I had this elaborate idea for a column this week, discussing the new sounds created through interesting collaborations between well-known artists. Yeah, sounds like a corker, doesn’t it? Try not to doze off just yet…

But I had what could easily be termed my worst week ever as a professional reporter, and it’s my birthday on Monday, and I really just need to decompress. So, how about a brief look at some of the new records I’m looking forward to this summer instead? I promise, that lengthy thesis relating collaborations to genetic mutations will be ready to go next week.

Cool? Cool.

So June is a pretty decent month for new tunes. Next week we have a collaboration (imagine that) between Elvis Costello and famous New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint called The River in Reverse, which is already being touted as the best response to Hurricane Katrina thus far from the artistic community. What I’ve heard sounds great. Also giving me a birthday present is Aaron Sprinkle, formerly of Poor Old Lu, who debuts his new band Fair. The album is called The Best Worst-Case Scenario, and for a typically effusive review, check out Dr. Tony Shore’s website.

Things pick up over the next few weeks. Sonic Youth returns on the 13th with the oddly titled Rather Ripped, and the 20th is dominated by Keane’s sophomore release, Under the Iron Sea. Every year there’s an album I look forward to more than any other, and Iron Sea is this year’s. What I’ve heard is just amazing, from the dramatic melancholy of “Atlantic” to the U2-ish rocker “Is It Any Wonder” to the mega-melodic “Nothing In My Way” to the most beautiful tune of theirs I know, “Hamburg Song.” Unless the album completely falls apart in its second half, expect kind words.

Guster returns on the 20th with Ganging Up on the Sun, their second album in a row to feature actual with-sticks drumming. I’m still not sure what I think of that choice – on the one hand, it takes away a big part (perhaps the only part) of their original identity, but on the other, the songwriting hasn’t changed, and the sweet melodies and harmonies were what kept me coming back to Guster anyway. I alternately like and am bored by the songs I’ve heard, so we shall see.

On a related topic, every band on the planet has a MySpace account now, and most will preview selected tracks from new albums before they hit stores. Guster’s does. If you’re interested, you can just replace Guster’s name in that web address with pretty much anyone’s I mention here and hear new songs from all of ‘em.

June 27 sees the new Pet Shop Boys album, Fundamental. I’ve heard good things, especially about the last track, “Integral.” The single, “I’m With Stupid,” is funny – it imagines a love affair between George Bush and Tony Blair. I get shit fairly often for being a Pet Shop Boys fan, but they are classic pop songwriters, and every album of theirs has something to recommend it. Technology has changed around them, and they’ve used it to their advantage, but their penchant for hooks and memorable songs has never wavered. You could play just about everything they’ve done on acoustic guitar, and they’d still be good songs.

Speaking of acoustic guitars, Grant Lee Phillips (semi-famous as the Stars Hollow minstrel on Gilmore Girls) returns on the 27th with Nineteeneighties, a collection of stripped-down covers of ‘80s songs like “Wave of Mutilation” and “Under the Milky Way.” His take on R.E.M.’s “So. Central Rain” is fantastic, as is his take on the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” What a voice Grant has. This is going to be superb.

Into July, Independence Day will see the final American record from Johnny Cash, subtitled A Hundred Highways. This is the one Cash was working on when he died, and includes the last songs he ever wrote. I honestly think Cash’s work with Rick Rubin should all be rounded up and issued as a monument to the man – it’s among the best stuff he ever did, a late-career resurgence in energy and creativity few thought possible. I would buy a 10-disc set of all of it, even though I have most of it already, just to put the box on a shelf and look at it.

The July 4 week will also see the release of The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees, the 10th album by the Lost Dogs. They’re a collective of some of my favorite songwriters, including Terry Taylor, Derri Daugherty and Michael Roe, and their work is heavily influenced by the aforementioned Johnny Cash. The last few Dogs albums have felt like placeholders, just something to have on hand to sell at the summer festivals, but this one is being touted as the real deal.

July 11 is deceptive – it’s huge, with a lot of new releases, but not much that will shake the earth. Muse strikes back with Black Holes and Revelations, led by the disco-flavored single “Supermassive Black Hole.” Sufjan Stevens issues The Avalanche, a collection of outtakes from Illinois. Thom Yorke releases his first solo album, The Eraser, which by all accounts sounds like Kid A. Phish puts out a triple-CD live album, Strapping Young Lad erupts onto shelves with the wittily titled The New Black, and there’s a They Might Be Giants tribute album scheduled as well.

But perhaps most interesting to me is an album called The Mother, The Mechanic and the Path, by relative unknowns The Early November. Exhibiting more ambition than most bands of their post-punk ilk, TEN has crafted a three-CD, 46-track concept album, each disc relating to one member of a family. The Mother is mostly acoustic, The Mechanic is heavier, and The Path, which deals with their child, is apparently a radio play with songs interspersed. The songs I’ve heard are leaps and bounds ahead of TEN’s other work, so this should be very interesting. And it gets points just for being grandiose.

Bruce Cockburn comes back on July 18 with an album entitled Life Short Call Now, about which I know next to nothing. But it’s Cockburn, so I will buy it sound unheard. The following week sees the new Tom Petty, Highway Companion. And then nothing until August, unless the schedule changes.

The eighth month will bring the new Ani Difranco, Reprieve, which purportedly is her angry response to the hurricane, recorded largely in New Orleans. Could be an interesting contrast with Costello and Toussaint’s record. Also on August 8 is the two-CD solo debut by Matthew Friedberger, the male half of the Fiery Furnaces, and when does this guy sleep? The Furnaces have released four lengthy albums and an EP in the past 33 months, and now here’s Winter Women/Holy Ghost Language School, Matthew’s 100-plus-minute side project, which will come out before the three-year anniversary of his band’s first record. And it’s not like any of it’s been terrible. Maybe Friedberger should be the one writing an album for each of the 50 states…

And finally, one of the ‘90s most interesting songwriters, Eric Matthews, will return on August 22 with Foundation Sounds, a 17-song proper album that should more than make up for his relatively weak six-song EP of last year. Matthews’ solo debut, It’s Heavy in Here, is still a template for lush modern chamber-pop, and I’m excited to hear him paint on a larger canvas again.

And that’s my summer, barring any last-minute surprises. Next week, that collaborations column, I hope, and after that, reviews of Sonic Youth, Keane and Guster, among others. And I’ll be 32. I expect to spend my birthday fielding angry calls and getting a headache at work, so I think I’ll go celebrate a bit right now. Thanks for your indulgence this week.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I really don’t like George W. Bush.

I thought I’d get that out early, before anyone accuses me of the bias that is certainly going to be present in this column. I think there’s certainly plenty of evidence to support naming Bush our worst president in recent memory, if not ever. At every opportunity, the man has shown a failure of leadership, of character, and of honesty. The most recent controversy regarding the NSA and phone records of thousands of Americans is just the latest – to tell you the truth, it didn’t really surprise me at all. Bush and his administration have shown a consistent willingness, if not eagerness, to shit on the Constitution whenever possible.

So yeah, I’m not his biggest fan. And I have to admit that I get a small charge out of anything that strikes back at his particular brand of Orwellian subterfuge and Barney Fife-ian incompetence. I find it hard to believe, for example, that I knew about Hurricane Katrina and its effects on New Orleans before the president, but there you go. The man can’t even be bothered to turn on CNN while people are dying. I’m amazed that he still has defenders. But then, I’m amazed that people watch American Idol, so I’m probably not the best judge.

Still, my political position used to be pretty moderate, fairly central – I’m fiscally conservative and socially liberal, I used to say. But thanks to this bizarre and seemingly unchallenged hijacking of the right wing by frothing, angry, intolerant nutjobs, what used to be considered right-of-center is now moderate, and I find myself labeled a loony liberal pretty often. The left has been scrunched down into a smaller space, and I find I’ve been shoved into it, sitting next to the likes of Al Franken and the guy who made Loose Change.

Thankfully, it’s becoming more and more acceptable to think Bush is an idiot. In recent years, left-leaning thinkers with something to say had to out-shout Fox News, but lately, what I like to call the “sense and reason” point of view has made some headway. Approval numbers are way down, The Daily Show is wonderfully popular, and even the Republicans are distancing themselves from the Bush administration.

Quite literally my favorite thing about America is it offers us the ability to speak out against our government (or anyone, really) if we feel we should. I don’t agree with the guy who made Loose Change (Alex Jones is his name), but I’m grateful we live in a country where the very act of putting that short film together doesn’t land someone in jail. Similarly, I’m glad Ann Coulter can continue to spout off. I just wish fewer people would pay attention to her.

If we lived under the same rules as many Middle Eastern countries, the two records I have to review this week would probably get their authors sentenced to death. They are both angry responses to Bush’s America, and they both take some cheap shots at his expense. I can’t deny that those cheap shots made me smile, though let’s be clear – neither of these are measured, rational arguments against the Bush administration and its policies. They are both simplistic doses of rage, which for some remains the only sane response to five years of insanity.

Take Neil Young, for example. Despite being from Canada, Young has never shied away from explicitly and specifically commenting on American politics, from his 1971 hit “Ohio” (with Crosby, Stills and Nash) to his 2002 response to September 11, “Let’s Roll.” But he’s never made an album quite like Living With War, his explosive tirade against King Bush II and his unprovoked invasion of Iraq. Recorded in a matter of days, War is defiantly a product of its time, a protest album that will mark off this specific year, no matter when it’s played.

For this record, Young has matched his trademark snarling guitar with a 100-voice choir, presumably to symbolize the voice of the people. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s an interesting choice, given this president’s southern Gospel leanings. At times, it’s like the most politically charged church service you’ll ever hear, with Young’s high-pitched wail collapsing into the arms of the choir after a fire-and-brimstone sermon full of righteousness.

But “judge not, lest you be judged” is not the verse of the day, and Young does a whole lot of judging here. The quick turnaround time is apparent in the lyrics, which are as subtle as Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner. “How do you pay for war and leave us dyin’,” he charges. “You could do so much more, you’re not even tryin.’” That’s from “The Restless Consumer,” which pivots on a repeated bellow of “Don’t need no more lies.”

“Shock and Awe” is as you’d expect, a look back on when we thought we’d be out of Iraq in a few weeks. “History was the cruel judge of overconfidence, back in the days of shock and awe,” Young spits. “Flags of Freedom” is about young men going off to war, while “Families” is about the people they leave behind. It’s all written in plain-spoken language, the furthest thing from poetic, and while the anger comes through, there’s sadly very little art to it. As a statement, it’s mostly successful, but as an album of songs, it’s graceless.

And that goes double for “Let’s Impeach the President,” the album’s most directly aimed track. It opens with a bugler playing “Taps,” then lists off a litany of reasons to yank Bush from office: “Let’s impeach the president for hijacking our religion, and using it to get elected, dividing our country into colors and still leaving black people neglected…” It’s a sharp tune, at one point wondering aloud if New Orleans would have been any safer if Al Qaeda had blown up the levees instead of Katrina overflowing them. “Was someone just not home that day?” he asks, not expecting an answer. The song also contains numerous sound clips of Bush contradicting himself, over which the choir chants “flip… flop… flip… flop…”

For all its unbridled rage, Living With War makes some good points. It concludes with a lovely and optimistic version of “America the Beautiful,” a hopeful finale to a bitter suite. Still, there isn’t much here that will sway anyone who doesn’t already agree with it, and there’s nothing that will stand the test of time. That’s the danger of being politically specific – it irrevocably dates the work. Living With War will soon only be a historical mile marker, and as the period it documents is not one I’m looking forward to reliving, I don’t know how often I will listen to this once 2009 rolls around.

But hell, three years is a decent shelf life for any pop record these days. And Young is not alone in his willingness to let current events brand his work. For Al Jourgensen, it’s almost a trademark – his band Ministry has been one of the most consistent voices of dissent against Bushes of all ages. In fact, it’s not so far off the mark to say that his band sucks when there isn’t a Republican in office – they were born in the Reagan years, really started kicking ass during King Bush I’s reign, and were just hitting their stride in 1992 with Psalm 69 when Bill Clinton was elected.

And they spent the next eight years floundering about, looking for something to stoke their rage. They only made two albums during Clinton’s terms in office, 1995’s Filth Pig and 1999’s The Dark Side of the Spoon, and they were both uninspired, limp affairs. Seriously, no one wants to hear Ministry cover Bob Dylan. They want to hear Al Jourgensen screaming his lungs out about injustice and the rape of America, over piledriver electronic drums and the fastest and most abrasive guitars this side of Slayer.

