I am completely against the idea that you have to be a good singer to front a band. My problem with this singer is that he's not singing like this because it's just how his voice is. He sings like this because he wants to. My impression is that he was listening to Radiohead's Kid A and said to himself, "why doesn't he sing like that all the time?? I should do that!" I would suggest that he tone it down some, except that it defines the band. And it defines the band because the music isn't strong enough to fall back on.

The album starts out promising enough with a calliope and organ song featuring a 1920's old-timey carnival barker. It's unfortunate, because this is the most interesting song on the album. "Let The Cool Goddess Rust" is a good choice for the second song because it has a strong melody, which allows the listener to ease into the vocal delivery. It's also in familiar lo-fi electric guitar indie territorry. The next song, "Over and Over Again", is probably the best song musically because the singer tones everything down and goes into full Thom Yorke mode. But at heart, it's just another new wave song; albeit a good one. Then for some reason comes a bell/music box style chord progression, repeated for one minute. Why is that there? It's a poor segue between songs; I can only guess they considered the arrangement clever. The majority of the album is good, but without that unique voice, they're just another 80s new wave influenced indie band.

I may have been harsh on these guys, but the truth is I like listening to their music when the singer isn't in full "nerdy Rick Moranis singing mode". But they neither make me want to clap my hands nor say "yeah." Good band, gimmicky singer; I say "burn".

Freak: Clap your hands!

Band: But I feel so lonely!

Freak: Clap your hands!

Band: But it won't do nothing!

Until they ask him if he's up to something, which he probably is. The whole effect is beautiful, lo-fi, textured, and affecting. The rest of the album, not so much.

Things do start to get a little tedious almost the minute modern instrumentation creeps into the mix (i.e., the first second of track 2.) This band isn't big on the ol' songwriting, is the problem - they often let entire songs go by on one simple riff, without even changing things up for a chorus. They're very good at texturing those riffs, adding in guitars and layers of tinny percussion and pretty vocal harmonies, but none of them are particularly prodigious as instrumentalists, either, and there's a limit to how much dynamic tension you can create by changing the way you play the same chord. On the other hand, the sounds they get out of their instruments, particularly the rubbery, endlessly looping bass and the assortment of fun keyboards, are pretty nifty. The appropriately-named "Over and Over Again" is very pleasant listening, partly because the vocalist has reigned in his crackbrained yelp and has decided to croon a little bit. But still, the song ends thirty seconds before the track does, and the band just keeps chugging away at the same loop, as if to remind us that change does not fit into their musical ideology. They are proud of their sameness.

Let's return to the problem of the vocals for a moment. They're drunken, Isaac Brocky, like all the cool rock bands from 2005, each word laden with emotion and inflected to wring the most damage and defeat from every syllable. Problem is after the first track the lyrics don't do much to convince me I should care -- I don't know what he's on about, really, and the band's very cuteness, the chug of their same-y choo-choo indie rock, undercuts whatever gravitas he might've had. Check out the heartland america Springsteen rock of "The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth", for example, with its three-chord shuffle -- it sounds like a brain-damaged Modest Mouse, with all the danger drained out, and as the singer's voice cracks on nearly every word I have to stop and ask myself: is this parody?

There are a lot of ideas at work here, and a lot of it's really very nice to listen to, but the shifts in tone, the way that we can't tell whether the singer is actually deranged or just doing a clever ironic put-on distances it for me. "Is This Love," where he sings his woah-woah-woahs as if he's about to fall off his chair (sounding more like his persona from the first track than at any point since), and there's an entirely unexpected time-signature change-up at the end, brings me in again -- the stupefyingly tedious guitar porridge of "In This Home On Ice" kicks me out. This album would've worked so well without half the songs-- if they'd paid attention to the feeling they created at the top and preserved it throughout instead of throwing whatever they had on to the tracklist. Without a lot of musical interest, originality, or innovation to trade on, that feeling is about all they have going for them. So go ahead and burn this one, make the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! album you want to make, and discard the rest. (For your reference- my CYHSY! album is tracks 1, 3, 7, 8, and 11, with an option on the tiny loops of 4 and 9 for padding.)

And give me points for not mentioning the ridiculous media frenzy that sparked up around these guys, whose only super-remarkable feature at this point is their genius for self-promotion.

The Clientele plays pop songs in the vein of the teen pop songs of the 60s, calling to mind the crooning groups of smart, handsome, young, wholesome boys that made up popular rock and roll bands back then. They tend towards the more mellow side of that era, sounding not like the Beatles, but more like the later Monkees, Smile-era Brian Wilson, The Animals, and just grazing upon The Velvet Underground. Really, they sound like very early-era Spinal Tap (during the "The Flower People" era). They've got all the sounds right: the singer's accent is dead-on, they have flat, subdued drums, and the very necessary Vibroluxe reverb vibrato guitar. But the sound that The Clientele gets is very authentic, and by that I don't mean that like Mexican restaurants mean it when they tell you the cooking is "authentic". That is, I'm not saying they sound like a band from 60s, I'm saying they sound like an actual, legitimate band. They're not trying to sound retro, that's just the music they like, and it comes out in what they write. They use the style well, and if you listen closely enough, you can make out modern influences in the guitar and bass lines as well.

That being said, what they do write is professional, well-recorded, and very convincingly played. The only problem is that I have a hard time remembering more than a couple of the songs. This album mostly has well written songs devoid of any hooks. The songs I do remember I'm not likely to be humming later on. "E.M.P.T.Y" and "Spirit" both have memorable lines and good flow. "Losing Harringey" is a spoken word song with an interesting anecdote, albeit a bit cheesy. But I have to ask myself: when is the next time I will listen to this album? The answer is, "not soon", and so I'll have to recommend you burn this CD.

...OK, I'm not going to waste my short review on this sucker, but I am finding it difficult to get through it without nodding off. You could stick a tap in these guys and put the resulting ooze on your pancakes. (Skim the production sheen off the top and feed it to Love is All, won't you?) They have a song called " E.M.P.T.Y.", for god's sake, and it's so string-sweetened and lead-arpeggiated and shaker-stained that there's not an inch of free space in the mix where you can hide from the saccharine sadness. (Seriously. There's a keyboard back in the back, cutting off all escape). And then the George Harrison guitar solo kicks in. It is enough to make you consider self-disembowelment as a proper critical response. Also, somebody should tell the guitarist that he's allowed to turn down the knobs on his amp marked "reverb" and "tremolo".

All of which isn't to say that the stuff isn't nice. It is, unbearably so. The bass parts are smooth and happy, the drummer is uncomplicated but competent, the melodies and harmonies are all very pleasant, and the lyrics vanish into the ether without leaving much of an impression either way. It's just missing that certain je ne sais quoi that makes for memorable and interesting music. As it is, this stuff would be great for quiet moments in romantic movies - the kind where people look damply off into the distance out of rainy windowpanes, or where they sit and stare at the ocean. There're twelve "our songs" here for romcom couples I don't care about. If you gave these guys some drugs, they'd sound like Spiritualized - and god, what a massive improvement that would be. In the meantime we have to deal with songs like "Impossible", which features vocals so voluptuously cutesy that I'm almost certain they kidnapped Ken Stringfellow and used some horror-film machine to suck all the lingering grunge out of him before propping him up in front of the mic. And please don't get me started on "Losing Haringey", an instrumental track made from unbearably sweet Beatles leftovers mated with musings about the singer's youth delivered in fine short-story style. As far as I'm concerned you can't get away with this kind of thing unless you're Scottish.

