It’s been a weird week.

I got hired full time at my shitty job. Up until now, I’ve been working through a temporary service, but I’d reached the end of the agreed-upon term, and it was come on full time or be cast out into the street. With the loss of temporary status went the attending privileges, including my guaranteed immunity to random-draft overtime. Twice a week now I’ll be pulling 12-hour shifts. In case there’s any doubt in your mind, 12-hour shifts suck. A lot.

Naturally, I’ve re-sent my resume to literally everyone with an office in northern Maryland. As Murphy would have it, though, circumstances have just intervened. I found out today that my last place of employment (in sunny Indiana) closed its doors for good. No notice, no severance pay, just a big “get out” from management. We all kind of saw it coming, which is one of the reasons I got out when I did, but it’s still a bit of a shock, especially for the folks I know who still worked there.

For my part, of course, this renders the top reference number on my resume useless. In fact, most of my reference numbers are useless – Face is still going, but under new management, and it’s unlikely that they’d give me the best of references. Plus, I’ve just discovered that the editor who hired me in Tennessee no longer works for that paper, so anyone trying my references in order will get a) a disconnection notice, b) a new editor who likely has never heard of me, and c) an owner/publisher with whom I parted on bad terms.

Yeah, I’d hire me.

It’s a good thing the economy is in such robust shape these days, or I’d be worried.

* * * * *

As I was picking up the new Jane’s Addiction CD this week, I tried to explain to the clerk my bizarre music-buying habits, especially as they pertain to this particular purchase. While most people I know buy CDs only after they’ve heard a song or two and are certain that it’s good, I know months in advance which ones I’m going to end up buying. In the case of albums as apparently ill-advised as a new Jane’s Addiction record, I then spend the weeks leading up to the release dreading it, hoping that it doesn’t suck.

This is a special case, however, because Jane’s Addiction has always meant more than just a bunch of songs to me. In the late ’80s, Jane’s, under the direction of anorexic-looking madman Perry Farrell, released a string of the most uncompromising, visionary records the major labels have ever seen. If you had to explain to someone in 1988 what “Mountain Song” sounded like, you’d be left with very few reference points – Led Zeppelin, sort of, but bigger, like a seventy-mile-long steamroller.

Looking back, it’s clear that Farrell and company first presaged the entire alt-rock movement with 1988’s Nothing’s Shocking, and then outdid it with 1990’s Ritual de lo Habitual, rendering the whole thing moot before it began. These are records so far ahead of their time that were they released today, they’d still sound forward-looking – Habitual especially, with its epic sprawl and dynamic atmospheres. None of the Nirvana-come-latelies that followed in that album’s path have reached as high as Jane’s did with the 10-minute “Three Days,” or the progressive-tinged “Then She Did…”

But there’s more to it than that. As I’m sure is the case with a lot of music fans my age, my first brush with corporate censorship revolved around Ritual de lo Habitual, and Warner Bros.’ insistence that the band replace the “offensive” cover art with something more “pleasant” to “grandmothers” who shop at “Wal-Mart.” The original art depicted papier-mache statues of three naked people in bed together, and by today’s standards, it’s fairly tasteful. Thirteen years ago, however, it was a big deal.

And I know it’s easy to impress a 16-year-old, but Farrell’s decision to scrap the cover entirely and replace it with a text block rendering of the First Amendment seemed downright heroic. Farrell further gained my respect when he decided, mere months later, that Jane’s Addiction had gone as far as it could with Habitual, and broke up the band before it could get stale. Even at 16, I was familiar with bands that had gone on too long, and inwardly applauded Farrell’s nerve and artistic conviction.

And then the money started coming in. Farrell quit his association with Lollapalooza, the traveling festival he helped create, in 1991 due to its increasing commercialization. It took 12 years to get him back in the saddle, and along the way he produced a bland side project (Porno for Pyros, although their second album, Good God’s Urge, had its moments) and stuck his name on a terrible electronica record (Song Yet To Be Sung). His Jane’s compatriot Dave Navarro, one of the most inventive guitarists of his generation, joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers for one so-so album (One Hot Minute) and also affixed his name to a lousy solo record (Trust No One).

Worse by far, though, was the money-hungry resurrection of Jane’s Addiction, who came together (minus original bassist Eric Avery, who was replaced by, of all people, Flea) for a reunion tour in 1997, complete with cash-in “rare tracks” compilation (the utterly useless Kettle Whistle). The effort seemed half-hearted at best, but now Farrell and company have decided to go whole-hog. Since no other project has lined the band members’ pockets quite like Jane’s Addiction did, they’ve reunited once more to headline Lollapalooza – minus Avery again, his spot this time covered by Chris Chaney. And of course, they’ve brought along some recorded product to shill. They’ve called it Strays.

You can see how one might consider this a triumph of the commercial over the artistic, and if you’re feeling melodramatic, the final death knell for a generation’s youthful, wide-eyed idealism. Even the jacket art of Strays is cynical and boring – the first of their cover images to not depict nipples, amusingly enough, it’s just a group photo, shot in a studio and digitally inserted in front of a landscape backdrop. This is not a cover worth fighting for, not an artistic statement worth preserving. It lies there and does nothing.

But maybe it’s the Waterworld effect – if you expect an absolute disaster, a halfway competent work will seem like genius. Or maybe I’m just mellowing out, and my youthful, wide-eyed idealism died a long time ago. Whatever the reason, I like Strays quite a bit. And whatever else this record may be, I can assure you it’s not a cash-in marketing tool. Jane’s worked on this, they crafted it when they could have just rushed something out, and for that they deserve at least one open-minded listen.

The funny thing is that Jane’s still play like it’s 1991. Yes, they’re older and a little mellower, but the songs and the band’s performance of them sounds very much like the last decade of pissers and moaners (what I like to call the “days of whine and poseurs”) never happened. Strays is a big, joyous record, with all the wailing guitar solos of the Guns ‘n’ Roses days, and liberal splashes of Led Zeppelin’s epic sense. After 12 years of guitarists following Saint Cobain’s lead, hitting the distortion pedal and calling it dynamics, it’s refreshing to hear someone like Navarro who knows what that word means. His tones slither and waft around this album, caressing it to life.

That’s not to say it doesn’t rock. One of the primary criticisms I’ve read of Strays is that it sounds like nu-metal, but that’s not true. It sounds like the nu-metal prototype Jane’s always was, molten riffs crashing into funk and Cure-style soundscapes, with a splash of electronics this time out. Jane’s started the whole mess, remember, and their sound was hijacked by the likes of Korn and ripped to shreds by Disturbed, Staind and other no-talents. We need a band like this to show us just how far this music has strayed from its original purpose – you’ve never heard a Jane’s Addiction song about how crummy life is, and you likely never will.

I don’t want to give the impression that Strays is a masterpiece, or even on the same level as Jane’s early works. It isn’t. These songs don’t have the same sense of unlimited adventure as the ones on Habitual – you never get the feeling with this album that anything can happen, that the floor could drop away at any moment. Strays also contains the worst Jane’s song ever, the acoustic blah “Everybody’s Friend,” which is almost spared by its nifty middle section, but not quite. Closer “To Match the Sun” fizzles before it can do anything, and “Hypersonic” doesn’t deserve its awe-inspiring drum beat.

But for surprising stretches of this record, all is right with the world. “Wrong Girl” is a neck-snapping slice of Zeppelin funk in odd tempos, “The Riches” percolates nicely until it flips on its own ear in typical Jane’s fashion, “Strays” is a good old clean guitar romp, and the album’s highlight, “Price I Pay,” condenses a side-long suite into five and a half minutes. Along the way, you’ll be taken aback by how much this new Jane’s Addiction actually sounds like Jane’s Addiction.

The hallmark of this album is its unrelenting positivity, a trait that all by itself sets it apart from the legions of Jane’s wannabes that sprung up in their wake. Farrell remains one of the most idiosyncratic frontmen on the scene, simply because he always sings and never screams, growls or raps. His delivery is so full of joy that even when his lyrics are accusatory (“Just Because”) or sarcastic (“The Riches”), he sounds on the verge of ecstasy. And it’s that sense of fun, of pure delight, that’s been slowly and painfully excised from so-called alternative music in the 13 years since Jane’s albums.

Strays may not be an instant classic, and it probably won’t irrevocably change the musical landscape like Shocking and Habitual did. Surprisingly, though, I think that’s a shame, because until hearing it, I didn’t realize how much we needed Jane’s Addiction’s brand of delirium and wonder. I was expecting a crapfest from tired old men hoping for a payday, and I got a vital, electric album from a band that probably doesn’t even realize how relevant they are. If Strays begins another alt-rock revolution and brings forth a fountain of wannabes who learn from its deep textures and joyous grooves, it won’t be a minute too soon.

Cash your checks, boys. You’ve earned them this time.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Well, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences missed their last chance to give Joss Whedon an Emmy for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer this week. One visual effects nomination, and that’s it. Never mind the fact that with “Selfless,” “Conversations With Dead People,” “Storyteller” and Whedon’s series finale “Chosen,” Buffy served up four of the best hours of television of this or just about any year. Screw it, let’s give the award to The Sopranos again.

Okay, end of rant. And, I’ve decided, end of dreary and depressing topics for this column, at least for this week. Yeah, the music industry is in a lousy place, and the world at large is in a lousier one, and at least one million injustices are committed each second, which means six million awful things have happened in the time it’s taken you to read this atrocious run-on sentence. One of music’s great attributes is its ability to make you think about the state of the world, or forget about it entirely. It’s all in how it’s used, and some of the best records ever made revel in their power to inflict temporary blissful amnesia for 50 minutes or so.

For instance.

I had a conversation this week about the new Fountains of Wayne album, Welcome Interstate Managers, and I remembered that this nifty little gem was still languishing in my “to review” pile. FoW is basically a songwriting duo – Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood – that makes some of the most infectious, hilarious, touching pop music this side of Sloan. They’ve never written a song that can’t be described as a ditty – they’re all simple, perfectly constructed three-minute marvels. The magic of FoW is that while these ditties are playing, you’ll find it hard to imagine enjoying anything as much as you’re enjoying them.

In some ways, FoW are doing a delightfully deadpan mockery of pop music, using its framework to dissect and destroy its usual lyrical concerns. Welcome Interstate Managers is in places just a few vulgarities removed from Ween – “Hey Julie,” for example, is a song the Ween brothers could have penned, and “Hung Up on You” would fit nicely on their 12 Golden Country Greats album. Any album that begins with the line “He was killed by a cellular phone explosion” is going to be labeled quirky, an easy description that has relegated bands like They Might Be Giants to the novelty bin.

And like TMBG, dismissing FoW as merely a quirky pop outfit will likely lead one to miss the subtler, more beautiful moments they pull off with ease. Yes, there is a song here based on the line “Stacy’s mom has got it going on,” but there’s also “Hackensack,” a lovely lament for a lost, now-famous friend. And there’s “All Kinds of Time,” which takes three minutes to describe in loving detail the couple of seconds before a young quarterback throws a perfect pass. And there’s “Valley Winter Song,” which emulates musically the soft New England snowstorm it paints lyrically.

And there’s “Bright Future in Sales,” the most fun you’ll have listening to a single song this year, barring an excellent new album from the aforementioned Sloan. Musically it’s perfect pop, and lyrically it’s a Dilbert strip minus the cynicism – “I had a line on a brand new account, but now I can’t seem to find where I wrote that number down, I try to focus, I’m staring at the screen, pretending like I know what all these little flashing lights mean…” In an alternate universe, this is an anthem that’s blaring out of speakers in convertibles roaring down every street in America.

And there’s “Halley’s Waitress,” a pastiche of ’70s orchestral pop balladry that’s just as clever as you hope it is: “Halley’s waitress never comes around, she’s hiding in the kitchen, she’s nowhere to be found…and when she finally appears it’s like she’s been away for years…” They choose the popular mispronunciation of Halley – “HAY-lee” instead of “HAL-lee” – but one gets the sense that a band this smart wouldn’t make that mistake, and it’s all part of the joke.

Welcome Interstate Managers has a masterfully executed ebb and flow, as well. In fact, had the album ended, elegantly and beautifully, with “Fire Island,” it would have been a worthy successor to 1999’s Utopia Parkway. Unfortunately, Collingwood and Schlesinger have uncannily sequenced the only four inferior songs right at the end. Three of them meander with pleasant grooves and very little melody, kind of like second-rate Oasis, and closer “Yours and Mine” is so brief it feels like an afterthought. “Peace and Love” does a decent job of skewering the recent lazy-hippie acoustics-and-drum-machines bong music thing, but otherwise the final quartet plays like a set of hastily appended bonus tracks.

But hey, you have the power to press stop at track 12 if you want to, and if you choose to do so, you’ll have a nearly flawless pop gem on your hands. Welcome Interstate Managers is just light enough to be winsome and ingratiating, and yet just considered and artful enough to avoid easy dismissal. It’s a pop record for people who think they’re too cool for pop records, and an absolute charmer. Like all the best pop, there is loneliness and disconnection beneath its sunny surface, and the lyrics, read on their own, would seem to belong to a much sadder record. That it leaves you with a hazy sense of pleasant wonder is nothing short of magic.

What’s that? Another example? Well, okay, but just this once…

I’m eventually going to write a book about criminally underrated bands, and when I do, Enuff Znuff will easily rate their own chapter. Most folks, if they remember them at all, lump Enuff Znuff in with the late ’80s-early ’90s hair metal explosion, dismissing them as they would Trixter or Britny Fox. These people are insane. Remember this – there will be a quiz later.

EZN (their preferred abbreviation) have been making records for 15 years, and their latest, Welcome to Blue Island, is their 11th. They scored their only two hits in 1989 with “New Thing” and “Fly High Michelle” from their self-titled debut, and have been ignored ever since. But here’s the thing – since their second album, the wonderful Strength, EZN have been on a roll, penning one terrific pop song after another. It would be far easier for me to list the bad Enuff Znuff songs, there are so few of them. They are the most Beatles-influenced power pop band since Cheap Trick, and proof positive that simply making great records is not enough in today’s market.

Enuff Znuff are easily described thusly: imagine if John Lennon had left the Beatles and started the glam-rock revolution. They’ve always balanced equal parts British melodicism and good old American arena-rock, despite not being able to play arenas since 1991 or so. Sure, there are wailing guitar solos now and then, but they’re easily countered by the soaring, Lennon-esque voice of Donnie Vie. (Sorry, but there’s no other way to describe him – he sounds an awful lot like John Lennon at his best.) And of course, there are the songs, with as many interesting chord changes and inescapable melodies as the boys can cram in. The work speaks for itself – Donnie Vie and Chip Znuff have written more great songs together than a large percentage of the folks who routinely outsell them.