But lo and behold, as soon as W. was elected, Ministry started to kick ass again. Jourgensen’s in the middle of a renaissance, having rediscovered that the tempo button on his drum machine can go way above 100 beats per minute, and it would be hard to miss the fact that it’s another President Bush that has energized him. Ministry’s latest, Rio Grande Blood, even features El Presidente on the cover – his face is superimposed over the body of Jesus Christ, complete with crown of thorns and bleeding side, bursting out of an oil drum while B-2 bombers fly ominously overhead.

In case you missed the subtle point, the lyrics of Rio Grande Blood rip the Bush administration from a thousand angles, some of them (I hate that I’m about to say this) a little unfair. The title track opens the record with a Ministry staple – sampled sound bites of the president. However, unlike those that cropped up all over Rantology, these are spliced together to form entirely new sentences: “I’ve adopted sophisticated terrorist tactics. I am a weapon of mass destruction, and I am a brutal dictator. And I’m evil.”

It’s very funny, on a gut level, and some of Jourgensen’s later charges are right on. (“Squeezing the middle class whom I detest, taxing the poor so the rich can invest…”) I just can’t help but think that Bush has said enough self-incriminating and scary things without needing a cut-and-paste job.

But that kind of thinking defeats the purpose of a one-sided screed like Rio Grande Blood. “Fear is Big Business” smacks down the culture of paranoia the Bushies have fostered (“I was never scared of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. Government’s the one to blame”), and “Palestina” takes on terrorism by slipping into the mind of a Palestinian girl with a bomb on her belt. “Ass Clown” even includes contributions from Jello Biafra, always a potent political observer.

Elsewhere, however, Jourgensen straps on his tinfoil hat and starts making unfounded accusations. On the closing epic “Khyber Pass,” he wonders where Bin Ladin is: “Some say he’s livin’ at the Khyber Pass, others say he’s at the Bushes’ ranch…” And on “Lieslieslies,” he even samples the aforementioned Alex Jones and his theories about the government collapsing the World Trade Center and hitting the Pentagon with a guided missile. “We want some answers and all that we get is some kind of shit about a terrorist threat,” Jourgensen growls, while Jones asks derisively, “Do you still think that jet fuel brought down the World Trade Center?”

And here’s where I have to draw something of a line, because as much as I despise Bush and his cronies, I really can’t imagine them killing 3,000 Americans just to nail Saddam Hussein. Can’t do it. It’s unfortunate, because I think Jourgensen is right about so many other things here. And it’s possible he’s play-acting and I’m overreacting to it, but I wanted to love Rio Grande Blood, and instead I’m stuck with just liking it a lot.

Luckily, it’s often difficult to make out what Jourgensen is saying, and as a titanic slab of industrial metal, the album is the best damn thing he’s done since 1992. Ministry now includes former Prong guitarist Tommy Victor on six-string, shredding along with the machines, and the sound is amazing – tight, powerful, vicious and spiteful. Can a guitar tone sound spiteful? This one does. Ministry under Bush II is a different animal than under Bush I – more straight metal madness than mechanical precision – but the fire is the same. If anything, Rio Grande Blood is more venomous than this band has been before, and that it doesn’t implode under the weight of its own bile is impressive.

Jourgensen has said that this album is part two of his final trilogy. Part one, Houses of the Mole, came out in 2004, and the concluding chapter, tentatively titled The Last Sucker, is slated for 2008. It’s an election year, you see, and Jourgensen expects the Republicans to be soundly defeated. And he’d rather retire than go through the Clinton years again, musically speaking. The hope is, once the last Ministry album comes out, we won’t need him anymore – we’ll be smart enough to make better decisions, elect better people, and dig ourselves out of the mess we’re in.

But just in case, I’m sure he (and others) will be watching.

Next week, some strange bedfellows.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

That date up there is a lie.

This is the column for May 17, but I’m writing it on May 21, Sunday, in the first genuine string of free-time hours I’ve had in a week. Work is really starting to cut into the independent writing time, and to make matters worse, I’m the Saturday reporter this month, which means I’ve had to put this off until Sunday each week.

I’m very tired.

And let me tell you one of the things that wore me out this week – I’ve been on Da Vinci duty for a while, talking to churches and religious groups about their issues with Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, and with Ron Howard’s quadrillion-dollar movie adaptation, which came out on Friday. So I read the book, I called people, I attended lectures, and on Friday, I went to see the movie. On my own, I’d have done none of those things – my sensitive allergy to hype has kept me away from Dan Brown the way it’s kept me from J.K. Rowling.

So what have I learned, after sloughing through the novel, staying awake through the film and talking endlessly with religious people of all stripes? Basically, that people are taking this thing way too seriously. The Da Vinci Code is based on old theories, most of which have been disproved by scholars and historians, as you can find out by doing a simple Google search. But I talked to some of those scholars, just in case, and they confirmed that Brown just didn’t do his homework.

But then, why should he? It’s a fantasy, a novel, clearly racked in the fiction section of your local Barnes and Noble. It’s barely enjoyable as it is – Brown’s prose is clunky and sixth-grade-level at best – and what’s good about it is the breezy pace and tense action that fills its pages, not the “stunning revelations” about Da Vinci and the Catholic Church. But guess what? Ron Howard took the whole thing too seriously, too, and his movie is a ponderous, overly long slog that tries to turn a simple globe-hopping treasure hunt into an Important Event for Our Times.

It’s all so stupid, and it’s already made more than $77 million, and it’s on track to be the biggest moneymaker so far this year, and I’m so tired of it. The only good thing about the movie is Ian McKellen, who plays Sir Leigh Teabing (an homage to the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail: Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, an anagram of Teabing). McKellen has that mischievous glint in his eye the whole time, as if he’s the only one who knows that this movie is supposed to be fun. It’s no coincidence that the first hour, in which McKellen does not appear, is the hardest to sit through. It’s an unfortunate mix of solemn and preposterous, and no fun at all.

In this context, the “grand secret” of the Catholic Church seems even more silly. I have no love for organized religions, and I do think that the Bible was put together by politicians who probably left some things out for selfish reasons, but really – a centuries-old secret society keeping the casket of Mary Magdalene in an undisclosed location, for fear that people may discover that Jesus had a kid? A secret society that left clues everywhere, ones which even a schmuck like Dan Brown could unravel? And no one has figured this out and exposed the church before?

In that light, the reaction of the church is even sillier. When are the Catholics going to learn that overreacting like this, demanding boycotts and bans and everything else, just lends credence to whatever ridiculous thing they’re upset about? Remember Kevin Smith’s Dogma? How much more obviously fictional can you get? Remember the Catholic responses? Protests, screaming fits, anger. Same with this – if people didn’t want to read or see The Da Vinci Code before, well, now they will, just to see what the church is so worked up about.

In fact, the furor is the only reason I had to read the book and see the movie, which makes me even more upset about it, despite the fact that I was paid to do both. I can’t wait for this whole thing to go away. See the movie if you have an abundance of free time and you don’t mind wasting two and a half hours of it. Read the book if you have a free Saturday. Me, I can think of a million better things to do with my time than that.

* * * * *

Let’s talk about music, shall we? Sheesh.

Paul Simon is one of the few artists that make me feel good about growing old. I discovered Simon and Garfunkel my freshman year of college, which was the perfect time – their work is full of sparkling. naïve optimism, the sense that all one needs is a poetic soul and moral determination to save the world. It’s beautiful stuff, especially the layered Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, and its political idealism and youthful joy was exactly what I needed at 18.

Even in his early days, Paul Simon was imagining what it would be like to grow old – check out the first side of Bookends, a life journey in miniature, and its heartbreaking centerpiece, “Old Friends.” He is now five years away from adding an ironic twist to that song’s line, “How terribly strange to be 70.” And his solo work has, naturally, turned to the subjects of mortality and God as he’s aged.

His new one is called Surprise, which is great, because it’s always something of one when Simon puts a record out. His last effort was 2000’s You’re the One, a retreat to lighter songwriting and stripped-down guitar tunes after his disastrous Broadway show, The Capeman, imploded in 1997. You’re the One felt like a final statement, in a way – it brought together the folk leanings of his early days, the world music influences of his greatest successes (Graceland especially), and the simple joy of just plugging in and playing. It was a nice summation, and would have served well as a final bow.

But Simon’s not done yet, and man, am I glad about that. He’s been a restless musical soul for decades now, and since Graceland in 1986, no two of his records have sounded alike. He always goes away for extended periods, but comes back with some new wrinkle, some new setting in which to couch his elegant, literate tunes. (Seriously, I know it was a flop, but dig out Songs From the Capeman, Simon’s album of tunes from the show. It’s excellent, just as good as anything he’s done in the last 20 years, and wildly unlike anything he’s done in that time as well.)

Surprise is no exception. This time, Simon has hooked up with legendary producer Brian Eno, who provides (no joke) “sonic landscape,” according to the liner notes. That’s easy to scoff at, until you hear this thing – it is easily Simon’s most sonically dense album, the polar opposite of You’re the One. Electronic drums thud and flutter, synthesizers support and caress, and sound effects twinkle in from both speakers. It’s a pretty impressive production job, even if it occasionally sounds just like Eno’s work with the Talking Heads in the 1980s.

But Eno never loses focus here – at the center of the whole affair is Simon, whose voice and guitar somehow find all the space they need. Check out the lovely “Wartime Prayers,” which includes waves of keys and guitars alongside a full choir, and still sounds intimate. Or dig the oddly funky “Sure Don’t Feel Like Love,” which homes in like a laser on Simon’s deft (and often overlooked) guitar playing.

So yes, the songs are wonderful, especially in the second half – “Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean” and “Another Galaxy” are classics out of the box. But what really makes this album something special, besides its very existence after a six-year break, is Simon’s lyrics. He’s always been a poet, but Surprise contains some of his finest observations and turns of phrase, full of a perspective one can only gain by living past 60.

The album opens with “How Can You Live in the Northeast,” a seemingly odd title for a lifelong New Yorker, but the song is a back-and-forth between people from different backgrounds – “How can you live in the northeast? How can you live in the south? How can you be a Christian? How can you be a Jew?” It’s an examination of how the places of our birth and the characters of our families shape us, and about how our preconceptions mean nothing – “Weak as the winter sun, we enter life on Earth, names and religion come just after date of birth…”

“Wartime Prayers” is gorgeous, a sad lament for post-9/11 America. It opens by discussing peacetime prayers, but then transitions: “But all that is changed now, gone like a memory from the day before the fires, people hungry for the voice of God hear lunatics and liars…” “Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean” finds Simon using an old metaphor (he’s a rock) to new effect: “I figure once upon a time I was an ocean, but now I’m a mountain range, something unstoppable set into motion, nothing’s different but everything’s changed…”

One thing age has done for Paul Simon is made him less concerned about sounding silly. You’re the One was full of funny ditties, and while Surprise is more serious as a whole, it is fantastically joyous at times. Still, nothing will prepare you for “Outrageous,” the third track. It starts as a rap (you read that right) about social ills – “It’s outrageous to line your pockets off the misery of the poor” – which Simon deftly turns on himself: “It’s outrageous, a man like me, stand here and complain…” It then morphs into a lighthearted admonition (“Who’s gonna love you when your looks are gone?”) and then into a gospel song (“God will, like he waters the flowers on your windowsill…”). It’s a ridiculous, silly song, and one of the album’s most enjoyable.

The final few tracks on Surprise are beautiful, self-aware and content, and Simon has rarely sounded so comfortable, despite the unfamiliar sonic setting. It’s almost a shame that he tacked “Father and Daughter,” his 2002 song from the Wild Thornberrys movie, onto the end. Or at least it would be a shame, if the song wasn’t so sweet and delightful. In a way, it’s kind of perfect – an album about old age that concludes with a song about passing things on to the next generation. Some will see it as proof that Paul Simon has slipped into irrelevance, but I see it as graceful aging, and I bet I will further appreciate his perspective the closer I get to sharing it.

There’s something to be said for the younger crowd, too, especially if they’re as talented as Taylor Muse, the sole member of Quiet Company. He’s the latest discovery of Northern Records, the California home of the Violet Burning and Cush, and he did just about everything but the drums on his debut album, Shine Honesty. I ordered it on a whim, having liked a clip or two I heard, and I’m glad I did. It’s a stellar first album.

Quiet Company plays dramatic pop, kind of like a budget Sufjan Stevens, with pianos leading the way most times. Every song here has something to make melody addicts smile, and most of them feature breakdowns and buildups, hallmarks of a developed sense of dynamics. The titles are pretentious – “I Was Humming a New Song to Myself,” “Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History,” “The Emasculated Man and the City That Swallowed Him,” like that. But the songs amazingly live up – they are simultaneously huge and heartfelt.