Of course it isn't as bad as all that -- I am in some respects a musical diabetic, and the same way I couldn't listen to Brian Wilson without reaching for the insulin, the sheer honey-dripped goodness of this music is not something I can easily stand. Nonetheless, this is about my opinion: this stuff is repetitive, hollow, and gives me hives. Skip it.

This music carries with it the energy associated with so many of the musical movements of the past: 70s punk, 80s new wave, and 90s riot grrl. Apparently Love Is All has a desire to be counter-culture as well, with songs named both "Turn The Radio Off" and "Turn The TV Off". It's very refreshing to hear a band having this much fun, too. The fact that the CD is a few decibles louder than the rest of my music helps, too. But plenty of bands have this kind of passion. What sets Love Is All apart is their ability to play their instruments and their ability to write hooks. They remind me of The Concretes, with the deep reverb, female singer, horn section, and so-obvious-why-didn't-I-think-of-it hooks. The only problem with the CD is that Love is All tries to go full speed the whole way. Some of the songs in the middle of the album ("Busy Doing Nothing") sound like they're just shooting blanks. And on such a short CD, it's even more disappointing.

But even the mediocre songs are still good: "Aging" vibrates with B-52s-style absolute abandon. My tastes are such that this CD may slip to the bottom of the pile, but I appreciate what Love Is All is doing too much to suggest anything besides buying this CD.

So, unfortunate recording choices and overuse of vocal effects aside (she really doesn't need to be distorted, ever - her natural yelping makes up for it) what kind of music are we dealing with here? We've got riot-girl ska, disco punk, europop, and when we're lucky (like on the opening track), a delicious melange of all three. Lyrical content is uniformly charming - "I know we like the same kind of cheese!" she intones with great gravity on the rubbery disco number "Used Goods". It's all about the tedium of everyday life, with the defining anthem being "Busy Doing Nothing", a sort of Franz Ferdinand with horns number about sitting at home wasting time. She wants you to turn the radio and the TV off, she couldn't even bother to come up with the titles to all these songs. But she also falls in love, as on the weird, sweet "Felt Tip", which hangs on a wonderful, deep-throated bass groove and is so soaked in delay that everything swirls gently together, and it works, tripping between euro-pop balladry and mad disco fury. And all about a dude who likes to write on walls.

The more I listen to this album the more cause I have to lament the way it was recorded. I want to hear more of it -- there are only a few duds, like the intentionally repetitive "Make Out Fall Our Make Up", which is almost completely swallowed up by the sucking pool of distortion in the middle of the mix. And even that one might've been saved and even made majestic in a big-drum eighties sort of way if the parts had been separated properly. You could say that the manic listlessness that defines the lyrical content of the album spilled out and lazied up the execution, but every musician on here is twice as tight and skilled as any member of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!... there's a disconnect which can only be explained by cash flow problems. So I say to every major label: sign these kids up and give them a recording budget! Where's the Elektra for these folks? (Oh, right. They went under.)

In the meantime, buy this album to hear a sketch of what might've been. Or just turn it way, way up, which is the only way to properly hear everything that's going on.

Apparently the editor of this album is one Clinton Sparks, who is referred to on the album as "Mr. Get Familiar"...

Most of hip-hop is devoted to talking about hip-hop itself, and Clipseis very good at pointing out just how awesome they are.

...'get familiar' seems to be the major theme of the mixtape, as not only is there a sample of some kid saying "get familiar" throughout the album, but most (probably all; again my ignorance betrays me) of the songs are heavily sampled from current hits (the ones I recognized were Beyonce, The Game, and Kanye West). The idea is that all the songs are going to be 'familiar' to the listener, as the beats are stolen wholesale and reworked in their own fashion. It's kind of fitting that they decide to engage in this kind of pop cannibalism...

At least you can get it cheap.

...celebrating their novelty while at the same time preying on pop culture, because the characters Clipse portrays themselves as are crack dealers, people that prey upon the dregs of society yet pride themselves at their ability to inspire addiction. They say, "I sell nose candy; Willy Wonka", and, in a hip-hop fashion, they have interesting enough personalities to make the comparison apt.

At a few interludes on the album, they stop everything to explain parts of the album, like what is meant by "the black card" (apparently the black American Express card could purchase a small nation if you felt so inclined) or why some exclusive song is on the album. These are charming...

The interludes make the album feel like an E! Hollywood Exclusive, or anything on E!, really. Flashy editing of nuggets of preview-reel-ready best-of moments interspersed by interviews aboutthe project itself, and just like E!, the program's logo appears in every single transition (here, the logo is "Clinton Sparks").

...and even unintentionally hilarious at times: when they inform you the Black Card can purchase a jet, a jet noise flys by, and then to end his rant, he declares "Zing!" — a word I didn't realize anyone cool was allowed to say.

It's an interesting exercise, especially in today's fads of remixing and "mashups" and "remashmixups", because the soul of rap was always in the way that the beats were used and what you say over them. In that respect, this album is a huge success. The 'get familiar' strategy throws you off at first because you're consciously thinking about the hook from the original beat. But crack and unlimited credit cards aside, one thing Clipse does have is talent, and they're able to make each song their own.

AND NOW, the exciting conclusion!

This stuff isn't my thing, but I didn't mind listening to it at all. It was catchy, and Clipse are talented enough to still remain interesting. Buy.

Let's talk about structure for a minute. The first half of the tape is about how awesome the Re-Up Gang (which is how this album should properly be credited - the Clipse only make up a third of the group) is and how they are very good at crushing their enemies. The second half deals with the ins and outs of coke dealing, and also, maybe, a little emotional shit: particularly after Pharrell, the beatsmith and definite odd man out of the group, raps on "Maybe", calling himself the black John Lennon. And for the two songs that're left at least Mal and Pusha seem comfortable with leaning back a little bit and letting some vulnerability cloud their lyrics. This means that for me at least the second half is a lot more pleasurable to listen to, since there's less squirm-inducing misogyny to contend with - but the exceptional beats redeem a lot of these tracks, like "What's Up", which feels like an instant classic even though they're not rapping about a hell of a lot. I should mention that the MCs I haven't mentioned yet, Liva and Sandman, aren't bad, either -- they have deep, buttery flows, in the Biggie Smalls vein, and they each explore a different aspect of that style. Liva is unexpectedly dexterous, Sandman is laid-back and velvety. But in terms of content they're journeyman MCs, solid but not nearly as interesting as the Clipse.