I know that bands are supposed to get better with age, but the last few EZN records have been pretty damn amazing. After a few efforts put together on a shoestring, the production finally caught up with the songcraft on 1999’s Paraphernalia, and only got better on 2000’s superb 10. Because this type of music is much more popular in Japan for some reason, they get EZN records before we do. Add in the search for a stateside record label (they finally landed one with Perris Records) and my aversion to import prices, and all told I’ve had to wait more than a year to hear 2002’s Blue Island, just out in the U.S. Not that I was worried, but I’m happy to report that the streak continues – it’s by and large an excellent pop album.

There is a touch more rock this time, and I always found it odd that a band that regularly throws back to the ’60s would want to evoke the ’80s as much as they do, but happily only one song – “Roller Bladin’ in the Shade” – really recalls the days of stonewashed jeans and teased hair. The rest of the album carries on the Beatles-but-louder tradition they’ve always upheld, and there are gems aplenty. “Saturday” and “Sanibel Island” could duke it out for Best Summer Anthem, “Man Without a Heart” levitates on gorgeous harmonies, and “Fallen in Love Again” is perfectly Lennon/McCartney.

Most impressive of all is the mostly instrumental concluding trilogy, quite unlike anything they’ve attempted thus far. The rocking “Z Overture” is the work of a tight, well-hewn unit, and it slams headlong into the multi-part jazzy epic “Zentimental Journey,” which, among other things, outs Vie as a halfway decent scat singer. That tune ends with a repeated Beatles quote – “Here comes the sun” – which, of course, leads into the wailing-guitar-and-huge-harmonies coda, called “The Sun.” It’s sort of their mini-Abbey Road suite, and it’s a fine capper to a short yet rewarding album.

The American bonus tracks are definitely tacked on – there’s a live reading of “Hide Your Love Away” on the Howard Stern Show, a new track performed with former BulletBoy Marq Torien (not even in the same league as Vie), and a note-for-note cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” the point of which eludes me. Like Welcome Interstate Managers, Blue Island is much improved by stopping at track 12.

There are rumors that Blue Island will be the last Enuff Znuff album, since Vie refused to tour with the band in order to promote his soon-to-be-released solo record Just Enough. Should this prove to be true, it will feel like reality finally intruding. Considering the tumultuous musical landscape into which they were born, it’s pretty remarkable that EZN managed 11 albums, as if the gods have been looking the other way each time. At the moment, they are alone in their field, the only band doing what they do, or at least as well as they do it. In the end, it’s all about the songs, and virtually every Enuff Znuff song can be lifted up as an example of pure pop joy.

I haven’t quite digested the new 6gig yet, but I hold out hope that I can get to it next time. Also on the way are Jane’s Addiction, Spock’s Beard, Queensryche, Mark Eitzel and Harry Connick, Jr. I just read that list again and I can’t help marveling at its incongruity. It’s neat to be me.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The Normal Rules Do Not Apply

On Glenn McDonald and the Alarm

7/9/03

I’ve been thinking an awful lot about big corporations lately.

I’m not sure why – maybe it’s because I work for one, so I get to see first-hand the doublethink and the layers of useless terminology and processes posing as innovations. I get to participate in soul-numbing multi-step procedures every day, procedures which could be simplified with the application of a tiny bit of common sense, but which are blindly and unquestioningly carried out because that’s the way things are done.

Part of my stultifying job is assembling wire harnesses for air conditioning units. These harnesses come in boxes of 50 or so, and each wire is masking-taped together at the ends. Hence, an essential part of my preparation for my job is removing each tiny piece of masking tape, one by one, box by box. This takes hours. These strips of tape are so small and tightly wound that it’s impossible to imagine a machine adhering them, which means that somewhere there’s a guy whose job it is to tape the ends of the wires together, one by one, box by box. That guy and I are likely being paid similar amounts of money to counteract each other.

And it should be the simplest thing in the world for me to call that guy and ask him to stop taping the wires. Surely he has better things to do with his time. I know I do. Yes, taping the wires prevents them from tangling up during shipment, but once I remove the tape, the wires get tangled on my end anyway, so what would be the difference? Thing is, I can’t call that guy – I have to go through my bosses, who then have to go to that guy’s bosses, because we’re talking about two enormous corporations communicating, and nothing will change because taping the wires is just how it’s done. The tape guy and I will still be paid to accomplish absolutely nothing.

Naturally, this made me think of the record industry.

I realized this morning that last week’s column offered a lot of problems without clear solutions. I feel the need this time to offer up a few more positives, to show that there are people out there trying to swim against the tide and make a difference in a soulless, plastic musical climate. There are people who are actively discovering new ways to reach people and connect with them, bringing undeservedly obscure music to light. In fact, I want to mention two of them by name: Glenn McDonald and Mike Peters.

Glenn and I have a bit in common – we both run a weekly online music column that often diverges into personal terrain. Glenn’s is called The War Against Silence and can be found at www.furia.com/twas. He also lives in my once-and-forever home state of Massachusetts, no more than an hour’s train ride from where I was born. That, however, is where the similarities seem to end, because Glenn and I hardly ever agree.

It’s not just our taste in music, although there’s a pretty impressive gap between us there, too. In the very rare cases in which our tastes intersect, we always seem to like a particular artist for completely different reasons, and never agree on which particular albums are any good. I loved Marillion’s Anoraknophobia, for example, largely because it sounds so un-Marillion and it shows their undying willingness to grow and change. Glenn, conversely, seems to have given up on the band entirely after repeatedly trying to like Anoraknophobia and failing. I hated Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk, going so far as to call it a boring waste of time. Glenn, on the other hand, called it the “best album ever.”

But that’s why I read him – to get a different viewpoint, and to read about artists I’ve never sampled. I also read TWAS every week to marvel at Glenn’s writing style, which couldn’t be more different from mine. I tend to focus on the music itself, going into often ridiculous detail about instrumentation and tone and theory. Glenn talks about how music affects him personally, and he does so with engaging eloquence. You can’t deny his palpable desire to connect his love of music with his readers, and while he sometimes misses the mark, he’s usually successful at drawing you in to his pocket universe, and communicating his one-on-one relationship with music in a universal way.

Glenn’s is the only online music column I read faithfully, and also the one from which I’ve learned the most. The highest compliment I can pay him is that he’s held on to his passion for music, a passion I sometimes find myself lacking when it comes to writing my own weekly missive. Reading his work helps me refresh and revitalize my own, and whether he’d take that as a compliment or not I don’t know, considering how often we disagree, but I owe him. So thanks, Glenn. And everyone who isn’t Glenn, go check out his column.

I really wanted to mention Glenn this time because he’s also the only online reviewer I’ve encountered who has as much love and respect for the Alarm as I have. It’s apparent that we both encountered the Alarm at similar points in our lives – those idealistic years when soaring anthems of hope and struggle connect with some unexplainable spark within. To most of America, the Alarm is a tiny blip of a band, most commonly known for their supporting tour with U2 in the late ‘80s. To some of us, though, the Alarm fulfilled the promise of U2 with more sincerity and less ego.

In one form or another, the spirit of the Alarm has continued through the efforts of singer/songwriter Mike Peters. The band officially broke up in 1992, but Peters has slowly staged a comeback in his native Wales, organizing a website (http://www.thealarm.com/) which treats the Alarm like the most important and influential band ever to walk the earth, and evolving his blossoming solo career into a vehicle for his newly formed version of the original foursome. He’s toured with the new guys for three years, getting old and new fans used to the name Alarm again, and now he’s reached the linchpin of his plan – a new Alarm album called In the Poppy Fields.

Peters is kind of a take it or leave it proposition, especially for newbies – he appears to carry out his life and career as if he’s never heard of irony. Everything Peters has ever done has been done passionately, and he puts himself on the line regularly. His self-serious, save-the-world-through-music persona invites laughter, but only until it becomes clear that it’s not a persona at all. Unlike Bono, for example, Peters truly believes every word that he sings, and he seems to have no patience for frivolity. I couldn’t imagine him taking an entire decade to ironically comment on the artificiality of fame, as U2 did – he’s got more important things to discuss, like hope and peace and rock ‘n’ roll.

Which brings me to the main reason I wanted to mention Glenn and Mike at the same time. Glenn beat me to the punch by reviewing Poppy Fields weeks ago, and he delivered the most accurate and insightful description of Mike Peters I’ve ever read. It’s bloody perfect, and I hope he doesn’t mind if I reproduce it here in its entirety:

“Gradually, over the past few years, Peters has morphed into a sort of hyper-cuddly reinvention of the fundamental archetype of the rock star as a new and inexplicable creature capable of taking himself monumentally and encyclopedically seriously without ever being detectably dour or egotistical about it. Far from any delusion that he’s some kind of King of Pop, Peters more often appears to labor under the delusion that he has somehow inherited the post of Town Singer in a village that has, and has only ever had, just one. He cheerfully sets out to entertain the townspeople with the mixture of senses of responsibility and entitlement that arise from the apparent assumption that people come to him for entertainment in the same way that they visit the town’s only blacksmith for horseshoes.”

Of course, Glenn and I disagree on the specifics of our shared love for Peters and his work. My favorite Alarm album is Change, their startlingly ambitious opus from 1989, and I like it for the same reasons Glenn seems to dislike it – it often sounds nothing like the Alarm. Unsurprisingly, our views on Poppy Fields differ sharply, for the same reasons. This album rarely sounds like the Alarm. Rousing, hopeful anthems only make up a small percentage of the record. But that stands to reason, since despite Peters’ insistence on using the name, the band that recorded Poppy Fields isn’t, in fact, the Alarm.

This is my main quibble with Peters, and it stems from the same place as my objections to the new Jane’s Addiction album. To my mind, the Alarm was four guys – Peters, guitarist Dave Sharp, bassist Eddie MacDonald and drummer Nigel Twist. The new Alarm retains only Peters, and even though guitarist James Stevenson, bassist Craig Adams and drummer Steve Grantley have the blessing of the original members, they’re not the Alarm. I don’t doubt the purity of Peters’ intentions, or the deliberate nature of his process, but it’s a misnomer to refer to this Mike Peters solo album as the work of his one-time band.

One thing I can’t fault Peters for, however, is his willingness to try new avenues of fan interaction and distribution. Poppy Fields is a bold step forward for ’net-based music, as it’s currently available exclusively from the Alarm website, and it incorporates a level of interactivity that seems like a logical progression, but is in truth a great leap. Most albums emerge from the studio at four or five times their intended size, and the artist usually undergoes a weeding-out process, throwing two-thirds to three-fourths of the recordings away. Peters and the band recorded 54 tracks for Poppy Fields, but rather than shelve more than 40 of them, he released the whole thing online as a five-CD set.

But that’s not all. Those who purchased Poppy Fields in its entirety before March were asked to vote on the track listing for a more traditional 10 to 12-song album to be culled from these songs. It’s based on the often correct assumption that the fans know how to turn new people on to the band better than the band does. Think about it – how many times have you bemoaned the selection of a first single that puts a bad face on an otherwise terrific album? Here’s an Alarm fan’s chance to design the album most likely to win new fans. It’s a very cool idea.

There is one flaw, however. You get the sense listening to the unedited Poppy Fields that Peters absolutely considers the 54-song version to be the official one. Unlike Glenn, who managed with ease to select 10 songs, I’m having difficulty imagining any version of In the Poppy Fields that runs less than two hours, so excellent is the vast majority of the material here.

Part of my positive reaction stems from my undying love for U2. Problem is, Bono’s boys have had a spot of trouble lately sounding like U2 – let’s say, for the last 13 years. Peters appears to have noticed this as well, and he’s set out to fill that vacuum retroactively. Here’s enough earnest, honest, wide-open landscape music to replace U2’s entire ‘90s output, and there’s no denying the connection this time. One listen to rousing opener “Close” and it’s clear – Peters couldn’t have made this sound more like U2 if he’d tried.

But listen beyond the “infinite guitar” trappings and atmospherics, and you’ll hear melodies the likes of which U2 haven’t written in ages. “Alone Together” gets the most out of its dramatic chord changes, “The Search for the Real Life” drops off surprisingly into spoken word at just the right times, and “How Long and How Much Longer” achieves orbit. This is a much mellower record than I expected, punctuated by moments of pulsing electrics (“Coming Home,” “Trafficking,” “45rpm”) that gain power through contrast. Best of all, for a 54-song collection, this thing is paced perfectly and sequenced brilliantly. Aside from a slow stretch of songs at the end of the third disc, it’s never boring.

There are definite highlights, which I suppose could aid in whittling this thing down. If I had to pick a favorite disc, it would be the second one, perhaps the mellowest of all. But “New Home New Life” is beautiful, gliding on Peters’ falsetto, and “Rain Down” is even more so, all passion and acoustic guitars. “45rpm” is a surprising punk raveup, leading into “Everafter,” a great rock song. The disc concludes with “The Unexplained,” a moody acoustic mantra unlike anything the Alarm has done.

Elsewhere, Peters sets the bar high with “The Drunk and the Disorderly,” the most Alarm-like song here. (In fact, it bears perhaps too close a resemblance to “Spirit of ’76.”) It’s a singalong fist-pumper, sequenced exactly halfway through, and it leaves little doubt that Peters still has the old fire. The fourth disc is given over entirely to a 30-minute song-suite called “Edward Henry Street,” and it’s the most impressive chapter in Peters’ ongoing autobiography in song. He leads the band through styles and sounds of his youth, and the songs amazingly recapture that sense of innocent power that infused the first few Alarm records. “Edward Henry Street” ends with “It’s Going to Be a Good Year,” reason enough to fall in love with Peters’ work all over again.

And In the Poppy Fields ends well, too. It’s rare to sift through this much material and still find mini-masterpieces like “Free Inside” sequenced at track 51. The record ends with three psychedelic experiments disguised as epics, and here Peters pulls out the late-period Beatles influences and takes them for a ride. It’s gratifying to me that he concludes such a mammoth work with three songs that break new ground for him, that push his personal envelope beyond his admittedly narrow purview. It’s a good sign for the future that he’s still willing to grow and change.

Throughout Poppy Fields, in fact, older fans of the band may think he’s changed a bit too much. Quite a lot of this set is slow, acoustic and moody, and while these songs would probably have been axed (or at least revved up) by the Alarm of old, here they serve to further separate the eras. Peters has grown, both as a person and as a songwriter, and if he’d churned out 54 variations on “Strength” or “Sixty-Eight Guns,” it would have been laughable. Poppy Fields sounds like what it is – the work of a mature songwriter who knows how much the world sucks, and who keeps the fire alive anyhow.

