m gonna get hurt.” The chorus is revealing: “It makes no sense, it’s not smart, forgive me but that’s the best part.” Just when you think you’ve heard the whole song, it elevates some more, breaking into a tremendous bridge and a jammy section that finds Dawn dueling with the string section. “Kiss me sweetly, love me completely, there’s two sides to everything,” she pleads. This song is masterful.

It all comes to a head on “Everything is Everything,” the one moment here of true anger. “Don’t say you hate everything but you love me,” she spits, “‘cause everything is everything.” This is the most elaborate song on the record, a collision of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (dig that upright bass thump) and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” a cornucopia of sound anchored by Knighten’s powerhouse drumming. It ends in rancor: “You haven’t found it, I think you should find it somewhere else…”

Dawn spends the final two songs standing in the wreckage, and they’re both ruinously beautiful. “Love Always” gets my vote for Dawn’s best song – it’s a straightforward, resigned piece with a glorious melody. “Love always fades away when you need it to stay, and love always hangs around when you need it to fade,” she sings, while a French horn plays mournfully in the distance. Her voice has never sounded better – she sings the hell out of this song, and it’ll shatter your heart.

If, by some chance, some part of you remains unbroken by “Love Always,” “Conversations” will finish the job. It’s just piano and voice, and is a final, bitter kiss-off. It is perhaps the quietest piece of defiance I have heard, nothing more than piano and voice, and it leaves no doubt that the relationship that has been at the heart of this record is over. “Control your stare and don’t you dare come anywhere near me,” she sings, before declaring, “If you don’t want me, you don’t get me.” The record’s last line is a moment of power: “I’ve got a lot to give, and I’m going to make sure you don’t get any more of it.” It’s hard to cheer this, but it sounds like a hard-won victory.

Doll is a difficult emotional ride – it’s tough to listen to the joy of “Lion Tamer” crumble into the despair of “Love Always” only four songs later. But it’s a brave and rewarding one, an astonishingly honest piece of work that will connect with anyone who has been through similar territory. It’s one of my favorite records of the year, quite separate from the fact that I know its author. If Theories was a slightly timid calling card, Doll is an album that can sit proudly with the best of today’s singer-songwriters. It’s the full flowering of a superb talent, and I can’t wait to hear more.

You can check out Theories here and buy Doll here. See the video for “All the Other Girls” here.

Next week, more quick ones with Lykke Li, Justin Currie and others. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I know, I promised to review Andrea Dawn’s Doll this week, but I’m still working on that. While I do, though, new music keeps piling up. So I thought I’d get through a few records this week, without spending a lot of time on any of them. (I know, I’m really enticing you to read this, aren’t I?)

I buy a lot of music, and I can’t possibly care deeply about all of it. It takes time to truly know a record, and I only have so much of that. Of the torrent of records that cross my desk every year, I feel like I really get to know and understand only about a third. I try to hear everything I can, multiple times if possible, but I can only lavish attention on a select few of them. So I’m looking out for those, for the records that will take over my life and inspire me to keep listening.

None of the ones on tap this week inspired me in that way. These are all albums I’ve heard at least once, and for whatever reason I’m not feeling like we’re going to be great friends. I don’t hate any of these – that would require a full review to examine those feelings. But I don’t love any of them either, and I probably won’t take the time needed to get more in touch with them. I may regret this. It’s possible that someday in the future, I’ll pull one of these discs down, pop it in and realize that I’ve overlooked a masterpiece. But for now, this is what they get.

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Mark Everett has made a lot of albums, mainly under the name Eels.

In fact, he’s made 11 studio records, along with a slew of live records and rarities collections. And at this point, his patterns are becoming pretty clear. I generally like Everett’s work, but even I can see that Eels albums break down into three types: the happy, life-is-good ones; the loud, uncomfortable ones; and the sad heartbreak ones.

So when I say that the latest, The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett, is a sad heartbreak one, fans will know what I mean. It starts with a slow instrumental with horns, half the songs are simple acoustic numbers over which Everett laments a lost love, and it concludes with a couple pick-yourself-up rays of hope. It wallows in misery for about three quarters of its running time, and by the end, Everett says he’s learned something, and he’s getting on with his life.

How many more times do you think he’ll make this record? He already perfected it with Electro-Shock Blues back in 1998, and if he hadn’t, he would have with the mammoth Blinking Lights and Other Revelations in 2005. I don’t want to suggest that Cautionary Tales is bad – some of these songs, like “Kindred Spirit” and “A Swallow in the Sun,” are quite nice, and he’s never done anything quite like “Dead Reckoning” before – but it is old hat at this point.