Take “Fashionabel,” which would be the first single, if Northern could afford to release singles. It goes through half a dozen little changes, floating through dramatic gateways before settling on a repeated piano figure and Muse’s aching voice. And then there’s the chorus, a soaring Britpop delight, and then comes the best part – the instrumental motif that follows, which sounds like something Michael Penn might come up with.

The songwriting never falters – the album’s sole misstep is “Circumstance,” a punk-ish gut punch sandwiched between two sweeter pieces, but even that one ends up enjoyable, with its distorted guitars and vocals giving way to cleaner piano sounds. “Then Came a Sudden Validation” is fantastic, nearly gospel in scope, and “I Was Humming a New Song to Myself” does everything Bright Eyes tunes should, but rarely do. I’m not sure why there is such hoopla over Conor Oberst when there are songwriters like Taylor Muse running laps around him.

The album closes with a seven-minute journey called “We Change Lives” that is easily one of my favorite songs of the year so far. After an unlisted interlude, the song explodes with purpose – this is the final song, and it couldn’t be anything else. I miss the days when albums built to songs like this one. This is a 6/8 march, in a sense, that sheds its skin around the four-minute mark to become a surprisingly effective portrait of death. (The final track proper is a one-minute coda called “When You Pass Through the Waters,” concluding the story with a passage into heaven.) In a way, Paul Simon and Taylor Muse are concerned with the same issues, and the only difference is age – Muse still romanticizes it, the way Simon did in the ‘60s.

And it will be curious to see how Muse continues his career, and whether he lasts as long as Simon has, and how his perspective changes with time. That’s the beauty of music – it can be shaped to augment any kind of observation or worldview. Paul Simon is still restless musically, but contented lyrically, and willing to share his vantage point at the end of his career. Taylor Muse is ambitious both musically and lyrically, just starting his journey with the same energy Simon displayed in the ‘60s. As old ones fade, new ones arise, but both old and young are capable of surprising you.

You can pick up Paul Simon’s album anywhere. You can get Quiet Company’s here.

Next week, the liberals strike back.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I vividly remember the first time I heard Grandaddy.

I was working part-time at a music store called Bull Moose in Portland, to supplement my meager magazine salary. (Yes, it’s true, editors for music rags don’t actually make a lot of money – I was the highest paid employee they had, and I needed a second job…) One of my co-workers was a guy named Chad Verrill, a man with amazing artistic ability (go here) and impeccable musical taste. I learned a lot from Chad during my short time there.

Anyway, so it’s a fairly busy day in the store, full of customers and employees. I’m bustling about, doing whatever it was I’m doing – probably one of those infernal dot lists, the Bull Moose method of restocking – and suddenly this song starts playing. Softly, at first, but then cascading in an ever-swelling build of graceful beauty.

I should mention that there’s a part of my brain that is always focused on what music is playing in the background wherever I am, even if I just acknowledge it as sonic wallpaper, but that part very occasionally hears something that makes it smack the rest of my brain to attention. And that’s what happened here – I stopped what I was doing and listened as the song washed over me. The final stretch, the playout of this eight-minute excursion into some strange galaxy, lifted me nearly off the ground. I had to find out who this was.

Turns out, it was Chad’s turn with the CD player, and he’d chosen Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump. And the song was the epic opener “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot,” a masterpiece that still takes me somewhere else.

Grandaddy is a band from Modesto, California, led by a guy named Jason Lytle. They play… well, it’s difficult to describe exactly what it is they play. Their sound has elements of indie rock, especially Lytle’s high-pitched voice and penchant for repeated quarter notes, but also of prog rock and Paul McCartney-esque pop. Their best stuff is simple in structure yet covered in layers of lo-fi orchestration. They are unfairly compared to the Flaming Lips all the time, but I think of them more as a garage version of Pink Floyd without the bombast. Even that isn’t totally accurate – there are moments of Sonic Youth and Genesis and half a dozen other bands in their sound as well.

The only real way to describe them is the one I started with – they’re a band from Modesto, California. Or, I should say, they were a band from Modesto, because Grandaddy is officially no more.

But don’t be sad. They left us a pair of fantastic parting gifts, a far more generous gesture than we get from most bands who call it quits. First out was last year’s EP Excerpts From the Diary of Todd Zilla, a seven-song continuation of the sound they perfected on 2003’s Sumday. “Pull the Curtains” remains one of their coolest songs, all crunchy guitars, delightfully cheesy keyboards, and sunny optimism, and the concluding piano number “Goodbye?” is drenched with regret.

And then there’s parting gift number two. Upon its release, Lytle claimed that the Todd Zilla tracks were the b-sides, the songs the band threw together on the side while crafting their final album. They were the eight-track songs, he said, whereas the album would make use of the full studio. And by God, he’s right – Grandaddy’s final album, out this week, is a stunning sonic wonder, the best sounding record the band has made. It also contains some of Lytle’s best songs, and is his most complete and cohesive statement. It’s the Grandaddy album to end all Grandaddy albums.

It’s called Just Like the Fambly Cat because, in Lytle’s words, when the family cat dies, he doesn’t make a big deal of it, he just finds a corner and curls up. And that’s exactly what Grandaddy has done here – they’ve made a final album that summarizes everything that was ever great about them, but wrapped it in a sweet, graceful balm of a sound, full and rich, yet soothing, as if it’s wiping away its own tears and offering a reassuring hug. The songs are mostly acoustic and sweet, with some of the most emotional, spacey orchestrations you’ll ever hear. It’s a beautiful thing.

Grandaddy’s main theme has always been mechanical breakdown, from “Jed the Humanoid” to “I’m on Standby” and beyond, so the organic metaphor, crystallized in the opening “What Happened,” is striking. This album is not about rusting and falling into disrepair, it’s about dying. The burst of screaming guitars on “Jeez Louise,” a near-monolith of a song, belies the tone of the record – almost immediately we’re into “Summer… It’s Gone,” the first of many autumn laments.

The album takes off with “Rear View Mirror,” a song about looking forward instead of backward, but just listen to the slowly unfolding melody and the building backdrop, blooming over a full six minutes. This is what indie rock can be, massive and ambitious without sacrificing simplicity or emotion. It’s terrific, and if this song doesn’t make you miss this band already, then the rest of the album will. Dig the eminently hummable instrumental “Skateboarding Saves Me Twice,” or the sky-high chorus of “Where I’m Anymore,” or the floating, ethereal “Guide Down Denied” – it’s a sad record, no doubt, but the sheer sound of it is almost joyous.

The only misstep here is the brief punk freakout “50%,” in which Lytle sets a goal: half as many words in 2006. Thematically, it works, but sonically, it just breaks up the sublime final half of the album, a transgression only ameliorated by the fact that it’s a minute long. The final stretch really begins with “Elevate Myself,” the most danceable thing here, its blipping beat and wondrous orchestration masking the self-loathing beneath: “And maybe for a little, get to where I find it really hard to hate myself…”

The last Grandaddy songs are about disconnection – our guide has decided to take his own advice, elevate himself, and be on his way. The printed lyrics to “Campershell Dreams,” which pivots on the line “You don’t have to be alone anymore,” come with an instruction to “repeat again so it sinks in,” and the stratospheric strummed acoustics help bring it home. “Disconnecty,” Grandaddy’s last great pop song, is about deciding whether to fly alone, and the near-lullaby conclusion, ironically titled “This is How it Always Starts,” describes the aftermath in darker tones – “Nothing great, nothing good, nothing works, and it should…”

And my God, the finale of that song is beautiful, an ocean of vocals crashing onto a shore of keyboards and drums and finally collapsing into a lovely ambient fade, like a ship disappearing over the horizon. It’s wonderful and fitting, and the untitled track that follows it is almost like closing credits music, Lytle repeating “I’ll never return to Shangri-La” over sad pianos and strings. Grandaddy have chosen to go out with their finest work, a movie for the ears. It’s not perfect – nothing they did ever was, but their ramshackle charm was always a big part of the attraction. And yet, it is as close to perfection as I could have hoped.

I’m not sure Lytle would be comfortable with grand pronouncements about his band, so I won’t make any more. Just Like the Fambly Cat is equal parts silly and sad anyway – just check “The Animal World,” or the lyrics to the final tune. And hell, no one died, no one’s sick, there’s really nothing permanent about this. Still, there is a sense of finality to Fambly Cat that is impossible to ignore, and speaking for myself, I will miss this band. Lytle has said he doesn’t want this to be a big deal, so I won’t make it one, but I wanted to thank him for years of great music, and for leaving us with his best work. Hopefully there’s much more on the horizon, but if this is it from Jason Lytle, I’ll still be happy and grateful.

* * * * *

Did we really need a two-hour, 28-song album from the Red Hot Chili Peppers? Really?

Whether we need it or not, here it is – Stadium Arcadium, the most ambitious album of this Cali band’s career. Granted, there isn’t a lot of competition, but word is that Arcadium was scaled down from the three-hour extravaganza the band wanted to release. The cylinders were firing this time, they said, and the creative juices flowing like never before.

Well, let’s just say that if you like the direction the Peppers have been heading in since Californication, then you’ll love this. Stadium Arcadium is the band’s final acceptance of their mature adult contemporary leanings. Every second of this thing is glossed up and spit-shined, courtesy of producer Rick Rubin, who ordinarily traffics in much rawer sounds. It’s one radio-ready pop tune after another, with well-crafted choruses and nicely layered backing vocals and punchy guitar sounds and Anthony Keidis singing almost entirely on-key.

And it’s so boring.

There’s no sense of adventure to anything here, despite the implied promise of the double album – this is just two half-decent Chili Peppers records in one package. Everything is sanitized for your protection – there’s nothing here that your local “alternative” radio station wouldn’t play. Even sorta-funky numbers like “21st Century” and the unfortunately titled “Hump de Bump” play it safe, and the album is practically drowned in mid-tempo numbers like the title song and “Snow” and “She Looks to Me” and “Especially in Michigan” and on and on.

This album is also uniquely built for the iPod generation. It may sport the form of the classic double record, but these songs would work in any order. Load them into your iPod Shuffle, stick it on random and you’ll get the same experience, more or less. There’s no reason that “Dani California” (a real departure in subject matter for the band…) opens disc one, or that “Hey” closes it. It’s almost like they sequenced it by writing each song title down on a plastic ball and then putting them through that vacuum machine you see on the televised lottery drawings. It’s that random.

And none of it is bad, exactly, just unexciting. One thing and one thing only saves Stadium Arcadium from being unbearable, and his name is John Frusciante. Coming off a year in which he released six solo albums, Frusciante still finds enough variety of tone to sustain 28 tracks, and his solos are, as always, fun little rides. He’s the Jimmy Page of this band, but as even Page learned by the end, he can’t carry the thing by himself.

Much as I like double albums – and if there’s one way to get me into your band, it’s to release a double album, because ambition always scores points with me – I think the next Chili Peppers record should be 35 minutes long, and recorded live with cheap microphones in a dingy basement. This band needs an infusion of energy, stat, because the polished soft-rock that fills most of Stadium Arcadium is like fizzy water, tickling a little but leaving no aftertaste at all.

* * * * *

Speaking of bands that should make shorter albums, there’s Tool.

It takes five years each time for Tool to return with something new, and each time, that something new is more than an hour long and packaged in an art object of some sort. 1996’s Aenima came in a special case that animated the artwork if you tilted the package back and forth. It was 76 minutes long. Then came Lateralus in 2001, dressed up in see-through layers of acetate that produced a 3-D effect. That one, a definite step forward, was also 76 minutes long.

But now I think they’ve stepped over the edge. The fourth Tool album is called 10,000 Days, and it comes in one of the most annoying and ridiculous packages I have ever seen. It’s wider and heavier than a standard digipak, and over the front cover is a half-flap that contains two lenticular lenses. And the point, I guess, is to set up the package like an eye chart, and view it through the lenses, so that the images coalesce into one 3-D picture. It’s neat, once, but when the novelty wears off, you’re left with a stupid-looking case you can’t rack, you can’t stack, and which makes the thing you actually bought – the CD – really difficult to access.

But that’s okay, because 10,000 Days isn’t an album you’ll be reaching for very often anyway. It is, again, 76 minutes long – the title doesn’t refer to the record’s duration, though at times you’ll think it does. No, it refers to the amount of time lead singer Maynard James Keenan’s mother spent paralyzed, between her stroke and her death. It’s a powerfully emotional theme, explored in a 17-minute epic called “Wings for Marie,” that is probably the finest piece of deeply-felt ambience Tool has yet made. Its second part, called “10,000 Days,” is more than 10 minutes of rain-soaked atmosphere that’s mesmerizing.

