Sometimes records just stump me.

I’m not sure why that is. I am usually able to form at least a few coherent thoughts about anything I hear, and a cogent argument after about three listens. But occasionally I’ll run across one that completely befuddles my critical faculties. I’ll listen, and I’ll listen again, and I’ll keep listening, but I won’t be able to muster up any kind of response that makes sense. I get stuck on details, and I second-guess myself. And then I find it impossible to write.

I’m not sure any album has given me as much trouble as Arcade Fire’s new opus, Reflektor. Released to a ridiculous shower of hype, the Montreal band’s fourth long-player is a two-disc affair (despite only running 75 minutes), and a complete shift in style. It’s been alternately hailed as a masterpiece and derided as a bloated, ridiculous ode to pretention. And the thing that’s been tripping me up more than any other is this: both of those statements are true.

The first time I heard Reflektor, I couldn’t stand it. The album felt simultaneously overstuffed and threadbare, full of songs that stretched on far longer than they were worth. The band worked with James Murphy, the guiding light of LCD Soundsystem, and his influence is everywhere – this is the most danceable Arcade Fire album ever, but the beats, I felt after that first listen, weren’t supporting any great songs. And a few of those songs were disasters – enough of them, actually, that I initially called this the band’s Kid A. (Yes, I know, some of you like Kid A. I’ve never managed it, though.)

If I’d just stopped there, I would have panned the album – with some regret, since I adored their last one, The Suburbs – and been done with it. Of course, I also would have been wrong. For some reason, I kept listening. Well, I say that, but I know the reason. Arcade Fire is one of the most intriguing bands of the last 20 years, and even though Reflektor has all the hallmarks of a superstar album – the one ode to excess every internationally famous band gets to make – I kept on listening because I have faith that Win Butler and company wouldn’t release something that didn’t speak to them on some level. I kept listening not to find out if I liked the songs, but to find out why the band liked them.

I’m sure you see where this is going. Over repeated listens, Reflektor began to take shape for me. I could understand its contours better, and appreciate the smaller moments that bring it to life. But this growing familiarity with the record didn’t translate into full-on love. It’s still a difficult, meandering, overblown thing, and though the songs I initially disliked are the ones that now get stuck in my head most often (“Here Comes the Night Time” especially), I still don’t like them. Everything has changed, and nothing has.

As you can imagine, I’ve struggled with how to write about this record. I toyed with several gimmicks, including writing each paragraph as a reflection of the last, illustrating dichotomy. I got about halfway through writing one review that purported to be a dialogue between me and my reflection. Really. I did that. It was absolutely terrible. And the irony, of course, is that I was using a pretentious formal experiment to criticize a band infamous for its pretensions.

So I finally realized that the best thing to do is just come clean. I’m still not sure what to say about Reflektor, but I’ve come this far being honest, so I need to own up. This album has me conflicted like few others I’ve ever encountered. I’ve been an Arcade Fire fan for years – I avoided Funeral until the hype died down, but ended up liking it, and I enjoyed both follow-ups (the insistent Neon Bible and the first-album-again-but-better epic The Suburbs) more. Until now, they haven’t made an album that has confused me the way this one does.

Reflektor is certainly self-consciously epic. It’s deliberately split into two discs – a groove-driven first volume and a more (ahem) reflective second. Murphy’s presence is more deeply felt on the first, but given repeat listens, his stamp is definitely on the second as well. The six-member band has always trafficked in big, sweeping drama, and here, they’ve tried to preserve that while adding a loose-limbed danceability. Sometimes it works – the opening title track is a monster, gliding forward on a shimmying Talking Heads beat and some dazzling saxophones by Colin Stetson, and even though it outstays its welcome at 7:34, it’s the album’s most successful melding of the old and new styles.

“We Exist” is similarly effective, with its “Billie Jean” bassline and its relentless buildup. “Joan of Arc,” which closes the first disc, pulls off the transformation as well – the song starts off with a few seconds of wild punk abandon, before settling into a slamming groove. The synth bass on the choruses is unstoppable, probably the record’s greatest single element. The song doesn’t actually have anything to say about Joan of Arc, but that’s all right. It’s the catchiest thing here, particularly when Regine Chassagne sings Joan’s name in French (“Jeanne d’Arc, ah ooh”), as is the law in Canada.

The rest of the first disc, though, is a total mess. “Flashbulb Eyes” may be the stupidest song this band has ever recorded. The entirety of the lyrics: “What if the camera really do take your soul? Oh no. Hit me with your flashbulb eyes, you know I got nothing to hide.” The music sounds like an experiment gone wrong – the beat is disconnected from everything, the goofy synths distract, the faux-reggae lilt grates. It’s nothing compared with “Here Comes the Night Time,” the apex of the band’s flirtation with Haitian music. A terribly simple song stretched to six and a half minutes, this thing threatens to fall apart every few seconds, and the instrumentation never seems to gel.

And yet… and yet… I keep humming it. The sort-of chorus, on which Butler repeats the title phrase as the synths pump in and the chords keep changing, gets stuck in my head like little else since that “The Fox” song. “Night Time” is constantly shifting from one odd moment to another – it’s truly a mess – but it’s probably the most intriguing tune on Reflektor. It’s my dilemma in miniature. It doesn’t work – it never really comes close to working – but it’s compelling nonetheless, and I keep listening to it, hoping it will cohere, fairly certain it never will.

The pair of straight-up rockers that follow seem oddly incongruous here, and neither one offers much of an argument for its own existence. It’s true that the sloppy lead guitar line on “Normal Person” is the first moment since “We Exist” that really brings things home, but the song is just average by Arcade Fire standards. (“Do you like rock ‘n’ roll music? ‘Cause I don’t know if I do,” Butler mutters, adding a touch of irony to what is a fairly typical rock song.) I like the sentiment – “Never ever met a normal person” – but I am not sure what the song is trying to do. “You Already Know” fares better, with its skipping beat, jaunty acoustic guitars and infectious chorus, but it doesn’t seem to belong on this album.

Then again, this first disc is all over the place. The more sedate second volume is quite a bit more consistent, even if that consistency sometimes feels like sleepwalking. It opens with “Here Comes the Night Time II,” a synth-and-strings interlude that effectively sets a dreamy tone. The two songs that follow do nothing to dispel that – both “Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)” and “It’s Never Over (Oh Orpheus)” float a few inches off the ground, making up for a lack of melody with an abundance of atmosphere. (Orpheus and Eurydice are figures in Greek myth, a doomed couple who fail to escape the underworld together. Their statues adorn the cover of Reflektor, and their songs are thematically resonant.)

And admittedly, it takes guts to title a song “Awful Sound,” and sequence another called “It’s Never Over” partway through your double album. Some days this diptych works for me, and I find myself singing along with the Flaming Lips-ish chorus of the former, and the lovely refrains of the latter. But some days, I want both of these six-minute songs to do more than they do. The same goes for “Porno,” an uncharacteristically dark and crawling synthesizer piece. I’m alternately drawn in by its sinister feel, and bored by its refusal to do much of anything at all.

It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to call “Afterlife” the first real sign of life on the second disc, but it is the most vital-sounding, and (perhaps coincidentally) the one most resembling old-school Arcade Fire. It takes its dance-rock foundation and builds on it, and then keeps building – the propulsive “scream and shout until we work it out” chorus is a delight. It’s such a big moment that it’s almost a shame when the album sinks into the 11-minute “Supersymmetry,” a sleepy, oscillating ballad that concludes with five and a half minutes of backwards noise.

And that’s a perfect example of the bloat that infects this record. Still, the sprawl is part of the point of making something like Reflektor, an album only those bands with stunning amounts of worldwide fame are allowed to create. It’s clear the band thought they were making their Achtung Baby. They even tried on a different identity, calling themselves The Reflektors and wearing giant false heads, but they seemed uncomfortable with the pretense. If anything, Arcade Fire is too earnest, too convinced of their own greatness to truly commit to something that all-encompassing.

That’s why Reflektor fails, ultimately. It’s messy and disjointed when it should be confidently striding through new terrain. It stumbles over discoveries when it should be celebrating them. It’s possible that this is a transitional record masquerading as a grand statement. But without the next few steps in the band’s evolution, we can’t know where they’re headed. This is the work we have, and it’s much less than the sum of its parts. Reflektor is a series of interesting moments that never add up to very much, despite its reach.

But you know what? I’m still listening to it. It hasn’t turned me away yet. I’m still fascinated by the fact that this band made these songs, and put them in this order. Reflektor is one of the most compelling records of the year, even if it’s not one of the best. I’m still not sure what to make of it, or why it’s drawn me in so much. It’s a gigantic misfire with moments of greatness swirled in. I can’t fault anyone who loves it, or anyone who hates it.

Nearly 2,000 words, and I still don’t know what to say. I’ll keep listening.

Next week, art and artifice with Eminem and Lady Gaga. 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.

Eagle-eyed readers will remember that I promised my review of Arcade Fire’s mammoth Reflektor album this week. And I was all set to deliver it, too. I’d heard the record a couple times, and I was ready to call it a bloated, tuneless disaster. I liked three songs on disc one, and one on disc two, and on a 13-track, 76-minute album, that’s just not a good average. I was prepared to talk about how I couldn’t understand the steep decline between The Suburbs and this, and express my hope for a more subdued, restrained work next time.

But then a strange thing happened. I kept listening to Reflektor – well, I felt compelled to keep listening, really – and it started clicking. By my 10th listen or so, I’d come to realize why the band liked each of these songs, and by my 20th, I started liking at least something in all of them as well. This is not the usual way these things go, but it is the emotional process virtually all of my favorite albums followed – initial hatred, then a strange compulsion to listen further, then grudging respect, then outright love.

I’m not at that final stage yet, and my thoughts on Reflektor remain complicated. But I thought I owed it to the album to keep plugging away, and try to figure out how I actually felt about it before writing my review. So you’re not getting that this week. Thankfully, there is other music – lots and lots of it. So here are three quick reviews of three albums that are not Reflektor. One is brand new, and the other two are older ones I neglected to wax lyrical about. Hopefully this will tide you over. I hope to have the Reflektor column done shortly. Thank you for your kind indulgence.

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It figures. I post a column stating that my year is pretty much over, and there are no new records to get excited about until 2014, and then one of my favorite British bands drops a surprise fourth album on me.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. My CD shelf always has room for a new one from The Feeling, one of the most dazzling pop bands I’ve heard since Jellyfish broke up. Their first two albums, Twelve Stops and Home and the extraordinary Join With Us, celebrated five decades of British pop with a glorious mish-mash of melodies. Not since Spilt Milk had I heard a record as delightfully in love with the possibilities of joyous pop as Join With Us. The Feeling gets a lot of criticism for embracing the more uncool elements of their music – the candy-coated swirl, the naked (and sometimes goopy) emotionalism – but they’ve stuck to their guns.

I’m still not sure what happened that third time out. Together We Were Made is a pretty good record, but not even on the same scale as the first two, relying on grooves and stuffy production that feels flat. The band had a lot to prove on their fourth album, especially considering it’s their first self-produced, self-released effort, but amazingly, they’ve managed to both go back to their roots and reinvent themselves on the wonderful Boy Cried Wolf.