I may be selling it short, and I would like to sink back into this one, reportedly Everett’s most autobiographical in some time. I do like that it begins with “Where I’m At” and ends with “Where I’m Going,” and the two songs share a melody. But I feel like I’ve heard this all before. Everett needs to break out of this rut before he goes through something similar and writes another one exactly like Cautionary Tales. Speaking as an Eels fan, I’ve bought this record a few times, and I don’t really want to buy it again.

* * * * *

Who here is sick of the Black Keys?

I am. Put more accurately, I’m tired of the whole hipster blues thing, which doesn’t bode well for Jack White’s new album, for example, or for the Keys themselves, who return in a couple weeks. It’s to the point now where if I see Dan Auerbach’s name connected with a project, my heart sinks.

Which brings us to the new Ray LaMontagne album, Supernova. LaMontagne is one of our most singular singers, and over four previous records, he established himself as a rootsy, powerful voice. My favorite LaMontagne stuff is the starkest and simplest, like the acoustic numbers on Gossip in the Grain, or the glorious “Be Here Now” from Til the Sun Turns Black. These songs focus on that raspy, syrupy, commanding, one-of-a-kind voice.

So of course, Supernova tosses all that aside in favor of a tour through pop-blues and ‘60s pop. It sounds exactly like you’d expect an album produced by Auerbach would. While these songs are sometimes interesting, particularly “Airwaves” and “Smashing,” this album commits a pretty severe crime: it buries LaMontagne’s voice beneath layers of sound, and processes it beyond recognition. It could be anyone singing these tunes, and that’s a shame.

The fact that half these songs are pretty boring, like the Keys-ish “She’s the One” and the shuffling title track, doesn’t make things any better. I’m not sure what possessed LaMontagne to make this album, but I hope it wasn’t money. Auerbach’s making his name as a hit producer to the stars, and this teamup hasn’t delivered the artistic goods, so I hope it does well. Nothing sucks worse than making a move like this and watching it fail on all fronts. As for LaMontagne, the sooner he gets back to making beautiful music, the better.

* * * * *

I’ve said a few times that The Gaslight Anthem needs to shake things up.

Three albums ago, they adopted a style that sounds like The Alarm playing Bruce Springsteen songs. They’re similar to The Hold Steady in that way, but they’ve never made an awful record, the way Craig Finn’s bunch did with Heaven is Whenever. Still, they’ve run their sound into the ground, and I’m not sure I want to hear another record in the same vein.

That’s why their B-sides collection, inventively titled The B-Sides, is such a treat. It’s an odds-and-sods thing, but it’s different in all the right ways, and its uneven nature makes for a nice break from their more polished efforts. You get acoustic readings of five songs, and five fascinating covers, including the Rolling Stones’ “Tumblin’ Dice” and Robert Bradley’s “Once Upon a Time.” You get one true b-side, too, the swell “She Loves You.”

All of this tumbles up next to each other with a ragged imperfection that suits this band. I’m not sure where they’re going next, but I enjoyed this glimpse at another side of them. I’ve always kind of liked them, and The B-Sides reminds me why. It’s exactly the kind of new perspective on this band I’ve been looking for.

* * * * *

Next week, Doll. I promise. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I know several people who choose which movies to see based on who stars in them.

Apologies if you’re one of those people, but I’ve always found that an odd way to do things. The star of the film has very little to do with the content of that film – they show up, they say their lines, and if you’re lucky, they infuse those lines with power and wit. But that’s it. Actors say the lines they’re given, and it’s the writers and directors who give them those lines. Although I liked Denzel Washington in Philadelphia and Malcolm X (and in most everything, to be honest), I’m not surprised when a movie like John Q. sucks, despite the fact that he’s in it.

So I follow writers and directors, and I’ll see films by my favorites no matter who is in them. I just (finally) caught Frances Ha, the latest film by Noah Baumbach – he’s owned a piece of my heart ever since I saw Kicking and Screaming, his phenomenal debut film, during my listless first years after college. Baumbach has grown up considerably since then (although K&S is still one of my very favorite movies), and Frances Ha is a wonderful slice of life. You can ask me who’s in it if you like, but when I tell you it’s Greta Gerwig and a bunch of people no one’s ever heard of, I expect a quizzical look. I’m in for Baumbach.