Other good things – the first two tracks, “Vicarious” and “Jambi,” are terrific examples of the minimalist prog-metal Tool does so well. There is hardly ever anything but bass, drums and guitar on these songs, and they stay pretty close to the root note at all times, but the band has perfected this grounded style into something downright exploratory. No choruses, no hooks, no ins for anyone who doesn’t appreciate musical theory, and yet it’s still captivating stuff. The penultimate track, “Right in Two,” is similarly great, exploding into riff-heavy catharsis after a lengthy intro.

But that’s it. And that’s roughly half of this long, long trip. A surprising amount of filler jams up the remaining 40 or so minutes, from the chanting of “Lipan Conjuring” to the uselessly long “Rosetta Stoned” to the concluding five minutes of electronic noise, oddly given its own title (“Viginti Tres”) as if it were an actual song. (They’ve done this before, but never taken up this much disc space with their experiments in formlessness.) There are really only seven songs on this thing, and three of them are well below par. But man, are they long.

And that’s the thing with Tool – it’s as if they feel like they can’t go back to a shorter album, like it wouldn’t be prog enough or something. Seriously, guys, if it took you five years to come up with 40 minutes of good material, then that’s what you’ve got. Ignoring the obvious question of why you’re still trying to get blood from this particular stone, if you have 40 minutes of good stuff, make a 40-minute album. I would have bought and loved one that included the first four tracks and “Right in Two” and that’s it, and I think that running order flows pretty well, myself. Strong opener, beautiful ambient epic in the middle, strong closer, no five minutes of worthless noise clogging up the finale. It’s a winner.

Granted, you wouldn’t be out of line for expecting more from a band like Tool after five years. Keenan has a voice like no other metal singer’s, strong and even and melodic, and the interplay between the three instrumentalists, when it’s on, is breathtaking. No one sounds quite like Tool, which is why it’s disappointing to hear them flounder about here. Half this album should have gone straight in the bin, but the good half is evidence enough that Tool has created its own unique sound, and they can pull it off like no other band. Many try, but there’s only one Tool, and when they put out something as haphazard as 10,000 Days, it’s like when the smartest kid in class brings home a D-. It’s not that they can’t do it, it’s that they’re not trying.

* * * * *

And then there’s the Elms, whose second album, Truth, Soul, Rock ‘n’ Roll, nearly made my top 10 list in 2002. There was an exuberance to that album, a celebration of melody, that’s all but missing from its follow-up, the just-released The Chess Hotel. And I’m not sure what happened.

The last time I encountered something like this, the band was Phantom Planet, and they’d followed up their winning sophomore album The Guest with a punky, noisy self-titled thing that couldn’t have strayed further from the reasons I liked them. I grew to enjoy that album, as I think I will grow to enjoy The Chess Hotel, but my heart lies with the melodies, and in both cases, the earlier albums just have better ones.

The Elms, a four-piece from Seymour, Indiana (home of John Mellencamp), are led by Owen Thomas, who writes all the songs, plays guitar and sings. And this time, instead of taking from British pop like the Beatles and the Knack, he’s gone for American rock – the guitars are on 11, the riffs are heavy and thudding, the songs are speedy little numbers that concentrate on knocking you flat more than sticking in your head.

Opener “I Am the World” is everything that’s right and wrong with it – it’s propulsive, with a chanted verse over nothing but the pounding drums, and a guitar riff that’s ripped right from the Keith Richards songbook. It’s good stuff, if you dig ‘70s rock, and the two songs that follow are similarly kick-ass. But by the time you hit “She’s Cold,” at track six, you’ll realize that none of these songs are very memorable. And that’s something you couldn’t say about the Elms before.

The second half is better, including the epic “The Towers and the Trains” and the finest piece of melody Owen Thomas wrote this time out, “Black Peach.” In fact, none of The Chess Hotel is bad – it does its job well, and it’s a concise and well-made rock record. But I wanted more than that, I suppose. I wanted songs I could sing along with, tunes I could hum, sweet melodies and harmonies, and it’s not Thomas’ fault that he didn’t write those this time, because he obviously wasn’t trying to. But his shift in focus has moved the Elms from a band that I love to a band that I like, and even that matter of degrees is unfortunate.

This goes right back to the theme of last week’s column, though – why shouldn’t the Elms stretch out and try something new? Why should I penalize them for that? I shouldn’t, but I can only report on my own reactions to music, and The Chess Hotel made me want to go dig out Truth, Soul more than it made me want to press play again. Some will (and have) celebrate the newfound ballsiness of the band’s sound, the sheer roadhouse bar band energy that’s all over this thing, and while I appreciate it, I don’t respond to it.

And in the end, as I have always maintained, a critic is no good to you unless you agree with him. A different critic would have praised this to the skies, but this one likes different things than this admittedly very good album is offering. Fans of bluesy rock and stomping good times are encouraged to check this band out, but if you have been reading this column for a while, and you find you agree with me more often than not, then I’d recommend starting with Truth, Soul, Rock ‘n’ Roll. Call it a prejudice if you like, but it’s what I’m hoping the next Elms album sounds more like.

* * * * *

A note before I go: Another song from Keane’s upcoming Under the Iron Sea has hit the web, this time in the form of an internet-only video directed by Irvine Welsh, writer of Trainspotting. It’s for the album’s opening track, “Atlantic,” and calling it a departure for Keane would be like calling Tom Cruise a little bit nuts. It’s a glorious six minutes, a moving and building track that is one part Marillion, one part Rufus Wainwright, but somehow all parts neither one. If this is the tone of the album, as dynamic first single “Is It Any Wonder” also suggested, then I am jumping out of my skin to hear the whole thing.

Check it out here, but I’d recommend listening without the video.

Next week, Paul Simon.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I wasn’t even going to see United 93.

Like a lot of people I know, I have been dreading this five-year anniversary of 9/11, and kind of hoping that it would pass by without any patriotic grandstanding or crass commercialism. And when I heard that there were not one, but two September 11 movies coming out, I felt like curling into a ball and sleeping until 2007.

It’s not that I think we shouldn’t remember 9/11. It’s just that the way we choose to remember it is often private and difficult and impossible to encapsulate in a movie. I’m also leery of anything that attempts to capitalize on a tragedy, especially one so fresh, and I’ve watched our illustrious president use and abuse 9/11 as an all-purpose justification too many times. I’m not about to pay nine bucks to be told what to think and feel about the attacks, especially if those thoughts and feelings can be unironically scored with Trey Parker’s “America, Fuck Yeah.”

I am especially worried about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, scheduled for later this month. Stone has never been a subtle filmmaker, and from everything I’ve heard, his film treats the attacks as the setting for an action thriller. The presence of Nicolas Cage doesn’t do much to quell my fears of exploitation. I’m terrified that Stone’s movie will reduce 9/11 to the level of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor, a minor American tragedy in itself.

So here’s Paul Greengrass, maker of The Bourne Supremacy, out of the gate first with a film about the plane that didn’t hit its target, and you can forgive me for expecting patriotic swill. All the elements are there – regular people caught in a dangerous situation, forced to stand up and become real American heroes. I could just hear the swelling strings as the camera closes in on the face of Todd Beamer (perhaps played by Josh Hartnett or Leonardo DiCaprio), his steely gaze fixed on the camera for interminable seconds as he gathers his red, white and blue courage and says, dramatically: “Let’s roll.”

It could have been terrible, in so many different ways.

Which is why it’s so astonishing that United 93 turned out to be perfect.

Start with the fact that as a pure movie, I have not been sucked in and enveloped like this in years. I knew the outcome, but I was still gripped, held in sickening suspense. Greengrass made two artistic decisions early on that set the tone – he shot this like a documentary, with handheld cameras and no dramatic staging, and he designed it in real time, which means you are on board Flight 93 for pretty much the entire 81 minute journey, watching the seconds tick by with increasing dread. In a way, knowing the outcome is worse – you are locked in, marching towards the inevitable, and it’s painful and difficult to watch.

So many times during United 93, Greengrass nimbly steps over potential land mines with sensitivity and an honest artistry. He gives each hijacker the dignity of an individual personality and perspective, something he’s been taken to task for. He dares to portray them not as monsters, but as real, frightened people. He cast no-names to play most of the parts, and got the real air traffic and military commanders to portray themselves in their scenes. He offers no backstories, no cheesy emotional hooks, and in fact very few names.

And he tosses aside Todd Beamer’s famous quote – if you’re not paying attention, you won’t even hear it.

So much of the conversation about United 93 has concerned What It All Means, and what it symbolizes for America, and how to contextualize it into the current political landscape. To his eternal credit, Greengrass is concerned with none of that. He never tells you how to feel about the attacks, or about the events on Flight 93, he simply presents them, in the most real and honest way he can. There is no catharsis here, no national mourning, no “let’s get ‘em” attitude. This film leaves you with a black pit in your stomach, and offers you nothing to soothe it.

It’s amazing. It is far better and more respectful than I thought possible, and at every opportunity it refuses to cheapen the events of September 11, 2001. Americans don’t need a movie to tell them how to feel about 9/11, and most Americans will not need this one to remember it. But if 9/11 movies are inevitable – and they are – then I can only pray that they are all as well crafted as this one.

Would I recommend seeing it? Probably not – you already know whether you want to sit through this or not. It’s not a fun night out at the movies, but it is a stunning work, a great example of how to dramatize an event without exploiting it. The only option better than making United 93 this way would have been not making it at all.

* * * * *

My good friend Chris L’Etoile wrote me a couple of weeks ago with an excellent question, and I’ve been too busy to get back to him. Those who know me know I’m not the best at email communication – I do try, but often my crazy schedule gets the better of me, and I just can’t find the time.

Anyway, Chris’ question, asked mere hours after I posted my Built to Spill review:

“Sometimes you criticize a band for lack of growth or retrenchment – finding a sound and mining it out. Other times you hail continued exploration of or a return to a given sound. What swings an album down one critique or the other? The skill with which they explore the boundaries of a chosen sound? How many other bands are doing something similar? Whether or not you like it?”

I’ve been thinking about this since he asked, and I’m still not 100% sure. There is a certain element of personal taste involved in everything I do – if Ben Folds, for example, decided to make an album of mariachi music instead of his crystalline Beatlesque piano-pop, I would be disappointed, no matter how fantastic his mariachi music turned out to be.

But Chris is right. I am often critical of bands like Franz Ferdinand, who take their one style, press repeat 12 times and call it an album, and I wonder if it’s just that I don’t like their one style. That criticism is borne out by my positive comments on their atypical ballad “Eleanor, Put Your Boots On,” from their latest record. I liked it at least partially because it doesn’t sound like Franz Ferdinand at all.

I guess it comes down to whether I still think there is gold in the mine. I think there’s a difference between exploring a sound to its fullest, and just retreading. The Rolling Stones, in my opinion, have been retreading for more than 30 years, recycling the same blues, rock and soul riffs and lyrical themes, and you only really need one or two Stones albums to get the full picture of what they do.

But take a band like U2, who have basically written the same type of anthemic pop song over and over throughout their career, and are still coming up with new ways to do it. I disliked their attempts to branch out on Zooropa and Pop because they just didn’t capture what this band is best at, and the group proved with their last two albums that they’re still excited about their old-school sound, and that there’s still much to be mined.

But on the flipside, it could be that I simply respond to U2’s sound more – witness my love of the Alarm, and of virtually every British art-pop band that reaches skyward in song. Witness, similarly, my dislike of just about every bluesy rock record I hear – I just don’t think, after more than half a century of this stuff, that there’s much more that can be done with it. It’s a definite bias – the Stones could be, as they believe, the best rock band on the planet, and I’m not sure I would care about them any more than I do now.

Complicating that is the fact that my tastes have changed over the years. Take Pearl Jam as an example. I used to love Pearl Jam. I stood in line with my fellow college students, waiting for midnight so I could purchase Vs., their second album, in 1993. I gave them enormous credit in print for branching out with No Code in 1996, and even for returning to guitar-rock with Yield in 1998. Pearl Jam deftly outlasted the Seattle scene they rode in on, just by being a great rock band, and I loved them for it.

But since then, I just haven’t been able to get excited about their stuff. Binaural, Riot Act and the rarities collection Lost Dogs just slipped by me – they’re there, sitting on a shelf with the rest of my collection, but except for research purposes for this very column, I haven’t listened to them (or any Pearl Jam, really) in half a decade. And I’ve come to realize lately that it’s not Pearl Jam that changed, it’s me. I’m making it sound like I’m breaking up with them, and maybe I am – I have relationships with bands, on a certain level, and sometimes the band and I grow apart.