What’s amazing about this album is that it seems to fly in the face of what made The Feeling great. This is not a joyous, silly album at all – it’s chock full of mature, stripped-back pop songs about hurt and loss. Lead singer Dan Sells has clearly gone through some stuff since we last heard from him, and he bares himself on songs like “A Lost Home” and “You’ll See.” There’s no carousel of color here – the album is mostly mid-tempo, often quiet, and almost entirely based around Ciaran Jeremiah’s piano playing.

But what seems like a major shift in sound ends up bringing The Feeling back to what they do best – write terrific songs. For most of this album, they sound like five guys playing live. It’s even more stripped back than their earliest work, yet it sparkles. Every time Sells’ guitar rushes in, every time he pushes his smooth voice out of its range, shouting his pain, the record just feels vital, open, alive. This is the sound of The Feeling rediscovering itself, and the songs are among their best because they obviously mean a lot to them.

Just listen to Sells singing his heart out on “A Lost Home”: “I won’t go back, please don’t look at me like that…” The song is simple by Feeling standards, but it hurts, Sells screaming his throat raw while the guitars and pianos crash behind him. He saves enough to bring the song in for a gentle landing: “I’m all right, I’m not alone, I’m just longing for a lost home…” He brings a measure of that emotion to even the poppiest songs here. The album opens with the catchy “Blue Murder,” which sets the tone with its tinkling pianos and big chorus, and continues with the one-two punch of “Anchor” and “Rescue.” When I say this is what it sounds like when grown-ups write pop singles, I don’t mean to imply that they’re sappy and boring. They’re mature, lovely, deep songs that flow from experience.

The brief interlude “Hides In Your Heart” quickly dives into the truly epic “The Gloves Are Off,” all circular pianos and cascading chords. “You’ll See” may be the gentlest thing here, but it’s also the most cutting: “When someone treats you like you treated me, that’s when you’ll understand, that’s when you’ll see…” That’s followed by a very pretty “oh-oh,” of course, because that’s what The Feeling does. And they end with the bitter taste of hope, a new emotion for them – “I Just Do” is a dark ballad, Sells wishing he could stop loving someone who has walked out of his life. “I wish I didn’t feel the way I do,” he sings with typical openness. “I just do.”

If you’re turned off by that kind of plain language, with little concern for artful poeticism, The Feeling may not be for you. Boy Cried Wolf puts the songs front and center, and they’re more heartfelt songs than ever. But they’re also fantastic, and the band sounds revitalized playing them. That sounds like an odd thing to say about an album of slower, piano-based pop songs, but it’s true. The Feeling has delivered an album that is almost nothing like their best work, and yet stands up proudly next to it. This record is a late-year surprise, but a most welcome one. It’s only available in the UK right now (and probably will never hit these shores), but it’s well worth the import price. Welcome back, gents. Lovely, lovely work.

* * * * *

In looking back over the year’s releases, I was stunned to see that I had never reviewed Harper Simon’s sophomore effort, Division Street. Let’s rectify that right now.

Harper is Paul Simon’s son, a fact that I feel bad mentioning. While his self-titled album from 2009 traded in his father’s brand of lyrical acoustic wonderment, Division Street is Harper’s gauntlet-throwing attempt to forge his own identity as a songwriter and record maker. And it’s a pretty damn successful one. My guess is that it alienated some of the folks who appreciated the more traditional feel of his debut, but as one of those folks, I have to say that Division Street feels like his true first album.

The first thing you’ll notice, of course, is how loud it is. The record is surrounded by swirls of distorted electric guitar, and songs like “Bonnie Brae” and “Dixie Cleopatra” rock like an avalanche. Simon’s voice is still thin and wispy, but it works surprisingly well with this more aggressive material. The production, by Tom Rothrock and Simon, is full and rich, and more importantly, consistent – Simon’s debut was recorded in pieces, and it sounded like it. This is a fully realized album.

Helping that case is the second thing you’ll notice – Harper Simon has become a pretty great songwriter. These songs go places. “Bonnie Brae” has a wonderful chorus, the title track morphs from a piano-pounding indie-rocker to a delightful pop tune, and “Eternal Questions” is one of the sprightliest things you’ll hear this year, with its cheeseball organ and skipping beat. “Who are you, where have you been, where are you going, eternal questions not worth knowing…”

Every song here is worth hearing. The Mellotron strings on “Chinese Jade” are as haunting as the melody, the constantly building melody of “’99” is a treat, the hook line of “Breathe Out Love” (“I breathe in suffering, I breathe out love”) is awesome, and the minor-key psychedelia of closer “Leaves of Golden Brown” is surprising and perfectly realized. He’s so confident on these songs that his one moment of acoustic folksiness, “Just Like St. Teresa,” is buried at track seven, and though it brings his father to mind, it’s stamped with originality.

Division Street is a mission statement from Harper Simon – he’s his own man, out of the shadow of his famous dad, and his songs stand on their own. It’s a much louder record than you’d expect, but also a much more well-crafted one. I should have reviewed this earlier, because I like it very much – perhaps even more than the debut. I’m more excited than ever to watch Harper’s career unfold.

* * * * *

And finally, here’s an album I can’t believe I like.

It’s been 10 years since Sting released a collection of original songs. The last one was the risible Sacred Love, easily the worst thing the man had ever foisted on the public. It’s become difficult to remember that Sting is a genius, and I’m not just talking about his days in the venerable Police. I mean he’s a musical giant, a strong songwriter with a thousand influences from around the world, only tripped up by his own pretentiousness. He’s also a really good bass player, though you wouldn’t know it from his more recent output.

In the time since Sacred Love, Sting fell in love with the lute and dove into the music of John Dowland, pausing only to put out a Christmas record and a lousy orchestral effort that reworked old songs to horrid effect. His reputation has suffered tremendously – I just tried Googling “Sting and his fucking lute,” in quotes, and got 110 hits. So I didn’t have high hopes for The Last Ship, an album of songs intended for a Broadway musical Sting will premiere next year. Musicals seem to be the next logical step on the downward path he’s set for himself, so I prepared for the worst.

But magically, The Last Ship is actually quite enjoyable. The story is based around Sting’s childhood home of Newcastle, England, a shipbuilding town hit by hard times. The songs take from English folk music, and Sting effects a working-class accent for his vocals, clearly playing characters. But the songs are obviously personal, in a way his work hasn’t been since The Soul Cages, and that makes all the difference. This is a work about the death of an industry and the death of childhood, but the moments of hope and grace here are well-earned.

In particular, I liked the title song, with its melancholy melody; “Dead Man’s Boots,” a song about a son rejecting his father’s way of life; the lilting “August Winds,” one of the few that can stand alone; and the heartrending “So to Speak,” in which one terminally ill character uses the album-length ship metaphor to plead for death. (“Is it really eternal life we should seek? That ship has already sailed, so to speak…”) I’m also a big fan of “Practical Arrangement,” in which a lonely man asks a less lonely woman to stay with him, and “The Night the Pugilist Learned How to Dance,” a sweet waltz that finds perfect symmetry between boxing and ballroom: “Ye swing to the left, ye swing to the right, keep your eyes on your partner, more or less like a fight… though the strategy’s subtle, retreat and advance, it’s all about attitude, all in your stance…”

This is miles from the pop music Sting is known for, but it’s all the better for it. The songs are complicated and sweet, full of nuance, and performed organically, with guitars, pianos, mandolins, pipes and violins. Though there’s no chance that he’ll regain his superstar status with this work, nor does he seem to want to, it’s the most artistically satisfying thing he’s done in a long, long time. The Last Ship is personal, poignant, and a welcome return to form from a songwriter I’d written off. A most pleasant surprise.

* * * * *

Next week, it’s just a Reflektor. 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 at this point, my year is just about over.

I’m waiting on Arcade Fire’s Reflektor, which – barring any last-minute surprises – should be the last major release of 2013. There are a bunch of smaller ones – Cut Copy, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Brendan Benson – and one other that I’m intensely looking forward to: Hammock’s Oblivion Hymns. But once I hear Reflektor, I think I will know the shape of the year.

And it’s been an odd one. My top five right now includes a folksy double album from a long-running married couple, a neo-soul statement of purpose from a young genius, a disco revival record from two guys in motorcycle helmets, a dazzling progressive epic from a Scottish singer with a 30-year track record, and the strange and wonderful little thing I’m talking about this week. I discovered Laura Mvula, Little Green Cars and Tom Odell, which is an amazing streak for just one year. But those three, like most of the great albums of the year, have absolutely nothing in common.

Which is actually a good segue into my full review of Gungor’s new record, I Am Mountain. As I mentioned in my mini-review a couple weeks ago, this album contains 12 songs, and none of them sound even a little bit alike. It’s often difficult to believe, listening in sequence, that the same group of musicians devised and performed all of these tracks. But the wonder of I Am Mountain is that all of them sit comfortably next to each other (and in some cases segue into one another) as if it’s perfectly natural for one band to reach this far.

So, who the hell is Gungor? Well, up until now, they’ve been a pretty decent worship band. Their previous efforts, culminating in 2011’s spectral Ghosts Upon the Earth, have been concerned with bringing church music out into the larger world without losing its identity. Michael and Lisa Gungor, the married couple at the heart of this band, have so far written lovely hymns and played them like a hybrid of David Crowder, Sufjan Stevens and Sigur Ros. Previous Gungor records are very pretty, for what they are, but they’re straightforwardly religious praise, with little real depth to them. (Their live album was even called A Creation Liturgy, just so you know how church-y they have been.)

I Am Mountain is the first album they’ve released on their own label, Hither and Yon Records. And the Gungors could not have made a more obvious statement of freedom if they’d tried. Nothing on any prior Gungor album will prepare you for this one. None of these songs could be played in church. The lyrics are seeking and doubtful, when they’re not about topics the band has previously steered clear of – the dark politics of “God and Country,” for example, or the retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth “Beat of Her Heart.”

And musically, this album is a beast. It should sound like 12 different personalities jockeying for space, but it doesn’t. That the Gungors and their many guests – string players, horn players, vocalists, etc. – can play in all of these styles comfortably, and make such a strong showing out of this entire album, is remarkable. I don’t necessarily want to pick out one portion over another, since all the music here is pitch-perfect, but Michael Gungor’s guitar on “Yesternite,” for example, is astonishing. This band can clearly play everything, and on I Am Mountain, they’ve decided to.

I’ve heard no other album this year that deserves a track-by-track review the way this one does, so here goes.

The title track starts off like Sufjan Stevens, with interleaving keyboard and guitar parts, as Michael and Lisa Gungor harmonize a fragile, repeated melody. But the soaring wordless chorus dispels any lingering twee-ness – it explodes out of nowhere, a thoroughly effective “whoa-oh” that invites you, by the hand, into this record. Good thing, too, because the second track, “The Beat of Her Heart,” is a complete left turn – a folk tale rendered in a mix of centuries-old melodicism and twangy surf guitar. As mentioned above, this tells the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice and their ill-fated reunion in the underworld. It’s like nothing I’ve heard – the 3-D web of percussion is striking.