I take the same approach to music. I know a lot of people who follow singers, and that’s fine. But not me. The voice is actually the last thing I respond to – I’m into it for the songwriters and record-makers. I’m looking for well-written, well-made songs, and the best way I’ve found to do that is to follow the people who write and create the best songs. This sounds elementary, but I’m surprised by how many people don’t pay attention to the people who wrote their favorite songs. I seek that information out. Write a few great songs, and I’ll buy your album. Write a bunch, and I’ll be your fan for life.

Dan Wilson has written a ton of great songs. He’s also a prime example of what I’m talking about, since he’s responsible for some enormous hits over the past decade, but very few people know who he is. If you’re aware of Wilson at all, it’s probably because you were a fan of Semisonic, his marvelous mid-‘90s pop band. Once they dissolved, Wilson became a behind-the-scenes songwriter for the stars – he’s written or co-written for Adele, Mike Doughty, the Dixie Chicks, Sean and Sara Watkins, John Legend, Rachael Yamagata, Taylor Swift and Pink, to name a few, and his contributions are routinely among the best on those projects. (He co-wrote “Someone Like You” for Adele, and that’s my pick for best song on that record.)

It’s always a joy when Wilson sings his own material, though, especially considering how rarely it happens. Wilson’s second solo album is called Love Without Fear, and if you want a tutorial on how to write a quality pop song, you could do a lot worse. Wilson has mastered the art of writing tunes that feel like old friends the first time you spin them. These songs have a warm and comfortable nature that slyly hides how well constructed they are, how perfectly arranged. Though I can imagine a host of singers taking on these lovely little numbers, I’m always glad to hear the ones Wilson saves for himself.

This time, he’s woven a tale of heartbreak and hope. Many of these songs concern the breakup of a relationship, the slow disintegration of love and the pain of longing. The jaunty title track is first, setting down what Wilson’s looking for – someone to take his hand, walk with him, give him time and love without fear. He then details just how short the object of his affection has fallen, in language that makes it clear that the affection is still there, but something else has died. “A Song Can Be About Anything” is a rave-up that rises above its jokey title – the songs he wants to write, clearly, are about “how you used to love me but you don’t even know me anymore.”

“However Long” is a melancholy wonder, Brad Gordon’s horns providing subtle accent behind Wilson’s promise to wait as long as it takes for someone. “When It Pleases You” is the one moment of anger here: “You love me when it pleases you, you want me when it’s easy to do, you hold me when you don’t want anybody else to…” The song itself is gentle, with pretty horns that belie the bite in the lyrics. “Too Much” is something of an old-time country number, complete with slide guitar from Blake Mills, on which Wilson admits to giving more than he should. And the absolutely delightful “We Belong Together” shimmies on a plunking piano line and more great horns, finds him stating his case.

The album’s most affecting track is its saddest. “Disappearing” is an acoustic lament for a dying relationship, Wilson and Sara Bareilles harmonizing beautifully on the chorus: “Some nights I feel like I’m watching your red tail lights disappearing…” For personal reasons, I’m responding very well to songs like this at the moment, and this is one of Wilson’s best. It’s simple, but exactly what it should be. In fact, the same can be said for most of Love Without Fear. Wilson only gets big a couple of times, most notably on the epic closer “Even the Stars Are Sleeping,” but for the most part, this is a little album of tiny, perfect songs.

As you might expect from a songwriter in as much demand as Wilson is, Love Without Fear is a festival of guest stars. In addition to Mills and Bareilles and Gordon, it includes contributions from Sean and Sara Watkins (of Nickel Creek), Natalie Maines (of the Dixie Chicks), pedal steel master Greg Leisz and drummer Joey Waronker. But everyone here is in service to the songs, even Wilson himself. This is an album that is about how wonderful its songs are, and man, they are indeed wonderful. Every year I get the chance to hear at least a few Dan Wilson songs, molded into shape by others, but a Dan Wilson album is a rare pleasure, and I’m treasuring this one.

Wilson is something of an anomaly – most of my favorite songwriters sing their own tunes all the time. Near the top of that list is Aimee Mann, who graduated from Til Tuesday in the early ‘90s and spent the intervening 20 years or so writing more great tunes than just about anyone from that era. Mann is living proof that perfection can be its own worst enemy – she constructs pop songs so expertly that lately she’s been struggling to shake things up, exploring synthesizers and other production touches to add new flavors. Those who say she’s made the same album half a dozen times aren’t exactly wrong, though they are taking the brilliance of her writing for granted.