Pearl Jam’s new self-titled album is, I guess, the best thing they’ve done in a while, and a return to the monolithic rock sound they once traded in. Or so I’ve been told, repeatedly, since the funny blue record with the avocado on the cover came out. And I suppose the critics who are fawning over this are right – this is the leanest, most muscular Pearl Jam album since Yield, and the songs sound mostly full and complete. It is, I suppose, a return to form, and I’m dismayed that I can’t greet it with any more than a yawn.

And it’s partially because, aside from a renewed sense of focus from Vedder and the boys, this record doesn’t sound any different to me than just about everything the band has done. The first five songs all blend together, buoyed by thudding riffs and Vedder’s bellow, which admittedly sounds less bored and detached this time around. Of the opening salvo, only the single “World Wide Suicide” sticks in my head, and if you’ve heard it, you know how typical Pearl Jam it is.

The band takes a couple of detours here and there, most notably on the Grant Lee Phillips-esque “Parachutes,” but mostly sticks with the guitar-driven rock, and that’s what Pearl Jam is best at, no question. On this record, they sound like the same garage band that recorded Riot Act, only someone switched out their decaf with high-test. Pearl Jam is the best, most consistent album they’ve made in ages, and they’ve obviously engaged with this material and put in every effort.

It just bores me silly, that’s all. Near the end, they almost lose me completely with “Come Back,” a rewrite of their hit cover of “Last Kiss” that drags on and on, and even though I know that this is the album’s one truly bad song, I can’t muster any excitement for the other 12, either. “Inside Job” is probably the most successful, closing the album with a moody yet hopeful semi-epic that reminds me of the Pearl Jam I fell in love with.

But that’s not even accurate, either. The whole album sounds like the Pearl Jam I fell in love with, and it’s almost as if the band is making a last-ditch, full-throttle effort to recapture my affection, as if they know I’m on the verge of walking away. And it’s just too little, too late. Pearl Jam hasn’t changed at all – they’re as good now as they’ve ever been – which leaves me to conclude that I have. I would have loved this record when I was 19, but if an album that is quite obviously the best they can do doesn’t thrill me, then it may be time to move on.

I also know that acknowledging my changing tastes doesn’t answer Chris’ question, not completely. The risks and rewards of reinvention is a topic I keep coming back to in this column, and he gives me a new angle to explore – what does lead me to conclude that the well has run dry in one case, but not in another? This will be on my mind for a while, so expect to revisit this theme in the coming weeks. And thanks, Chris, for the challenging query.

Next week is the big one, with a two-hour effort from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the long-awaited return of Paul Simon, and the final album from Grandaddy.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The new Keane album is called Under the Iron Sea, and it comes out here on June 20.

I’m racking my brain to come up with any first album I have ever enjoyed more than Hopes and Fears, Keane’s 2004 debut. It made number two on my top 10 list that year, ahead of Marillion’s Marbles, a feat in itself, and just behind Brian Wilson’s amazing SMiLE. I can only think of a couple opening shots I’ve liked more – Jellyfish’s Bellybutton, for example, or Ben Folds Five.

So I’m in that familiar state of anticipation and dread for the follow-up, especially after hearing that the trio a) almost broke up while recording it, and b) decided to shake up their sound and produce something darker. I love their sound, and I don’t want them to shake it up. I admire bands who can keep growing and evolving, and I certainly don’t want a Strokes situation for Keane – they’re way too good to produce the same album over and over. But change is scary.

My hopes are renewed and my fears allayed, however, by the first single, “Is It Any Wonder.” Wow. This is one of my favorite songs of the year so far, and seemingly a shove back at everyone who ever called Keane boring. It doesn’t take much to get me excited – a killer melody, sung and played well, will do it – and this song has a hook that never stops. Plus, I have been assured by several sources that there are no guitars on this tune, a claim I find hard to believe, but there you go.

This song is great, and if Under the Iron Sea weren’t already atop my list of records I can’t wait to hear this year, it is now. I won’t post any links to the tune or its video, but both are floating around the web in a number of unofficial places, and I’m sure a simple Google search will yield results.

* * * * *

Apologies for last week’s absence. My workload has increased exponentially since becoming the new City of Aurora reporter, and last week (and this one), controversial news just kept exploding in front of my face. By the time I sat down to write last Saturday, the words just weren’t there. I hope this doesn’t happen again – I did plan to have two columns for this week, but I didn’t find the time, which is another bad sign. I’m not sure what I can do to improve this situation, but I will do everything I can. I love this column, and I don’t want to give it up, nor do I want to produce crappy, cranked-out junk just to meet the deadline.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

* * * * *

The Fiery Furnaces have four albums now, and each one seems to have started its own religion.

I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a band that divides its fans as consistently as the Furnaces do. The Friedberger siblings (Matthew and Eleanor) began their career with 2003’s Gallowsbird’s Bark, a simple little blues workout that didn’t impress me much, but gained them legions of devotees. They’ve not yet made another album like it.

Instead, they returned 10 months later with Blueberry Boat, a nearly 80-minute masterpiece of garage-prog, with 10-minute songs and suites and an obviously restless imagination. Blueberry Boat sounds to me like Spoon trying to make Tales from Topographic Oceans with $50 and an eight-track. It’s extraordinary, but it seems timid when compared to Rehearsing My Choir, last year’s collaboration with the Friedbergers’ grandmother, Olga Sarantos. Choir is a seamless radio play narrated by Sarantos, full of textures and sound effects and one plunking, nostalgic piano. It’s incredible, but it plays like a dare – so you stayed with us from our boogie-blues record to our crazy-ass synth-prog album, but can you handle this?

I could. I love to be challenged by music, and I especially love following artists that aren’t afraid to express an individual vision. The Furnaces’ vision is perhaps the most individual one on the Pitchfork-approved indie scene right now, and their records have only two things in common – Matthew’s absurd genius for melody and arrangement, and Eleanor’s clear, gorgeous voice.

The trend continues with Bitter Tea, the duo’s fourth album in two and a half years (not counting their EP, called – what else – EP, which collected singles and b-sides). Sonically, it shares that plunking piano with Choir – it was intended as a companion piece – and a crazy sense of ground-falling-away songcraft with Blueberry, but that’s about it. Everything else is new territory, and as usual, it’s brilliant, maddening, difficult and amazing. And as usual, the fans are divided.

Bitter Tea was touted as a return to guitar-rock, but don’t you believe that. There are guitars, but they’re woven in with oceans of keyboards, pianos and sound effects, Matthew Friedberger firing up his trademark ADD arrangement sense. Bitter Tea, like the albums before it, reminds me of New England weather: if you don’t like what’s happening, wait two minutes, and it’ll change. The album kicks off with a count-in, promising a live feel, and then dashes that with “In My Little Thatched Hut,” a multi-textured studio wonder that changes direction half a dozen times.

So goes the whole record – just as soon as the band settles into a groove on something, Matthew loses interest, and he’s on to the next idea. Some of his ideas are more brilliant than others, and I found myself wishing more than once that he would follow something to its logical conclusion instead of leapfrogging ahead, but that’s his style. “Black Hearted Boy” establishes a sweet piano theme, dissects it, inverts it, coughs it up and then restates it, just in time for the title track to explode all over it. It’s great stuff, but it does take several listens to fully grasp.

The Furnaces do take things in some new directions here – Bitter Tea is their darkest record, lyrically and musically, and they lay down some of their most compelling atmospheres. The album repeatedly returns to backwards recording, almost as a motif – “Teach Me Sweetheart” is almost entirely made up of backwards piano, drums and keys, and many songs contain backwards verses or bridges. The technique is used so effectively that it’s part of the song – I don’t care what Eleanor is singing in the reversed sections. They sound right just the way they are.

The album gets a bit more traditional by its conclusion, but not much – “Nevers” sounds like it will be a loping snooze-fest until the vocals come in, all cut-and-pasted like the next generation of “1999.” (Dig the second verse, recorded backwards but retaining the melody of verse one. That must have taken days to put together.) Still, the ideas don’t come as fast and furious in the final few tracks, perhaps indicative of Matthew’s well running dry. But give the guy a break – he wrote and recorded more than four hours of material in 30 months, and he even found time to do two solo records, coming later this year. If he slips a bit – and “Benton Harbor Blues” is definitely slipping a bit – I can’t fault him for it.

Bitter Tea is manic, ridiculous, fascinating, daunting and idiosyncratic – essentially, everything you could want in a Fiery Furnaces album. The Furnaces are one of the few current bands I know that can’t be described or encapsulated. They simply must be heard. I can’t relate what they do to any other band I know, and I’ll be amazed if they can keep up this level of imagination and enthusiasm for their whole career. It would be tempting to list off all of the styles they play brilliantly, and call them the best garage-prog-rock-blues-ambient-folk-sea shanty-techno-pop band there is, but it’s easier just to say this:

They are the Fiery Furnaces. There is no one like them. Period.

Next week is the best new-CD week of the year, with new ones from Pearl Jam, Tool, Glen Phillips, Ministry and the Elms. So I’ll review one or two of those, most likely.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A quick one this week – I’m writing this at my friend Ray’s house, in Massachusetts. I’m here visiting for Easter, and I have a few hours of downtime. I almost called in sick this week, but I like the record I’m reviewing enough to spend some of my precious vacation telling you about it. And if that’s not a decent recommendation all on its own, I don’t know what would be.

I also wanted to talk a little about South Park, and about the issue of censorship, but I don’t think I can get into it as much as I want to right now. Short version – Matt Stone and Trey Parker aired the second half of their “Cartoon Wars” epic this week. The plot: Cartman travels out west to get Fox to pull an episode of Family Guy in which the prophet Mohammed apparently will appear.

Cartman says he’s doing this out of respect for Islam and to keep people from getting hurt, but we learn that (of course) he has his own motivation – he hates Family Guy’s humor, and wants it off the air, and he knows the best way to accomplish this is to get the network to cave in one time, on one episode. This will, he says, set a precedent – if the network will pull one episode because one group is upset, it has to keep pulling them under pressure from other groups, until the show is no more.

Part two seemed to be leading up to an actual image of Mohammed as part of the Family Guy episode, which Kyle finally convinces Fox to run. But instead of the prophet, we viewers all saw a black slide with a message from Matt and Trey, informing us that Comedy Central has refused to show an image of Mohammed, and has censored the show. This was followed almost immediately by the Islamic “retaliation,” a similar cartoon depicting Jesus shitting on George Bush and the American flag. Which ran uncensored.

Big laughs, of course, at the expense of Comedy Central – until the news broke that it wasn’t, in fact, a joke. The network did tell Parker and Stone to snip their image of Mohammed from the show, and were apparently okay with Jesus taking a crap on the president. The problem I have with this isn’t the defecating Christ scene, well-timed for Holy Week – it’s the selective censorship, which is what the show’s creators railed against throughout the two-parter.

As Kyle said on Wednesday’s show, when you decide to censor something, you’re making a judgment about what is permitted as satire, and what isn’t. Either everything is okay to make fun of, or nothing is. “Cartoon Wars” was the logical extension of the message Parker and Stone have been shouting out since day one, 10 years ago, and was their most impassioned statement in defense of free speech. They constructed it in such a way that Comedy Central’s weakness and cowardice became the punchline.

I have long held the theory that most people in America don’t know what freedom of speech means, and if they did, they wouldn’t want it. Parker and Stone have been at the forefront of the free speech issue for a decade – what seems to some a juvenile, potty-mouthed cartoon is actually one of the most incisive social commentaries in any medium right now, and has been for the whole of its run. And they are dead on when it comes to what I believe is our most important right – either all speech is free, or none of it is.

More on this next week, when I can really delve into it.

* * * * *

I first heard Built to Spill thanks to my time at Face Magazine – Warner Bros. sent me Perfect From Now On, the band’s third album and major-label debut. I have been hooked ever since.

BTS is from Boise, Idaho, and their leader is Doug Martsch, a high-voiced guitarist with an obviously deep Neil Young fetish. The best Built to Spill material sounds like Crazy Horse with a pop edge – long, sprawling, and in love with the sound of the guitar, yet melodic and hummable, too. Perfect was an excellent blend of those influences, with songs stretching up to 10 minutes and full of loud, distorted fretwork, but also of sweet vocals and melody lines.

The band has been good since then, but they’ve never captured the striking sound of Perfect since. Both Keep It Like a Secret and Ancient Melodies of the Future trimmed things down and scaled back the ambitions, but I didn’t mind, since Martsch came up with some winning songs in place of the six-string wonderment. The live album made the division clear – short pop songs took up half the time, and winding epics (including a 20-minute cover of “Cortez the Killer”) filled the other half. Martsch seemed to have forgotten that his band is at its best when he’s bringing those elements together.

Ah, but here’s You in Reverse, the first Built to Spill album in five years, and the band’s best since Perfect, in 1997. And you know what? They’ve found their sound again.