This is good enough to merit a buy (although, of course, you can't -- this is a mixtape, the samples resolutely uncleared.) It's worth downloading just to hear "Maybe", which apart from its amazing beat has a hook that, if you're at all sociologically minded, will make your brain hurt -- "You and me - baked ice cream and BBC..."

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Yeah. I just fucking reviewed this. Now I get to review what amounts to another Ladytron.

OK, to be fair they are a bit different from Ladytron. Ladytron is far more produced and far more gothy, with more of an industrial sound than Broadcast, who is more reserved and techno sounding. But both have the same intended feel to them: ambient electronic music that retains a traditional song structure. They also have very similar lead vocalists in both style and timbre. But what separates Broadcast from Ladytron (and what makes them better) is that they sound less like a band singing over music they made in GarageBand and more like an actual group of musicians. The arrangment of music is far more organic, more analog. Some songs are even absent the electronic parts entirely. Overall, Broadcast is more musical than Ladytron and catchier. I just wish I didn't have to listen to them each in a row.

The album certainly doesn't start off with very much hope. As much as I love the title "I Found the F", the singer's voice carries with it a certain amount of dullness. As opposed to the singer of Ladytron, who carries a unique indie vibe, the singer of Broadcast inspires relaxation and comatose behavior, perhaps inspiring one to dance like the sad goth kids one might see on a mediocre sketch comedy show. The next song lets me down again, being one of the more disappointing songs inspired by Alice in Wonderland I have heard. But by the time the third track, "America's Boy" comes on, I have a much better idea of what Broadcast is all about. They're basically Bis in slow motion, electronica pop slowed down a bit; opting for atmosphere over structure, distorted and haunting background pads instead of slick and sweet instrumentation, reverb over compression. "Tears in the Typing" is a departure from the rest of the album, being a simple stripped down, reverb-drenched acoustic singer/songwriter number that reminds me of Mirah.

There are still some sore spots on the album for me. "Corporeal" is another Ladytron sound-alike, and "You and Me in Time", even at 1:24 is kind of boring. But it's very difficult to find any other negative areas on this album, because Broadcast's melodies are really very catchy. The atmosphere and her voice say "sleep", but the hooks on the album say "listen". Burn.

The first track of this album is the last time we hear live drums- the rest of the time it's all held together by a casio beat barely elevated from its primordial click-track ancestry. Somebody had a couple of good keyboards (and a couple bad ones) and decided to make them interesting by running them through a variety of bargain-basement distortion effects. Throw in some equally fuzz-slathered guitar and bass and put a vaguely Nico-sounding chanteuse with an unidentifiable accent over the whole thing, and you've apparently got the recipe for indie success. I'm kind of baffled by this album: it sounds like it was recorded in someone's bedroom, and not in the good way, there's not a whole lot of interest going on lyrically or melodically, and the only thing that differentiates it sonically is that they gave the knobs on all their effects pedals an extra quarter-turn so it sounds really bumpy and 8-bit. There is a nice baseline hidden in there at one point - Track 6, I believe, "Corporeal", and of course it has the kind of one-finger fucked-synth solo snaking all over it that would make an engineer wonder where the bad circuit is.

The rest of it verges from acceptable to deeply irritating. "Arc of a Journey" is particularly fun - how you make this track is you turn on the auto-chording and arpeggiating function on an electric church organ, hold down a key for five minutes and then near the end turn your distortion up. Also feel free to solo very slowly with your other hand. And there is "Subject to the Ladder", which by cunning use of two alternating chords contrives to let you know that something is subject to the ladder. She implies that it may be her mind.

If this is a one-person project I guess it's cool in a look what I did in my basement sort of a way. If there was an actual band involved that's sad. You don't really need to listen to it either way. Skip.

This style means that I should probably run through this album a song at a time. "My Home Is The Sea" is lyrically what you'd expect: heavily bluegrass-influenced (he uses the word "reckon" at some point) and highly poetic, describing the thoughts and life of a man at sea in a roundabout way heavy on imagery. The song is quite dynamic, going from vocals and a clean electric guitar to full band when the drums kick in about a minute in to guitar solo back down to a quiet, organ-led bridge, and then it starts over again. It's excellence in songwriting, as the drums come in at the right moment, the way the electric guitar is recorded is at once clear and refreshing, even the quiet parts are catchy, and the outro solo is a calm denoument that sails you back into port. I focus on the first song because it captures the best of both sides of Bonnie and Matt. It's an average length but doesn't leave the listener wanting more despite its length, the full band parts are that kind of nostalgic 70s folk rock, and the two vocalists work wonderfully in tandem. "Beast For Thee" and "What Are You" are more quiet, classic country/western guitar fingerpicking ditties (the most fitting term) which lend credence to the "boring" hypothesis. It's saved somewhat by the lyrics on "What Are You", which describe a romantic interlude and remind one of a modern revisioning of Victorian-era sexual relations.

The album takes it down another notch on "Goat and Ram", which has a soft section of about 2 and half minutes which is quite inaudible unless you are listening to it at full volume. Then, the song launches into full band, distorted guitar that wakes you up and scares the shit out of you (especially if you've turned up your player up to hear the other part). Then it goes back to sleep. It reminds me of cartoon characters sneaking into the bad guy's room at night, and the audience gets spooked when the bad guy stirs, maybe screaming in his sleep and tossing and turning violently, and then finally returning to rest. "Lift Us Up" is the same as the ones before, with a stripped down arrangement of two electric guitars and two singers. The song's not completely boring, however, as the hook in the chorus is quite excellent. "Rudy Foolish" is just the same, but without the hook.

Don't get me wrong: Bonnie and Matt's basic arrangement, two electrics and two singers, isn't bad on its own, even with their quiet style. It's just that when songs in this style don't have a definite hook to them, they tend to all blend into each other in a haze of soft, gentle voices and arpeggios. That makes the loud sections on "Goat and Ram" so much more powerful - but by the time they show up, I've completely lost interest. The hook on "Lift Us Up" makes it rise far above the songs around it. The excellent flow on the opener make it the clear winner. Similarly, "Bed Is For Sleeping", the next song after "Rudy Foolish" works because the main theme is so catchy. The next song, "Only Someone Running", works because the simple change to acoustic guitar totally changes the atmosphere. Above that, the chorus is excellent, although the backup vocalist kind of slaughters his question-and-answer harmony at the climax of the song, ending up sounding like a bad impression of a gospel singer. "Death In the Sea" and "Blood Embrace" are both dull songs, but "Death In the Sea" is much better because it only lasts two and a half minutes. "Blood Embrace" gives us the exact same thing for over seven minutes, kind of like "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" but not as good. It also ends with a strange dialog cut from an 80s movie or something. The album ends strong, though, with "I Gave You", whose structure laid out like a classic country song while retaining their basic style.

This album is a lot like Iron and Wine's 2004 Our Endless Numbered Days — well-performed and soothing, but there are only a few songs that manage to be very moving. The rest is mood music, and I don't give that very high regard artistically. Burn.