Mann’s latest attempt to shake things up is a doozy, however. She’s teamed up with fellow pop-rock luminary Ted Leo, he of the Pharmacists, another guy who knows his way around a hook. They’ve called their collaboration The Both, and their self-titled album is everything you’d hope a team-up between these superheroes would be. I’ve read some surprised reactions to The Both, many pointing to Leo’s punk-rock roots and marveling at how well his style intertwines with Mann’s here. This ignores two important things – Mann has her own punk roots, having started her career with the band Young Snakes, and more importantly, both Mann and Leo have been all about the songs from the start.

What makes The Both so great is their alchemy. They’ve found a way to naturally combine the loud guitar-pop of Leo’s work with the tricky melodies and dark-hearted sweetness of Mann’s. The result sounds like both of them, and neither of them. This isn’t just a louder Mann or a smoother Leo. This is The Both, and you can hear the distinction clearly on the first few tracks. “Milwaukee” remains the best intro to this new unit, all snarling guitars and thrashing drums giving way to a delightful chorus, Mann’s voice entwined with Leo’s. Where you’d expect some tight structure from Mann, you get Leo exploding all over the song with a guitar solo. It’s a perfect chemical reaction.

Some of the songs bear Mann’s distinctive flavor, like the melancholy “No Sir,” and some sound more like Leo, such as the sunny tribute “Volunteers of America.” But even these are energized, pushed in new directions. My favorite here is “You Can’t Help Me Now,” a melodic masterpiece that would be the best song on either co-writer’s latest album. Mann and Leo trade off lead vocals here, as they do throughout the album, and they sound as though they’ve been singing together for a decade. Leo loosens Mann up – her records were starting to sound studied – and Mann brings a fresh melodicism to Leo.

Needless to say, this is the best work from either of them in some time. I haven’t even mentioned gems like “Hummingbird” and “The Prisoner,” or their cover of Thin Lizzy’s “Honesty is No Excuse.” The Both is a triumph, a meeting of songwriting minds that has struck gold. As much as I like Mann and Leo separately, I hope The Both isn’t a one-off. This is one collaboration that deserves a sequel, if not half a dozen of them.

One final note while we’re on the subject of writers and filmmakers. About 10 years ago, I got wind of a new project from genius director Richard Linklater. I’ve been a fan since Dazed and Confused, in the early ‘90s, and particularly of his fascination with a explorations of time. His best films are about that – the Before Sunrise trilogy catches up with the same characters in nine-year intervals, and plays out snapshots of their lives in real time, for instance. But this project, called Boyhood, would take that idea to its extreme.

Linklater cast a six-year-old boy named Ellar Coltrane to play the lead in his film, and planned to catch up with him once a year to film a new scene. There would be 12 scenes in all, and we would get to watch Coltrane’s character grow from six to 18 before our eyes. Nothing like this has ever been attempted, and I’ve kept track of the production, hoping that it would work out. Well, it has – Boyhood is playing festivals now, and the first trailer just hit. It looks amazing, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am to see this.

But not next week. Next week, I’ll review my friend Andrea Dawn’s new album, Doll. Here’s a taste to whet your appetite – the video for “All the Other Girls.” Check it out, and I’ll see you back here in seven or so. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

This week I get to write about the new Choir album.

If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you know how important a sentence like that is to me. If I’m asked to pick a favorite band, more often than not I will answer with the Choir. I’ve heard many bands I might consider better, but none that moves me and affects me as much as they do. I sometimes feel like they exist just for me, like their particular alchemy was painstakingly crafted to flip just about all of my switches. There are very few Choir songs that don’t do it for me, and very few Choir albums that don’t make me ridiculously glad to be alive.

I first heard the Choir in 1990, when I was a sophomore in high school. I’ve told this story before, but I was a young, angry man, on the verge of ditching so many things that have become central and important to me. I bought the band’s fifth album, Circle Slide, on a whim – the cover art just mesmerized me. That album changed my life. I’ve carried Circle Slide with me for almost 25 years, and each time I listen, I’m filled up. I find new things to love, new reasons to consider it one of my favorite records, full stop.

I’m realizing that the Choir’s been with me for more than half my life now. They’re old friends, and I’m not just saying that because the guys in the band are in their mid-50s now. The Choir’s music is so personal, so honest, so open that I feel invited into their lives just by listening. I’ve heard songs about their kids as infants, toddlers, high schoolers and now, on this new one, adults with their own separate lives. I’ve listened as they told me about their loves and losses, their guilts and fears, their moments of doubt and their moments of true, abiding faith.