I admit that part of what I like about Poppy Fields is its sheer mass, its inescapable ambition. But I also like that it provides a comprehensive, crystal-clear picture of Mike Peters, one which justifies the place I’ve reserved for him in my personal pantheon. How easy would it be for Peters to live off the past, to fade away into an anecdote on VH1’s I Love the ‘80s? Instead, he pushes himself to excel musically, and pushes the model of internet distribution forward at the same time.

In the Poppy Fields is an imperfect collection, to be sure, but it simply burns with the desire to connect, to reach out and ignite everyone it touches. Far from the impersonal product of a massive corporation, it’s an intensely personal expression, delivered directly from Peters’ heart to yours, with no interference. It’s an attempt at a one-on-one dialogue, a stab at revitalizing music by bringing it back to its original purpose. That alone is worth supporting. That it’s very, very good is just icing.

Remember to check out Glenn McDonald – www.furia.com/twas. Next week, the new 6gig.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

At this point in his career, saying that Bruce Cockburn has made a terrific album is kind of redundant.

In fact, Bruce Cockburn has made more than a dozen terrific albums, and a bunch more very good ones. He’s had a long career – his new album You’ve Never Seen Everything is his 27th – and while he’s something of a national hero in his native Canada, he’s pretty much a nonentity here. Which is a shame, because Cockburn is a talent that deserves wider recognition and blah blah bitty blah.

I’m so tired of singing this same song. Aren’t you tired of hearing it?

Most of you don’t know who Bruce Cockburn is. Just a glance at his sales figures makes such a statement self-evident. Somehow this man has managed to create 27 albums over more than 30 years, and still escape the notice of just about everyone. He’s on tiny Rounder Records now in the United States, and there’s no question that Rounder is a great label – they discovered Alison Krauss, and released the soundtrack to the Buffy musical, just for starters. They’re just small. They don’t have the resources to put Bruce Cockburn’s incredible music in the home of every American, and there’s only so much room on the radio dial anyway and Jennifer Lopez is taking up most of it with her ass. So you don’t get to hear Bruce’s new album.

I try to pretend most of the time that this greed-driven music distribution system we have doesn’t make me angry, but truth be told, it pisses me off. You all know who Puff Daddy-slash-P. Diddy is. You’ve all heard the Backstreet Boys. I talked to a guy at work this week who buys nothing but MTV-promoted “rebellious” rock, like Disturbed, Linkin Park and Staind. He just bought his first Jimi Hendrix album, because Hulk Hogan recommended it on TV. He’ll buy the Staind album the day it comes out, but it takes Hulk Hogan to convince him to try Jimi Hendrix.

Guess what? He was blown away. He’s a Jimi fan now.

Music should be taught in schools, right alongside English and math. Kids should know that they’re being used, that marketers have targeted them since birth to buy products disguised as emotions. They should know that there’s a world of music that won’t be spoon-fed to them, a world that’s brighter and more vivid than anything TRL says they have to buy, buy, buy. They should be encouraged to appreciate music as art, and be taught to discern the honest and talented from the plastic and calculated. Otherwise they’ll grow up to buy Staind albums. Or, you know, albums by whatever group of sullen, middle-class mopers have taken Staind’s place in the grand machine.

Everything is backwards. Everything is in reverse. There’s no way that Carlos Santana should have to duet with Rob Thomas or Michelle Branch to sell albums. (The best part of that last sentence is that people stumbling upon this column online in 10 years will be scratching their heads and asking, “Rob who?”) There’s no way that a talentless bozo like 50 Cent should be selling millions of records and Terry Taylor should have to post a letter to his website practically begging his tiny group of fans to buy his albums, not copy them for each other. He can’t pay his bills, you see. He needs the paltry income his few hundred CD sales a month bring him to live.

Seriously, what the hell is going on?

This is not music that no one would like, either. Most of the great albums that appear and disappear month in and month out are filled with songs people would respond to, if only they got to hear them. Many of them are filled with songs that would open worlds to people, overflowing with sounds they’ve never heard in combinations they’ve never imagined. But we’re trained, you see. We’re trained by the grand parade of lifeless packaging, trained to believe that our opinion means nothing. That our taste means nothing. Most people don’t like music unless they’re certain that everyone else will like it, too, and they can be reaffirmed by the herd.

This mentality makes it incredibly simple for the marketers. If the primary characteristic of something “good” is that everyone likes it, and everyone is afraid of deviating from the norm, then it’s the simplest thing in the world to use the mass media machine to make a certain product the norm. Put 50 Cent on the radio 40 times a day and in heavy rotation on MTV, for no other reason than because the record company said so, and you’ve circumvented the natural order of things – you’ve made something “good” by making it popular first, instead of letting it become popular because it’s good. If you can do that, and get people used to it, then the product can be any old shit you wish.

All of which makes it harder to find the music that actually is good. Take Bruce Cockburn, for example. (This is, after all, supposed to be a column about him and his new album.) As redundant as it may be to say, You’ve Never Seen Everything is a great album. Cockburn plays a tricky yet appealing blend of jazz and folk, with indelible melodies and impeccable guitar work. Just the opening guitar figure of “Tried and Tested” is enough to win you over – it’s deep and soaring, weaving a dense web of light. “Open” is a wonderful pop song, as is “Put It In Your Heart,” and there hasn’t been a more graceful, gently uplifting number this year than “Don’t Forget About Delight.”

The most impressive aspect of this album, as usual, is Cockburn’s gift with lyrics. It’s always worth it to digest his albums whole, since he offers the most finely tuned sense of lyrical balance you’re likely to find. The message of nearly every Cockburn album is that life is absurdly difficult and depressing, but hope is always there. He juxtaposes moods like no one else – furious political rant “Trickle Down” (which contains a stunning piano solo by Andy Milne and the great line “pinstripe prophet of peckerhead greed”) is followed by “Everywhere Dance,” the most gentle and beautiful thing here. And it’s all about unnamed hope – “And we cry out for grace to lay truth bare, the dance is the truth and it’s everywhere.”

Similarly, the nine-minute title track is a mostly spoken litany of responses to the person who says they’ve seen everything: “On the other side of the world the drug squad busts a child’s birthday party, puts bullets in the family dog and the blood goes all over the baby. And the Mounties are strip-searching schoolgirls because they can.” The song laments the fact that we “never feel the light falling all around.” One song later and he’s making sure we “Don’t Forget About Delight” – “Amid the post-ironic postulating and the poet’s pilfered rhymes, meaning feels like it’s evaporating out of sight and out of mind, don’t forget…”

In many ways, though, “Tried and Tested” is the mission statement of the album, and of this phase of Cockburn’s life. It lists off the trials the song’s narrator has faced, and concludes with one repeated phrase – “I’m still here.” Twenty-seven albums into a career which, added all together, probably doesn’t equal the sales figures of Avril Lavigne’s one record (five, Mike!), Cockburn is still here, following his muse and his conscience and simply making great music. Music which, unless you seek it out, you’ll never get to hear.

The stupid music distribution system works just fine for the rich guys who run it, so it’s not going to change. That means we have to. We need to crawl out from under the pile of soulless shiny crap they keep dropping on us, and seek out the good stuff, and support it. None of this means you need to agree with me about Bruce Cockburn – he’s my current example of a guy who’s had a lengthy, acclaimed career in relative obscurity. There are many, many more, most of which I’ve never heard. And isn’t that the best part about music – the discovery? Yes, it’s harder than it needs to be to find those magical musical moments, but finding them is always worth it, isn’t it? This is no time to be complacent. That’s exactly what they want. Dig. Discover. Explore.

To paraphrase the man, you’ve never heard everything.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So I was watching Project Greenlight on Sunday night, and I nearly fell out of my chair in shock. Let me tell you about it.

For those who’ve never seen it, Project Greenlight is a show on HBO that documents this interesting experiment. Will Hunting and the Sexiest Man Alive (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, respectively) have set up this annual contest to find untapped filmmaking talent, and give them an opportunity to make a real, million-dollar nationally-released film. They take submissions from screenwriters and directors, fly the finalists out to the Sundance Film Festival to pitch their projects (or themselves), and select one script to be made and one director to make it. Then, the whole filming process is documented by HBO and turned into some surprisingly compelling reality television.

I highly enjoyed the first season, which followed neophyte Pete Jones as he made Stolen Summer, a fairly mediocre coming-of-age tale. What was fascinating about it to me was seeing all the incredibly hard work and emotional anguish that goes into the making of even a slight, forgettable film. Some people actually think that their favorite actors make up their own lines, and directors merely point the camera at them and the film comes together on its own. Project Greenlight worked overtime to show how untrue this assumption is. Even with the slanted, chopped-up reality presented on the show, which probably resembled the whole truth only a small fraction of the time, it was a fun and informative window into a world few will experience.

So I made a point to watch the premiere of the second season on Sunday, which culminated with Damon and Affleck announcing the winners at Sundance. And I guess I’m really out of the loop, because the winners were announced in January, and I only found out who they were by watching the show, but whatever. But I plan to watch every week from now on, and catch the movie itself, because it turns out I’ve met the directors.

Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle were local celebrities in Portland, Maine while I lived there. The two hosted a cable access show that gained them notoriety, but their real accomplishments were the feature films and shorts they made, including the creepy Reindeer Games and the rather funny Pennyweight. Plus, the pair used to do movie reviews for Face Magazine, which I edited for years. I always admired Kyle and Efram for their drive and ambition, and their genuine talent – which, like all genuine talent in Portland, was met with a mixture of jealously and derision, for the most part. The two are amazingly sympatico, and getting to watch them make a movie on HBO is going to be fun.

The movie they get to make is called The Battle of Shaker Heights, and was written by fellow contest winner Erica Beeney. This will be the first film these guys have directed that they didn’t write, and it should be interesting to see how much of their creative stamp they get to imprint on it. Anyway, I just wanted to congratulate Kyle and Efram for landing this opportunity – and the premiere episode of the show certainly argues that they did earn their chance – and say how strange it already is to watch these guys, a fixture of a life I left behind, doing their thing on television. Hope it turned out well.

* * * * *

Pretty much every musical artist who isn’t Fugazi or the Sex Pistols has, at one time or another, been accused by fans of selling out. But what, exactly, does that mean?

Unfortunately, to some closed-minded people, selling out refers to anything a band does that might expand their audience. It’s the our-little-secret syndrome – the truth is that some people only love certain music because most everyone else has never heard of it. They latch on to bands with which they identify, and then regard people who get into them later as less than worthy. “I’ve been into the Screaming Fuckdragons since their first demo tape,” they sniff. “You only got into them when they signed with a label,” they whine. And then they go in for the kill – “You only liked them after they sold out.”

But if an artist is producing good work, isn’t it a good thing that said artist’s audience continues to expand? It’s usually the opposite, honestly – despite decades of solid, terrific work, people like Bruce Cockburn and Mike Roe continue to sell only to the faithful few. There’s a certain indie cachet to only selling a few thousand copies (at most) of one’s work, but such a paucity of income doesn’t guarantee the ability to keep making that work. It’s a vicious cycle, and as long as the work is not affected, audience expansion is an unqualified good.

Ah, but there’s the rub – the work often does suffer in such circumstances, especially when artists sign to major labels. Suddenly, there are more people with jobs on the line who want a hand in crafting the music, and most of them aren’t musicians. Even if that’s not the case, it’s often extremely difficult to maintain the sense of the work under such increased pressure. (Another reason I’m interested to watch Kyle and Efram make their movie…) For instance, few would argue that R.E.M. made a smooth transition to Warner Bros. Records from tiny I.R.S. in the late ’80s. Their last I.R.S. album, Document, was excellent, and their first WB album, Green, was… well, not so excellent. They didn’t really find their footing again until Automatic for the People, three albums into their contract.

It is possible, however, for a band or artist ascending to major label status to retain the qualities that won them fans in the first place. An arguably perfect example is Sonic Youth, who kept the squalling, dissonant wonder of Daydream Nation when they moved to Geffen for Goo. Listen to those records (and the follow-up, Dirty) now and they sound like a logical progression. Still, at the time, fans cried sellout just because the band went to a major. Honestly, if Geffen could help get something like Washing Machine or NYC Ghosts and Flowers made and internationally distributed, then it can’t be all bad.

Selling out, then, should be a term reserved for those artists who deliberately change their sound or the content of their work to appeal to a broader audience. Under that definition, neither R.E.M. nor Sonic Youth would qualify as sellouts. (I don’t care how “poppy” you think Goo is, to the mass public it still sounds like unlistenable waves of noise. Really.) In order to really examine the process of selling out, we need to look at albums specifically designed for radio play, or video rotation, or anything else that sets commercial concerns above artistic ones.

Okay, then. I’ve got a couple.

It pains me that both of this week’s targets are talented women performers, because we don’t have enough of them on major labels. Jewel’s debut album, Pieces of You, seemed to indicate the birthing of a genuine, major talent. It was mostly acoustic and folksy, but it was nearly bursting with emotion and personality. Songs like “Adrian” are difficult to listen to – Jewel put so much real pain into their delivery that they practically shake with honesty and power. Similarly, Liz Phair made a huge splash with her defiantly lo-fi debut, Exile in Guyville, a maelstrom of blunt vulgarity and devastating lyrical acumen. Guyville went on to become a legend, held in such high esteem that any new Phair album gets the same treatment as a new Star Wars film – it could be Citizen Kane and still be disappointing.

I’m not entirely sure how we ended up here, though, because both Jewel and Liz Phair have decided, presumably independently of one another, to become pop stars. Jewel’s new album is called 0304, named after the years she hopes to ride it all the way to the bank, and believe it or not, it’s an excursion into dance-pop land. This is the kind of album which replaces both the words “to” and “too” with the numeral “2” in the song titles, the kind of album that surges forward on glossy production and propulsive, programmed drum beats. It’s the kind of album that prefaces each chorus with the production equivalent of a mighty voice screaming, “Here it comes!!!”

Unsurprisingly, Jewel adapts well to this style, which doesn’t speak to versatility as much as it does to Jewel’s faceless non-identity. Since her debut, she’s effectively subsumed her singular voice in the whims of her producers. She’s made slick Lilith Fair pop (Spirit), bland country-tinged rock (This Way) and a frigging Christmas album (Joy), and she’s completely submerged herself in these genres each time. It’s to the point that Jewel probably can’t remember how to summon the strength of her debut anymore.