It's always struck me as a weird accident of fate that Will Oldham is an indie rock star and not, say, one of the endless roll of folkies and adult-contemporary reformed rockists who quietly sell out middle-sized venues the nation over without any of us kids (us who count, you see) ever having heard of them. His stuff is so restrained, so classic-minded, so grown up - man's music, not boy's music - that you have to wonder where, in the man-depleted landscape of indieness, he is supposed to fit.

This album, although ostensibly by Oldham (as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy) and Matt Sweeney, belongs to Oldham, with Sweeney adding musical polish in the guitar lines and ethereal floating harmonies to the schtick Bonnie Billy perfected on "I See A Darkness". Everything is quiet, here, drums and bass sparingly scattered behind circling or spiraling guitars which buzz and seethe gently as Oldham sings his songs of death and relationships and relationships and death.

Sweeney does get the chance to take the lead here and there, as on "What Are You", but that song is just as pretty and ethereal as everything else on the album, if not a little more so. Sweeney's idiom is slightly more countrified than Oldham's archaisms and doom-tinged meditations, and thus slightly more straightforward.. with Oldham, you have to be prepared in the middle of a dirge for a silly rhyme involving his tummy or a weirdly inappropriate use of the word 'friend' or the odd 'thee' heaving into view. (And yet, still, somehow, it always feels mature and assured... it's a dad's measured silliness.) It's worth going with him -- he always has a lot to say, as on the epic "Blood Embrace", wherein he contemplates how he would deal with a partner's infidelity, wishing he would walk away but knowing that he would stay and fight, before yielding to a lengthy sample of dialogue from a movie where the protagonist seems incapable of doing either. It's a moment that shouldn't work, but it does, because the backing instrumentals, soothing and evocative, are cinematic in and of themselves.

In an album this quiet one does eventually wish for a little more to sink one's teeth into, and a few more songs from Sweeney would've been welcome if only for their overt songiness. This is largely countered, though, by the fact that many of the album's strongest songs are near the end - like the fuzzy, bent "Death In The Sea", which oddly turns out to be about wanting to live, and "I Gave You", a song about a dead love which is nearly swallowed up in its own distortion but which is carried through by Oldham's vocals, which are (always) at once plaintive and strong.

Buy this one - it's as good as "I See A Darkness" in places, and better. And the cover art ain't bad either.

It's interesting that I mentioned The Band in my last review, because apparently The Hold Steady was inspired heavily by Scorcese's documentary about The Band, The Last Waltz. Apparently, the lead singer said something like, "Bands don't sound like this anymore. Let's do this from now on," and they've certainly achieved success in that regard. The Hold Steady is the kind of straight-forward rock'n'roll that no one plays anymore. It's not prog rock, but it's not punk; it's not as masturbatory as Van Halen or as juvenile as AC/DC; they aren't afraid to use organs or power chords or harmonized guitar solos; it's not cheesy or pretentious, and it sounds equally good at an arena or a local festival or a small club. These guys also play guitar riffs that would make AC/DC jealous, and they routinely segue into "Layla" or Billy Joel-esque piano parts. But, despite me comparing them to 10-20 year-old music, they are undeniably modern. It's just that no one sounds like them these days.

I have to admit, I was on the fence on this one for a long time. I really appreciate what The Hold Steady does, but I wasn't entirely sure if this was something good or something great. They cover a long range of styles, to be sure, from Rancid-style guitar playing to 50s 6/8 ballads to blues riffs so bluesy they are almost country. But it's still very hard to decide if there was any depth to it. What eventually won me over was the lyrics. The album is a loose concept album about a girl named Halleluiah (Holly for short) and the narrator — who, I'm not sure, may play different characters in each song. It's kind of intentionally vague. The album tells the story of how Holly tries to reconcile her similarly vague religious teachings with her adolescent existence, has some strange experiences, gets reborn again in a bizarre program, and comes out more or less with an awareness of herself. But the story, if you can call it that, is absorbed into the mind by osmosis. It's told in circles, in a non-linear fashion, from different viewpoints. In fact, it seems as if the story actually changes as the album goes on, which makes it very difficult to compile into a continuous narrative.

One of the best songs is "Cattle and the Creeping Things", which is about someone reading the Bible with a strangely naive common sense blue-collar view:

"she likes the part where one brother kills the other. she has to wonder if the the world ever will recover. because cain and abel seem to still be causing trouble."

The actual words the lyrics are made up of are just as good as anything John Darnielle writes. The Hold Steady and The Mountain Goats are actually often mentioned in the same breath, and it's because both write good lyrics that are very often sung in a spoken manner. The difference between The Hold Steady and The Mountain Goats, though, is that The Hold Steady has rhythm. The Mountain Goats desparately try to shove every word they can into each verse, no matter how awkward it is. The Hold Steady sing/speaks each line with an incredibly natural flow. The passion they sing with differs, too. The Mountain Goats sing with a warbly, sensitive, emo passion, while The Hold Steady has two basic speeds: sad drunk and angry drunk. It helps that the lead singer has the unique voice to pull this off. When he sings, "I'm a very busy man, man," you believe it.

This is an album that has to be heard. It's something you won't see come out these days, and The Hold Steady have a penchant for turning an excellent phrase. Go out and buy this album. I guarantee if you can get past the singer's voice, which may be a turnoff to some, you will have fun listening to it at least once. You may even grow to like it.

Craig Finn shouts his lyrics, which are stories that happen to pull rhymes out of the air haphazardly as they go. He's got a knack for song titles ("Charlemagne In Sweatpants") and character and color, and he sells every line he delivers. The songs all tell the same story, but they're mixed up chronologically and you can never be sure who's narrating what or who each character is meant to be at any given moment or who's been born again or whether the whole thing might just be about Stevie Nix. If it's your thing you could probably spend days unraveling it, figuring out who had drugs in their socks and who took who up to Penetration Park. The tone don't vary much, sure, and you can really only tell one song from another by the hooks, but it's all catchy enough, and there are some moments which stick out -- like "Don't Let Me Explode", musically a fifties make-out number stapled to a Weezer-esque rocker, lyrically a tale of two people who despite themselves never went everywhere or saw anything. This is followed by "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night", which feels to me like the masterpiece of the whole damn thing, a song that starts with meeting W.B. Yeats at a party and proceeds to kick your ass up and down, breaking out the horn section before stopping dead in its tracks so you'll notice how awesome the bridge is. A piano comes out of nowhere and plays a series of chords that make me think of a post-Rent musical or the New Pornographers, and then the rest of the band falls on it and for an all-too-brief moment they don't sound like anybody else. Not that it's a bad thing when they take on the styles of their elders, necessarily. "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" is at least 85% Springsteen, dumbed down appropriately and tinged with country rock, and it's a delight. Weaker tracks like "Multitude of Casualties" coast a little, chugging along on the back of the lyrics, but generally somehow arrive at a moment of catharsis anyway.

The complaint will be that it all sounds the same and that the lead singer never switches up his delivery, which given the sheer weight of words this album deals in can wear on the nerves. But screw that. If you're not up for this much triumphal ass-kickery at once take it in chunks. And the real exciting part is that according to nearly all the critics they topped this one with their 2006 album. Stay tuned for our take on that and in the meantime pick this sucker up (by buying it, if possible.)