“Long Way Off” is much more straightforward, a pop song that floats on electric piano and a lovely melody. It’s about the march of science, and how many questions open up with each answer: “The smartest men, they saw a world with corners and endings far, far away, but when they drew it out and searched it, they were a long way off, we’re a long way off…” Bonus points for working the phrase “apophatic mystic” into something so sweet and catchy.

“Wandering,” then, comes out of nowhere. Lisa Gungor sings this melancholy number through the auto-tuner, over little more than a plunking piano and a subtle horn bed. The effect is wonderful, and the song is gorgeous, particularly the middle section, in which she really puts the vocoder through its paces, somehow transforming it into the loneliest sound in the world. The final “I’ve been wandering through this world” is dry and effect-free, and somehow more hopeful because of it. This song is amazing.

With everything so far, you’d be forgiven if “Let It Go” knocks you off your chair. It’s a synth-happy dance-rock song, with wacka-wacka guitar, and a chorus that’ll lift you off the ground. This is such a capable dance tune – complete with synth breakdown – that it’s almost hard to believe it’s the band’s first one. Similarly, “Wayward and Torn” is their first back-porch blues-rocker, with a stomping-and-hand-clapping beat and some impressively authentic acoustic work. Seriously, the band takes you from Phoenix to Jack White in back-to-back tracks.

And then comes “God and Country,” wafting in on a Pink Floyd keyboard oscillation. The song couldn’t be more surprising, though – a full-on Spaghetti western rocker, with a killer riff and some wrist-breaking percussion. (And the sound of a whip.) It’s the band’s most political tune, and its most rocking – check out the Ennio Morricone horns, and then marvel at Michael Gungor’s shredding lead guitar. “How we love our God, oh God we love our guns for the love of country, for our fathers and our sons,” the Gungors sing, before bringing it home with an acoustic outro: “Those who live by the gun die by the gun…”

What to do after that? How about a complex interlude that features wordless vocals, intertwining and combining into new shapes for two minutes? Yes, that’s “Hither and Yon,” and it glides seamlessly into “Yesternite,” a heroic bit of acoustic guitar playing that forms the backbone of a melodically complicated piece. What starts off sounding like a classical number slowly turns into a fantasia, complete with dark string flourishes. It’s hard to even know how to categorize this song, but one thing is certain: Michael Gungor can certainly play the guitar. I mean, wow.

“The Best Part” is a showcase for Lisa Gungor, and it sounds a lot like Enya to me, with the subtle keyboard bed and the clear, high vocals. The chorus brings in a trip-hop drum beat, and what sounds like Darth Vader’s breathing used as a percussion instrument. The chorus is haunting, the song effectively minimal and beautiful. At first, it seems like “Finally” is going to follow in the same vein, its understated guitars and vocals caressing instead of jostling. Even the chorus is muted. But then the banjo breaks in, and the song turns into a hands-in-the-air anthem. “Be here in the free, we could just be, finally…”

But that’s not the closing track. Oh no. “Upside Down” is a stunning finale, eight minutes of ever-building beautiful. It’s the album’s only prayer: “This world is upside down, do you see us, do you hear us, make it right.” Michael Gungor sings this over some fragile, reverbed guitar, and then for the last six minutes, the wave gathers strength, the instruments coalescing, the strings crashing in, the pianos building, and finally it all breaks, in one of the odder musical moments of the year. The last 90 seconds are bizarre – muffled conversations in each speaker, synths rising past the point of human tolerance, everything falling apart and floating to the ground. It’s an off-kilter finish, but on repeated listens, a fascinating one.

I didn’t expect it, but I Am Mountain is one of my favorite records of the year. I haven’t been able to stop listening to it. It’s an expression of unbridled artistic freedom from a band that has remained in a lovely jeweled box of their own making for years. There’s nothing like this in their catalog, and nothing like it on the shelves, either – you have to go back to prime Queen to find something this fearlessly varied, and Gungor pulls it off with a miraculous consistency. They’ve always been good, but on I Am Mountain, they kick open their own doors and make the leap to extraordinary.

Next week, Arcade Fire. Please don’t suck. Please don’t suck. 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 have a lot of music to catch up on. But lately, I’ve been spending more time watching those recently found episodes of Doctor Who.

You may have read about this. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, before the advent of home video, the BBC saw no need to keep old episodes of television shows after they aired. So they junked the only copies in their archives of most of the old Doctor Who stories. The only reason we have most of what we have from those early seasons is that they would also create film copies of the stories to sell in foreign markets. For decades, industrious episode hunters have been searching for those film copies around the world.

A few years ago, a chap called Phillip Morris decided to conduct an on-the-ground search of television stations in Africa. A couple weeks ago, the first fruits of that search were unveiled – nine previously missing episodes from 1965, starring Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor. Put together with a couple we already had, we can now watch all six episodes of The Enemy of the World and five of the six episodes of The Web of Fear, two stories I thought I would never see.

And the BBC did another very smart thing – they offered these episodes for immediate download. I have them, and I’ve been slowly making my way through them, savoring the experience. For years, I’ve been watching these stories as reconstructions – essentially, slideshows of on-set photos run over the original episode’s audio. Watching them come alive has been a pretty emotional thing for me. For years, the opening sequence of The Enemy of the World has been a static shot of Troughton’s face with scrolling text reading, “The Doctor takes his shoes off and runs to the water.” Now it looks like this.

The Enemy of the World is a revelation. I’ve always liked the story, but to see Patrick Troughton pull this off is just astounding. Troughton plays both the Doctor and the villain, Salamander, and he’s giving three distinct performances – as the Doctor, as Salamander, and as the Doctor pretending to be Salamander. It’s remarkable work, and I’m so glad I can watch it. I haven’t seen The Web of Fear yet, but come on… it’s The Web of Fear. The Yeti in the London Underground, and the first story to feature Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. (Wouldn’t you know it, his first episode is the one that stubbornly remains missing.)

Nine recovered episodes at once is monumental, and I’m trying not to think about rumors I’ve heard that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Even if this is it, fans owe Morris a huge debt of thanks for going where no one has before in search of these bits of Doctor Who’s past. The 50th anniversary of the show is coming up in just over a month, and I couldn’t have asked for a better present. And you can bet we’ll get to these newly discovered episodes in due course on Doing Doctor Who. They are absolute classics, and it’s great to have them back.

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Speaking of classic, there’s Paul McCartney.

I’m not really sure there’s a songwriter more deserving of the accolade “living legend.” I’m not even sure what that phrase would mean, outside of McCartney. The man started his career in the best band of all time, essentially helping to rewrite all the rules of pop music before he was 28. He went on from that to a slightly spottier solo career, with a long and fruitful stopover in Wings, and this body of work deserves a complete reassessment. (The ‘80s weren’t kind to anyone.) McCartney’s written more astonishingly good pop songs than virtually any of his contemporaries, and he tends to get dismissed simply because he prefers effervescence over soul-searching.

The crux of the matter is this – Paul McCartney doesn’t have to write new songs, or record new albums. He’s 71 years old, and he’s done everything a lad from Liverpool could possibly have dreamed of. He’s scratched his “serious artist” itch with a number of orchestral works, he’s dabbled in electronic and avant garde, and he’s legitimately the most successful composer and recording artist of all time. He’s in the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame twice. No one would blame him for becoming a nostalgia act at this point, or just retiring.

And that’s why New, his 16th album as a solo artist, is such a joyous surprise. The deluxe edition contains 15 new songs, and none of them rest on McCartney’s laurels. They’re almost all vital, imaginative tunes with a pulse, recorded with an energy and a verve you’d never expect from someone of McCartney’s age and stature. This is a young, hungry record, the sound of one of the world’s best songwriters rediscovering his love of the craft, and going after it with gusto.

I will admit to not enjoying New on first listen. I think I subconsciously compare any new McCartney work with Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, and that’s just not fair. It’s the same attitude that has led to popular dismissal of killer records like Ram and Venus and Mars. These new songs won’t reinvent pop music, but they do celebrate it, and that’s enough. McCartney’s voice has also aged, as you might expect, and he sometimes strains it here more than he should. But that’s just part and parcel of the fearless, reckless abandon with which he approached this album.

The first four tracks here may be the best opening salvo of McCartney’s later years. “Save Us” kicks things off with a bang, a stomping piano, and a sharp beat. It’s a sweeping rocker, and it sets up “Alligator” nicely – the second track keeps the insistent beat, but adds a strumming acoustic and some nifty electric guitar and keyboard flourishes. “On My Way to Work” slows things down a little, but by the time the song gets to the pealing instrumental bridge, it’s soaring. And “Queenie Eye” is a four-minute epic, explosive and complex, with some fitting Queen touches.

“Early Days” almost derails things. You’re going to hear a lot about this song, since it finds McCartney revisiting his Beatles days with a sardonic eye toward people who claim they were there, but weren’t. It’s a good lyric, but the song, performed on weepy acoustic guitar, is threadbare, and McCartney can’t really sing it. The vocal take he chose is certainly emotionally naked, but it’s hard to listen to. The ship is righted with the sprightly title track, but takes on water again with “Appreciate,” an electro-pop slog. Luckily, that’s the last song on New that fails to impress.

The rest of the record is made up of skipping, joyous tunes like “Everybody Out There” and slower experiments like “Hosanna,” and they all work, despite some vocal problems. “I Can Bet” is a fuzzy delight, “Looking at Her” overcomes its sappiness with some deft production (and an infusion of unexpected noise), and “Road” provides a suitably dramatic finish. Even the three bonus tracks are pretty good. Hidden track “Scared” ends things on a surprisingly down note, Sir Paul singing over just his piano about his hidden fears. But it’s quite nice.

With 13 out of 15 songs striking gold, New is McCartney’s most consistent effort in some time, and all by itself makes a great argument for him continuing to follow his muse. At 71 years old, he could be looking at a nice, easy retirement. Instead, he’s attacking his career as a recording artist with renewed force, and producing his most vital work in ages. McCartney doesn’t need to make new records. But if they’re going to be as good as New, I hope he keeps on making them for a long time to come.

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If there’s a current band that could be described as classic rock, it’s Pearl Jam.

Seattle’s favorite sons came of age during the grunge revolution of the ‘90s, and you would have been forgiven for thinking they wouldn’t make it out of that decade intact. And yet, here they are, with four-fifths of their original lineup (and a drummer, Matt Cameron, who has been in the band for 15 years). They’ve just released their tenth album, Lightning Bolt, hot on the heels of a Cameron Crowe documentary celebrating their 25th year together.

Over that time, the band has changed somewhat, but they’ve never taken any of the disastrous roads their peers have traveled. No dabbling in electronic music, no piss-taking lounge covers, no conceptual rock operas, no stabs at radio-rock relevance. Every few years, they simply release another slab of well-considered meat and potatoes rock, and they tour it until they drop, playing marathon shows wherever they go. And what many seem to have missed in their rush to condemn Pearl Jam for remaining basically the same is that they’ve quietly assumed the throne of the best rock band in the world.