The record opens with “Goin’ Against Your Mind,” a nine-minute excursion that revolves around two chords and has no real chorus. And it rocks. It’s the most energetic, guitar-loving piece of work the band has done in ages – the lead lines snake in and out of the simple yet satisfying backdrop, while the drums flail wildly and Martsch sings his little heart out. It sounds like it was recorded live, and the spacey breakdown in the middle bit probably goes on for another 10 minutes when they’re on stage.

“Goin’ Against Your Mind” is a hell of an opener, and while in some ways it throws down a gauntlet that the rest of the record can’t pick up, it does set the tone. You in Reverse is a guitar record, through and through, and its simple little songs serve as mission control for some of the band’s greatest orbital journeys. Just listen to “Gone,” which shifts guitar tone several times in its not-quite-six minutes, finally crashing down in a colossal collapse.

Or check out “Traces,” an acoustic-based piece that, on the heels of “Goin’ Against Your Mind,” feels slight at first. But listen to the melody, and the web of solos in the second half – this is one of Martsch’s most accomplished songs. “Mess With Time” accomplishes the same trick, in a way, as it morphs its simple, sledgehammer riffage into a stratospheric, reggae-inflected guitar workout. The album falls apart from there, its last two tracks not quite measuring up, but the first eight provide more than enough big-wide-grin moments.

Much as I love the poppier places BTS has been since I first heard them, You in Reverse is the kind of album I always secretly wished they would make. It is the perfect juxtaposition of their talents, the ultimate indie-pop jam record, if you will. If you ever wished that J. Mascis would learn to write better songs, then this is for you. It’s a terrific return to form for Built to Spill – the band sounds energized here, and ready to take on the world. And hell, if this record makes garage-rock kids want to actually learn to play their instruments this well, then I say more power to them.

Next week, the Fiery Furnaces return. Wait, did they ever even go away? Wasn’t their last album released, like, three weeks ago…?

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The year is 1988.

I’m 14 years old, thin, with hair past my shoulders. It’s my second year at a new school, and I’m just starting to think about things like art, and free speech, and politics. The Reagan years are coming to a close, and King Bush I is just about to take his throne. We are still a couple of years away from Gulf War I, the most critical world event of my young life, and still four years away from the first election in which I can vote.

And I do vote, in 1992, for an Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton, and the rush when he sails to victory is my rush, too. 14 years later, I think about politics and world government and social injustice perhaps too much, but in 1988, I’m an apolitical kid, experiencing my first glimmers of the structure we’ve erected around us. And those first glimmers came through music – R.E.M.’s “World Leader Pretend,” Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes” and “…And Justice for All,” the still-striking video for Genesis’ “Land of Confusion.” Music is my first love, and I listen to what it has to teach me.

Of course, 1988 is the height of my metalhead phase – it continues for another four years or so, and for half of that time, I am convinced that Megadeth’s Rust in Peace is the best album ever made. A list of my favorite bands in 1988 would include Metallica, Anthrax, Guns ‘n’ Roses, and others of that ilk. I’ve never even heard of Seattle, Washington, which in almost no time flat will unleash a full-blooded assault on the headbanging music I hold dear, wiping it from the face of the earth.

Except I had heard of Seattle, in that abstract sense – I still, at this age, don’t have a firm grasp on the concept that the bands I love are made up of people, and that these people actually live in real places. But if you ask me, I will tell you that the smartest band in the world comes from Seattle, and their name is Queensryche.

You know how people studied records like Tommy and The Wall when they came out, endlessly playing them to search for conceptual clues and piece their operatic stories together? That’s me with Operation: Mindcrime, Queensryche’s magnum opus. I play that thing to death, going over the lyric sheet (printed, in my cassette, as one long sentence that was incredibly difficult to follow) and leaping for joy as new insights present themselves. This is new territory for me – there are characters, there’s a plotline, this record has Something to Say.

It’s 1988, and Operation: Mindcrime is the best album I’ve ever heard.

* * * * *

I have often made the distinction in this column between albums that are genuinely groundbreaking and important to music as a whole, and ones that are personally important to me, no matter how much they objectively suck. Mindcrime is one of those – it was the smartest album my 14-year-old self had heard, a politically-charged headrush that also rocked really hard. Looking back, it’s the absolute apex of Queensryche’s career – they only approached it once more, with Promised Land in 1994 – and even if the band itself is a blip on the radar of pop culture, that one album changed my life.

I don’t think it’s possible to undersell the place Mindcrime has in my personal musical life – it’s an album I can still sing from memory, and one that I go back to even now. Does it still hold up? I’m the wrong guy to ask. I can’t separate Mindcrime’s admittedly over-the-top operatic metal sound from what it means to me. I still think that Geoff Tate is one of the best singers in popular music – the only difference between Tate and someone like Matthew Bellamy of Muse is the cheese factor inherent in what Queensryche does. And the relative intelligence Queensryche brought to my then-favorite style of music was like a gateway drug.

Here’s the story of Mindcrime, and if you haven’t heard it and don’t want to know, stop reading now. The album follows a street thug named Nikki who, disgusted with the political situation in Reagan’s America, joins a revolutionary movement named (you guessed it) Operation: Mindcrime. Under hypnosis, Nikki goes about assassinating political leaders, following the directives of a shadowy figure named Dr. X. He gets the call, X says the word “mindcrime,” and off Nikki goes, gun in hand.

X has other ways of keeping Nikki under his control, including drugs, administered by a former prostitute named Sister Mary. We learn that Mary joined the church after a priest picked her up off the street, and now that priest rapes her once a week. Nikki and Mary fall in love, and, sensing the danger, X orders Nikki to kill the unsuspecting nun. (“And get the priest, too,” he says, in a spooky interlude.) What happens next is up to conjecture, but Nikki finds Mary dead two songs later. The record ends where it began, with Nikki in a hospital room, under arrest for crimes he doesn’t remember committing, and mourning Mary. He’s been used by the revolution just as much as he’d been by the system it sought to overthrow.

Cheery, huh?

Incredibly, this dark, complex album was the band’s commercial breakthrough, thanks to a hit single “Eyes of a Stranger” and a video that summarized the whole story. I must have watched that video 200 times, looking for more clues – what happened to Mary? Who killed her? Did Dr. X get away? What happens next? And as difficult as it was for 14-year-old me to grasp, I had to learn that in this case, as with most stories, nothing happens next.

Except, it turns out, something does happen.

* * * * *

Time has not been particularly kind to Queensryche – they’ve gone through as many changes as I have in the intervening 18 years. After Mindcrime, they hit the big time with Empire, a concept-free collection of love songs that included “Silent Lucidity,” an orchestrated ballad about dream control that is still the song for which they are best known. Empire was good, Promised Land was better, and then it all fell apart.

Many point to the departure of guitarist Chris DeGarmo as the death knell, but his last album with them (Hear in the Now Frontier) is still their worst, so that doesn’t quite hold water. DeGarmo’s replacements have failed to fill the void, and despite showing off a renewed vigor on 2003’s Tribe, they’re demonstrably not the same band they were. Even Tate’s powerhouse voice has seen better days, as he strains to hit high notes and can’t hold them for as long as he used to.

It’s this band, this not-quite-Queensryche, that has decided to risk ridicule by making Operation: Mindcrime II in 2006. What the hell were they thinking? It’s bad enough that records like Q2K and Tribe get unfavorably compared to Mindcrime, why would the band intentionally invite that scrutiny? And more importantly, who, beyond the small set of folks like me who hold the original in perhaps-undeserving esteem, will care about this? Offering someone like me an official sequel to one of the more important records of my life is like asking me to hate it.

Because of course I’m going to buy it. Of course. No matter how much it sucks, or how much it taints the albums I loved as a teen. Naturally, I had to hear this thing.

And really, all I was praying for here was for Mindcrime II to rise above the level of unlistenable crap. It does that handily. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, is just how much it would connect me, emotionally speaking, with the original record. The story picks up in real-time, and Nikki apparently had a really good lawyer, because 18 years later, he’s out of jail, and hungry for revenge. He’s also insane, and he hears Sister Mary’s voice in his head constantly.

So Nikki tracks down Dr. X, and kills him, but in the process, he learns (I think) that he himself was Mary’s killer, under that apparently powerful hypnosis. The final third of the album is basically a long conversation between Nikki and the voice of Mary in his mind, urging him to kill himself. If it’s possible, Mindcrime II ends on an even more depressing note than the original – there are no plot twists waiting in the wings, just a collision and a sad aftermath.

And that’s one problem I have with it – the story is pretty much unnecessary, and doesn’t tell us anything new. It also misses the opportunity, unlike the first one, to comment on the state of the world, which I was looking forward to – the original Mindcrime is a tight burst of anger at the world and at how it chews people up, whereas the new one is more of a vengeance flick with little context. It’s not an essential new chapter, and even though it clears up one lingering question (kind of), all it accomplishes is a further exploration of just how used and damaged Nikki is.

But I really have to give Tate and company credit – this is the punchiest, most vibrant Queensryche album since before DeGarmo left, and much of that can be chalked up to the band’s decision to time travel back to the ‘80s. Most of this album is crunchy, heavy metal, the kind that the ‘Ryche hasn’t turned out in almost two decades. Some of this album represents their heaviest material since The Warning, believe it or not, and it’s full of flailing guitar solos and high, wailing vocals.

The band is on fire here, especially new guitarist Mike Stone, who almost makes me not miss DeGarmo. First single and leadoff track “I’m American” is a jaw-dropper, the kind of riff-heavy monster I thought Queensryche would never write again. While the album doesn’t erupt quite like that again, some other tracks come damn close – “Signs Say Go,” “Murderer?,” “Re-Arrange You.” This is without a doubt the band’s attempt to bring back fans that wandered during the ‘90s. The sound is punchy, thanks to Snake River Conspiracy’s Jason Slater in the producer’s chair.

But I was also surprised at just how dark and moody this thing is. The original Mindcrime didn’t take a lot of time to wallow – it had a plot to advance, and it did so with razor-sharp, uptempo rockers. But Mindcrime II explores emotions, sometimes in cringe-worthy ways, and the music is appropriately minor-key and overcast. The final third is a tumble down into suicidal thoughts, and tunes like “If I Could Change it All,” with a reprise of the choir from the original record, are as atmospheric as one could hope.

* * * * *

So it’s not terrible – in fact, it’s the best thing the band has done in ages.

Except…

Well, there’s the cheese factor again. And I don’t know at this point if it’s me or the band, whether I’ve outgrown this kind of thing or if they’ve really ratcheted up the Velveeta here. Take “The Chase,” the song in which Nikki confronts Dr. X. The band has invited Ronnie James Dio to play the part of the evil doctor, and he does so with gusto, chewing up whatever scenery Tate has left untouched. The two vocalists make a radio play out of their predatory circling, but the end result is… well, really cheesy.

“Believe it or not… you owe me!”

“I owe you nothing!”

“I gave your life a purpose!”

“I owe you nothing but your death!”

Yeah… it’s like that.

But that’s nothing when compared to the closing song, “All the Promises,” which finds Tate singing a duet with Pamela Moore, as Sister Mary. (She provided the voice of Mary on the original record, a nice nod to continuity.) This song is so laughably awful it nearly ruins the whole project for me. It’s the most groan-inducing love song (“When you said you loved me, it made me feel like I could fly…”) sung with all deliberate vocal force, American Idol-style. The song is meant to be the emotional climax, the sad withering of Nikki’s will to live, but it falls painfully flat.

And I’m listening back to the first Mindcrime, and to the records that surround it in Queensryche’s early catalog, and I think it’s the band, not me. I think they regrettably chose cheese in several key places here, and turned their love-slash-revenge story somewhat silly. These moments keep Operation: Mindcrime II from rising to the status of its predecessor in my mind, and unfortunately, prevent me from embracing it the way I do the original.

Maybe Mindcrime was just the right album at the right time for me – had this sequel been released in 1990, it’s possible I’d think of it as equal to the original. But I don’t. It’s certainly better than I expected, but it doesn’t make me feel 14 again, like I’d hoped. Although, I admit, that was a far-fetched hope to begin with, and too outrageous an expectation to place on what is, after all, just a rock record.

In 1988, Queensryche was just like me – they could have gone anywhere and done anything. 18 years later, this is where they’ve ended up, and I would no more fault them for where life has tossed them than I would stay angry at myself for not living up to my perceived potential. For the first time in a long while, this sounds like Queensryche making the best album they could, and even though they landed a triple while aiming for a home run, at least they tried to knock it over the wall, which is more than I can say for most bands I listened to when I was 14.