This album is really heavy, and they don't hold back on the opening track. "The Fox" starts off with what is probably the loudest noise on the album; the guitars and drums playing as loud as they possibly can. Immediately, you know that this is Serious Rock, the kind that even the most jaded rocker is going to admit 'rocks'. On this album, Sleater-Kinney combines very simple, blues-inspired guitar riffs with heavy choruses and crooning vocals, which on the surface makes them remarkably similar to Led Zeppelin. When they sing "land ho!", they do it with soul and a vibrato that Devendra Banhart is probably very jealous of. It's also clear that their drummer is one of the reasons for their success as she basically excudes pure energy. The next two songs are based off of jaunty, elfish rhythms that quickly turn into dark, distortion filled straight-forward choruses, and in the case of "What's Mine Is Yours" eventually becomes a brief backwards guitar jam noise solo, that when used sparingly, is an effective tool in advancing the song. It works well here, but is overused a lot later on in the album, especially on "Let's Call It Love", which is 8 minutes of it. It's still somewhat forgivable if you decide to call that the "end of the record" and chalk it up to a noise outro or something, which allows you to get up and shut off the record at any time. The problem, and the largest stain on this record, is "Night Light", the song that follows "Let's Call It Love" and ends the album. The song is completely uncharacteristic from the rest of the album, and what's worse is that it sounds like an indie rock copy of Evanescence.

Most of the songs on the album are in the same vein as the first three, but it doesn't get boring or detract from the album, and no critical complaint can be made about it. That's like faulting Rancid for sounding like a punk band. There are a few points that stand out from the rest of the album, thought. The verse on "Jumpers" leans more towards the "alternative" side of indie rock than you might expect. "Steep Air" could be mistaken for the Sleater-Kinney take on Modest Mouse. "Modern Girl" is a soft song with the guitar distortion turned off that is more melodic than the rest, with a pianica(?) in it. They make up for the guitars by distorting the entire mix. Incidentally, this album was produced by Dave Fridmann, who has worked with The Flaming Lips before. His goal seems to give the album a very live feel to it, which actually succeeds spectacularly. The entire mix is saturated, and the reverb on the vocals isn't the tone-sucking reverb you might hear from say, Broadcast; instead it gives the music a live feel. (The reverb also hangs on a little longer at the end of vocal passages, bringing to mind psychedelic 70s artists.) Add to that the fact that Sleater-Kinney is a band with a phenomenal amount of energy that actually comes through on the CD, as opposed to other excellent live artists, e.g. The Arcade Fire.

If you value rock and roll in the depths of your soul, as I know you do, you will accept the gift Sleater-Kinney has given you and buy The Woods. It's also interesting in its own right as an artifact, as this is apparently the final studio album ever released by this band.

Let's just go with instinct, then. This stuff is bitchin' in a way that went out of style a long time ago. The guitar lines are massive and yet still retain a measure of the intricacy and interplay that made Sleater-Kinney famous. Opener "The Fox" feels like the start of something huge and scary, with huge walls of chugging guitar buoying up Corin Tucker's unmistakable ululating vocals, but that overt menace is replaced as the album goes on with a feeling of timelessness. You can't be sure when this stuff was made, and on songs like "Jumpers" you feel the guitar sound sloping off into the kind of timeless growl that made Sonic Youth's best material transcend itself. Or, possibly, I'm just a sucker for baritone guitar and twining melodic lines, and songs about how soulless California is. See, maybe I do like it that much. Or not. Or...

I suppose the problem is that every note, every squall of noise, even the gimmicky "Modern Girl" (a sugary pop song about being a consumer repeated three times, each time with the distortion on every part turned up just a tad and the lyrics a little more menacing) feels inevitable, Classic, both as a genre and as a descriptor. The way Tucker shouts her 'woah-oh-ohs' on "Entertain" hearken back to a thousand other woah-oh-oh's, male and female, british and american, but all indubitably rockin'. And even as "Let's Call It Love" threatens to destroy you with its endless noise-solo breakdowns you still feel as if you're standing in a stadium, you at one end, the band at the other, both of you caught up in a ritual as old as the Rolling Stones (and that's old, brother)... and it's really kind of wonderful to hear that arena-rock, here-are-my-balls mentality filtered through a resolutely indie all-girl three-piece punk band. It works as if it were always meant to work this way, as if the sparkling production and trim guitar lines they'd always favored were self-imposed chains that they've finally allowed themselves to break. It's rockism at its best. And they do have the chops to pull it off -- the guitars are precise in their sloppiness, alternately huge and amorphous and sharp and cutting, and their drummer (Portand institution and current member of Quasi Janet Weiss) is thunderous.

So. Yeah, they got me. This is probably a classic and well worth a buy. I just hope Stephen's review is slightly more useful.

A band like this in California would produce something pagan and hippy (like My Barbarian). A band like this in New York would produce satanic metal, and a band like this in the Midwest might produce something nerd-core. But in the fertile indie ground of Portland, they produce something gilded and unique. (However, before Isaac claims yet another victory for the Pacific Northwest, I should point out that lead guitarist Chris Funk — as seen on The Colbert Report — is from the other Northwest - Northwest Indiana, specifically my hometown of Valparaiso.) The album starts off with the epic "The Infanta", telling a story about princes and dukes and whatever, I'm still not sure what he's saying. But it's exciting, melodic, and the East Indies influenced style makes you feel like you're watching an old 70s film like Lawrence of Arabia or The King and I or something similarly exotic. I also want to note that while his voice is not perfect by any means, it's still an excellent voice that is made better simply by the singer's confidence. It's put up front in the mix and is clear and understandable, something you don't see too often in modern music.

The rest of the album is a journey and interesting to listen to. Sometimes it's the album's lyrics, sometimes it's the music alone that is engaging. It helps that The Decemberists are excellent storytellers, like "The Sporting Life", a song odd in that it doesn't talk about the exotic, but rather football, in telling the story of a young high school player who injures himself on the field. A very innocuous-seeming scene, but it's told in a simple yet engaging fashion. But taken too far, it can backfire: the lowest point on the album comes in "Espionage", a very long story about a spy and his lover. The song starts off well enough, but it drags on with a plodding verse. After you think the song might end, it inexplicably spirals into a failed attempt at some kind of string crescendo which ends in more of the verse. It's disappointing, because the song would have really worked with some editing.

Other than the length of some songs, I can't find any fault with this album other than the basic style, which might be off-putting to some people. But if the idea of hearing about people shipwrecked inside of a whale or about royal court intrigue doesn't bother you, then you should definitely buy Picaresque.

The word Picaresque is used to refer to a certain kind of swashbuckling narrative of grand guignol and global adventure popular in the mid-eighteenth century. And, oddly enough, when you crack this sucker open you get exactly what it says on the tin, minus the eighteenth century part. (Although there're songs on here that would've gone down a storm in the dockside taverns of Liverpool, back in the day.) You also get the best album we've had so far, rife with tales of bloody revenge, international espionage, double suicide, and love affairs that last beyond the grave. And it's all constructed with the rhythm and the narrative of the whole shebang in mind, which is particularly welcome in these trying times, now that the idea of the record album as a cohesive unit seems to be on its way out. Again.