Pearl Jam’s biggest problem is that they are consistent, and consistency is the hardest thing to get excited and write about. Lightning Bolt is another 12 very good Pearl Jam songs, on which the band plays like Pearl Jam, and Eddie Vedder sings like Eddie Vedder. The band once again worked with producer Brendan O’Brien, who has manned the boards for more Pearl Jam albums than anyone else. This one’s a little more slowed-down, a little more drawn-out, than 2009’s Backspacer (which comparatively was more of a lightning bolt). But that’s really the only difference. If you’re looking for radical reinventions and easy conceptual hooks, you won’t find them here.

So why is Lightning Bolt worth getting excited about anyway? Because it’s damn good. The first three tracks are the sound of a fantastic rock band at the height of their powers. “Getaway” is a strong opening shot, leading into the punky “Mind Your Manners,” a spiritual cousin to “Spin the Black Circle.” And “My Father’s Son” is tricky, full of interesting and unexpected melodies and chords, but it rocks like an avalanche anyway. Things slow down after that, but if you’re going to slow down, do it with a song like “Sirens,” one of the band’s best mid-tempo tunes. It just keeps climbing, piling one swell melodic moment atop another. After establishing their bona fides on the opening trilogy, they earn this moment of pure beauty. (Listen to Stone Gossard’s all-out-there solo.)

Much of the rest of the album is similarly slow and pretty, although the band does rip through the title track and the snarling, bluesy “Let the Records Play” with vigor. (Vedder pulls off that stomper convincingly.) “Infallible” takes a jabbing eighth-note thump and builds it into a full-blooded melodic wonder, Vedder singing his heart out while the two guitarists drive things forward. “Pendulum” is a dark, swirling work, with subtle percussion from Cameron and chiming piano from O’Brien, and an instrumental outro that sounds like sinking into a deep cavern.

Lightning Bolt ends with three quieter numbers, perhaps the gentlest landing the band has ever given us. “Sleeping By Myself” is a skipping acoustic number about loneliness, one that brings the Everly Brothers to mind, while “Yellow Moon” hearkens back to songs like “Better Man,” with its strum and organ lines. The finale, “Future Days,” actually begins with melancholy piano before lifting off with a pretty acoustic lilt. Vedder sounds perfect here, crooning a song of devotion: “If I ever were to lose you, I’d surely lose myself, everything I have found, dear, I have not found by myself…” Gossard’s gossamer guitars share space with a shimmering violin. It’s just lovely.

So yeah, Lightning Bolt is another in a long line of very good Pearl Jam albums. This one has a lot to recommend it, particularly the slower and prettier material. But Pearl Jam is Pearl Jam, and the band’s consistency has been its greatest strength and its biggest obstacle. They’ve carved out a quarter-century career by sticking to their guns and making the best rock music they know how to make. Their longevity, and the sheer quality of albums like Lightning Bolt, would seem to indicate that they’re doing something right. In fact, one might even say they’re doing everything right.

Best rock band in the world? Yeah, I think so.

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Next week, that extraordinary Gungor album. 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’ve always written long.

As far back as creative writing classes in grade school, I was delivering far more than the assignment called for. My one-page short stories were routinely seven or eight pages. My favorite editor from my journalism days would constantly berate me for writing long. “Your story is 37 inches? Goddammit!” And now I write this column, which edges 3,000 words each week. It’s a disease, and I need help.

So I thought I’d try an experiment this week. I’m going to review seven albums, and I’m going to do it in the fewest words I can. This won’t be a forced exercise in brevity, like my annual Fifty Second Week columns, but an organic attempt to write shorter. You can already see what a challenge this will be – this intro is considerably longer than it needed to be. Let’s just press on and see how I do. I have some great records (and some not-so-great ones) to burn through this week, and I’m hoping this will help me catch up a little bit.

Sigh. Go!

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Six months ago, Justin Timberlake gave us The 20/20 Experience, a truly surprising piece of work. A 70-minute slice of future-soul, the album fully plumbed the new depths that were only hinted at on FutureSex/LoveSounds seven years earlier. Timberlake and producer Timbaland tapped into a vein of inspiration that seemed to be bottomless.

Alas, the second 20/20 Experience volume, released this month, shows us exactly where that bottom is. Like most sequels, the second act is longer and emptier than the first, regressing Timberlake’s sound and removing a lot of the fascinating production choices and old-school soul that elevated its predecessor. There’s nothing here as smooth as “Strawberry Bubblegum” or “Spaceship Coupe,” nothing quite as joyous as “Let the Groove Get In,” and nothing as dark and moving as “Blue Ocean Floor.”

What is here? A bunch of sex rhymes with beats that range from not bad to tedious. Opener “Gimme What I Don’t Know I Want” strides in on a convincing funk groove, but second track “True Blood” outstays its club-happy welcome after its second minute. (It goes on for nine.) I enjoyed the Michael Jackson-ness of “Take Back the Night” and the dramatic “Amnesia,” but the lows are much lower – “Drink You Away” is an embarrassing attempt at blues-rock, “You Got It On” is as cheesy as anything N’Sync ever did, and “Only When I Walk Away” is a sad attempt to ape Mutemath’s sound.

Instead of leaving “Blue Ocean Floor” as the finale of his 2.5-hour project, Timberlake ends this second volume with the breezy, semi-catchy “Not a Bad Thing,” then obliterates all goodwill with the goopy hidden track “Pair of Wings.” I worried that this second 20/20 Experience would just be the b-sides from the first, and as it turns out, I was right. The first album is terrific. The second, not so much.

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In 2010, Peter Gabriel released a stunning covers album called Scratch My Back. It was intended to come out simultaneously with an album of the covered artists returning the favor and tackling a Gabriel song, but for various reasons – not the least of which was a negative reaction to Gabriel’s covers – it never materialized.

Well, it took three years, but the companion album is finally here. It’s called And I’ll Scratch Yours, and it brings together 12 artists, each taking on a Gabriel classic. I’m a huge fan of the man’s work, so for me, hearing these reinventions was revelatory. Of the original dozen artists covered on Scratch My Back, only Radiohead and Neil Young declined to reciprocate. They’re replaced here by Joseph Arthur, who turns in a remarkable guitar-dirge take on “Shock the Monkey,” and Feist, who does a capable take on “Don’t Give Up.”

The Scratch My Back Ten, though, mostly knock it out of the park. Many of them are so honored to participate, and you can hear it in their tracks. Bon Iver’s absolutely wonderful version of “Come Talk to Me” finds a home here, as does Elbow’s magical “Mercy Street.” David Byrne brings his nervous, kinetic energy to “I Don’t Remember,” Randy Newman just owns “Big Time,” and Arcade Fire work their magic on “Games Without Frontiers.” Only Lou Reed, who ruins “Solsbury Hill,” truly disappoints, but the record ends with Paul Simon’s lovely, sympathetic read of “Biko,” and it’s perfect.

Essentially, Gabriel has compiled a tribute album to himself here, a questionable practice at best. But the results are mostly fantastic, and worth the risk. If you’re a Gabriel fan, you’ll hear these songs in a completely new light.

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It’s been 17 years since Mazzy Star released a new album. But if you’d told me that Hope Sandoval and David Roback recorded their new Seasons of Your Day in 1997 and just held on to it for all this time, I would believe you.

Seasons is the fourth Mazzy album, and virtually nothing has changed. The band still delivers slow, woozy folk-pop, with Sandoval’s gorgeous, laconic voice floating over it. This album gives us less of the sinister psychedelic side of the band, but we get everything else – the organ-drenched swoon of opener “In the Kingdom,” the melancholy acoustics of “California” and the title track (and a bunch of others), the spectral pop of “Lay Myself Down,” the bluesy crash of finale “Flying Low.”

Along the way, we get some of the prettiest music the two have created. It’s all slow and simple, but if you ever liked Mazzy Star, well, here’s another one. I have no idea what about this record took 17 years, but it’s quite good.

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There’s a song on this new Jars of Clay album called “Love in Hard Times.” I first heard it when it was offered as an extra with the band’s live EP, Under the Weather, and I probably listened to it 25 times that evening. It’s a moving, wonderful thing – over a web of reverbed guitars, Dan Haseltine sings of lovely reconciliation. “It’s when I think to reach across those battle lines, and love in the hard times…” There are shades of U2 to this song, but it stays quiet and subtle for its entire running time, and it just sweeps me along. I love it.

It’s also the best song on Jars’ new record, Inland. I had high hopes for this album, but while about half of it is memorable, polished guitar-pop, the other half just lies there and does nothing. I quite like “Loneliness and Alcohol,” the most upbeat and rocking Jars tune since Good Monsters, and “Fall Asleep,” a hushed piano piece, is also quite nice. “I Don’t Want You to Forget” has a lovely melancholy to it.

But listening to the rest of this album, I find myself wishing it were as good as the band thinks it is. I don’t hate anything here, but quite a lot of it – “Skin and Bones,” for instance, and “Human Race,” and the title song – just slips by without comment. The band has called this the album it took them 20 years to make. I would like to hear that. This sounds like just another Jars record to me.

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Only William James McAuley, also known as Bleu, would risk ire by naming his first crowdfunded album To Hell With You, and then turn the title track into a song of undying devotion. It’s exactly those kind of quirks that have kept him a vital and fascinating artist for 15 years and counting. He inspires fan devotion – he raised $39,645 to make and distribute To Hell With You – because he always keeps you on your toes.

This album, his fifth, is no exception. It finds him embracing electronic music and wrapping it around his warped pop sensibility, to dazzling effect. Once you’re past the overture, the first four songs here are probably his finest opening salvo, inspiring dancing and smirking in equal measure. “In My Own Little World” is a fabulous ode to sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting life away, while “Merry Go Round” is as delightful a pop tune as the man has ever written.

From there, the record gets weirder, but no less enjoyable. “I Have to Have You” is a creepy crawl; “It’s Not Over (Til It’s Over and Done),” co-written with David Mead, is a slice of ‘50s pop; “Grasping at Straws” a true guitar-fueled epic; and “Endwell” and “Odd Future” experiments in hip-hop. I won’t tell you it all works, but enough of it does that this record comes out on top. Closer “Won’t Make It Out Alive” sums up the record’s dark tone with lilting acoustics, capping it perfectly.

It’s hard to say To Hell With You is a curveball, since Bleu’s whole career has been made up of sharp left turns. As experimental works go, this one’s pretty fantastic, though. Bleu’s a master craftsman, and here he shapes his drum machines and synths into something that remains quintessentially him. Check it out here.

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Speaking of master craftsmen, there’s Aaron Sprinkle.

Formerly of Poor Old Lu and Fair, Sprinkle’s name has appeared on a million production credits, but it’s been 12 years since he’s made a solo album. He’s back with Water and Guns, and like Bleu, he’s gone electronic – this album is glossy, layered, intricate and synth-heavy, a one-man-band labor of love. Sprinkle’s got a great voice and a way with a hook, and this album showcases both in brand new ways.