0304 is an album that could have been made by any one of the current crop of teen starlets, and it would probably be praised for its minor moments of interest if it had been. “Leave the Lights On,” for example, incorporates some jazzy elements behind Jewel’s processed, husky voice. “Haunted” is supposed to be creepy, and you can hear the barest glimmers of what it could have been beneath the drum machine. “Doin’ Fine” is also an acceptable pop song.

Oddly, though, it’s the lyrics that really do this record in. They’re so bad on some tracks that part of my preparation for writing this column was to look up the noun form of insipid, because I was sure I’d need it. (It’s “insipidity,” by the way, just in case I don’t manage to use it.) Here, for example, is the chorus of “U & Me = Love,” a title I swear I am not making up: “Come on baby won’t u crash into me, I’m like nothing that you’ve ever seen, Dynamite, I’ll blow your mind, Guaranteed 2 mesmerize, You’ll say ‘Ooh la, la, la.'” All “2 kewl” spellings have been preserved.

Still, it’s easier to sell out when you have very little to sell, and Jewel has made such a schizophrenic mess of her career that it’s hard to be surprised at this move. 0304 seems entirely geared towards getting Jewel on TRL, but after three utterly bland and featureless albums, who’s to say she doesn’t belong there? If, however, Liz Phair winds up there, it would be kind of tragic. It’s hard to argue with the downward slide of Phair’s career, though, and the best you can say about her post-Guyville output is that, unlike Jewel, she’s followed a straight line of decaying decline. None of that confusing lateral movement for Phair. It’s been straight down for many, many years.

The strange, unfortunate nadir of Phair’s career to date is her self-titled fourth album, a slick product from the school of Sheryl Crow. Phair is the bigger attention-getter, largely due to interviews in which she’s dissed Guyville and said this album is the one she’s always wanted to make. Oh, and of course there’s the cover photo, in which 36-year-old Phair goes all Maxim on us in a shot reminiscent of Christina Aguilera’s recent Rolling Stone cover.

If she’s telling the truth, and Liz Phair is the album she’s always meant to make, then it only means that she’s not someone we should have been paying any attention to in the first place. She collaborates with the Matrix, the production team behind Avril Lavigne (that’s four, Mike!), on several tracks, including the pseudo-woman-power anthem, “Extraordinary,” also the first single. The Matrix has worked its magic here – their songs sound just like everyone else they produce, and they’ve even turned Phair into a pop singer, sanding off her rough edges. Sadly, the rest of the album is of a piece with the Matrix singles. Even the Michael Penn-produced material is dumb and glossy, and virtually none of the songs exhibit an ounce of individuality. They’re all radio-ready melodic rock, workmanlike and professional.

But if you listen closely, you can hear Phair trying to sell out with a wink. In “Rock Me,” for example, she discovers the joys of younger guys – “I want to play X-Box on your floor, say hi to your roommate who’s next door.” In the next couplet, she slips this in: “Your record collection don’t exist, you don’t even know who Liz Phair is.” In one of the Matrix tunes, “Favorite,” she subverts the glossy production somewhat by making the song as stupid as possible: “You feel like my favorite underwear, and I’m slipping you on again tonight.” That’s the chorus. Honest. You even feel dumber just singing along.

(Oh, and I highly doubt any of the less worldly teen stars with whom Phair has chosen to compete for radio time will be singing the praises of “Hot White Cum” anytime soon…)

So yes, there is a bit of the old Liz Phair on this album, but not nearly enough to make up for the layers of crushing mediocrity covering almost everything. I say almost because, saddest of all, sitting at track seven is “Little Digger,” a simply beautiful song that deserves a better album. Musically it sounds like Michelle Branch, unfortunately, but lyrically, thank Christ, it sounds like Liz Phair. “Little Digger” is about a single mom and her son (obviously autobiographical), and the honest tangle of emotions surrounding bringing another man into the family makeup is heartrending. It’s the one moment on Liz Phair that couldn’t have been much better.

The stink of sellout is all over this record, though, as it is on Jewel’s disc. These are two sterling examples of completely rewriting one’s sound to expand one’s appeal, and neither of these albums are worth much beyond that motivation. Both fall prey to the sad corollary of selling out as well – even if it works, years after the fame and fortune has dried up, both Jewel and Liz Phair will be left with artistically bankrupt albums no one really cares about, sucking black holes in their collections that infect everything around them with their stench. When it comes down to it, the saddest part of selling out, to me, is that an artist had a chance to make a statement, an impact, a masterpiece – and instead chose to make a minor, forgettable blip.

Depressing, really.

* * * * *

I plan to further explore this ground when Jane’s Addiction returns next month with a new album nobody demanded, so you can think of this column as a preview of that one. Although, I expect that one will be a bit angrier…

Next time, the amazing Bruce Cockburn.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Here Comes the Rain Again

So they put our lawn in this week, right? You’ve seen how this is done – the grass arrives planted in strips of dirt, which are placed on the barren lot like carpeting. Given a few days, the grass will take root, adhering the strips to the ground. Works in theory.

Unless, of course, you get a torrential rainstorm or five.

My area of Maryland has had seven rain-free Fridays since December, apparently, so I guess we should have expected this. Our lawn is now mostly washed away, and what’s left has a riverbed running through it. Seriously, it looks like the Tigris and Euphrates met in our yard. I spoke with a neighbor the other day, and apparently, we’re the talk of the neighborhood. I keep seeing pieces of our lawn on the side of the road, some three or four houses down from ours. I get really weird looks from people when I claim these hunks of dirt and grass and drag them back to our house. It’s all a big disaster.

This column is late again, I know, but look at it – it’s huge. Gi-normous. It won’t be this long again for a couple of months, so enjoy it now. (Wait, the sexual connotations really took a strange turn with that last one, didn’t they?)

* * * * *

Second Grade

Well, the wonders of digital downloading have made possible another first – this is the only time I’ve ever written two different reviews of the same album. You may remember that I previously gushed over Radiohead’s sixth record, Hail to the Thief, based on a rough draft I’d downloaded two months before the release date. You may also remember that the band freaked out when they heard the versions that had escaped to the public, posting angry diatribes on their website and other message boards.

They’re early, unmixed roughs, they said.

Some of them aren’t even finished, they said.

Don’t judge the album by these versions, because the real thing is so much better, they said.

Poppycock.

The official version of Hail to the Thief came out on June 10, and it just ain’t that different. Oh, there are minor things – some of the haunting harmonies have now been equalized, and the twittering drum beat that runs through “Sit Down Stand Up” has now been extended to provide the less-inspiring introduction – but honestly, they didn’t do very much. No matter what the band may say, these tracks were almost in their finished form when they were leaked, and only the most discerning listener could spot the differences.

I admit that I was bothered by some of the tiny changes at first, especially the meddling with Thom Yorke’s awe-inspiring vocal tracks this time out. The band and producer Nigel Godrich cut back the surprising three-part harmony in “We Suck Young Blood” that I liked so much, and gave less emphasis to my favorite melodies in “I Will” – mostly as a result of picking one of the three Yorke tracks as the lead vocal, relegating the other two to backing vocal status. I liked ’em all, dammit. But overall, making the switch to thinking of the official version as, well, the official version is quite simple.

And amazingly, I think my appreciation for this record has grown since I last rambled on about it. Hail to the Thief is undoubtedly Radiohead’s third-best album, combining the spacy atmospherics of Kid A with the melodic sense of The Bends. There’s no question that the band set out to make a pop album this time, and even though the result is not what anyone might deem pop, the songs are there, and that makes all the difference.

I do have reservations about Thief. Nothing on OK Computer, still reigning champion of the Radiohead catalog, sounds like the band gave up on it halfway through. The songs on Thief are certainly realized, but not fully realized in some cases. Partway through “Where I End and You Begin,” for example, I find myself wishing the band would do something with the terrific groove they’ve laid down instead of just carrying it to a conclusion. The same goes for the swirling “Sit Down Stand Up,” which builds to an explosion and then abruptly stops, or “The Gloaming,” which rides its jittery percussion and single melody to the end.

Minor quibbles, of course, when Radiohead have provided us with stunners like the soaring “Sail to the Moon,” the energetic “Go to Sleep” and the gloriously off-kilter “We Suck Young Blood.” And waiting at the end of the record, after the processed metallic drone of “Myxomatosis,” is perhaps the loveliest song the band has ever written. “Scatterbrain” is deceptively simple – just bass, clean guitar, drums and that amazing voice – but its melancholy melody is the very definition of haunting. On a record full of very good songs, “Scatterbrain” is the one truly great one.

One big difference between the two versions is the clarity of the vocals on the official release – plus, the lyrics have been printed in the booklet for the first time since OK Computer. Despite the title, it wasn’t immediately apparent before just how political this record is. It’s brimming with references to George W. Bush and his war of American might, which gives Yorke’s trademark paranoia an impending doom on which to focus this time. “It is too late now,” he mutters on “2+2=5,” before screaming, “because you have not been paying attention,” a clear finger-wag towards the complacent public. The middle third of “Sit Down Stand Up” centers on the line, “We can wipe you out anytime,” and “The Gloaming” features a paraphrase of Bush’s central rhetoric: “Murderers, you’re murderers, we are not the same as you.”

Given that framing, even the sweetest and most upbeat numbers here take on a potentially political subtext. “Go to Sleep,” for example, is about those who ignore atrocity – “I’m going to go to sleep and let this wash all over me…” Similarly, “I Will” deals with parental love, and details the thoughts of a father forced to hide underground with his children. Though Yorke doesn’t specify from what the family is hiding, enough context is provided by the surrounding songs to suggest a theme. Even “A Punchup at a Wedding”… well, no, that’s about a punchup at a wedding. But still.

The album’s major drawback is that despite the overarching theme, it sounds like 14 songs on a disc as opposed to a cohesive album. Even Kid A hung together better than this one does, but Thief‘s fractured versatility only lends to its air of scattered, raining doom. The second review isn’t much different from the first, I’m afraid: Hail to the Thief is certainly Radiohead’s best work in years, and ranks as one of the high points of aught three thus far. Just when you thought it was safe to write them off.

* * * * *

A Whole Lot of Shoot, a Little Bit of Nanny

I don’t exactly understand my undying love for the music of Mark Oliver Everett, the man called E, and his one-man band, Eels. He seems to possess very few of the qualities I admire in other artists, and a whole bunch of the qualities I despise in other artists. Yet here we are, at studio album number five for the Eels, and I just can’t stop loving this stuff.

Okay, right off the bat I need to point out that there was no way E would make an album worthy of the title he selected for this one: Shootenanny! is just too wonderful for words. What’s interesting is that the title seems to have been selected at random – the album doesn’t even try to live up to it. In fact, considering that E is known as a Beck-style mix artist who plays with sound more than with structure, Shootenanny! is rather restrained.

That’s not to say it isn’t interesting, however. It’s just that E has stripped away virtually everything that his detractors say he’s hiding behind – Shootenanny! contains no trippy beats, no samples, no processed guitar textures, and no brassy horn sections. Embellishments are few and subtle here, leaving 13 guitar-driven ditties that focus on being uncomplicated yet engaging. E writes simple songs about loneliness and pain, but this is the first time he’s let the production remain as simple as the composition.

And while I generally recoil from simple as if receiving an electric shock, it works here. After years of writing folk songs with the word “blues” in the title, E has finally discovered the real thing on this record – “All In a Day’s Work,” “Agony” and “Lone Wolf” all draw from nifty blues figures. (Unsurprisingly, character study “Restraining Order Blues” is a folk song…) Elsewhere, E offers revved-up power pop on single “Saturday Morning,” “Dirty Girl” and “Wrong About Bobby.”

The bulk of the album, though, is given over to delicately strummed laments, the kind at which he’s excelled since his debut. E is all about finding glimmers of joy amidst crushing pain – see his two-album treatise on dealing with the loss of family members (Electro-Shock Blues and Daisies of the Galaxy) for an unparalleled example – and here he sings about “Rock Hard Times” and “Numbered Days” with his trademark silver-lined gloom. Though “Fashion Awards” centers around the line “We’ll blow off our heads in despair,” E gently reminds you in the closing track that “Somebody Loves You.” And even that song is suffused in melancholy, as E notes at one point that “no one pays you to sit around and think about how you’ll die.” (No one but Dreamworks Records, apparently…)

Once again, E has balanced the sweet and sad with finesse and grace. Though Shootenanny! has the feel of a rushed-out release, and some of the songs are a bit more simple than they had to be, it’s never less than engaging, and is sometimes downright delightful. E is about as idiosyncratic and honest as a mainstream performer can be, especially one who’s played Lollapalooza, and his prolific nature and refusal to coddle the middle of the road make him a fascinating one to follow.

For example, if you really want to hear an album that sounds like a shootenanny, check out I Am the Messiah, the debut from MC Honky. Officially, MC Honky is a 50-something Los Angelean DJ with a style he’s termed “self-help rap.” He’s the first and only artist so far that E has offered to produce, and the pair is scheduled to tour together in the fall.

Unofficially, of course, MC Honky is E, and I Am the Messiah is his solo project. And it’s here that he lets his inner Beck out to play, with hilarious results. “A Good Day to Be You,” for instance, samples a string quartet and splices it with a jittery beat and the funniest Daily Affirmations-style voice-over you can imagine. “You’re well-read,” the voice croons. “You’re smart, but you don’t make me feel stupid. Thank you.” Beck even gets a shout-out (or a one-up) with the hysterical “Three Turntables and Two Microphones.”

But wait, there’s more. Everett’s third album of 2003 (so far) is his haunting score to the film Levity, which also includes two new Eels songs. The score itself is lovely and off-kilter, much like the Eels’ forays into ambient instrumentals. It’s a measure of E’s bizarre skill that he can release three projects within months of each other, under three different names, and craft them so that they sound like the work of three separate artists. Anyone who can do that is someone worth watching, methinks, and so far, E hasn’t let me down. After 11 releases, it still feels like E’s career is just beginning.

* * * * *

Radio Jesus Superstar

Last time I reviewed a Michael Pritzl project (last year’s Gravity Show album Fabulous Like You), I got an e-mail from the man himself, taking me to task for not giving him full credit for what was essentially a solo record. Even though I’m reviewing his band this time, I’m not going to make that same mistake. The Violet Burning is Pritzl’s project, through and through, guided by his vision, songs and voice. The band is, and has always been, a reflection of Pritzl – his musical ideas and his heartfelt spirituality.