We open with a galloping drumbeat that tells you that we mean business - that this cute, literary little band has grander intentions this time and is going to wipe the floor with you. And the opener, "The Intafada", is a stunner, a five minute description of a royal procession bearing a holy babe plucked from the water in a basket. That's it - no context provided, just intense martial climax after climax. The Decemberist's sound, beyond being flecked through with horns and bowed bass and accordion, is notable for its sense of rhythmic and dynamic tension -- this song starts out loud, gets louder, straps on some hilariously over the top spaghetti western arpeggios, gets even louder and then slows to a halt for a brief, yearning glance at the prince's virgin bride. And then it gets louder still. And then it's straight into the double suicide, with the perversely catchy "We Both Go Down Together", which is part shanty, part irish lilt, part piano rock and contains melodic hooks that burrow into your head. This story of a love that could never be sets the tone for the rest of the album, ushering in the tone of romantic doom that will see us through to the end, where in the ethereally beautiful "Angels" we are treated to a more metaphorical drowning.

It's hard to pick out highlights because the album's dripping with them. Check out "The Sporting Life", a tale of failure on the football field that is redolent of Belle & Sebastian's high-school-forever aesthetic and sounds just enough like something off of "If You're Feeling Sinister" that we know it's a homage, without ever feeling like anything but a Decemberists song. (You don't get banjo in B&S.) This whole album actually reminds me of that band's underrated comeback album "Dear Catastrophe Waitress"... there's the same willingness to experiment, the same far-reaching narratives, and the same half-serious sophistication, but "Picaresque" is far more cohesive and thus far more successful. It balances its higher and more ludicrous flights of fancy with songs of bracing immediacy. The epic cold war romance "Espionage" is full of crazed stylistic tailbacks and about-faces, starting and stopping and building and falling until it lands eventually in a Glass-ian minimalist cul-de-sac which explodes into the one moment on the album where the vocals aren't pushed to the fore, drowned instead in a storm of noise. Then, after the stripped-down ghost song "Lost At Sea" to clear our palates, we have "16 by 32", a triumphant stomp-along protest song about the war in Iraq, which could stand alone as a radio single if it weren't so caustic. This balance of the high-flown with the direct serves the album very well indeed, and nowhere better than with "Bus Mall" and "The Mariners' Song", the last big songs on the album, which are placed right next to each other because isolated they would be overwhelming, the first from sheer poignancy and the second from pure swashbucking ridiculousness. The first is a story of teenage runaways who turn to prostitution (and is probably more affecting to me because it's set in Portland and I recognize the places he mentions and the sort of kids he's describing.) The second is about a revenge-crazed sailor who is swallowed by a whale, only to find himself sharing the thing's cavernous belly with the very man who brought about his mother's untimely demise. Either might be over the top if they weren't juxtaposed so closely. As it is, it just feels like Colin Meloy flexing his compositional muscles, particularly because after the whale we get the stark intimacy of "Angels", proving that the bastard can write love songs that don't involve civil war captains or selkies.

The last thing I want to mention about the album is that it has a song that functions as a kind of mission statement. "Engine Driver", which references both the Who and "Wichita Lineman", is about a man trying to escape his overpowering love for a girl by diving into story after story and character and character. He is "a writer, a writer of fictions", a line and a conceit which so disgusted me when I first heard this album last year that I shelved it and didn't give it a second look until I had to review it here. You might have the same reaction... it's almost as easy to hate Colin for his cleverness as it is to be swept along by his stories. I'm in a different place now than I was then, and I think this is easily among the top five albums of '05, and that you should buy it. But it ain't for everyone, not even always for me. But just for the chance that you can allow yourself to be caught and dazzled by it you should give it a shot.

All arguments about whether singles collections should even be reviewed aside, after hearing this, my only experience with Mr. Braxe, perhaps he is best served to the general public as a Best Of collection. Those of us who are not versed in techno can experience the highlights of his career without being turned off by what is — as having a singles collection affirms — a bunch of mediocre filler along the way.

If you aren't familiar with Mr. Braxe, like myself, he seems to have a very distinct style. His recordings push the high end of the EQ, and his synth pads give you a very distinct feeling: the feeling of being awake at 5am in the countryside. His sparse arrangments and chords are exceedingly natural, like an incarnation of techno wandering the moors. On "Intro", there is a repeated "woo-ooh" that bears a striking resemblance to a Bob White's call, normally heard at 6am in Indiana while waiting for the school bus. This is music to play a 10 year old driving video game to until 4 in the morning. It's music to make coffee to, if you were so inclined.

Overall, if this were not a singles compilation, I would advise the techno enthusiast to hastily purchase this CD, and the layman to burn it. But seeing as how this is a singles collection, the enthusiast probably already has all of these songs already, which would lead me to suggest to you to burn the CD.

God deliver me from these neo-discophytes and their broken-record stylings. The loops that drive these tracks are usually less than two seconds long -- the tedium bores into the brain as the phased vocals swirl in and out. This is less music than counter-insurgency black ops -- I bet there's an entire section for it in the new prisoner interrogation guidelines. The only thing that saves it from being outright torture is the occasional funky bassline that worms its way in to taunt you with its musicality.

Where were the hippoisie when my favorite band decided that disco-electronica was in again and did it with actual songwriting? You didn't care. You didn't dig the emotion. You didn't dig the beats, which were easily on a par with this numbingly same-y crap. If you couldn't dance to it without a measly thought in your brains it wasn't cool enough for you. You let them die, and now you shovel up crap like this, which is hip because it's European.

Yeah. If overuse of phasing and tremolo were a crime, these people would be shot at dawn, with the overuse of canned handclaps cited by the prosecution as an aggravating factor. May you rot, Alan Braxe! How do you make a hip-hop song so limp and unrappable that the MC sinks into it like a man being swallowed by a vat of thick porridge when you refuse to use any loop longer than five seconds? It must be a christmas miracle. (That's Track 11 for those of you foolish enough to still be listening at that point in the album). Skip! Skip! Skip!

As good as the lyrics might be, they're also the biggest problem. One of the complaints I've heard levied against Pavement (don't worry, I'm getting to The Mountain Goats) is that they "sound like a bunch of indie dorks making it up as they go along." This applies equally well to The Mountain Goats as well: Darnielle sounds like he's just singing whatever crap comes off the top of his head. Oh, he's most definitely not; the lyrics, taken separately, are quite good. The problem is that the man has an annoying, and to my ears, wrong approach to meter. Most of the time he sounds like he's trying to cram as many syllables into a phrase as possible just so he doesn't have to violate the sanctity of his lyrics. What I imagine to be Darnielle's creative process is this: first, he figures out a tune on the guitar, improvising lyrics and coming up with some kind of hook. He then takes that hook and writes a poem around it that has no relation to the song whatsoever. The result sounds like someone trying to cram a square peg into a round hole. In the end, the music is great, the lyrics are great, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

But this is a criticism that can be levied against The Mountain Goats in general; it doesn't address this specific album. This album has a much higher production quality than I was expecting; it's slick, like you would expect from say, a Broadway album. I say this because "Dance Music" sounds like it comes direct from the Rent soundtrack. Overall, the arrangements are well thought out, especially for music which is at its heart simple singer/songwriter acoustic ballads. If there is a problem in the music, it's cello-driven pieces that are reminiscent of old Beatles song but sound incongruous with Darnielle's voice and the album as a whole.