Fans of his earlier acoustic-based material may be put off by the wall of sound that comes at them at the start of opener “Heatstroke.” But by the time Sprinkle gets to the chorus, it all makes sense. “Whisper Something” is one of the year’s coolest songs – its kinetic piano chorus makes me grin like an idiot. “River of Lead” has a killer chorus, and an even more killer post-chorus refrain. Sprinkle’s voice proves a surprisingly fine fit for the synth-balladry of “Giving Up the Gun,” and “I’ve Missed You” provides a late-album jolt of energy.

Bottom line, Aaron Sprinkle is a terrific songwriter, no matter the musical pond he’s swimming in, and Water and Guns proves it. It’s unlike anything he’s done, but amid the swirling synths, electronic drums and pounding pianos, his skill with a melody shines through.

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I’m probably going to spend the least amount of time on Gungor, since I owe this one a full review at some point. I Am Mountain, the third studio album by the collective led by Michael and Lisa Gungor, moves them away from their liturgical roots and into a far more interesting realm. It’s an album full of doubt, pain and magic, and just as the lyrical concerns have widened, the musical range has exploded.

Imagine a mix of Sufjan Stevens, the Black Keys, Moby, synth-funk and centuries-old spirituals, and you have the idea. And you’ll understand why I just can’t review this one in 100 words. I write long, what can I tell you? More to come. But this album is highly, highly recommended.

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Next week, classic rock with Paul McCartney and Pearl Jam. 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.

Before we get rolling this week, I want to direct your attention to a couple Kickstarter campaigns you may want to support.

Kickstarter has been getting a lot of flack for essentially providing a platform for rich people to avoid risk. I get that. But to me, that’s a small price to pay for what Kickstarter does best – it helps small, independent artists create music that would otherwise not exist, and get that music into the hands of their fans. It fosters community around creation, and that’s an amazing thing. Trust me that neither of these artists I’m about to mention are rich, and both of them create wonderful work that’s worth supporting.

Longtime readers no doubt know that The Choir is pretty much my favorite band. For more than 30 years, they’ve been making stunning spiritual dream-pop, the kind of thing that bypasses my brain and touches my soul. They have 14 albums, and they’re hoping to make a 15th early next year, in addition to their first live album in some time. They’ve asked for $25,000 to make those two projects happen. I hope they get three times that, and are able to keep on going for many years to come. If you haven’t heard The Choir, here’s a link to a Zip file with 15 songs from their recent albums. If you like what you hear, you can support their Kickstarter campaign here.

My friend Andrea Dawn is a remarkable singer and songwriter. Two years ago, she released her first full-length solo album, Theories of How We Can Be Friends. Now she’s gearing up to make her second, and she’s looking for $5,000 to launch that project. Andrea writes baroque, dramatic piano pop, and sings it with a voice that seems to have infinite depths. You can hear all of Theories here. If you like it, support her Kickstarter campaign here.

Also, if you haven’t seen my new project with Andrea, you can check that out here. I’ve somehow convinced her to watch all of Doctor Who with me – all 800-some episodes – and record her reactions on video. We call the project Doing Doctor Who, because we really like innuendo. Comments are most appreciated. Thanks!

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In 1989, one of my favorite bands underwent the biggest and riskiest change in its history.

For eight years, Marillion had been led by a tall, swaggering Scotsman named Derek Dick, but more commonly known as Fish. The four albums of the Fish era reflected the frontman’s personality more than anyone else’s, particularly the latter two – Misplaced Childhood, which contains Marillion’s only real hits, is a concept album about one of Fish’s particularly bad breakups, and the great Clutching at Straws is entirely about his love-hate relationship with alcohol. Fish was the face, the voice and the outsize persona of the group, and when he chose to leave, many assumed Marillion would be over.

What actually happened was much better than anyone could have predicted. Fish went on to a solo career that, despite some lows, has found him producing some riveting, timeless work. And Marillion found Steve Hogarth, one of my favorite singers, and have thrived with him at the helm. Last year, Marillion released what may be their career best album, the amazing Sounds That Can’t Be Made. It’s risky, complex, emotionally devastating and all-around beautiful stuff, the pinnacle of the band’s work with Steve Hogarth.

And now it’s Fish’s turn. His new album A Feast of Consequences is without doubt the finest thing he’s done since leaving Marillion. The big man has been on a massive upswing lately, moving from the pummeling rock opera Field of Crows to the more groove-oriented 13th Star, and though his voice has aged, he’s found new ways to bend and shape it, and new settings to place it in. While both his most recent albums were splendid – in fact, the best he’d made as a solo artist – the praise was reserved, since his voice was nowhere near its height.

I have no idea what he did in the meantime, but A Feast of Consequences contains Fish’s best vocals since Sunsets on Empire, easy. His voice is still an older, rougher instrument, but it’s more supple than it’s been in years. I mention that first, because the songs on A Feast of Consequences – his best as a solo artist – require a subtle yet strong singer to bring them home, and Fish steps up to the plate here. He’s always had a unique quality to his voice, and in the past, I felt like he was trying to recapture his early, more elastic sound instead of working his new range and tone into something more comfortable. Well, he does that here, finally. It’s just a great performance.

But you’re here for the songs, and they’re excellent. Of the 11 tunes here – five of which make up an extraordinary suite in the middle – only one feels less than complete. The album is loud and vibrant, blessed with the best production Fish has ever enjoyed, and the songs match it. They were written with three mainstays of Fish’s band throughout the years – Steve Vantsis, Robin Boult and Foss Patterson – and you can tell that this time, they buckled down and decided to make each one as special as it could be.

The record opens with four unrelated songs, three of which would make terrific singles. “All Loved Up” is a rocker that presents a jaundiced view of technology and social media – “We’re beautiful people, we’re all fucked up,” Fish spits over a snarling riff. “Blind to the Beautiful” is the record’s loveliest song, and perhaps its darkest – it’s about the pain of life overwhelming the joy. “I just can’t see the beautiful anymore” is one of Fish’s most devastating lines, and he delivers it with feeling, before the wonderful violin section. The title track is another of Fish’s patented angry breakup tunes, this one with a bouncy and memorable chorus.

To get to those comparatively jaunty numbers, you have to get through the opener, the 11-minute “Perfume River.” But believe me, this will be no chore. It’s a gloriously atmospheric trip through Vietnam, which Fish visited in 2007. The record’s first few minutes show just how intense the production is – it opens with bagpipes and a bed of synthesizers, sounding like fog off in the distance. When the bell-like acoustic guitar cuts through, right in the foreground, you know you’re in for a 3-D listening experience, and “Perfume River” doesn’t disappoint. It turns into a hootenanny halfway through, and Fish knocks it out of the park.

But it pales in comparison to the High Wood Suite, comprising tracks five through nine. Inspired by his grandfathers and their service in World War I, the suite is a powerful bit of historical scene-setting, taking place at the sites of several famous battles in Europe. “High Wood” starts as a piano ballad, and ends as a death march, with shades of Savatage. It sets the stage: a wooded area in which 8,000 men disappeared. “Are they ghosts or moving shadows, are they spirits gone before, are these the restless souls still wandering, the ones that were forsaken in the high wood…”

The soldiers’ tale is told in “Crucifix Corner,” for my money the best song on this album. The repeated melody sounds ancient, like a folk song sung through the mists of time. But as the seven-minute epic moves on, Fish sets it against beautiful pianos and then thunderous guitars, occasionally bringing Iron Maiden to mind. The music matches the mood, as the soldiers prepare for battle, then charge, and are defeated, leaving this mournful final verse: “In the cornfields ripening corpses sweet, in a sunrise moving shadows, from the High Wood the reaper walked to a harvest duly gathered, the skylark’s solo mournful cry above spirits torn and tattered, in a new dawn the whistle blows on a field prepared for battle…”

“The Gathering” starts with a jubilant fanfare, and goes on to capture the national mood of Britain at the start of World War I. “We signed off our lives with a stroke of a pen, joined our pals in the line, we took the king’s shilling with pride…” Placing this right in the middle is perfect – we know the horrors these men will face thanks to “Crucifix Corner,” and that prepares us for the horror of “Thistle Alley,” the darkest piece here. “Thistle Alley” is the name of a trench Fish’s grandfather helped dig, and the song details the battle that took place there: “Heaven above, Thistle Alley below, motionless survivors bloody on the killing floor, praying for the darkness to return and hide the graves of the living…”

“The Leaving,” the final track of the suite, examines the aftermath, not just of the battle, but of the war. It begins on a field strewn with corpses, but ends with hollow-eyed soldiers coming home: “The men returned, the war was over, the bells rang out, a country cheered, behind their eyes they stored the horrors, behind their smiles they hid their fears…” Fish sings with emotion over a melancholy string arrangement that gives way to a sad mirror of the marching beat from “High Wood.” It brings the suite to a stunning end.

After the High Wood material, anything would have fallen short, but “The Other Side of Me” is still the album’s weakest song. A tender acoustic ballad about reconciliation with oneself, the song’s lyric and melody (and vocal performance) are lacking in comparison. The whole thing sounds great, particularly the violin lines, but the repeated “first person singular, me, myself, I” doesn’t hit home. Thankfully, the finale, “The Great Unraveling,” is great indeed. Fish uses his parents as a starting point to talk about how everyone eventually leaves everything, and he makes it sound glorious. The final refrain of “into the light” is lovely, and the song a fitting finish to this marvelous album.

It’s amazing to even think about, but since their own great unraveling, Marillion and Fish have both been gathering strength. And now, less than a year apart, both have issued career highlight records. A Feast of Consequences is Fish’s high point as a solo artist, a record of remarkable depth and power, one that has made the entire journey worth it. It’s a completely independent piece of work, beholden to no one, the product of pure artistic freedom. And it’s just wonderful.

A Feast of Consequences is only available from Fish himself, here. The special edition is packaged in a stunning hardcover book with dozens of illustrations from Mark Wilkinson (who has handled Fish’s artwork since the beginning), and comes with a feature-length documentary on DVD. It is so well worth the asking price.

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Next week, I’ll try to catch up with a bunch of shorter reviews. Yes, you heard right, I’m going to try to write shorter. Come by in seven days and see how I do. 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’ve been playing piano for as long as I can remember, which means I’ve been interested in the work of piano players for most of my life.

My list of favorites has grown and changed since my naïve younger days – Yanni is no longer on it, for example. Ben Folds is pretty high on the list, as is Tori Amos, especially her early work. (Can we just agree that whenever I mention Tori Amos anymore, I mean “especially her early work”?) Brad Mehldau is my favorite jazz pianist right now. I saw Bruce Hornsby live a couple of months ago, and he was fantastic – his chord phrasings are like a fingerprint.

And then there’s Elton John, with whom I have had a complicated relationship (no, not like that) for much of my life. I was an early adopter of MTV in the ‘80s, so my first exposure to Elton was the ridiculous video for “I’m Still Standing.” I never would have pegged him for a piano player from that, or from subsequent schlock-fests like “Sad Songs” and “A Word in Spanish.” Oh, and that terrible duet with Kiki Dee.