And since Pritzl is one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet, it stands to reason that his band reflects this. Everything TVB has done has striven for beauty and wonder, grace and compassion. Those are strange words to use to describe a rock band, but it’s true – even at their most epic, TVB’s crashing waves of sound caress rather than slap. Their records are designed to build you up, to approximate the awe of seeing and believing something grander and lovelier.

It should be no surprise that TVB began as a worship band, even though they drifted from those roots somewhat on their major-label self-titled album. Recent Pritzl projects like the Gravity Show and TVB’s Faith and Devotions of a Satellite Heart have showcased their evolution towards a more radio-friendly sound, but lyrically, TVB have been circling back to those worship roots for some time now. The two aesthetics finally reach their apex on This Is the Moment, the just-released seventh Violet Burning album, and it sounds for all the world like the best modern worship album you’ve ever heard.

That’s assuming you’ve heard modern worship albums, of course. They’re all the rage now in the Christian music industry, with the likes of SonicFlood and Waterdeep crafting whole careers out of singing sweet pop songs to Jesus. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea, even if it isn’t my cup of tea, except that most of the modern worship trend has suspicious motivations. Most of it feels to this cynical soul like cashing in on a craze, rather than honest spiritual outpouring.

And now here’s Michael Pritzl, delivering an album full of small, heavily produced, Christian-radio-ready pop songs like “Heaven Holds My Heart” and “Lord, Rescue Me,” all but begging for a shot at mainstream success. You might be tempted to cry sellout, but for two very important things. First, The Violet Burning was ahead of the modern worship trend by about a decade, and second, they’ve been organically evolving into this for several albums now. For all its calculated sound, This Is the Moment feels like an accurate portrayal of where Pritzl is now, and any attending success is coincidental. Pritzl just happens to be playing what’s in vogue at the moment, but he’d likely be playing it anyway.

The record itself is very enjoyable, if you’re able to roll with two things – glossy mainstream production and up-front Christianity. The first is Pritzl’s choice, and may actually turn off longtime fans of the band weaned on atmospheric epics. The second, however, is simply who Pritzl is, and songs like this are just as honest and personal for him as those of any confessional folkie. The difference is that this time, they’re all dressed up and ready to take on the world.

I say more power to ’em. Any amount of mainstream success can only be good for the band and their label, tiny Northern Records. Listening to Moment, you’d never know it’s from a shoestring indie label, so clean and shiny is the production by Pritzl and TVB and Cush guitarist Andy Prickett. The rockers rock – opener “Lovesick” is a powerhouse, and “I’m Not Letting Go” is a standout – but Pritzl has always been better at slow, affecting tunes, and starting with track six, you get half an album’s worth of them. Best is closer “Manta Rae” (not the Prayer Chain song, meaning that Prickett has now played on two songs with that title), but the entire second half of Moment gently soars on Pritzl’s awesome voice.

I hope this blatant stab at Christian radio works for them – that institution could only be improved by embracing TVB. In fact, if Northern is smart, they’ll press up singles for “Everywhere I Go” and highlight “Lost Without You Near Me” and send them to every Christian radio station they can find. When a band this good wants success this badly, one can only hope they succeed. But even if they don’t, the record is exactly what it intends to be – an enjoyable and often moving modern worship record, with an honest heart bigger than the whole industry they’re trying to conquer.

* * * * *

A Very Different Drummer

When drummers decide they want to sing, it hardly ever turns out well.

Don’t you wish, for example, that Phil Collins had kept his mouth shut and stuck with pounding the skins for Genesis? He would have spared us years of goopy pop crap from that formerly excellent progressive band, and we never would have had to deal with his whole sad solo career. No “Sussudio,” no “Groovy Kind of Love,” no Tarzan song. I’m happier just thinking about it.

Wayne Everett’s never been just a drummer, though. Oh, sure, he’s been the man behind the kit for several bands, including Starflyer 59 and the Prayer Chain. In fact, his percussion work on Prayer Chain records, especially Mercury, is uniformly astonishing. But there’s always been more to Everett, and he got the chance to show it off with his post-Prayer Chain band, the Lassie Foundation. He sang, wrote songs, produced and guided the band through two great albums and a slew of EPs, turning out dramatic (some might say melodramatic) guitar-driven rock with an epic edge.

And now Everett has finally put his name on the front cover. Kingsqueens is Everett’s solo debut, on which he wrote or co-wrote all the songs, co-produced with Frank Lenz, sang, and played drums and guitar. It’s been a slow process getting him out front to bask in the spotlight, but one listen to the album and you’ll be glad he’s there.

Far from the noisy heights of any of his former bands, Kingsqueens is something of an indie-rock classic, full of color and light but never losing its accessible, approachable sound. Even though it’s his first solo project, Everett has packed the album with musicians, including sax players, trumpet players and backing vocalists. “Mor Far,” for example, is rooted in gospel-style soul thanks to a choir of backing vocalists and a sweet horn section. “Bring Your Ship” has analog synthesizers swirling in and out of it, as well as xylophones and other mallet percussion.

Everett’s songs are sweetly tuneful, rooted in classic pop, and perfectly suited to the album’s diverse production. There isn’t a depressing moment here – Kingsqueens is a pop album that remembers when pop was supposed to feel good. As a singer, Everett doesn’t suffer from drummer-itis, either. He has an impressive range, crooning “Lucky Skies” in a sweet lower register while letting his falsetto soar on “I Can See Jail.” He places his nine new songs next to a complete reworking of the Prayer Chain’s “Chalk,” done with acoustic guitars and a loping gait.

Kingsqueens isn’t going to set the world on fire, but it’s another success for Northern Records and a fine achievement for Wayne Everett. I’ve just realized that he’s the second Everett I’ve recommended in one column, and there are similarities – both E and Wayne are better known for their work in bands, and both have just signed their names to solo projects after long periods in those bands. Both write and play idiosyncratic pop music from the fringes, but while E usually uses his to make you feel as bad as he can, Everett’s album is a breath of joyful air.

* * * * *

Both Sides Now

And I think, though I’ve not totally decided yet, that I’ve saved the best for last.

I’m talking about Grandaddy, and here’s where I need to send a major shout-out to Chad Verrill once again. Chad gave me my first exposure to Grandaddy’s terrific second album, The Sophtware Slump, and without him I may never have heard these guys. Their third album, Sumday, has just been released to no fanfare, and I remain baffled as to how the Flaming Lips have racked up accolades for doing just this type of thing, only without writing compelling songs like these or arranging them nearly as well.

Grandaddy is Jason Lytle’s band – he writes the songs, produces the records, plays many instruments and sings everything. Lytle also obviously remembers vinyl, and appreciates the particular skill it takes to arrange an album for two sides. That’s why this record was originally intended for release on two CDs, each about 25 minutes – Sumday is absolutely divided into two sides. In fact, had record company finances not prevailed and forced the band to abandon that plan, it would have been a fascinating experiment. As it is, those who don’t know the story and don’t remember vinyl will probably be surprised at the abrupt shift in tone at track seven.

The first half of Sumday (or side one) is entirely engaging strummed indie-pop, for lack of a better description. Everything is propelled by the quarter-note beat, and with that limitation firmly in place, Lytle has written some delightful tunes and spiced them up with atmospherics and synthesizers. It’s hard not to think of these six songs as six movements of one long piece, so similar do they all sound. That’s not a bad thing in this case – it’s a sustained mood that really works, punctuated by great pop songs like “El Caminos in the West” and one genuine epic in “Lost On Yer Merry Way.”

Had they carried this mood through the second half, Sumday would fall far short of Sophtware, but side two takes off on wings borrowed from Brian Wilson. We get pianos, crashing percussion, synthesized orchestration and a sense of drama all but missing from side one. “Yeah is What We Had” works as a transition of sorts, incorporating some of those production flourishes, but by “The Saddest Vacant Lot in All The World,” we’re in epic pop wonderland.

And really, there isn’t a stretch of songs in the Flaming Lips catalog that can compare with the final three tunes on Sumday. “OK With My Decay” is a big, sad delight that leads into the bigger “The Warming Sun” before crashing into piano-driven finality with “The Final Push to the Sum,” and by the end, you’ve been carried somewhere and back, and you’re dizzy from the trip.

The Lips even borrowed Grandaddy’s pet theme of technology lost in a world of humans for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and did a crushingly inferior job of it. Here Lytle uses mechanical breakdown as a metaphor for emotional breakdown, and achieves that rarest of lyrical accomplishments – finding new ways to describe a broken heart. If Sumday is less immediately astounding than Sophtware, it grows in significance with each listen, particularly the ambitious second half. Why Grandaddy isn’t at the top of critics’ lists like their less talented contemporaries is beyond me. This album is more than recommended – if you’re into well-crafted and thoughtful rock music of any stripe, it’s mandatory.

* * * * *

Last Words

I’m still not as caught up on recent releases as I’d like to be, but I think this will do for now. Coming up look for an examination of selling out with Liz Phair and Jewel, a bit about Led Zeppelin’s mammoth new live record, and reviews of Type O Negative, Guster, Mark Eitzel, the Alarm and Spock’s Beard. Coming in August is Sloan’s new one, called Action Pact – love that name – and what will likely be Warren Zevon’s final album, The Wind. Oh, and expect a diatribe about art and commerce when Jane’s Addiction returns with Strays.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m torn.

Torn, torn, torn.

So I thought I’d try something a little different this time. As people who’ve known me forever will attest (and people who’ve known me only a short while invariably find hard to believe), I’m a longtime fan of Metallica. I know all the words to “Creeping Death,” I can air-guitar along with “Leper Messiah,” and I once considered “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” the one song in all the world with which I most identified. I bought their stupid home videos (even the one with several versions of their then-lone video, “One”), and I believe (though I’m not sure) that …And Justice For All was the first album I waited for, and bought on the release date.

So yeah, me, James, Lars, Kirk and the ever-changing bass player go way back. Which means I’ve also suffered through the dreaded black album and watched as the group turned into video whores while parlaying moderately toughened-up boogie rock for the last decade. I even really liked some of it. But like many longtime fans, I longed for a return to the complex, heavy, lightning-fast Metallica of old, knowing in my gut that they, like Megadeth, would never grant my wish.

But lo and behold, they have.

Just out from the Metallicamp is St. Anger, a 75-minute album that’s billed as a trip in the Wayback Machine, a seriously heavy slab of old-time thrash and rage. And it is. Except it isn’t. Yet often, it is. And round and round I go, debating with myself on whether I’m hearing the best damn Metallica album since the ’80s or a pile of shit dressed in the emperor’s new clothes. And then I thought, why not just bring my inner debate to you, live and uncut?

Hence this little experiment. Two reviews, point and counterpoint, both of which I seem to believe. My hope is that other longtime Metallica fans share in my joy and frustration with this album, which could have been titled Be Careful What You Wish For. Herewith, the voices in my head battle it out over St. Anger:

Why St. Anger Rules

Let’s start with history, most of which points to the inescapable fact that Metallica was really starting to suck. Their first three albums with bassist Cliff Burton are legendary, not just for the music but for the attitude. Metallica was an undisputed success years before they got a record deal, and they managed to last six years on a major label without making any videos or doing the usual promotional bullshit. This band toured their asses off and played challenging, powerful music with conviction, and that’s all they needed to do.

Plus, they were fucking heavy. Just check out “Fight Fire With Fire,” or “Damage, Inc.” to hear classic Metallica on overdrive, drummer Lars Ulrich flailing away like an epileptic octopus while singer/guitarist James Hetfield growls and bellows with unrestrained fury. Try to find moments like that on any of the band’s ’90s releases. You can’t do it. The black album was simplistic and boring, Load and Reload had glimpses of excellence but basically plodded along like stretched-out ZZ Top records, and Garage Inc. was all covers, the heaviest of which were recorded in 1987. And that symphony thing was cute, but…

Now try finding moments like the early days on St. Anger. Jesus, they’re everywhere. The record opens with Ulrich playing the double kick drum as if he’s warming up to play “Whiplash,” and nearly every song contains sections of pure thrashing metal, the likes of which haven’t been heard on a major label release in ages. Here’s Hetfield, in his 40s, whipping out killer riffs and snarling into the microphone again with force, feeling and power. And here’s 11 songs that twist and turn and change tempos and do everything but just lie there, separating them instantly from just about every Metallica tune since 1988.

But that’s not the best part. It’s the vibe, the aggressive fucking vibe that permeates this record. Metallica has suffered setback after setback in recent years. They lost bassist Jason Newsted, who was with them for the whole of their boogie-rock phase, to inventive thrashers Voivod. Hetfield himself nearly crumbled due to addiction, and checked himself into rehab. The band’s future has been in doubt before, but they’ve never come this close to packing it all in.

Hence the glorious rebirth that is this album. Give some of the credit to new bassist Rob Trujillo, formerly of Suicidal Tendencies, but the lion’s share belongs to the three core members. This is now a band playing like their lives depended on it. The sound is raw, furious, and best of all, live. They’ve stripped everything away, even the guitar solos, and given us the real shit. For the first time in a decade, Metallica sounds like a real-live heavy band again, and also for the first time in a decade, they’ve made a record that isn’t predicated on how many MTV-watching teens like it. St. Anger isn’t an ad for the Metallica Marketing Machine, it’s a genuine work of expression, and that in itself is remarkable considering how far this band had fallen.

At its core, Metallica has always been about finding inner strength through dealing with rage, and St. Anger‘s lyrics read like an anger management class. This is a meditation on fury, with the final lesson being that you are stronger than anything if you want to be. It naturally deals with addiction – “My lifestyle determines my deathstyle,” Hetfield spits out in “Frantic,” the self-descriptive opening track, and the record is filled with similar hard-won truths.

What’s impressive about that is the vulnerability that James Hetfield lets show on most of the record. He channels the Hetfield of Kill ‘Em All in places here, but retains the melodicism that has marked his best moments as a vocalist. St. Anger is his most remarkable performance – he snarls, screams and whirls all over this album, his voice cracking and showing naked emotion even over the most punishing of the band’s riffs.

No, Metallica hasn’t made a sequel to Ride the Lightning here, but what they’ve done is even more impressive. They refused to disregard their melodic evolution, yet went back to their roots and found the old fire again. Just watch the accompanying DVD, which consists of the band playing every song from the record live in rehearsal, and you’ll see rebirth before your eyes. The focus is back, the drive is back, and the anger is back. St. Anger is without a doubt Metallica’s best album in more than 10 years. Their redemption is complete.

Why St. Anger Sucks

Simply put, there’s a definite difference between revisiting the old fire and recapturing it completely.