In many ways, each new Choir album is a gift, and in recent years, it’s become easier to take it for granted. Ten years ago, we didn’t know if we would ever get a new Choir album. Their late-career renaissance began in 2005 with O How the Mighty Have Fallen, an out-of-nowhere surprise that was their best work in ages. These days new Choir albums happen regularly, and it’s easy to get complacent. So when they dropped The Loudest Sound Ever Heard two years ago, and it turned out to be a comparatively lackluster affair, I wasn’t worried. They’d bounced back before, and they could do it again.

When I stopped to think about it, I realized that was a wonderful notion. The Choir has been such a steady, going concern that I never once imagined that Loudest Sound could be their last. That might be the first time since the ‘90s that I’ve been sure that the band would not fade away, that new music would be a certainty. There have been five Choir albums since 2005, plus a Christmas EP and a solo project from Derri Daugherty. It’s been a steady stream of quality stuff, and it’s clear at this point that the band isn’t going anywhere.

Still, only a few thousand people have ever heard of them, which is why I’m glad (once again) that Kickstarter exists. Last year, The Choir asked for $25,000 to create a new studio album and live record. They got $54,268. They also got a direct line to the hundreds of people, myself included, who would be most excited by the prospect of something new from the band.

This week, all 791 of us received a download link for The Choir’s 14th album, Shadow Weaver. I’d heard rumblings that this one was something special, and though it took a few listens to sink in, I’m happy to report that those rumblings were right. Shadow Weaver is an exceptional Choir record, one of the best of their late-career renaissance. I’ve heard it eight times now, and with each play, it grows in stature. At 13 songs and 56 minutes, it’s their longest effort, and though it sags a bit in the middle and stumbles a little near the end, it’s one of the strongest front-to-back experiences they’ve delivered.

Perhaps my favorite thing about Shadow Weaver is the sense of coherence that winds through all of it. This record was made with the best of all Choir lineups – the Core Four of Daugherty, drummer Steve Hindalong, bassist Tim Chandler and sax player Dan Michaels, joined by ambient guitarist Marc Byrd (of Hammock) and his wife Christy on ethereal backing vocals. Gone is the sense of freewheeling diversity that marked Burning Like the Midnight Sun, but in its place is a thrilling consistency of sound. This is the Choir, sounding like no one but themselves.

That means thick, watery guitars are the order of the day, and man, this album offers a feast of them. Byrd seems to be on every track, filling the empty spaces with oceans of lovely reverbed noise. Daugherty is a master of texture, whether piling on the pummeling chords or adding clean flourishes. He pulls out the acoustic only once here, on the sweeping ballad “We All Know.” Otherwise, it’s all big, powerful electric guitars, played like only Daugherty can. Behind all that, Chandler remains one of the most fascinating and unorthodox bass players alive, his flights of fancy anchored by Hindalong’s rock-solid work. And this album finds more space for Michaels, integrating his sax and lyricon into the sound like their best work does.

What I’m getting at is that while the Choir can sometimes feel like the Steve and Derri Show, Shadow Weaver sounds like a band. They’ve cohered, coalesced. Even when the songs aren’t top notch (which is rare), the full-band vibe of this record carries the day. True to its cover art, Shadow Weaver is darker than the band has been in a while, and the fullness and richness of its sound adds immeasurably to that darkness.

I haven’t even talked about the songs yet, so taken am I with the sound. Let me just say that the first six tracks of Shadow Weaver are absolutely flawless. It opens with the sorta-title track, the moody “Good Morning, Shadow Weaver,” and if you’ve ever been a fan of this band, you’ll recognize their stamp immediately. Chiming guitar tones rising out of a cloud of wispy vapor, Daugherty’s high and lovely voice, Christy Byrd’s delicious counterpoint (“Lights on, I say, lights on…”), everything about this song welcomes you in.

The real surprise comes next: the powerhouse “What You Think I Am.” Sporting one of the most menacing grooves the Choir has ever laid down, this tune is four and a half minutes of thunderous awesome. It puts the relatively staid Loudest Sound to shame all by itself. Hindalong’s lyrics roundly reject the tendency to both idolize and demonize people – “I’m no angel, that ain’t me, and what kind of devil do you think I’d be, I’m a good Samaritan and a very, very bad man, I’m a whole lot better and a whole lot worse than what you think I am…” I can’t wait to hear this one live.