But my father, he of the Columbia Record and Tape Club subscription, had a copy of Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, Elton John’s 1973 effort, and I listened to that again and again as a child. It never occurred to me until later that the guy who wrote “Have Mercy on the Criminal” and “Texan Love Song” was the same guy behind “I Don’t Want to Go On With You Like That.” I probably wouldn’t have believed it. And then Elton went on to score The Lion King, and, well, that just cemented my impression of him as a mall-pop sellout.

And then I heard Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I still remember the way my jaw dropped the first time I spun “Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” the piano-prog opening track. The whole album was terrific, a double record full of ambition and sparkle. And go figure, the five albums before it and the three albums after it were all great too. In the 1970s, Elton John was a pop messiah, a superb and inexhaustible songwriter – he and lyricist Bernie Taupin could do no wrong. The stretch from Elton John to Rock of the Westies is one of the finest streaks any pop musician has ever released.

So what happened? Well, the ‘80s, and a lot of drugs. Blue Moves and A Single Man were fine, and then everything for 20 years was a mixture of cheeseball and unlistenable. I remember in the ‘90s Elton would keep staging comebacks – Made in England was touted as a masterpiece – and keep taking only baby steps forward. I stuck with him, but 1997’s The Big Picture was very nearly my exit. It’s excrement. And then he jumped full bore into shitty musicals with Tim Rice, and I figured that was that.

Are you ready for the latest plot twist, though? Elton’s been on an upswing lately – no, he has, I swear – and his new album, The Diving Board, is his best in nearly 40 years.

You read that right. Nearly 40 years since the man has made an album this good. Elton is back behind the piano – there’s nary a synthesizer to be found on this one – and he and Taupin have delivered their best, most consistent set of songs since I was in diapers. Elton’s older now, and his voice has aged, but it’s in wonderful, full, rich form here. In T-Bone Burnett, he’s found a sympathetic producer who convinced him to go with the sparest arrangements he could, and write from the heart.

You can hear the difference right from the opening track, “Oceans Away.” A moving tribute to soldiers lost overseas, the song is performed with nothing but piano and voices, Elton harmonizing with himself beautifully. The mood remains melancholy on “Oscar Wilde Gets Out,” a song that could have easily found its way onto Elton’s classic ‘70s records. A gliding piano figure, a minimal drumbeat from Jay Bellerose, some subtle strings, and a haunting melody. That’s it. You get to actually hear Elton John play piano on this record, more than you have in decades.

There are 12 songs and three instrumental interludes on this album. Of all of them, only “Can’t Stay Alone Tonight” never takes off, its lazy-hazy groove stuck in second gear. Elton coasts a little on “Mexican Vacation” and “Take This Dirty Water,” both New Orleans-style piano-pounders, but both songs shimmy convincingly. Everything else – literally, everything else – is tremendous, and it only gets better with repeated listens.

There’s very little here that could be called rock, but that’s OK, because Elton is at his best here when he’s diving deep, playing the minor keys and singing from a place of pain. “My Quicksand” is the first truly moving song he and Taupin have written in ages, Elton’s dark chords driving things forward, slightly goofy lyrics and all. It’s tops here, until you get to track nine, “Home Again.” You may have heard this one – Elton performed it at the Emmys. It’s simply gorgeous, Taupin’s words capturing the recursive nature of age perfectly: “We all dream of leaving, but wind up in the end spending all our time trying to get back home again…” The melody is heart-rending, the arrangement powerful, the horns perfectly balanced in the background. It’s the best damn Elton John song of my adult life.

But really, there are very few weak moments here. Even a late-period showtune like “The New Fever Waltz” scores. I’ve been a fan of Elton John long enough to have given up on ever getting a record like this one again – the good ones all came out before I could even read, I have said – so The Diving Board is the best kind of surprise. Even if he never makes another one as good as this again, it’s so nice to get the good Elton back for just an hour. Thanks, Sir Elton, for making this one something special.

* * * * *

Elton John is 66 this year. I’m not sure how many generations separate him and England’s latest piano-pop prodigy, Tom Odell. I do know this – Odell is 22 years old, and he’s made a debut album that would be the envy of musicians twice and three times his age.

I first heard Odell thanks to Aaron Sorkin – the riveting, unforgettable “Can’t Pretend” scored an overly dramatic promo for the second season of The Newsroom. Every music fan knows this feeling – you hear a song that grabs hold of you, demands your immediate and undivided attention, and you must, immediately, drop everything you are doing and find out who created this song and how you can own it right fucking now. “Can’t Pretend” was such a song for me, the first one in a long while. The big chords, the rising-and-falling arrangement, Odell’s big, Buckley-esque voice, the entire amazing atmosphere of the song. Everything about it is perfect.

Odell’s debut, Long Way Down, isn’t perfect, but it’s really close. Odell writes good songs, and occasionally great ones, but it’s the way he performs them that makes this record the gem it is. His voice is elastic and dramatic, and he layers that voice atop itself, creating a wall of vocals. His playing is loud and bracing when it has to be, and tender and delicate at all the right moments. Best of all, his arrangements are striking and dramatic – he begins “Another Love” with fragile chords, but it builds into something enormous, massive, unstoppable. And he knows enough to bring it back down to earth before the end.

There isn’t a bad song on this album, although its centerpiece remains the untouchable “Can’t Pretend.” “I Know” is a swaying, Keane-style pop number with a wonderful crescendo; “Sense” is stripped back and gorgeous, rising from its own dark clouds; “Sirens” makes the absolute most of its simple, pretty piano line; and closing song “Heal” brought a tear the first time I heard it, its rising, hopeful melody backed by piano and little else. Odell even turns in a fantastic, respectful cover of Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” bringing a depth beyond his years to this treasure of a song.

The main stumbling block here is Odell’s lyrics, beyond doubt the product of a young man’s mind. In “Another Love,” for example, he aims for a portrait of a man who has spent all his affection on someone else, and has none left. But he doesn’t have the skill yet to paint the finer brushstrokes such a work needs – “I’d sing a song that would be just ours, but I sang ‘em all to another heart, I wanna cry, I want to learn to love, but my tears are all used up…” It’s fine, for what it is, but the music is so far ahead of the words that it’s almost jarring.

But that’s OK. As I mentioned, Tom Odell is only 22. I love the record he’s made – I’m not sure I’ve been this in love with a piano-pop album since Keane’s first two – but I’m over-the-moon excited now to follow his career, and hear what wonders he’ll create as he grows into his prodigious talent. His first album is great. I expect his fourth will be amazing. (And then, of course, he’ll get hooked on cocaine and slip into banal mediocrity for about four decades, before finally finding his voice again in his 60s and making a comeback album full of joyous melancholy. Seems to be what English piano players do. )

For right now, though, Tom Odell is my favorite discovery of 2013, and Long Way Down one of the year’s best. His potential may be limitless, but the music he’s making now is pretty damn great too.

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You know what time of year it is. This is the last column in September, and we’re rounding third on my annual top 10 list. So it’s time for the Third Quarter Report. Here’s where I reveal what the list-in-progress looks like right now. The last few months have been incredible, with superb album after superb album hitting stores. The list looks very different today than it did back in June, and given what’s to come for the rest of the year, I expect it will look pretty different in December as well.

For now, here’s the list:

#10. Little Green Cars, Absolute Zero.
#9. My Bloody Valentine, m b v.
#8. Elton John, The Diving Board.
#7. Laura Mvula, Sing to the Moon.
#6. Daniel Amos, Dig Here, Said the Angel.
#5. Tom Odell, Long Way Down.
#4. Frightened Rabbit, Pedestrian Verse.
#3. Daft Punk, Random Access Memories.
#2. Janelle Monae, The Electric Lady.
#1. Over the Rhine, Meet Me at the Edge of the World.

As you can see, several albums have gone up in my estimation, and some – The Joy Formidable, Everything Everything – have disappeared from the list completely. As the wonders get more plentiful, the list reflects my own taste more and more. I’m back and forth between the top two choices – some days Monae is number one, others OtR. I just saw Over the Rhine in concert last week, and the new material was glorious, so right now I’m leaning in their direction. But it could change next week.

Speaking of next week, we’ll most likely review Fish, or Peter Gabriel, or Justin Timberlake, or Deltron 3030, or Kitchens of Distinction, or… you know what? Drop by and find out. 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.

Last week we were talking about audacity, about artists willing to try ideas that shouldn’t work, and bend them into reality by sheer force of will. As it turns out, that’s a great lead-in into this week’s review, so I’ll reiterate: some of the best music I know comes from a place of total trust and belief in a seemingly unimaginable idea. On paper, it reads like a recipe for disaster. On record, it’s magic.

With that in mind, check this out: Elvis Costello made an album with the Roots.

I’ll say that again, because it’s so much fun: Elvis Costello, the 59-year-old Englishman who stands as one of the worlds best and most idiosyncratic songwriters, made an album with the Roots, the premier live hip-hop band from Philadelphia best known for their long-running stint on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. It’s called Wise Up Ghost, and it was released by Blue Note Records. This is a real thing that really exists.

If you’re a fan of Costello or the Roots (or both, like me), this titanic team-up probably caught you by surprise. It’s not a natural pairing, but it you think about it, it starts to make a sort of sense. Costello is a musical chameleon, beholden to no style, and willing to try just about anything. He’s known for pairing up with younger, less pedigreed acts like Fall Out Boy and the Strokes, though he generally saves his big-deal collaborations for his albums – his knockout record with Allen Toussaint, The River in Reverse, for example.

And the Roots are one of the most versatile bands on the scene right now. They play with everybody on Late Night, and their records, though rooted in hip-hop, draw from a deep well of influences, including soul, funk and jazz. They have a strong social conscience and a knack for storytelling – see their album-length tale of woe from 2011, Undun. And in bandleader ?uestlove, they have one of the finest drummers any band could ask for – and one of the smartest.

That being said, there are two ways Costello and the Roots could have screwed this up.

1. They could have made a Roots album with Elvis Costello on vocals. Can you imagine Costello relegated to singing the hooks on a hip-hop album, trying desperately to shoehorn one of the most distinctive voices in rock into a box that would never fit it? While it might have been a strong showcase for the Roots, it would have been a missed opportunity.

2. They could have made an Elvis Costello album with the Roots as the backup band. Never mind that Costello’s songs are fussier and less loose than the ones the Roots normally play, this would have wasted one of the coolest bands around, turning them into little more than session men sitting in for the Impostors. It might have been a fine Costello album, but it wouldn’t have been much of a collaboration.

Thankfully, Wise Up Ghost is neither of those things. It’s a true collaboration, for better and for worse, between two distinct artists willing to hunt for common ground. It never comes off as effortless – they worked at this, trying to meet each other halfway, and hammering this new hybrid sound into shape. The record is full of experiments, and some of them work better than others.

Costello and the Roots have front-loaded the album with the ones that work, particularly the opening trilogy. Wise Up Ghost bursts to life with the busy streetscape of “Walk Us Uptown,” making the most of a killer beat from ?uestlove, a minimal bassline, some low-key horns and organ, and Costello’s thick-throated voice. This song comes right from his bile duct – he sounds furious, even on the major-key sunrise of the choruses. Costello’s voice has aged in recent years, and though he still sings like a man possessed, he can’t carry the same heavy tunes he used to. But he’s perfect on a song like this, with its slow orbit of a melody.