It’s true that this band was starting to suck, and suck hard. The problem is, I think they were (and still are) making the best music they are physically capable of making, and they’re just not as good as they once were. It’s not their fault. They got old. But to make an album like St. Anger, which purports to fit right in with their older, better albums, and to fall this short of accomplishing that goal is just sad.

What’s wrong with it? Well, your worst moment listening to St. Anger will likely come early on, like in the first two minutes, when you realize that that pinging sound is the snare drum tone they’ve chosen for the entire album. It honestly sounds like two paint cans being clanged together, and it’s mixed really loud, so there’s no escaping it. In fact, for most of this record, the fine line between raw production and indistinct mud is gleefully crossed. Who knows what James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett are playing during those snare-ping-infested middle sections? Who can hear new bassist Rob Trujillo at all?

Then there’s the songs. I understand that the band has tried to go back to the roots of their sound, and they’ve certainly amped up the aggression in places, but for a depressing stretch of St. Anger‘s running time, they fall back on mid-tempo repetition. Take the eight-and-a-half-minute “Invisible Kid,” which runs out of ideas one minute in and basically sticks to three notes throughout. Or try “Some Kind of Monster,” which really wishes it was “The Thing That Should Not Be.” But it isn’t.

In fact, the bits of blistering speed here and there only serve to underscore how average most of the songs here are. The title track, for example, quotes both “Damage Inc.” and “Hit the Lights” in its lyrics, but fails to measure up to either of those songs in the Furious Explosion category. The chorus hinges on the line “fuck it all and fucking no regrets,” pulled straight from “Damage Inc.,” but in comparison, Hetfield sounds like he’s whining that sentiment on the new song.

Oh, right, James Hetfield. There’s another big problem. The guy has spent so much time over the last 10 years writing little melodic ditties that he’s forgotten how to scream and bellow without sounding silly. He’s basically unrestrained here, which means we get to hear his loony laugh, his hillbilly sing-speak trick, and his oh-so-metal “hah!” He likely thinks he’s channeling the Hetfield of the Kill ‘Em All era, but in reality he sounds like James Hetfield at 40-something, not 20-something. And hearing him screech the line “I’m madly in anger with you” on the title track is like listening to a loved one go senile.

Basically, while it would be nice to hear Metallica make an album as good as their first four, St. Anger just isn’t that album. The band really tried, and it’s obvious. Some of the record is quite good, but most of it drowns in mediocrity that even the flashes of the old fury can’t salvage. In fact, it’s those very flashes that make the album an even bigger disappointment, since they invite comparison. No one compared Reload to Master of Puppets – there’s not even the thinnest of similarities between them. But Metallica wants you to think of St. Anger in those terms, and ultimately, that’s what kills it. I do believe that this is the very best album Metallica can make at this point in their career. It’s just not a very good one, unfortunately.

* * * * *

In the very un-metal film Mumford, Loren Dean’s character, Dr. Mumford, makes the observation that holding two opposing thoughts in one’s head at once can cause splitting headaches. It seems he’s right – after typing this up, I’ve been afflicted with a monster cranial ache, so that’ll do it for me this week. But hey – birthday went well, I’m 29 (it’s pretty cool…no one but Mainers will get that reference), and there’s a buttload of new music awaiting review. Next week should be another long one, including Radiohead, Bruce Cockburn, the Violet Burning, Wayne Everett, Eels, Type O Negative, and anything else I’m forgetting at the moment. Hope you missed me, ’cause it’s good to be back.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s a long, hard one this week, designed for your pleasure. Hi, and welcome to Bad Sex Puns R Us. How may we service you?

I won’t even try to connect these reviews thematically. Enjoy the scattered. Embrace the disjointed. Away we go…

* * * * *

There are an awful lot of obscure bands.

I know that’s not really an insightful observation, but a lot of people don’t seem to realize that. An alarming number of folks believe that all the music that’s being created right now can be found in your local Sam Goody store, and can be heard on MTV. The truth is, those two companies actually showcase a depressingly small fraction of the music available, and even the most alternative-cool anti-corporate record store can only stock a slightly higher fraction of same. The definition of obscure changes according to your immersion level, of course – some people think Aphex Twin is overexposed, for example – but for most of the general public, it refers to the stuff they can’t hear on the radio. Basically, music that needs to be discovered, which means that most people will never hear it.

There are also an awful lot of bands that are obscure for a reason – they’re not very good. But then there are those acts who are obscure for no reason beyond fate’s cruel whim, bands that exist on the fringes for years, even decades, producing album after album of great stuff that most people would actually like if they ever got the chance to hear it. Starflyer 59 is one of those bands. Ten years, seven albums, six EPs, and through it all, they’ve steadfastly refused to suck. And still they remain on tiny northwestern label Tooth and Nail, selling thousands of CDs when they should be selling hundreds of thousands.

Starflyer 59 is the brainchild of Jason Martin, who was once in a band called Dance House Children with his brother Ronnie, who later went on to form long-running synth-rock outfit Joy Electric. The differences in approach between the Martins are fascinating. (Well, if you’re me, they are…) Ronnie has become increasingly insulated, eschewing collaborators in favor of producing every painstaking Joy Electric track himself. The music has progressed towards a complex (and, yes, insular) brand of synthetic pop unlike anything else out there. (I hope to get around to reviewing Joy E’s new one, The Tick Tock Treasury, in this space soon.)

Jason, on the other hand, has broadened Starflyer’s scope by opening himself up to contributions from a host of musical minds. His band has included members of the Prayer Chain and currently includes superstar drummer Frank Lenz, and his albums have been produced by masterminds like Gene Eugene and Terry Taylor. Every time, Martin has melded his vision with that of his collaborators, resulting in a constantly shifting sound that’s almost impossibly all-encompassing. In a sense, every Starflyer 59 album is the best Starflyer 59 album for different reasons, because they’re all so different from one another that they defy direct comparison.

For example, The Fashion Focus is the best Starflyer 59 album because Martin took the huge, heavy guitars of his early records off center stage, replacing them with textures and clean lines. Similarly, last year’s Leave Here a Stranger is the best Starflyer 59 album because Martin and producer Terry Taylor strove for Sgt. Pepper, augmenting Martin’s melancholy pop with bursts of pure pop psychedelia and ambient wonderama.

And the band’s new one, Old, is the best Starflyer 59 album because Martin has brought the guitars back front and center after a three-album absence, and made a superb, classic pop collection. The speaker-popping confections sprinkled throughout the last few albums are all but gone here, leaving a live band feel with minimal enhancements. Martin again worked with a star producer, this time Aaron Sprinkle of the band Poor Old Lu, and that band’s influence can be felt all over the disc.

Naturally, Martin has written another 10 great songs here. Old bursts out of the gate with “Underneath,” which contains a whiplash-inducing tempo shift about 30 seconds in. That songs contains the most production of any here, concluding with synth lines and a chorus of backing vocalists. It also contains a great chorus, delivered in Martin’s understated baritone. “Major Awards” bustles along like a steam train, and “The Lights On” alternately shimmies and struts like Starflyer rarely has. Most of the songs feature melodies played in Martin’s unmistakable clean guitar sound – half surf-rock and half Robert Smith – and it’s especially effective on “Unbelievers,” near the album’s end.

Old is a delight because Martin seems to have rediscovered the ’70s rock band he used to want to front. Closer “First Heart Attack” even contains an extended epic guitar solo, the kind David Gilmour used to play. Starflyer 59 is always kind of melancholy, but this time the album sounds like it was as much fun to make as it is to listen to, and it’s a lot of fun to listen to. It’s gimmick-free: these are 10 great songs, just waiting to be discovered.

* * * * *

Strained credibility alert: I’m about to give a big thumbs-up to “Weird Al” Yankovic. If you’re one of those people that believe humor and music should stay as separate as church and state, skip to the next review.

Still with me? Cool. I love “Weird Al” Yankovic. Always have. I also think that those who dismiss him as a mere novelty act because he gets played on the Dr. Demento Show are missing the boat completely, and failing to give him proper credit as a master musician. The skill it takes to do what Yankovic does is rare, no matter where you look, and the greatest testament to his ability is that each of his albums can be enjoyed on musical terms, not just humorous ones.

The best weapon in his arsenal is his crack band, which is and has always been guitarist Jim West, bassist Steve Jay and drummer Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz. These guys are amazing because they have to sound like everybody – not like a band pretending to sound like everybody, but exactly like everybody. They’re the best cover band in the world, but even that sells them short. They have to be able to handle anything Yankovic throws at them, be it a polka medley of metal songs or a nine-minute tribute to Frank Zappa. Both of which, by the way, appear on Yankovic’s just-released eleventh album, Poodle Hat.

Okay, yes, there are parodies here, but increasingly, one gets the sense that Yankovic does parodies because that’s what’s expected of him. But hey, he’s incredibly good at it. Writing bad parodies is simple – even morning drive DJs can do it with ease. Writing good parodies is an art, one that Yankovic mastered a long time ago. He intrinsically understands the lyrical and melodic ebb and flow of the songs he’s skewering, and his joke lyrics actually ape the syllables and rhyme structure of the originals line for line.

That’s a neat trick when you’re aping, say, Eminem, who justifiably earned oodles of praise for his nontraditional, internal rhyme schemes. Yankovic here turns Em’s “Lose Yourself” into “Couch Potato,” another in a series of diatribes about how much TV sucks. The real joke is that he’s turned an anthem of self-reliance and bootstrap-pulling into a song about wasting your life in front of the tube, which is the more likely choice for most people these days anyway. He also packs three different parodies into Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” scoring some kind of bathroom-incest-mutilation humor hat trick.

None of the other parodies are that clever, but Yankovic’s fans know that the parodies really ain’t shit compared to the original tunes. It’s on his originals that Yankovic pulls no punches, and unleashes his biting social and pop culture criticism. “Hardware Store,” for example, is an insanely joyous song that embraces and pokes fun at small-town culture, places where the opening of a hardware store is an event analogous to a visit from the Pope. “Wanna B Ur Lovr” takes a swipe at cheesy soul sex songs by doling out bad pickup lines, one after another. (My fave: “I hope I’m not being too forward, but do you mind if I chew on your butt?”) Imagine Chef’s songs from South Park sung by Tim Meadows’ Ladies Man character and you’ve got the idea. The funny thing is, the song is no sillier than most of the stuff that appears on pop radio every day.

“Why Does This Always Happen to Me” is about misplaced priorities – the main character is upset that the network interrupts The Simpsons for a news brief about a devastating earthquake in Peru. It’s also about so-called “first world problems,” and doubles as a critique of American self-importance. Then there’s “Bob,” an incredibly clever two-fold joke. On the surface, it’s a letter-perfect slam of Bob Dylan’s singing and lyrical style, filled with florid images that go nowhere. A closer examination of the lyrics will show that it’s made up entirely of palndriomes, like the title, and it all rhymes. It also includes my favorite palindrome ever – “Oh no, Don Ho.” Really, though, couldn’t you just hear Dylan spouting out a line like, “Go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog”?

And the closer, “Genius in France,” only illustrates Yankovic’s ability to assimilate musical styles perfectly. It’s a nine-minute epic that emulates Frank Zappa’s mid-’70s style, right down to the smallest details. As anyone who’s heard Roxy and Elsewhere can tell you, Zappa’s stuff from this period was typically impossible to play, but the Yankovic band pulls it off swimmingly. Honestly, the song gets everything right, including Zappa’s tendency to run one ethnically-inspired joke into the ground over nine minutes. It’s such an authentic tribute that Dweezil Zappa even lends a hand on guitar.

I haven’t even mentioned such winners as “Party at the Leper Colony” or “Angry White Boy Polka.” Suffice it to say that Yankovic has good and bad albums, like anyone else, but Poodle Hat is a very good one. It’s astounding that he’s managed to sustain a 20-year career, but I’m glad he has – we need someone like “Weird Al” Yankovic to take the air out of our blustery pop culture every now and then. Lately, the culture has needed the air taken out of it more and more, so welcome back, Al. We missed you.

* * * * *

It surprises a lot of people that I’m such a big fan of Live, and I’m not sure why. They satisfy the two most important criteria for my affection – they write good songs, and they play them well. They can sometimes be a bit earnest, but they play with conviction, and singer Ed Kowalczyk knows how to deliver even the cheesiest of sentiments with heart to spare. After making their best record with The Distance to Here in 1999, Live stumbled a bit with 2001’s V, an overproduced and underbaked affair.

Happily, the band is back on track with Birds of Pray, their sixth album. In fact, the only thing bad about it is the atrocious pun in the title. Live has thankfully chosen to dispense with the keyboards and drum loops that weighed down V, and concentrate on writing massive hooks and buoying them with powerful guitars. It’s a winning combination that has worked for countless bands before them, but when it gels, you can’t beat it. There’s not a clunker among these 13 songs, and every one plays like an anthem, the kind of song U2 has only just remembered how to write.

Birds of Pray is also, as the title implies, Live’s most spiritual record. Opener “Heaven” could be a Delirious? song, so naked is its spiritual leaning: “I don’t need no one to tell me about heaven, I look at my daughter and I believe, I don’t need no proof when it comes to God and truth, I can see the sunset and I perceive.” Live has always swung this way, most notably on V‘s standout track “Overcome,” but they balance it with a healthy dose of social critique. Kowalczyk brings the two together on closer “What Are We Fighting For,” an anti-war anthem that calls all war “godless” and notes that “the crucifix ain’t no baseball bat.” But hey, it’s better than the pseudo-sexy crap he was spouting last time.

Really, the only major criticism I can level at Birds of Pray is that it’s too short. Like all the best skyward-looking pop-rock records, this one’s over before you know it. While it’s playing, however, it’s another in a series of winners from this overlooked band with the lousy name. Of all the guitar-rock bands that emerged in the mid-’90s, Live has carved its own place in the firmament most successfully, a place they keep earning with good records like this one.

* * * * *

It’s time once again to review the new King’s X album, and again, I don’t know where to start.

King’s X is one of the best bands in the country, but you’d never know it listening to their recent output. Their first five albums are masterpieces, heavy yet melodic, and Gretchen Goes to Nebraska and Dogman are permanently entrenched in my pantheon of great records. But pretty much everything from Ear Candy forward is lousy. Not just kind of bad, but seriously lousy. They seemed to have hit an upswing with 2001’s Please Come Home…Mr. Bulbous, but shortly thereafter released the nadir of their downward spiral, the electronic groove experiment Manic Moonlight. It was pretty awful.