“It Hurts to Say Goodbye” is a moody seven-minute stunner that finds Daugherty, Byrd and Michaels weaving around each other like birds in flight. Hindalong and Daugherty are both fathers of adult daughters, and this song is about watching them leave the nest. It’s glorious – The Choir rarely stretches out like this, but you’ll want this particular slow wonder to go on forever.

The pace picks back up with “Get Gone,” the sharpest rocker on the album, and slows back down for “We All Know,” a lovely examination of the ways suffering brings us together. “You know you’re alive when you taste your own blood, open hands to the sky with your face in the mud, we all know how suffering feels…” Daugherty just takes this one into orbit. That opening stretch ends with “Two Clouds Are One,” a 104-second ambient piece that is unabashedly about the aftermath of sex. It’s so pretty you may not realize its intentions at first. Once you do, it’s even prettier. I can’t name another song that captures this particular moment this well.

Things get a little rockier from there, but thankfully, only a little. The next two tracks are middling Choir songs, but they may be among my favorite middling Choir songs. “White Knuckles” actually makes its chorus lyric (“Dancing with a serpent, dancing with a snake”) palatable with its simple-yet-effective melody – the song’s about doubt, about walking on the edge with one eye on safety. “Everybody’s Got a Guru” doesn’t fare quite as well, its search-for-truth platitudes propping up a fairly pedestrian tune. But with Daugherty and Byrd entwining and Christy Byrd singing like an angel, it’s still an enjoyable four minutes.

Ah, but “The Soul of Every Creature Cries Out” is next, and it may be my favorite thing here. It’s certainly the most spiritual, a song of deep yearning: “Into our lungs we drew sweet breath, and the first thing we all knew we were choking, sometimes we laugh in the face of death, but when we cry for mercy, nobody’s joking…” The repeated refrain is haunting, Daugherty laying down a gorgeous minor-key soundscape. This is the beautiful dark spirituality that first drew me to the Choir, and they do it better than just about anyone. “The soul of every creature cries out, the heart of humanity moans, somebody out there won’t leave us alone…” That is how my own spiritual yearning feels to me – somebody out there won’t leave me alone. The song ends with 90 seconds of light and noise that could have gone on for 10 times as long without getting boring.

After that, you’d think a trifle like “Rhythm of the Road” would be a letdown, but this song rocks. I’ve always enjoyed their travelogue tunes, and this one – about a storm causing an oil leak in their van – is more fun and joyous than most. The album’s only true misstep is “The Antithesis of Blue,” which plies its too-simple chord progression for too long without developing it. I don’t actively hate this song – it’s quite nice, if you’re in the mood for it – but it pales in comparison to the rest of this record, and it sits where the climax should be.

But all is well again with the closing track, an extended reprise of “Shadow Weaver” that finds Chandler doing his rubbery-bass thing, Daugherty playing chiming chords and Byrd covering everything in glorious waves of noise. “Good morning, shadow weaver, what have you realized,” Daugherty sings, before the band launches into an extended ambient playout that lasts more than two minutes. It’s beautiful – heart-rendingly, soul-stirringly beautiful – and a tremendous way to end a tremendous record.

And it is, seriously, a tremendous record. Of the latter-day material, I think it’s second only to Midnight Sun. This is the Choir’s 14th album, and I can’t think of very many bands who arrived at their 14th album with this much energy, imagination and conviction. Even if they weren’t my favorite band, the sheer consistency, dynamism and overall power of Shadow Weaver would be worth respecting and celebrating.

But they are my favorite band, so hearing an album this good from them means so much more to me. Every Choir album is a gift, and Shadow Weaver is an especially sweet one. I’ve never quite been able to put into words the depth of feeling that the Choir’s music stirs in me. I won’t be able to do it this time either. For 24 years, they’ve been the band of my dreams, and the fact that they are still creating music that moves me, fills me, takes me places and leaves me with wide-eyed wonder is just… I’m unspeakably grateful.

Shadow Weaver is marvelous, and even if you don’t love the Choir as much as I do, you’ll still enjoy it. But if you do – if this tiny band from Tennessee stirs in you the same things they stir in me – you’ll welcome this album into your life with open arms. I certainly have. Thank you to Steve and Derri and Dan and Tim and Marc for making another record that rewrites my life, gives voice to my inner longing, and fills me with joy. Thank you. In the end, just that. Thank you.

You can buy Shadow Weaver starting April 15 here.

Next week, Aimee Mann and Ted Leo join forces, and Dan Wilson returns. Leave a comment on my blog at tm3am.blogspot.com. Follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am, and Twitter at www.twitter.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.