He’s even better on “Sugar Won’t Work,” a slinky old-school slice of striding soul. This one’s a good showcase for guitarist Captain Kirk Douglas, but it’s Costello’s chorus and the tasty strings that make it work. (Some of the strings are real, some are sampled, but in a nice touch, the Roots sampled exclusively from Costello’s orchestral works.) It’s “Refuse to Be Saved,” however, that truly proves the concept. This song, to put it mildly, kicks ass. Aside from some horn accents and a repeating electric piano line, this song is driven by ?uestlove’s drums, and Costello rises to the occasion with some of his angriest, darkest vocals. He spits these words out like he can barely get his tongue around his own disgust.

This seems like a good time to talk about the lyrics, the most complex and rage-filled set of words Costello has given us in a long while. The cover of Wise Up Ghost is designed to resemble City Lights Publishing’s Pocket Poets series, which first published Alan Ginsberg’s Howl, among other notable works. This is not just a clever marketing gimmick – the album is politically charged poetry, red with anger. Costello is done being amused, and he’s back to being disgusted full time.

“Refuse to Be Saved” is a strong example. It’s terrifying: “They’re hunting us down here with liberty’s light, a handshaking double-talking procession of the mighty pursued by a TV crew, and coming after them, a limousine of singing stars and their brotherhood anthem, the former dictator was impeccably behaved, they’re mopping up all the stubborn ones who refuse to be saved…” Costello stands up against the dystopia in the song’s final moments, repeating “I refuse to be saved” as the world collapses.

Costello reuses some older lyrical concepts here, reworking “The River in Reverse” for the relentless stomper “Wake Me Up,” and fashioning his first flirtation with hip-hop, “Pills and Soap,” into the even more venomous “Stick Out Your Tongue.” Throughout the record, he works in apocalyptic imagery: “Someone went off muttering, he mentioned thirty pieces, Easter saw a slaughtering, each wrapped in bloodstained fleeces…” The songs are littered with messy revolutions and uncaring gods.

I only wish Wise Up Ghost were more consistent. You can hear the scaffolding creaking on “Tripwire,” a decidedly Costello-esque ballad with lyrics that should have been shouted, but ended up crooned. After that, the record sags – it’s one mid-tempo, melody-free jam after another, and despite some nice surprises, like “Cinco Minutos con Vos,” it fails to keep the interest level high. I’ve ended up liking all of these songs, at least somewhat, but the stretch from “Come the Meantimes” to the title track could have used some tightening up, some pruning, or a shot of adrenaline. They’re all valiant attempts at musical alchemy, but they fall short.

Odd, then, that the album ends with its most typically Costello song, and it’s a winner. The tender “If I Could Believe” finds Costello stretching that aging voice to its limit, singing his heart out over Ray Angry’s delicate piano. The song is a cry of anguish: “If I could believe, then I know I might sleep all through the night, but how many times must I wake in fright, nagging doubts still tugging on my sleeve, if I could believe…” His weathered voice adds a lovely dimension to this song – he’s not choosing his fate, he’s unable to choose anything else. There’s an indescribable sadness to it, one I did not expect on an album like this.

I feel pretty certain that Wise Up Ghost is a one-off – both Costello and the Roots are too restless to stay in this place for too long. That’s kind of a shame, since in the record’s early going, they seem to have hit upon something worth exploring. If the entire album had remained at the standard of the first five songs, this would be an unqualified success. As it is, it represents a fascinating collision of disparate styles, a potential chocolate-and-peanut butter situation that could have used some further digging. This album works much more often than it should, and that alone is a sign that they’ve struck some form of gold. I like Wise Up Ghost, for the most part, but I’d like another one, and then another, to really see if Elvis Costello and the Roots can truly connect. This album is audacious, and it’s almost great.

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I just heard that Girlyman broke up.

As I understand it, the four members of the band split up some time ago, but Doris Muramatsu and Ty Greenstein made formal announcements this past week. It’s a sad day – Girlyman was a consistently lovely band, built around three extraordinary voices that blended together like angel hymns. Muramatsu, Greenstein and Nate Borofsky wrote some gems during their decade-plus together, and drummer JJ Jones rounded things out, joining full time in 2010.

I first heard Girlyman courtesy of my friend Mike Ferrier, who saw them opening for the Indigo Girls. He bought me Remember Who I Am, the band’s debut, and I was hooked from then on. They made five albums, including last year’s excellent Supernova (which I never got around to properly reviewing), and one superb live album. And they wrote one song in particular that changed my life – “Somewhere Different Now” became my anthem of hope in 2008, a decidedly simple yet astonishingly beautiful work of art.

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I guess I should have seen this coming – Ty has a solo album, One True Thing, and the other three Girlymen recently collaborated on a children’s album under the name Django Jones – but I didn’t. So here’s a toast to a band that should have been more widely heard, and more widely loved. Thanks for everything, guys, and I look forward to following your future endeavors.

Next week, two generations of English piano pop. 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 am a fan of swagger.

I don’t mean cockiness. There’s a certain negative connotation to the word swagger that I don’t think it deserves. When I say an album swaggers, I mean it has a confidence that informs every song, every line, every decision. It’s particularly invigorating when those decisions shouldn’t work, when the record achieves a kind of alchemy on pure willpower and determination. When you know the music you’re listening to would fall flat on its face in the hands of a lesser artist, but the record itself betrays no sense of self-doubt, that’s swagger.

And that’s as fine a description of Janelle Monae as I’ll be able to muster. Her work swaggers. She’s incredibly ambitious – she’s rounding third on a seven-part concerto about robots on the run in a futuristic city, with five of the seven suites wrapped up – and she effortlessly combines old-school soul with a dozen other, more modern influences. When reviewing her last album, The ArchAndroid, I said her music sounds like the spawn of Prince and Erykah Badu, if that kid really liked Blade Runner. It’s still true.

I couldn’t have known this at the time, but both Prince and Badu pop up in guest spots on Monae’s second full-length album, The Electric Lady. This should tell you where she’s coming from – she creates some of the most imaginative, eclectic, original-sounding soul-pop you’ll ever hear. The Electric Lady covers suites four and five of the story of Cindi Mayweather, an android who committed the sin of falling in love with a human, and is simultaneously hunted and made famous for it. But if you think it gets bogged down in sci-fi concepts, you’re not familiar with Monae. Like everything she’s done, this record… well, swaggers.

The Electric Lady is a little more streamlined and personal than prior efforts, with a few songs that seem like stabs at radio hits. It’s in no way a typical pop record, though, and the first three tracks will dispel that notion. It opens with a surf-rock-inflected overture, then slams into “Givin ‘Em What They Love,” which features Prince on vocals and guitar. It’s a slow-burn powerhouse, a surprisingly mid-tempo opening to the record, but as it steps forward, sure-footedly, it builds into a convincing stomper with a soaring chorus. And then comes “Q.U.E.E.N.,” Monae’s duet with Badu. Over a particularly ‘80s synth line, the two knock this collaboration out of the park – it’s like they decided to show everyone else attempting soulful pop music these days just how it’s done.

The quality of Suite IV never flags, and its 33 minutes zips by. The title track is an absolute triumph, the ballad “Primetime” overcomes its cheesy lyrics with a fine vocal performance by Miguel, and “We Were Rock and Roll” is a lovely bit of nostalgic ‘70s funk mixed with ‘60s soul. And then there is “Dance Apocalyptic,” one of the year’s best singles – it’s a quick-step pop tune that somehow mixes ukulele, cheesy organ, cheerleaders, finger snaps and a killer chorus into an irresistible brew. You simply will not be able to sit still through this one. It’s fantastic, and it even ends with a Prince trademark – pitch-shifted spoken word.

“Look Into My Eyes” brings the suite to a close, and it’s marvelous, a James Bond theme with a male voice choir in the background and a hundred little Henry Mancini-esque touches. And this is what I mean by swagger – you won’t find another singer on modern pop radio who would do anything like “Dance Apocalyptic” or “Look Into My Eyes,” and they certainly wouldn’t do both on the same record. It’s an incredible show of confidence.

Suite V doesn’t quite hit the same heights, but it’s still excellent. After another overture, Monae slides into the traditional soul number “It’s Code,” and follows it up with the Stevie Wonder-esque “Ghetto Woman.” With the story confined largely to a series of interludes in the form of radio call-in spots, the songs are free to explore anything Monae wants, and she chooses love and yearning. There’s even a song called “Can’t Live Without Your Love,” with swelling strings, deft clean guitar and glorious harmonies. It’s perhaps more typical than you’d expect, but stick around for the middle eight, in which Monae pulls out a humdinger of a jazz melody.

The last few tracks are pretty much perfect, concluding the suite on a stratospheric high. “Sally Ride,” named after the first woman astronaut, is a dense, jazzy piece floating by on guitars and strings, Monae giving the delirious vocal line everything she has. “I wanna fly, fly,” she sings, as the electric guitar crashes in. Nothing about this song is typical, and neither is “Dorothy Dandridge Eyes,” which features another new-school wunderkind, Esperanza Spalding. The record ends with an anthem, unlike anything else Monae has done. “What An Experience” brings up her ‘80s influences, including that plinking, echoed guitar that found its way into half the radio hits of the decade, but mashes them into a perfect, blissful, easygoing end credits theme. There’s even a reggae breakdown. Yes, it all works.

Why does it work? Because throughout this record’s 68 minutes, Janelle Monae’s self-confidence never falters. She’s innovating before your ears, pushing soul-pop into new and more fulfilling directions, showing off her chops as a singer, songwriter and producer, and oh yeah, becoming a top-notch role model for female artists who are too smart to be music industry pawns. And she does all this with an effortless grin. The Electric Lady is another terrific piece of work from one of the best pop artists to emerge in decades. It swaggers like nobody’s business.

* * * * *

It would be hard to call Neko Case’s music swaggering, but her own confidence has grown immeasurably since she first emerged as a solo artist with The Virginian in 1997. She was a country-rock crooner then, covering the Everly Brothers and Queen with equal aplomb, but over four more solo albums (and five records as part of the Canadian supergroup The New Pornographers), she’s blossomed. Her work now contains strains of country, but is a glorious hybrid of all the styles she’s absorbed over the past 15 years.

Her evolution reaches its apex (at least so far) on her sixth solo album, blessed with this delightful mouthful of a title: The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. She still composes tuneful meanders, but this album pulses with a sense of purpose, of drive. Case has called it her most personal work, the one on which she stopped telling stories and started baring her soul, and if that’s what it took to get her to this next level, then more power to her.

Just listen to “Man,” on which Case subverts her own gender to talk about the roles she has played. “I’m a man, that’s what you raised me to be, I’m not your identity crisis…” The lyric is pure awesome, and the music rocks, hard. It’s louder than the last couple New Pornographers records, chugging forward with purpose. She follows it up with “I’m From Nowhere,” on which she sings over nothing but an acoustic guitar, lamenting a life in the music biz. It’s pretty, and it’s even more poetic and bracing after “Man.”