And now here’s Black Like Sunday, sonically the best thing they’ve done in ages. They sound like a live band again after Moonlight‘s Pro Tools-infected disaster, and Ty Tabor even whips out a bunch of awesome solos, just like the old days. Mentioning the old days is appropriate, sadly, because Black Like Sunday is a collection of unrecorded tunes from the ’80s, finally seeing the light of day via the King’s X of 2003. It’s an interesting idea, and anything that gets them sounding like they once did is a good thing. There’s just one eensy little problem.

The songs, for the most part, should have stayed on the shelf.

Take “Rock Pile,” for example. It’s a rock and roll song about being a rock and roll star, the kind of thing only written by exuberant, inept youths. Fun as a curiosity, not so much fun as the second track on a new King’s X album. It’s not as bad as the third song, “Danger Zone,” a hunk of crap about rebellious youngsters that fight with their parents a lot. There’s nothing even kind of original or redeeming about it, frankly. Most of the songs here take heavily from the first Rush album (there’s even one called “Working Man,” for pity’s sake), and it’s intriguing from a look-how-far-they’ve-come perspective. Problem is, they don’t seem to have come far at all in recent years.

Don’t get me wrong. There is good stuff here, and it’s almost indescribably wonderful to hear Ty Tabor, Jerry Gaskill and Doug Pinnick lock into a groove and play with abandon again. “Bad Luck,” “Screamer” and “Save Us” even overcome their dumbass lyrics with powerhouse licks and some, let me repeat, amazing solos by Tabor. Black Like Sunday even contains the best reason to buy a King’s X album since Dogman in the 11-minute jam-o-rama that is “Johnny.” It’s the one place on this or any of their recent albums where you can hear how great this band can be.

The thing is, this album comes nowhere near showcasing how great I know this band actually is. I’ve seen them live, only a couple of years ago, and they smoked onstage. They’re easily one of the best bands we have, so why have the members’ side projects (Pinnick’s Poundhound and Tabor’s Platypus, for example) produced better records than King’s X for so many years? This is the second time in a row the band has released an experiment in lieu of a new King’s X album that lives up to the legacy.

The upside is that they don’t sound nearly as tired and worn out on Black Like Sunday as they have since 1996. I can only hope that recording these old songs has somehow revitalized them – God knows that tearing through a thrasher like “Won’t Turn Back” sounds like it would be revitalizing – and that the songwriting will come full circle next time. Black Like Sunday is not even close to the best that King’s X can do, but it’s the best they’ve done in a while, and I guess that will have to be enough.

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I was going to try to review the Thorns without mentioning Crosby, Stills and Nash, but it’s no use.

CS&N formed as a “supergroup” when David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash left their respective bands (The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the Hollies) to form a folk trio resplendent with gorgeous harmonies. CS&N is the obvious touchstone for any group of three rockers who leave the world of electric guitars to form a harmony-laden folk group, and since the similarities don’t really end there, I have to mention them. But just this once.

The Thorns are Matthew Sweet, Pete Droge and Shawn Mullins, all suffering mid-career crises simultaneously. Sweet has been the most artistically successful, producing a string of terrific power-pop records throughout the ’90s, and he tasted commercial success briefly with “Girlfriend.” Droge as well had one hit with the catchy “If You Don’t Love Me (I’ll Kill Myself),” off his first album Necktie Second, but subsequent records fizzled, even though they were just as good as the debut. Mullins had the most success at radio with his ubiquitous smash “Lullaby” several years ago, from his major-label debut Soul’s Core, but the follow-up, Beneath the Velvet Sun, failed to make a dent.

So here they all are, sporting acoustic guitars and co-writing sweet, simple songs as the Thorns on their self-titled debut. Projects like this have the tendency to feel like desperate acts, but this one feels like coming home. Sweet, Mullins and Droge harmonize like angels, naturally, and the album has an easygoing vibe that likely reflects the mood in the studio. Sweet’s beautiful melodies haven’t had settings this unforced in ages, especially on “I Can’t Remember” and the perfectly sad “Now I Know.” “Think It Over” brings CS&N to mind immediately, with its delightful harmony and mid-’70s folk sound, and the gorgeous “Among the Living” might be the prettiest non-Lost Dogs song I’ve heard yet this year.

The boys do crank up the electrics once, on their theme song “Thorns,” but it’s just so much fun. It’s a simple, carefree stomp that recalls Sweet’s “Time Capsule” – two chords, that’s it. Most of the album is melodic and melancholy, however, giving the feeling of having been recorded around a series of campfires on summer nights. They even cover the Jayhawks’ “Blue” faithfully, like they just remembered that they all know it and like it seconds before they hit the record button. Producer Brendan O’Brien keeps things as minimal as he is able, for the most part – there’s a string section on “No Blue Sky” and “Now I Know” that adds some drama – and the natural sound is warm and comfortable.

Truly, this could have gone either way, and it’s a wonderful thing that it turned out so well. The Thorns sounds much less like a side project and more like a perfect union. These three musicians haven’t sounded this at ease with just playing and singing in a long time, and hopefully they’ll make a career of it, like that other folksy trio. The Thorns is proof that when the pressure of financial success is removed, great musicians can make great music. This is a sweet little album, no pun intended, one that gently envelops and lifts like the best folksy pop out there.

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Only Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio would follow up his solo debut with a two-hour live album from his first solo tour. And only he would be able to pull it off this successfully.

Plasma is a two-disc collection of performances from Anastasio’s 10-piece band during their North American tour last year. He breaks with Phish tradition here, releasing a live compilation instead of the complete shows his band has been putting out lately, and I can’t help but think the record may have been better as a single show document, but why bicker when the results are this engaging?

The first thing you’ll notice on Plasma is how huge and expansive the sound of the Anastasio band is. He’s got percussionists, a horn section and a sultry female vocalist, and the sonic colors are breathtaking, especially when compared to the relatively stolid Phish lineup of guitars-bass-drums-piano. Their 10-minute take on “Mozambique” is by itself worth the price of the disc, showcasing the jazzy, exploratory side of Anastasio’s guitar playing and the powerful percussion of Cyro Baptista and Russ Lawton. They cover Bob Marley’s “Small Axe” beautifully as well.

The second thing you’ll notice, especially on the jam-heavy second disc, is that this band doesn’t really jam at all, and that’s sort of unfortunate. The thrill of a Phish show comes from the nearly telepathic way the four musicians connect with and anticipate each other, the way Mike Gordon’s bass plays an integral role in determining the harmonic direction of Anastasio’s guitar and Page McConnell’s piano. By contrast, the Anastasio band tends to groove repetitively while someone (usually Anastasio on the second disc) solos. It’s not necessarily bad, but it is less interesting than hearing Phish at their peak.

Still, the 22-minute read of “Night Speaks to a Woman” manages to visit numerous melodic places along the way, and the delightful improv “Inner Tube” skirts by so engagingly that you won’t even notice where your 19 minutes went. What’s fascinating about Plasma is how much better it is than Phish’s latest album, the depressingly simple and rushed Round Room. While reports from the road have been positive, it can’t be a good sign when your side project is making more vital music than your main band. Here’s hoping Anastasio brings some of the expansive nature of his own band back with him to the Phab Phour when next they return to the studio.

* * * * *

And that will do it for me. Next week is my birthday, and the tradition has been that I take a week off to celebrate. Of course, I’ve never actually done that, so we’ll see if I stick to it this year. Anyway, next time, I’ll be 29, and I’ll be discussing the Violet Burning, Wayne Everett, the Eels, 6gig, Metallica, Radiohead, and/or Grandaddy. Bet you can’t wait. But you have to.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s Thursday afternoon, and I just watched “Chosen,” the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for the fourth time.

I know what you’re thinking. Only four times? Well, I did have to go to work and sleep and stuff, too…

I’m not sure I will be able to encapsulate what Buffy has meant to me, or the dozens of conflicting emotions I’m feeling at its conclusion. This is more about me than about the show, but I’m exposed to a lot of artistic expression on a regular basis. So much, in fact, that as I’ve grown, my buttons have become harder to push, and any movie, album or show that wants a piece of my heart really has to work for it these days. Most things I see and hear are immediately relegated to the “whatever” file, coaxing forth no emotional reaction whatsoever. Some, but less and less as the years go by, entrench themselves in a quiet corner of my being, and are content with the occasional fond thought. A very few set up shop in my soul and proceed to rewrite my life.

For the last year and a half, Buffy has rescripted my whole existence, and all but owned my heart. I quote it more than anything I have ever seen. I view events in my life through the show’s unique prism, and find my point of view has been changed, altered and revised by something as seemingly ludicrous as a television show about vampires and the woman who kills them. No other work of popular culture, least of all a television show, has affected me as deeply and enriched me as fully as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Go ahead. Laugh. I am. I honestly never expected such a reaction from myself to this show. Eighteen months ago, I was just like most of the country – I had, of course, heard of Buffy, and in fact had read numerous articles and reviews about the show’s razor-sharp wit and deep emotional undercurrent, but I’d never gotten around to watching a single episode. One thing that scared me away was the reportedly labyrinthine mythology the show had crafted, rendering casual viewing impossible – you have to start from the beginning. This is absolutely true, by the way.

And here’s where I thank God for Jody Bane. I met Jody in Indiana, and she’s one of those people with such a sweet nature that you immediately start looking for things about which to make fun of her, because you know she’ll take it well. I ragged on her for reading V.C. Andrews books (especially the ones ghost-written long, long after Andrews died), and for her pathological fear of sharks. And I also ragged on her for loving Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And rather than simply saying “piss off,” she lent me her entire Buffy collection, one season at a time, until I was caught up. By that time, of course, I was also just as much of a raving fan as she was.

What is it about Buffy that turned so many people off? At the height of its popularity, the show barely pulled in 5.5 million viewers, and the average for the just-completed seventh and final season was around 3.9 million. The show was always ranked near the bottom of the top 100, and never got a major Emmy award. What kept people away?

Where to start answering that one? First, there’s the silly title. Then there’s the premise – Buffy Summers is a teenage vampire slayer, and her home of Sunnydale, California rests on a Hellmouth, a center of mystical activity used by the writers as an excuse to flood the show with monsters and demons. Buffy fights evil and usually gets home in time to study for mid-terms. Sounds utterly dumb, right? Then mix in the fact that this show never hid from its cheesy elements – rather, it embraced them and flaunted them, usually as a prelude to turning them on their ears. We got giant snake demons, rotting zombies, tacky-looking werewolves, evil gods from hell dimensions, praying mantis demons, talking floating eyeballs, hyena spirits, and demons with squishy, foam-looking shark heads. Oh, and vampires. Lots of vampires.

And yet…

And yet we also got the most fully rounded, fully realized characters ever created for television. We got layers of metaphor and symbolism – every hellish threat Buffy and her friends faced represented something else, and usually something directly related to the emotional state of the characters. We got characters who grew and changed in ways simply unprecedented on series television. In its best moments, we got the sharpest writing of any show that has ever aired. And best of all, amidst all the unreality of Sunnydale, we got genuine, deeply felt pain and struggle. When that struggle culminated in redemption, as it often did, Buffy earned every second of joy and release with hours and hours of real anguish – and not that Party of Five kind of melodramatic anguish, either, but the kind of pain that cuts right to the soul, every time.

Buffy started out, in the words of creator and all-around genius Joss Whedon, as a way to redeem “that blond girl” in all the horror films. You know the one – she’s cute but kind of dumb, which is why she’s walking around dark alleys at night, just begging for the monsters to kill her. Whedon envisioned that blond girl walking into the same alley, but instead of being afraid of the monster, she’s ready for it, and she trounces it. It’s a simple yet revolutionary concept – most major networks passed on Buffy because a) the feature film (also written by Whedon) was bollocksed up beyond belief, and b) they didn’t think an action show featuring a female hero would work.

Even from the start, though, Buffy has always been more than an action show. Sure, there are big dumb fights in every single one of the show’s 144 episodes, even in ones you kinda wish didn’t have them, but even during the monster-of-the-week years, Buffy was fighting on metaphorical levels. Longer story arcs bore this out and expanded on it. When, for example, the mayor of Sunnydale turned into a giant snake at Buffy’s graduation and tried to devour all the students, it was representative of the real world, waiting to eat you alive once you leave high school.

The series’ most potent metaphor early on came out of Buffy’s relationship with Angel, a brooding vampire with a soul. As a result of a gypsy curse, Angel was given a conscience, forced to remember and regret all of his misdeeds over 200 years as a vampire. However, he must continue to suffer for the curse to stay in effect – one moment of true happiness, and Angel goes stark raving evil once again. That moment arrives in Season Two when Buffy and Angel consummate their relationship, and Angel quickly joins the other side and starts killing Buffy’s friends.

As Whedon said, this is certainly a story about vampires and slayers, but it’s also a story about every teenage girl’s fear – that your boyfriend will change once you give in and sleep with him. The resolution of this arc at the end of Season Two (in a beautiful two-parter written and directed by Whedon) provided the show’s first truly emotional powerhouse.

Whedon also played with television convention throughout Buffy‘s run. His only Emmy nod for writing was for “Hush,” an episode in Season Four that contained a half-hour without dialogue. This episode was Whedon’s breakthrough as a director as well, and remains visually one of the creepiest entries in the Buffy canon, but he matched and surpassed it with “Restless,” the Season Four finale told almost entirely in dream sequences.

Then there’s “The Body,” one of the most wrenching and devastating hours of television ever filmed. It’s a sustained portrait of grief – Buffy’s mother, the ever-wonderful Joyce Summers, succumbed to brain cancer unexpectedly the episode before – that explores the silences between characters during periods of mourning. “The Body” contains no incidental music, and consists almost entirely of muted conversations and perfectly drawn character moments.

And of course, no discussion of Whedon’s many achievements would be complete without mentioning “Once More, With Feeling,” a full-blown musical episode that dances rings around any such stunt attempted on television before. The key to its success is that it wasn’t a stunt – Whedon developed a logical reason for characters to burst into song, and used that device to dramatically shift the ongoing plot of Season Six. He also wrote some amazing songs, ones that revealed his characters in new ways. “Once More” is not a standalone, but an essential piece of the story, and therein lies its brilliance.

In fact, in many ways, therein lies the brilliance of the series as a whole. Buffy utilized television’s capacity for long-form narrative better than any show before it. Over seven years, Whedon allowed his characters to change dramatically, yet logically. Where shows like My So-Called Life developed themes over the course of an episode, Buffy developed them over a season, at least. The full scope of the show’s themes were often only clarified after the season finale, and as they unfurled, the characters developed along with them.