I'm not familiar with The Mountain Goats' other work, but this is an expertly made, detailed, and closely crafted album at the very least. So that leads me to a conflict: if it were up to most fans of indie rock, they would tell you to buy it. If it were up to me (and it is), I would tell you to just skip this album. But I suppose that you need to hear the Mountain Goats at least once before deciding your position on them, so ultimately, I would suggest an averaged burn.

So this guy turns out to be a classically poppy songwriter with a great voice and consistently interesting lyrics. Also he has a song here called "Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod", which beats out Cursed Realms (Of The Winterdemons) and Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed as the best song title of 2005 so far. There are shades of They Might Be Giants in here, although I'm not sure wherefrom they come, since this stuff isn't as musically complex and is far, far more emotionally committed. I think it's just the general air of nerdiness, a certain kind of cool-but-dorky-dad quality in the vocals. And that's what you really have to latch onto with this guy - his voice, his passion, his delivery. The music itself is resolutely pleasant but unremarkable, and the production is intentionally haphazard. It has, occasionally, dat ole chimera Pop Sensibility padding around its bones, but I could do with a little more movement, a little more complexity, a little more ache to go with the tape hum. And then there's the problem of repetition - there's not much structurally, musically or even melodically that separates "Up The Wolves" from "This Year" or "Broom People".

Darnielle's at his best when he's at his least cartoonish, as on the affecting album closer "Pale Green Things" and the death-meditation "Song For Dennis Brown". The appeal of this music is in the emotion packed into each song, and the more stridently dorky Darnielle gets the harder it gets to access that feeling, and one's attention drifts to the music, which is only good insofar as it supports the vocals, and then things get boring. There are some exceptions - the dumb sunny pop of "Dance Music" buoys up two little vignettes about destructive relationships in a wonderful, sour-sweet mix. This is another case where the best songs on the album achieve a unique beauty that makes me see why people could fall in love with this artist and follow him to the grave, but where the merely solid tunes leave me uninspired. I'd rather listen to the Decemberists -- Darnielle has a better voice, and I believe the stories he's telling me are true, where Colin is obviously telling a bunch of fibs. But I'd rather have insincerity delivered in layers of musical complexity than sincerity served on a half-warmed pop platter. If you will. If you tend the other way (and there are many good folk who do), this stuff's for you.

So. As a whole, the endeavor feels slight, and that's the recipe for a burn, in my book -- you should check it out, if only to hear the way Darnielle acts the vocals on "Dilaudid".

In a weird way, I get the feeling that the kind of person who is into this might also be into Morissey too. The music has a kind of unique indie 80s feel, covered by a depressing shroud of gray that reminds me of the feeling you get when you watched crappy 80s bands with horrible stage presence on cheesy 80s videos with cheesy background effects, like everyone is kind of surrounded red thanks to "edge-detect" technology. I say Morissey, though, because both Morissey and Ladytron have, from a certain perspective, a particular quality of lameness. But there's a certain kind of charm that has the potential to cause a completely inexplicable snowballing of appreciation, as if somehow the performer has found a way to trasmit that 'indie' feeling: the feeling that you are the only one on the planet who might like this person because your musical tastes are just that eclectic, but at the same time you feel that there might be others like you, so you wear your Smiths shirt as a beacon. I'm not saying that such a feeling is childish or even undesirable, I'm just saying that both Morissey and Ladytron are able to hypnotize certain listeners into feeling it.

That said, Ladytron was an absolute trial to sludge through. Every single track sounds vaguely the same, with a few exceptions like "Fighting In Built Up Areas", and the last couple songs, "White Light Generation" and "All The Way". But these aren't nearly impactful enough to make up for 12 songs worth of Ladytron. Even the album title, "The Witching Hour" is a let down. It's more like the "Watching Late Night Infomercials Hour", though I suppose both of those are around midnight. So unless you are a fan of mellow techno that is mellow due soley to its mediocrity rather than its aural quality, I would suggest the music fan skip Ladytron.

You know how I mentioned in passing that my favorite band (while it lived - bis, for those of you not in the know) died because nobody wanted to listen to their darkly atmospheric disco electronica? They were apparently ahead of their time. Ladytron is death disco of the highest order (though not as good by virtue of not being Scottish) and as a result I can't help but like it, all the while cursing the fickleness of taste-makers everywhere. What makes it better than the Alan Braxe is that a) these are songs, rather than looping exercises, and b) that the phaser has been ditched for guitar-borne distortion. In other words, it's a band, not a concept.

That being said, this stuff still ain't all that great, and its presence this far up the list is kind of perplexing. There are some really awful songs pushed up right near the front of the album, like "International Dateline", which mates the rhythm from 'lust for life' to a melody line that's nearly identical to the first track of the album and then opens with the flat-affect girl singer intoning "Woke up in the evening / to the sound of the screaming / through the walls it was bleeding / all over me." Awww. That album opener, though, is a corker, insistent and driving, if just as gothy, with raw-edged guitars mated with choked-off back-mixed electronic squirts to create a grimy wall of sound. The vocalist is at her best when she's at her most sugary, drenched in reverb and twisting her vowels like a teen idol, rubbing up against a backing track that takes no prisoners and chugs forward dumbly, a juggernaut with sharp corners. This band can't do spare, they can't do dynamic variation, they can't do start/stop. When they try they fail badly. But when they start punching and don't let up til the song exhausts itself, they succeed. I dig the swooping guitar effects and driving beats on mid-album tracks like "Sugar" and "Fighting In Built Up Areas", the latter of which is sung in russian, which improves matters tremendously. The album really picks up around that time, with lyrics like "If I give you sugar, will you give me / something elusive and temporary", which beats the hell out of bleeding walls. Break out the minor chords and let's have a doom dance party -- we can wear pancake makeup and cherry lipstick and glow-bracelets.

But when they slow down the beats, take out the guitars and try to bring the floaty melodic vocals, things get depressing. "Soft Power", which sounds like an outtake from a Castlevania soundtrack, is a great example. Without the driving beat or the hard-panned guitars all the wind goes out of their sails.