The Worse Things Get is Case’s most diverse effort, diving from the thick indie rock of “Bracing for Sunday” (“Friday night girl, bracing for Sunday to come”) to the completely a cappella “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” – that song’s beautifully rendered “get the fuck away from me” will take you by surprise, but it sounds perfect in context – to the sweet acoustic ramble of “Calling Cards,” complete with subtle trumpets. All that in just over seven minutes, too. A couple minutes later, she’s covering Nico’s “Afraid” with nothing but piano, vibes and autoharp.

It’s Case’s vision that keeps all this together, wraps it up as a single piece of work. When she asks, seemingly unironically, where she left her fire on the lovely dirge of a penultimate track, it’s puzzling – the fire is all over this album. Case seems to answer herself just fine on the closing number, “Ragtime,” one of her finest and most confident tunes – “I will feel myself invincible soon,” she sings, before the horns start blaring. It’s a tremendous closer, so much so that the three bonus tracks on the deluxe edition feel as tacked-on as they are. The Worse Things Get is a unified whole, and “Ragtime” is its climax. (The hidden snippet – Case saying “That was awesome” – sums it up.)

Case has taken some flack for the softer bent of a lot of this material, as if the only way a female artist can express her fire is by rocking out. Ignoring the fact that that’s ridiculous, Case has built her… um, case on a platform of diversity here, branching out in a dozen directions, yet infusing everything with her own stamp. I say that’s a perfect expression, and I hope she keeps on expressing it. Neko Case has blossomed into something simply splendid over the past decade and a half, and while The Worse Things Get is certainly a high point, I hope it’s just a rest stop, and she keeps on climbing.

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Next week, Elvis Costello meets the Roots. 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.

Music is physical.

I don’t just mean this as another argument for physical packaging, though that certainly adds to the experience. This week, Fish’s excellent new album A Feast of Consequences ended up in my inbox, and though I’ve listened through twice, I don’t feel like I own it yet. I won’t feel that way until the deluxe hardbound CD/DVD edition winds its way to my house. To me, the physical object is the album, and the files currently resting in my iTunes library are nothing but ghosts. The music’s there, but it isn’t tangible. It isn’t real yet.

But that isn’t what I meant when I said music is physical. I’m talking about sheer sound, about the tactile impact of putting on a record and letting it fill your room. If that record is really well made, the effect can be felt. The music has form and texture. My favorite records are like that. Nothing against the raw and bare-bones recordings many artists choose to make, but give me an album that plays with the shape of the sound. Give me a Spilt Milk or a SMiLE or a The Age of Adz. Last year’s extraordinary album by Lost in the Trees, A Church that Fits Our Needs, did exactly that. Frank Zappa called it moving the air molecules around in the room. I call it sculpting with sound.

There are a few artists who are consistently fantastic at this sort of thing. Not for them the simple pleasures of the acoustic album – these folks take their damn time, crafting every millisecond of their records until the right shape appears. They know that the exact right tone of a bass note, or an ambient flourish, can add new dimensions, even if they’re inaudible on first pass. They’re architects, building real structures out of imaginary materials, and the resulting albums are always worth diving deep into.

Trent Reznor is one of the best. Ever since The Downward Spiral in 1994, Reznor has been obsessed with physical sound, and obsessive about making sure every detail of his finely crafted records is perfectly placed. His journey from leather-wearing, rage-filled frontman of Nine Inch Nails to Academy Award-winning composer seems like it would feel disjointed, but it’s been a smooth straight line. The Downward Spiral and The Fragile were both symphonies, after all, arranged for electronics and guitars with all the precision of an orchestral score.

In recent years, Reznor has left Nine Inch Nails behind, focusing on his film work (he co-created the remarkable scores to The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and his new band, How to Destroy Angels. The latter project released its debut full-length earlier this year, and it was a surprisingly slow and ambient beast, gliding forward on the gilded tones of Reznor’s wife, Mariqueen Maandig. It was as grown-up and reserved as one might expect from the now-48-year-old, and the fury of NIN seemed a thing of the past. Once you see Trent Reznor in a suit and bow tie at the Oscars, you can’t un-see it.

But surprise surprise, here is Hesitation Marks, the eighth Nine Inch Nails album, and the first in five years. If you’re wondering how Nine Inch Nails can exist in 2013, you’re not the only one. What, exactly, would Reznor have to be upset about these days? Isn’t this a skin he’s already shed, a cocoon he’s outgrown? Hesitation Marks provides a canny answer – its concerns are more complex than NIN has been, although no less full of existential dread, and its music follows suit. It is still Nine Inch Nails, but it’s airier, moodier, less visceral and more fascinating. This is an evolution, an album that finds a way to bring the NIN sound into middle age without losing its core.

What does that mean? Hesitation Marks is considerably more open and electronic than previous NIN albums. Reznor would often build towers of sound, monoliths stretching to the sky, blotting out the sun with layers of guitars and white noise. This album is comparatively minimal, letting shafts of light through – there are many songs here without recognizable guitars at all. Second single “Copy Of A” burbles to life on a Kraftwerk-esque squiggle bass, and leaves spaces where walls would have been. “Came Back Haunted,” the first single, is probably the most classic-sounding NIN song here, and even this one bears the marks of this new sonic attitude.

You can hear it most clearly in an ethereal number like “Find My Way,” or a bizarre epic like “In Two.” Both of these songs sound sort of like Nine Inch Nails – the former like one of the slower pieces on The Fragile, the latter reminiscent of “Ruiner” in places – but they also sound completely different, like new territory for Reznor. “All Time Low” is the funkiest NIN song since “Into the Void,” “Satellite” is a full-on electro-dance track, and much of the album’s second half is surprisingly slow-building and patient. What connects all these songs together, and to NIN’s rich history, is the sonic detail in each and every track. This is Reznor the master craftsman, providing new little moments every few seconds. Final song “While I’m Still Here” mixes Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar and Reznor’s own saxophone playing into a crawling slice of dread. The entire album is full of surprises like that.

Yeah, the lyrics are still kind of stupid, but they’re more intricate here than they’ve been. While previous NIN albums have been about losing oneself, Hesitation Marks is about struggling to find oneself, about working to right the ship and make things better. Nowhere is that more evident than on the song that launched a thousand angry fanboy tweets, “Everything.” A relatively sprightly pop song with chugging guitars and harmonies, “Everything” is about overcoming: “I survived everything,” Reznor sings at its beginning, and repeats a mantra at the end: “I am home, I believe, I am home, I am free…”

The fact that Trent Reznor feels liberated enough to write such a song as Nine Inch Nails speaks volumes about this record. Hesitation Marks is the man’s finest electronic symphony in many years – maybe even as far back as The Fragile – because he harnesses his deep talent for sonic sculpture and molds NIN into unseen shapes before our ears. He allows his most famous project to grow older with him, retaining everything that makes it NIN, but evolving it. This is classic Nine Inch Nails. This is something new. It’s pretty terrific.

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Brian Transeau is another guy with an ear for sonic architecture.

Over nearly 20 years recording as BT, Transeau has made “obsessively detailed” his middle name. His meticulous music clearly takes years to put together, tiny note by tiny glitched-out note. He’s impossible to pigeonhole – he started as a trance artist with the extraordinary Ima in 1995, but by the time he created Emotional Technology in 2003, he was embracing pop, rock, rap, dance, prog, ambient, and nearly anything else he could get his laptop to do.

Since then, he’s made a string of masterpieces – the instrumental wonderama This Binary Universe, the explosive double album These Hopeful Machines (which included a cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You”), and the incredible ambient works If the Stars Are Eternal So Are You and I and Morceau Subrosa. Every one of them was crafted with infinite patience and love of sound. I have always considered BT a cut above most electronic artists, and in the past 10 years, he’s been on a roll like no other.

That hit streak continues with his ninth album, A Song Across Wires. It’s BT’s first real attempt at a dance record, but of course it’s not that simple. A triumph of progressive dance production, Wires is a 79-minute journey that will make your head spin. BT’s trademark is his restlessness, and this record vaults through trance, dubstep, pop, ambient and full-on four-on-the-floor club tunes, each song a multi-part suite of seemingly infinite twists and turns. It begins with perhaps its most traditional piece, the transcendent “Skylarking” – nine minutes of sun-dappled trance music that sounds like supernovae exploding across a brilliant starscape. It’s utterly amazing, but surprisingly straightforward for Transeau.

Not to worry, though, as the album then cycles through a series of astonishingly detailed dance numbers, teaming BT up with the likes of producers Fractal and Adam K, and singers Jes (with whom he has worked before) and Tania Zygar. The latter sings on “Stem the Tides,” a phenomenal dramatic pop song with an insistent beat. For the past decade, Transeau has been perfecting the art of producing pop songs like electronic dance music, while retaining their tunes and structures. “Stem the Tides” is a perfect example of such a hybrid – it swoops from section to section, synth lines darting in and out, but it never loses sight of its sweeping melody. (Sometimes Transeau fails in that mission – “Tonight” runs on too long for its threadbare and repetitive chorus.)

The celebrity singer this time is Matt Hales, better known as Aqualung. He adds a yearning earthiness to the blissful “Surrounded,” a song that sounds like a vortex of beats and tones. Transeau himself sings the dramatic “Love Divine,” another perfect fusion of pop-rock and dance. The major departure here is “Must Be the Love,” a slow-burner nestled in a bed of ringing chimes, lifted by the voice of Nadia Ali. Every song on this album segues, offering what seems to be Transeau’s unified field theory of dance music – it all comes together as a seamless whole.

Despite all that, A Song Across Wires is the first BT album that feels like Transeau limited himself. It focuses entirely on dance, and even though it provides an extraordinary journey through the multiple genres that call that descriptor home, dance music is but one small part of what Transeau does well. It’s phenomenal, rich and detailed and thoroughly enjoyable, but by its end, you may feel like BT hasn’t taken you to as many places as he could have. The places he does visit are wonderful, but next time I’d like to hear more of what he can do when he’s not worried about genre.

Aside from that complaint, this album is splendid. It’s another in a long line of beautiful art from Brian Transeau, a richly detailed collection that could only come from the mind of a sonic architect. Music is physical, and BT’s music will rearrange those air molecules like little else. Everything he has done is worth hearing, worth exploring, worth getting lost in, and A Song Across Wires is no exception.

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I feel the need to clarify BT’s bizarre release strategy for this album, so bear with me. If you buy A Song Across Wires on CD, you get a 79-minute perfectly segued mix of an album, with tracks ranging from five to eight minutes. But if you download it on iTunes or Amazon, you get considerably shorter edits of these tunes – between three and four minutes each, with the continuous mix as a bonus track. And if you buy it from Beatport, you can get extended tracks (six to 11 minutes) – the album on Beatport runs 98 minutes, and contains the continuous mix as a bonus. It’s very confusing, but luckily all these versions are worth hearing. I think the continuous mix is the album, with shorter and longer edits available, but the release strategy doesn’t make that clear.

Anyway, next week, it’s Janelle Monae, and after that, Fish, Elvis Costello with the Roots, Neko Case, Tom Odell and a bunch of 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.