Look at the Core Four characters – Buffy, luckless Xander Harris, shy Willow Rosenberg and stuffy Rupert Giles – in the first two seasons, and then contrast that with later seasons. Buffy is no longer the confident chosen one – she’s become sullen, hard-edged and withdrawn. Willow has overcome her insecurity to become a powerful witch, yet is unaware that the insecurity remains at her core, and that her self-image can shatter like glass. Xander has become a successful carpenter – perhaps the most successful of the four – and has a balance about him that only comes with experience. And Giles has removed himself from his long-treasured role of father figure and grown much more at ease in the process.

And much of the credit must go to the actors and actresses, all of whom flew above and beyond. Alyson Hannigan, for example, took Willow from the meek bookworm of Season One to the confident wicca of Season Five to the fragile addict of Season Six, and finally to the brink of inhumanity and back in that season’s amazing finale. Her work is consistently genuine – you feel Willow’s immense pain, her yearning to be more than she thinks she is, and her intensely powerful nature which she fears she cannot control. She and all the other players brought genuine life to these characters, so much so that they regularly transcend the word characters. These people feel real.

No one did a better job of that than Sarah Michelle Gellar, the slayer herself. I realized some time ago that I take Gellar for granted, and that I hardly ever notice what an incredible job she does each episode. She embodies Buffy so completely that I often forget I’m watching an actress play a role – she simply is Buffy. In many ways, she’s had the most difficult journey – Buffy has had to struggle with the fatal flaw at the center of the slayer power: that it isolates its user and disconnects her from the world. Buffy has grown increasingly harsh throughout the series, and Gellar never flinched from showing us the worst sides of Buffy’s life.

And here I have to talk about Season Six, the most reviled chapter of the Buffy novel. It’s perhaps no secret that Buffy died at the end of Season Five, sacrificing herself to save her pseudo-sister, Dawn. (Which is a whole other can of metaphorical worms…) It should also come as no surprise that Willow and Xander resurrected her at the start of Season Six. But what did surprise most viewers was Whedon’s gutsy decision to make the rest of the season about that resurrection – its consequences, and Buffy’s intense, desperate pain. All of the characters, in fact, spend this season in hell, and the darkness of S6 contrasted beautifully with the balance of light and dark in prior seasons.

That this darkness coincided with the lowest ratings of the show’s run should also be no surprise. Longtime fans defected, mostly because the show wasn’t giving them what they signed on for, and they didn’t want to see beloved characters put through the slow, horrifying wringer week after week. These people missed the transformation of this show from spry yet resonant mythology to unparalleled emotional conduit. S6 connects viscerally like no other season, and it earns its resplendent finale. No other season ender packs quite the punch of “Grave,” anchored by terrific performances by our Core Four.

By comparison, Season Seven has been sloppy and somewhat disappointing, but still some of the best that television has (or has ever had) to offer. Among the highlights this year was “Selfless,” an hilarious and touching look at ex-demon Anya; “Conversations With Dead People,” the creepiest episode this side of “Hush”; “Storyteller,” in which formerly evil geek Andrew presents events from his hysterically skewed point of view; and “Dirty Girls,” a poem of menace and death that concludes with an assault on one of our dearest characters.

And, of course, “Chosen,” Whedon’s final goodbye. I find myself with an internal conflict about this episode, which is easily one of the series’ best. It suffers, unfortunately, from its 42-minute running time, and leaves many questions (Beljoxa’s Eye, what Joyce meant in her ghostly early-season appearances, how the splintering of the Slayer line led to the First Evil’s attack, where the amulet came from, who planted the talisman in “Lessons,” and on and on) unanswered, hanging for eternity. My brain is unsatisfied – it keeps saying, “That’s it? But…but…”

My heart, however, which Buffy has always coveted more, is completely fulfilled. Whedon’s steadfast refusal to say goodbye to his characters, and his decision to underplay virtually every potentially heart-rending moment, somehow gave “Chosen” more resonance than had he gone full-out with the tears. Buffy herself reaches a point in her journey that leaves us with a more complete sense of hope than at any other time in the series, and the genuine, subtle smile on which the show concludes feels like closure.

The scene to which I keep returning, however, is a small one in the grand scheme, and like everything about “Chosen,” it was beautifully subtle. Moments before the big final battle with the First, Buffy joins the rest of the Core Four in the hallway of Sunnydale High, full circle from the show’s beginning. Here, I thought, would be the tears, the emotional reconciliations, and the final goodbyes. The foursome had been torn apart by recent seasons, and nothing had seemed right between them since Joyce’s death. I braced myself for the last conversation.

And they threw it away. Rather than have them address the rifts I was sure had grown between them, the Core Four got together one last time, and they just were. They talked about what they’d do the day after the apocalypse, and made a grand reference to the first episode, but basically, they just were. And it was beautiful. How foolish of me, I thought, to imagine that they would be anything else than perfectly together, and how foolish to think that they would need words to communicate that togetherness to each other. All of the recriminations and pain that have threatened to tear them apart never even got close to the center of this group. The point of that scene was that nothing, nothing will ever break these four. And they said it by not needing to say it.

It’s without a doubt my favorite moment of the series as a whole.

But there are others, countless others. Buffy, like life, is a collection of small moments amid the bigger goings-on, and it’s the small moments that you end up treasuring. Here are a few that I love, in chronological order:

When Angel, embracing her, lets himself be burned by Buffy’s cross necklace in “Angel.”

When Willow first encounters real, sadistic evil in “Prophecy Girl.”

When Buffy and Giles discuss life at the end of “Lie to Me.”

When Angel (the evil version) makes his first cut into Buffy’s heart in “Innocence” – “Love you too. I’ll call you.”

When Buffy whispers “close your eyes” in “Becoming.”

When Giles and Joyce, um, get to know each other in “Band Candy.”

When Buffy finds out about that in “Earshot.”

When Xander, sporting a sly smile, walks right by Cordelia at the end of “The Zeppo.”

When Buffy and Angel share a last dance in “The Prom.”

When Oz panics in “Graduation Day.”

When a neutered Spike tries to feed off of Willow in “The Initiative.”

When Giles chases Professor Walsh in “A New Man.”

When Faith in Buffy’s body repeatedly tries out the phrase, “Because it’s wrong,” in “Who Are You.”

When Willow chooses Tara in “New Moon Rising” – “You have to be with the one you love,” Tara stammers, and Willow replies, “I am.”

When Giles sings “The Exposition Song” in “Restless.”

When Angel and Riley meet in “The Yoko Factor.”

When Willow and Tara dance at the end of “Family.”

When Anya desperately tries to understand loss in “The Body.”

When Dawn and Buffy embrace at the end of “Forever.”

When Buffy delivers her final message to Dawn in “The Gift.”

When Xander and Anya sing “I’ll Never Tell” in “Once More, With Feeling.”

When Tara leaves at the end of “Tabula Rasa.”

When Buffy refuses to believe she didn’t come back “wrong” in “Dead Things.”

When Tara reconciles with Willow in “Entropy” – “It’s a long, complicated process, and can’t we just skip it? Can’t you just be kissing me?”

When Giles enters at the end of “Two to Go.”

When Willow collapses into Xander’s arms at the end of “Grave.”

When Spike reveals his soul in “Beneath You.”

When Buffy offers her strength to Willow in “Same Time Same Place.”

When Anya sings “Mrs.” in “Selfless.”

When Buffy talks with Holden Webster in “Conversations With Dead People.”

When Xander comforts Dawn at the end of “Potential” – “You’re not special. You’re extraordinary.”

When Andrew runs out of stories at the end of “Storyteller.”

When Xander asks Willow not to cry in “Empty Places.”

When Spike declares his love, and Buffy finally listens, in “Touched.”

There are, of course, many more I’ve forgotten, but that’s the way it goes when something rewrites your life. The good parts are just too many to list, and the extraordinary parts don’t translate into words. So how does one say goodbye to something like this? (Well, “Grrr Argh” comes to mind…) I’m not sure. Now that the shape of the series as a whole has become clear, it feels more like an arrival than a departure. Still, one must say goodbye somehow.

There’s a woman who posts under the name Duskfire on one of the message boards, and for all of S7 she has eloquently, insightfully and poetically analyzed the themes and characters. Her signature file perfectly echoes my sentiments, so I hope she doesn’t mind if I reproduce that here: “To the cast and crew of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Thank you could never cover it.”

But in the end, I have to come back to the epitaph the show wrote for itself, back in Season Five. Many have used it in the days since the finale to end articles like this one, but it captures the spirit of the show better than anything I could come up with. So, one last farewell to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

She saved the world. A lot.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I had a policy a while ago of never reading other reviews before writing mine.

Now, I’m addicted to music reviews – and movie reviews, book reviews, comic reviews, and basically any analysis of art I can get my hands on. I even read those usually asinine customer comments on Amazon, the ones filled with sentences like “OMG, ths CD rulz!” I can’t help it. I’m just naturally attracted to finding out what people think, especially about something as absolutely subjective as art.

So you can imagine how difficult it was for me to keep myself away from advance reviews of albums, especially since magazines like Rolling Stone seem to publish those reviews months prior to release these days. I was honestly afraid that reading other reviews might influence the way I experienced music, and that I might find myself unconsciously ripping off another reviewer, especially one who articulated my reactions more eloquently than I could.

But right around the time of Radiohead’s Kid A, I said hell with that. I read every advance five-star ejaculation I could find, looking for clues as to what to expect, and each drooling encapsulation only increased my anticipation. And then I absolutely hated the album. Years of continuing to absolutely hate it have convinced me that my initial reaction wasn’t just a matter of it not meeting overly high expectations, either. I just think Kid A sucks.

Since then, I devour advance reviews, fairly secure in the belief that they don’t influence my opinions. I realize this is a big ol’ rationalization, and that what’s really going on is more akin to a crack addict getting his daily fix, but I now consider advance reviews an essential part of my preparation process. If the notices are good, I’m excited to hear if they’re right, and if they’re terrible, I’m even more excited to hear if they’re wrong. Which, I guess, counts as outside influence, but I find I agree with most reviews only about 50 percent of the time.

Truthfully, I’m often most excited to hear albums that the reviewing community has, en masse, deemed unlistenable. There’s something appealing to me about monumentally bad records, especially from great artists, and since a large part of my process is looking for the artist’s original intention, train wrecks (especially purposeful train wrecks) are much more fun than smooth rides. Plus, occasionally, I will completely disagree with the universal negative opinion, and that’s even more fun.

Take, for example, the new Blur album, Think Tank. Just drop the band and album name into a search engine, and you’re guaranteed to encounter a mountain of lousy reviews – one star, D minus, what-were-they-thinking reviews. You can only read so many of those before you start bracing yourself for a disaster, and it’s not like the boys in Blur haven’t been heading that way recently. Their last two albums (the self-titled one and 13) were sloppy, overly long, underdeveloped messes that veered sharply from the twee pop they delivered in their early years. 13, in fact, deserves to be called unlistenable – its few delightful moments are drowned in an ocean of noise and repetition that doesn’t even pretend to be cohesive.

And then there’s Graham Coxon, the Lennon to Damon Albarn’s McCartney. Coxon left the band before Think Tank was finished, and he only contributed to one track, the closing “Battery In Your Leg.” With Coxon gone and Albarn spending a good chunk of his time in Gorillaz, his animated electronic madhouse side project with Dan the Automator, one could be forgiven for expecting a beat-happy pile of sludge this time out, which is exactly what the majority of reviewers have apparently heard.

This is definitely one of those cases where I’m not sure if I’m listening to the same album everyone else is, because my copy of Think Tank is absolutely marvelous.

Even with Coxon missing, this is easily the most complete Blur album since The Great Escape. Albarn has, of course, embraced technology in the years since 13, and under his direction Think Tank is loaded with electronic bleeps and blips. Here’s the thing, though – where most artists use technology for its cold and distant qualities, Blur has crafted perhaps the warmest and most emotionally resonant album they’ve ever made.

Most of Think Tank takes its time to unfold, wafting in on ambient waves and subtle computer drums. Virtually every time you think the electronics are going to take over, however, Albarn surprises you with a lovely vocal melody, or a delightfully human guitar line. If, for example, you’re dismayed by the twittering electronic percussion and how-low-can-you-go bass that opens “Ambulance” (and the album), just wait 30 seconds for Albarn’s vocal entrance. His beautiful tenor raises the song’s temperature immeasurably, and sends it straight for your heart.

Think Tank contains some of Albarn’s most comforting ballads, set to chilling landscapes of electronic sound which only seem to accentuate the warmth of his voice. Just listen to the acoustic guitar on “Out of Time,” or the saxophone arrangements on “Caravan,” or even the extended ambient outro of “On the Way to the Club” and you’ll hear technology given its most human foundation. The simple pleasure of “Sweet Song,” with its repeated piano sample, cannot be overstated either.

The album is, no doubt, experimental, but nearly all of the experiments work marvelously. There are misfires – the Fatboy Slim-produced “Crazy Beat” reenacts “Song 2” with a, um, crazy beat, and no one would have missed the minute-long pseudo-punk shoutalong “We’ve Got a File On You.” But the delirious successes far outweigh the miniscule failures, and the overall effect is low-key and cohesive. The band even saves the most human moment for the end – “Battery In Your Leg” is a slow piano caress full of the melodic melancholy that characterizes this record.

So what album are the other reviewers hearing? Think Tank is nowhere near the techno-driven mess you might expect from the avalanche of bad press it’s received. (In fact, I only found one review that seems to echo my reaction, and that’s at pitchforkmedia.com.) On the contrary, in fact, it joins Supergrass and Ester Drang in the upper echelon of 2003 releases, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in the top five at year’s end.

I’m not sure anyone would have expected the diversity of the last few Blur releases, but it seems the band has finally hit upon something here. While many artists have taken a shine to technology recently, Blur has shown with Think Tank that they’re one of the few acts that understand it, and can use it to make their music more human, not less. This album is also the first time the band has sounded sure-footed since the early ’90s, and it bodes better than anyone could have expected for the Coxon-less Blur. But beyond all that, it’s just a beautiful record, one that deepens with each trip through. Think Tank does what all great art must do to be considered as such – it resonates, it affects, and it stays with you. You can’t ask for more than that.

* * * * *

I’m going to eulogize Buffy fairly extensively next week, so I don’t want to say much about this week’s penultimate episode, except that it was splendid and a fitting goodbye to some of television’s most fully realized characters. The feces hits the spinning blade on Tuesday, and I remain blissfully spoiler-free, an act of will so difficult that it’s physically painful. Expect an overview and a fond farewell next time, and after that, a long (like, really long) column to catch up on recent releases, most of which don’t deserve their own spotlight, so they all have to share.

See you in line Tuesday morning.