Operation: Mindcrime II is not essential, really, nor is it important, in the grand scheme. But it is a sign of new life, of renewed purpose, from a band I have always liked, and sometimes loved. This is not one of those times, but given how much I dreaded this album’s release, I am relieved that it’s at least solid and imaginative. I don’t love it, not like I love the first one, but I’m not disappointed in it. Is that enough?

Sometimes, yeah, it is.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

We’ve got a lot of catching up to do:

Ladies…

I often bemoan the sad state of gender inequality represented here at tm3am, but I’m not sure what to do about it.

Some of my favorite artists are women – Aimee Mann, Tori Amos (who will always have a spot on this list, no matter how much she sucks lately), Ani Difranco, Kate Bush, PJ Harvey (sometimes), and on and on. Yet the disparity is evident, and I don’t think it’s entirely my fault. Women are just not afforded the same opportunities as men in the music business – not just at the signing stage, although labels take on many more male artists than female ones, but also at later phases, when men are allowed to dive into artistic risks while women are often nudged into sexpot pop singer roles to appease the bean counters.

There are exceptions, but for every Eleanor Friedberger (strange and wonderful from the outset, and showing no signs of compromising), there’s a Liz Phair, a formerly daring artist streamlined by the mass machine into fitting one of their pre-arranged roles for women. Granted, no one forced Phair to write and sing teen-pop radio hits, although a distressing enough number of women fall into that trap (*cough* Jewel *cough*) that it seems like a trend, and it fits with the labels’ attempt to confuse promiscuity with empowerment on a mass cultural scale so that they can sell sex and make it seem like they’re selling freedom and individuality.

I can name 25 male artists off the top of my head who have followed an artistic muse album after album, refusing to pander or write for the masses, but I can only name a couple of women who have done the same thing, and I think label influence has to be at least part of the cause. The aforementioned Difranco is one of the most self-determined artists, male or female, in the world, and it can’t be coincidence that she’s been on her own label for her whole career. Historically, it’s taken some measure of self-releasing, or labels committed to seeing women as artists instead of as sex objects who sing, to really level the playing field.

A good example is Neko Case, best known as one of the New Pornographers, but an accomplished solo artist in her own right. For her whole career, she’s been supported by little labels like Bloodshot and Anti, and she’s quietly built up a body of work that rivals that of her more famous contemporaries. Her fourth solo album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, is another good one – short, mostly acoustic, delightfully rendered country-pop of the highest order.

Case’s voice is, of course, the main selling point. It’s strong without being overpowering, effortlessly gliding over the music and tying it together. But, as Imogen Heap said recently, people don’t really think of women as producers and players, only singers, which is a shame – Case co-produced Fox Confessor, wrote or co-wrote every song (except the one traditional tune, “John Saw That Number,” which she arranged), and played guitar or piano on every track. And Heap’s right – if Case were male, I wouldn’t even feel the need to point any of that out.

While I always like Case better when she’s with the Pornographers, she’s crafted a gem here. “Star Witness” is a standout, a moody waltz with chiming clean guitar accents and a backing vocal performance to die for, as well as a great piano outro by The Band’s Garth Hudson. It slips into the minor-key delight “Hold On Hold On,” and then the brief yet striking “A Widow’s Toast,” on which Case spins a traditional-sounding chant over gorgeous echoed guitars.

The record never falters, and its 35 minutes are up very quickly. Case surrounded herself with great collaborators here too, including the members of Calexico, the Sadies and Howie Gelb, though she is absolutely the star of the show. Final track “The Needle Has Landed” is a perfect summation – co-written with the Sadies, the song is every bit as modern as it is drawn from a deep well of classic country and pop influences, and the cello arrangement is awesome. Neko Case has made another winner here, and aside from its brevity, there’s nothing at all wrong with it.

Faring nearly as well is Jenny Lewis, who, like Case, is taking a break from her time in a popular indie band. In Lewis’ case, it’s Rilo Kiley, a group that has grown more and more shiny, in a pop sense, as they’ve gone along. For her solo debut, Rabbit Fur Coat, Lewis made the wise choice to strip it all back and return to the early Kiley sound, all acoustic guitars and harmonies. And on this record, those harmonies are provided by bluegrass singers the Watson Twins, adding just that much more cred.

But not much more – this isn’t a country record, it’s a sweet pop outing that’s reminiscent, oddly enough, of Neko Case. Lewis’ clear voice isn’t quite the powerful instrument Case’s is, but she still carries this album winningly, She also takes greater pains than Case does to ground her album in a traditional sound. “Happy” could be an old Patsy Cline number, so convincing is its torchy balladry, and the title track is an old-fashioned story-song, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” style. There’s a refreshing intimacy to the album that’s like an antidote to more recent Kiley.

Like Case, Lewis includes one cover, but it’s a surprising one – “Handle With Care,” the 1988 hit by the Traveling Wilburys. The Wilburys were a supergroup that included Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, so for her take, Lewis assembled a little supergroup of her own, trading verses with Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard. I’m surprised this hasn’t received more press – Lewis doesn’t even make a big deal of it in the liner notes, and the familiar voices are a neat surprise.

But as with Case, this is Lewis’ show, and Rabbit Fur Coat shows a deep love of folk and country history. She’s on Oberst’s label, Team Love, which bodes well for her solo career – if there’s anyone who knows what it means to develop at one’s own pace, it’s Oberst. Nothing here is going to push music forward, but the album is a sweet look back, and if Lewis can bring some of the starker, more haunting moments of Rabbit Fur Coat back with her to Rilo Kiley, it could only be a good thing.

Sometimes, though, stripping down the sound is not the best idea, as Beth Orton shows us on her new Comfort of Strangers. Orton has long been a favorite of mine – her second album, Central Reservation, made my top five for 1999, and her debut, Trailer Park, is one of the coolest messy, unfocused records I own. She seemed to be on a roll, and I sincerely hoped that Daybreaker, her 2002 album, was just a slight misstep. But now it seems to have been the penny that derailed the train.

Don’t get me wrong – I like Comfort of Strangers, somewhat. There are some good ideas here, but they’re clipped and truncated far too often. The album is 14 short songs, mostly little acoustic-and-piano rambles, and while some shine (“Safe in Your Arms,” “Feral”), others just sound unfinished. The record was produced by Jim O’Rourke, formerly of Sonic Youth and currently of Jeff Tweedy’s other band, Loose Fur, and you’d think he would infuse some life into the proceedings. But no.

Here’s the issue – Orton has an incredible voice, when she’s allowed to stretch out and use it. She’s never been a complex songwriter, but she’s always infused her ditties with emotion, utilizing that lovely voice to captivate and enthrall. There’s pretty much none of that here – every song is over too quickly for that, and the production captures Orton’s worst Rickie-Lee-Jones-esque qualities. It’s like Trey Anastasio’s last album – streamlined to the point of suffocation, and containing very little of what makes Orton a musician worth hearing.

And maybe I have to alter my view when it comes to labels and artists, because I doubt highly that a company like Astralwerks would ask Orton to make an album like this one. Comfort of Strangers is probably exactly what she wants, which is unfortunate. The bits of it that stand out contain glimmers of the haunting, moving music of which she is capable, and I hope she realizes it soon and gets back to doing what she does best. This album reminds me of latter-day Tori Amos, and like Tori, Beth Orton is one of the most affecting female musicians on the planet, when she allows herself to be.

…and Gentlemen

Kurt Heasley was the second musician I ever interviewed. It did not go well.

I was brand new at Face Magazine, with absolutely zero journalism training, hired on the strength of my music reviews and my apparently rare decision to show up every day for my three-month internship. My first feature interview was with a guy who ran a tiny record label in Portland, and I think he was so grateful for the attention that he let my obvious nervousness and incredibly awful questions (“How do you want to be remembered after you die?”) slide.

Armed with a boost of false confidence, I marched into my second interview with head held high. I would be in control of this one, I would ask probing questions, I would get the Whole Scoop. The band was the Lilys, and my one-on-one would be with their leader and only mainstay, Heasley, a very tall, very wild-eyed man with flailing limbs and an energy level that would tire out even the hardiest Olympic athletes. He was also bugfuck insane, and believe me, I wasn’t in control of this interview for a second.

Among the first things Heasley did upon sitting down with me was to eat my tape recorder. Not entirely, and he didn’t swallow it, but he did stick nearly the whole thing in his mouth. His answers to my queries were all over the map – hell, off the map – and I was so stunned by the whole thing that I couldn’t even converse with the guy. At one point, he accused me of selling my list of interview questions for crack, so befuddled was I throughout the whole process. I got pretty much no usable stuff – I was surprised to learn that the things I liked about the band’s ‘60s-inspired Better Can’t Make Your Life Better album were improvised solutions to financial problems, and at the time I couldn’t think of how to write that story effectively.

Which is a shame, since I now realize I had Heasley in his prime. After Better in 1996, he made one more pop masterpiece, The 3-Way, in 1999, and then started to lose focus. The latest Lilys album, Everything Wrong is Imaginary, is a far cry from the excellence of previous releases, a mish-mash of grooves and noise that ends up going nowhere.

There’s a reason for that – the album was reportedly recorded mainly on the cheap, at home, when Heasley’s personal life kept him from diving in to a long production schedule. He recorded his own guitar and vocal tracks at his house, and studio musicians filled in the rest later, under the direction of Michael Musmanno. And if you think that style of recording would result in a thrown-together album with no clear vision or direction, well, you’re right. There are good moments – “Still in All the Glitter” is trippy, and the instrumental title track has a good melody – but they’re drowned in meandering half-songs that stretch even this 38-minute disc to unbearable lengths.

I have very little idea what personal problems kept Heasley from devoting his full energy to this record, but it represents a downward slide from even his last couple, which have been pretty lacking. Heasley’s voice is strained, when the poor mix doesn’t drown it out, and his songwriting has never been more lax. It’s a shame – I certainly hope everything works out for him, and soon, because he’s so much better than this album would lead you to believe. Thanks to our brief encounter in 1996, I’ll always have a soft spot for Heasley, and I wish him well.

I’ve done probably hundreds of interviews since then, and I’d like to think I’ve gotten a bit better at it. Case in point – I had the opportunity last month to talk with Greg Boerner (pronounced Burner), a Georgia native who moved to Illinois a few years ago. Boerner just self-released his third CD, World So Blue, and since quite a lot of the album was inspired by his recent divorce, our features editor thought that would be a neat story. Especially since I got to talk to his ex-wife, too, and get her thoughts.

But even if you’re not enthralled by real-life tales of lost love, Boerner’s music is worth checking out, especially if you’re into folk and blues traditions. His songs are uncomplicated in the best way, especially a romp like “Heaven Bound,” and his acoustic guitar playing is deft and skillful. His best quality is his deep, soulful voice, but here he’s surrounded it with his most complete production. Boerner still plays most of the instruments himself, as he did on his comparatively stark earlier records, but World So Blue adds percussion, electric guitars, horns, and a host of other colors. You’d never know it’s a DIY effort, so clear and well-balanced is the sound, but the elaborate measures don’t detract from the core – acoustic-based songs, played and sung well.

Boerner stretches out here, too, incorporating a Tom Waits influence on “Don’t Wake Me From This Dream,” perhaps his finest song. It fits in well with the more melancholy tone of this record, which, considering its subject matter, is not surprising. The title song is a mid-tempo lament, a plea for a second chance, on which Boerner provides subtle mouth percussion, and “This Love,” another minor-key favorite, takes an old blues trope and makes it new – “One thing’s for certain, there’s two things I know, this love will kill me, and I can’t let it go…”

Both Boerner’s lyrics and music are simple and accessible – sometimes too simple for my taste – and fans of singer-songwriters like John Hiatt and Steve Earle (in acoustic mode) should find much to like here. The two things I admire most about World So Blue are the sense of diversity – there’s gospel, Louisiana shuffle, country-folk and pop mixed in with Boerner’s traditional blues and roots music – and the sonic texture. The whole thing is sequenced well, and lest you think it’s all lovelorn moping, it concludes with two breezy, upbeat numbers that leave you wanting more.

World So Blue is an interesting homemade document, and Boerner is obviously a talented guy with quite a good voice. Nothing here is going to change the world, but Boerner’s not trying to be innovative, just enjoyable. If you like straightforward songs about love and life, drawn from a perspective of deep respect for classic American music of all stripes, then this is for you. I’d also recommend Wishing Well, Boerner’s second record, which is more blues-based, and sounds more like his live show.

Check Boerner’s work out here.

Another guy who makes simplicity work for him is Teddy Thompson. The first thing people will want to tell you about Teddy is that he’s the son of Richard and Linda Thompson, and that his parents both appear on his second record, Separate Ways. They’ll want you to know this because it makes it easier to dismiss him as a child of privilege, handed a record contract because mommy and daddy pulled some strings. And I want you to know it because these people are wrong – Teddy Thompson is his own guy, and his music stands on his own.

Separate Ways sounds a bit like Rufus Wainwright trying his hand at country-folk. Thompson’s voice is just as even and ethereal as Wainwright’s, but with a slight twang that belies his British roots, and his songs are little ditties produced like art objects. The first single, “Everybody Move It,” is a fine example of the tone – the party-anthem lyrics could fit an AC/DC song (“Bump and grind, have a good time, free yourself and lose your mind”), but the music is mournful, almost tragic, as if the singer were already thinking about the consequences.

“I Should Get Up” is an apathy anthem, set to a mid-tempo country beat, and in a way, the same character reappears in “I Wish It Was Over,” a song about not having the willpower to end a bad relationship. Thompson lets out some of his darker side on “Think Again” and the backhanded “That’s Enough Out of You,” and what’s fascinating about them is how half-hearted they sound, as if he lacks the energy to be as mean as he wishes he could be. The classic here is the title track, in which Thompson leaves the terms of a breakup to his partner. Separate Ways, as a whole, is about drifting through life, and it’s a better portrait of disaffectedness than a hundred records with hipper pedigrees.

As an extra treat, the album ends with an unlisted cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Take a Message to Mary,” performed as a magical duet between Teddy and his mom, Linda. In the wake of the sparkling music that precedes it, this feels more like a celebration of Thompson’s talents than a refutation of them – yes, he comes from a semi-famous family of musicians, but his work is dynamic enough to deserve attention for its own sake. Separate Ways is a very good sophomore album from a songwriter on the verge, and I expect great things in the future.

We Are Floating in Space

As if this weren’t long and late enough already, I thought I’d debut a new regular feature this week. Just like the folks who handicap the Oscars eight months early, I draft and revise my top 10 list again and again as the year progresses. Some have asked me just how seriously I take the list, and just how much thought I put into it, and I can tell you – way more than I should, on both counts.

So for those who have asked for a glimpse into my process, I thought I’d try something akin to quarterly reports this year – I’ll publish a draft of my top 10 list once every three months, so you can see how it progresses as new albums are released and old ones are bumped up or down. I fully understand how self-indulgent this is, and if you don’t care, I don’t blame you. But for those who do, here’s what my top 10 list for the first quarter of 2005 looks like:

#10: Prince – 3121
#9: Duncan Sheik – White Limousine
#8: Ester Drang – Rocinate
#7: Teddy Thompson – Separate Ways
#6: Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
#5: The Violet Burning – Drop-Dead
#4: The Alarm – Under Attack
#3: Ross Rice – Dwight
#2: Belle and Sebastian – The Life Pursuit
#1: Mute Math

The final list will, hopefully, look nothing like this. Upcoming records I expect will shake this up tremendously: Bitter Tea, by the Fiery Furnaces; You in Reverse, by Built to Spill; Mr. Lemons, by Glen Phillips; Foundation Sounds, by Eric Matthews; Permafrost, by Bill Mallonee; and Just Like the Fambly Cat, by Grandaddy. And I’m hoping the Flaming Lips, Ministry, Tool and Paul Simon surprise me. (Simon’s album is even called Surprise, so that’s a good sign…)

Anyway, expect a second-quarter report at the end of June.

Next week, there’s a job for you in the system, boy, with nothing to sign…

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s my sister Emily’s birthday this week. She’s 29.

This seems impossible to me, because if she’s 29, then I’m almost 32, and that’s… wrong. It has to be. I spend a lot of digital ink here bitching about how old I am, and I won’t do that again, but seriously. My little sister is 29? What the hell?

I don’t feel to bad about it, though, because I know age means nothing. It’s all attitude. And like a musical miracle, just when I’m feeling down about my advancing years, here come a couple of actual old people, partying like it’s 1982. Granted, neither of this week’s contestants are as old as David Gilmour and Ray Davies (and thank God neither of them sound as old as Gilmour), but still, we’re not talking young, fresh fellows here. And yet, if you didn’t know it, you’d never guess.

Start with Mike Peters, all of 47 years old. I can’t overstate just how important Peters’ band, the Alarm, was to my formative years. Some people glommed onto U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree around the same time, but I identified more with the expressive anthems of Eye of the Hurricane and Strength. I can’t tell you why, but the Alarm moved me more.

I’m beginning to think that it may be because I sensed the absolute earnestness and strong integrity of the band’s leader. Peters gets compared to Bono all the time, but while the erstwhile Paul Hewson hides behind a fake name, wraparound sunglasses and an undeniable messiah complex, as well as heaping tons of irony, Peters has never been anything but straightforward. The Alarm, during their time, wrote nothing but anthems, every song reaching for the brass ring, every song a showstopper. And it’s become obvious to me in the intervening years that Peters believes every word of them, and that lends them power.

Put simply, I don’t trust Bono, but I believe in Mike Peters.

I do realize that I just spent three paragraphs propagating the Alarm-U2 comparison, which has always been an unfair one. The Alarm lived in U2’s shadow, especially after touring with them in 1987, but since the ‘80s, Peters has stayed the course and turned out one great record after another, while U2 has gone astray (for 10 years!) and come back again. In terms of consistency, there is no contest. And in terms of personal importance to my life, there is again no doubt – the Alarm is one of my very favorite bands, and Peters one of my heroes.

In recent years, Peters has resurrected the Alarm name, despite the fact that three-fourths of the band are gone. His new band, including guitarist James Stevenson, ex-Cult bassist Craig Adams and Stiff Little Fingers drummer Steve Grantley, is all wrapped up with his old one, and has as much of their blessing as Peters could expect. And he certainly isn’t doing the name wrong – in 2003, the Alarm released In the Poppy Fields, a five-CD, 54-song opus that contained nary a weak moment.

They even hoodwinked the music industry, releasing the first single from the album under the name The Poppy Fields and hiring teenagers to fill in on the video, to prove a point about image and popularity. It worked – the song, “45 RPM,” hit big in Britain, and the music press fell all over themselves praising it before discovering its true authors. It was the most revealing scam I can remember, and slightly out of character for the ever-honest Peters, who quickly revealed the truth.

Life seemed good for Peters, until December of last year. While working on the follow-up to Poppy Fields, he was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a form of cancer. His prognosis is favorable, but since this is his second bout with cancer, the outcome is never certain.

But here’s why Peters is my hero – he gets hit with cancer, and it barely even slows the man down. Since the diagnosis, Peters finished Under Attack, the second album by the new Alarm. He booked an extensive tour on two continents, and shot videos for every song on the record (included on a bonus DVD). And now he’s out promoting it, and playing his heart out every night, as is his custom. I have missed several opportunities to see the Alarm live, but I’m going to try not to miss this one.

Part of my determination here is that Under Attack is absolutely awesome. I paid import price for it (it doesn’t come out here until May 30) because it’s the Alarm, and I couldn’t wait for it. It was worth every penny, the most furious and committed album Peters has made in many years. For all its sprawl and stylistic breadth, In the Poppy Fields now stands as the timid first step of this new incarnation. Under Attack makes it sound like a James Taylor album, so wonderfully loud and bracing is this new music.

Under Attack kicks off with “Superchannel,” the first single, currently doing gangbusters across the pond. It’s an explosive way to start, a caustic indictment of modern culture with a great hook. From there, the record never falters – it’s one anthem after another, each one immensely singable and uplifting. Peters sings semi-trite lines like “Everyone is someone to somebody” and “You only get one life” from the heart, elevating them from cliches to truisms to rallying cries. And pretty much every song contains at least one “Whoa-oh,” an Alarm tradition that still never fails to make me smile.

Under Attack contains four songs from the full Poppy Fields (the album was released commercially with only 12 of its tracks), and they’re completely different. Especially re-worked is the great “Rain Down,” an acoustic ballad on Poppy Fields that bursts forth here as a jagged rocker with a terrific arrangement. Also fantastic is the new “Be Still,” faster and louder and more stirring than the original take.

But it’s the new songs that shine. “Without a Fight” is a perfect Alarm anthem, its title preceded by “I’m never giving up,” and it takes on new meaning in the context of Peters’ medical condition. “It’s Alright/It’s OK” should be a hit – in fact, each of the first six songs could be hits, I think, and they ought to be. The album gets deeper and more minor-key after that, reaching its volcanic apex with “Something’s Got to Give,” which could be this band’s “Bullet the Blue Sky.”

But thankfully, it ends on a perfectly positive note with “This Is the Way We Are,” another in a series of semi-acoustic epics like “Spirit of ‘76” and “The Drunk and the Disorderly.” This one will stay with you, a decidedly Alarm-ish sendoff that feels absolutely right. And that’s the best part of Under Attack, to me – even though the amps are cranked for this one, and the punk influences are more evident, all of these songs sound like the Alarm to me, and like classic Alarm at that. You can’t ask for anything more than that. Even though Peters still hedges a bit by adding the date next to the band name – this one’s billed to the Alarm MMVI – I have no problem thinking of this as the next Alarm record, and a damn good one at that.

And I hope the relentless positivity, the all-out go-for-brokeness of this album is a good sign, both for the Alarm and for Peters in his fight with cancer. It would be more than a shame to lose a musician this passionate, this committed, this important, especially since he’s as good now as he’s ever been. Under Attack makes me feel 16 again, ready to take on the world, and to say that it’s a feeling I need right now would be an understatement. So thanks, Mike, and here’s to your health and a long life.

* * * * *

It seems weird to switch gears like this, to go from talking about a guy with not one trace of artifice to a guy who spent most of a decade using an unpronounceable symbol for his name. But if we’re talking about ‘80s artists experiencing a renaissance in the Aughts, well, we have to mention Prince, don’t we?

Prince is 47 as well, and he’s transformed himself in his old age from randy soul-funker to classy master of his craft. In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, Prince explored jazz and funk like never before, expanding his sound with strange, beautiful records like The Rainbow Children and NEWS. In 2004, though, he staged a massive career comeback, releasing Musicology, his most popular and acclaimed album in many years, and launching an incredibly successful tour.

Musicology was old-school Prince, a timid attempt at commerciality, and it left me sort of cold. I knew what he’d left behind to make this record – most notably his amazing band, the New Power Generation – and I couldn’t jump on the bandwagon. It was a decent, funky, unremarkable Prince album, and while I was glad for his renewed success, since I think he’s a stone genius, I haven’t really played Musicology since it came out.

So now here’s comeback part two, 3121 (pronounced “thirty-one twenty-one”), and I was expecting more of the same. In a way, I got it, but where Musicology sounded rote, this one sounds inspired. This is a great Prince pop album, and while his flights of fancy are reined in, his melodic sense and gleaming production are at full force. There are 12 songs on this album, and at least eight of them are hits, and better than anything on pop radio at the moment.

Start with the title song, a classic Prince track, with a relentless beat and processed, sped-up vocals. Prince self-harmonizes, but uses variable pitch effects, so it sounds like he’s singing with munchkin and demon versions of himself. He played all the instruments on most of this album, once again forsaking his terrific band, but I don’t miss them as much this time, for some reason. Part of it is the dark, spacious production – it’s as minimalist as his best ‘80s work, and yet as full as it needs to be.

This record is much more varied than Musicology, too, including Latin-tinged balladry (the single “Te Amo Corazon”), guitar rock (“Fury”), and sweet soul-pop (“Beautiful, Loved and Blessed,” a duet with Tamar, his new protégé.) “Lolita” is like stepping in the wayback machine, so ‘80s are its grooves and drum fills. And closer “Get on the Boat” is a jam and a half, a great funk workout with horns by, among others, the awesome Maceo Parker.

For all that, it’s the atmospheric spiritual piece “The Word” that really does it for me here. With a tough beat and an appealingly dark acoustic guitar part, the song expresses Prince’s always-present faith through one of the best melodies on the record. It’s a bit of an island amidst all the love and sex songs – 3121 is Prince’s most sensual album since becoming a Jehovah’s Witness in 2001 – which only adds to its impact. It’s the kind of moment that was sorely lacking on Musicology, and only one of the reasons that this is a superior effort.

If Prince is going to make pop records – and it seems like he is – then I hope he keeps making ones as good as 3121. It’s a varied, versatile album that finds him at the top of his game, and it betrays not one trace of his age. For nearly 30 years, Prince has forged a career path unlike anyone else’s, and he refuses to slip into mediocrity. Credit his restless artistic spirit, and his devotion to his craft, for making even a stab at pop radio like 3121 sound fresh. Forget Musicology – this is the commercial comeback, and a welcome one it is.

Next week, I catch up on a ton of 2006 records, before the spring flood hits on April 4. Operation: Mindcrime II, baby! Really, how bad can it be?

See you in line Tuesday morning.