In short, when Ladytron plays to its strengths and goes over the top it works. You can bop your head to it, you can score your revenge fantasies to it, you can run in the woods and rip out the throats of small animals. Thank god they have a decent drummer, even though they've recorded him in such a way that he sounds as tinny as a machine -- it's the fills that keeps music like this thing going, enabling swoops and crescendos to go as they should. (Or maybe it is a machine, and it's good programming. Either way.) There's a stretch of songs, from "Sugar" to "Weekend", that I enjoy greatly, and "High Rise", the opening track, has made its way onto a couple mix tapes of mine. But the rest of it fails to reach my hindbrain and the rational part of me can see it for what it is -- trashy electronica with plastic fangs on. A burn, here, and that's generous.

The album starts off with a simple guitar riff, quickly brings the rest of the band, and it becomes very clear: Franz Ferdinand is a fun band. Normally, on this first track, you'd get the now-ubiquitous disco style beat, but Franz Ferdinand turns it into a just-as-dancable shuffle beat. There's some sweet instrumental guitar interplay here, the chorus is catchy as anything, and the music is solid. The only thing missing is some kind of deep emotional impact — but that's okay, because that's not what Franz Ferdinand is about. They're about having fun, and in their words, "making music that girls will want to dance to." You might be wondering, don't I fault bands for this? The difference with Franz is that they are completely honest, and they are good enough songwriters that the result doesn't feel processed like American cheese. They just play good rock and roll. "Do You Want To", the Big Single on the album, starts off with a sloppy, garage band opening but then kicks into the simple dance beat section. But they bring back that part later, only transformed to the new style. What I'm trying to get at is that this band has depth, are making real contributions to rock and roll, yet remain accessible to just about everyone. That's a real accomplishment.

You could have said that about Franz Ferdinand on the previous album, but here they are better at it. In addition, they've also tried to move beyond the typical Franz Ferdinand sound. "Walk Away" has strong spaghetti Western influences and acoustic guitar, but they make it work with their style. Helping them, of course, is the power of the lead singer's voice and their ability to write hooks just about anywhere. "Eleanor Put Your Boots On" is a piano driven song which reminds me somewhat of Spoon. This kind of song, actually, is what I wish Spoon was. "Fade Together" is another song in the same vein. The rest of the songs are in the dancy, Franz Ferdinand power rock style, but don't let that description fool you: they don't all sound exactly alike.

Really, the low point of the album are those songs where fatigue starts to set in: Franz Ferdinand is very professional about its music, but at one point on the album you start to get a little tired of the excitement. The first is the song "Well That Was Easy", which in addition to being a mediocre song, follows the mellow "Eleanor", so while it is intended to jump start your excitement after a short rest, it's too forceful. For me the album kind of coasts from there until you get to the title track, "You Could Have It So Much Better", where the lead singer changes up his delivery somewhat, really switching things up and providing some much needed novelty.

Overall, though, if you bought their debut album, this is an album you should definitely buy. If you didn't, I would suggest this album as an introduction to Franz Ferdinand over the debut. (Needless to say, if you are opposed to the idea of Franz Ferdinand, you probably won't like this.)

Oh my god, it's rock and roll? With melodies? Real melodies? Thank you, you crazy scotsmen. This album is just such a relief - we haven't had any really decent rock since Spoon, and that barely counts - that I don't know if I'll be able to be entirely objective about it.

Objective. I crack myself up.

So we open with "The Fallen", which as a song kicks the stuffing out of anything 2005's had to offer so far. It's almost hard to explain why -- is it the skanky, sinuous, almost Bond-ian lick? Is it the the fact that it has at least three separate parts, not including the rhythm-section-only verse and the abruptly major-key bridge with the La La Las? Is it the theme - a song for rebellious kids everywhere, a big old fuck-you in the "let he is without sin cast the first stone" mold? Is it the "hoo-hoo" background vocals? Is it the complex structure, the melody with its unexpected dips and flats? Or is it just because it's a hell of a lot of fun? And then we get "Do What You Want", which starts us off with a verse that's 100% early Beatles and then slathers Cars-esque rubbery stomp all over it. And then adds a dollop of FF's trademarked gay disco juice. This is the way to do style homages - flip shit together at random and then make it your own. And then do... geez, I don't know how to describe the bridge of this song, except the guitars seems to be built out of flaming tires. And all this for a song that is, as far as I can tell, about letting someone do you in the butt.

The album is not all up to this standard, inevitably -- for one thing, half of the songs seem to be about a break-up, and while there's nothing wrong with that in principle it doesn't work very well with Kapranos' fey seducer persona. His vocals seem a little deflated, becuase it's hard to strut while you're singing about people walking out on you, over and over. And as tends to happen when heartbreak is involved, the lyrics get a little dumber... it's hard to talk about how she done you wrong without repeating yourself, over and over again, as you watch people's smiles of sympathy freeze into get-me-out-of-here rictuses. Not. That I am bitter. Where was I?

Oh yeah. There's plenty going on here anyway. There is for example the two minutes of rawk that comprise "Evil And A Heathen", which makes me think of a disco White Stripes. I'm a sucker for riffs that're nothing but descending chords. And there's "Eleanor Put Your Boots On", which with its piano and rock'n'roll cello is an obvious homage to that other song about an Eleanor.. it takes a lot of balls to get your Beatles on more than once or twice on an album, but FF have the brio and (somewhat surprisingly) the chops to pull it off. And... whoof, "What You Meant". This song combines three distinct brands of awesome, one of which is Beatles-flavored, one of which is pop-rock hooky as hell, and one... It's hard to describe why that particular riff is so all-devouring. I think it's the fingerpicked acoustic guitar which gently draws your brain out through your right ear while the rest of the instruments distract you on the left with a buttery groove.

This album, although it is to my ears a little more filler-heavy than their first and doesn't contain quite as many easy radio hits, tells me that Franz Ferdinand are not a flash in the pan and could probably become one of the great bands of this generation if they keep pushing the sheer strength of their songwriting. The title track is oddly flat, more interesting for its lyrical content than for the song itself, and has a shout-along chorus that seems designed to hook the masses rather than to further the song -- but if that's what they have to do to survive, and to leave us with beautiful numbers like "Fade Together", a sad little pop song that succeeds entirely on the basis of its melody, then more power to them. Buy this album so they can become the newer, femmier, rubber-clad disco-rock Fab Four.

The album starts off well enough, and despite being a mid-tempo drone shoegaze kind of song, it's still nice to listen to—the song has a catchy guitar riff, clear 80s stereo canyon reverb vocals that complement the mass of analog noise, and a good sense of pacing without rushing or forcing the song, and it only weighs in at 3 and some minutes. The next starts off with a simple yet effective guitar chugging away, and throws in a bass, and then repeats this one line interspersed only by a chorus for about 6 minutes. The song seriously starts to drag around 4:30, having spent its climax on a particularly excellent guitar solo (fabulous tone) a minute and a half previous. The next song is thankfully short, so much so that it seems to have been made to make up for the rest of the album. The next song, "Candlelighted" is the real centerpiece of guitar noise and solo wankery, providing a subpar soundtrack to a lame movie about the 60s where someone totally drops acid and everything is just fucked up, man. What's worse is that the rhythm guitar is almost the same as it was two songs ago.

"Beehiver II", which exists despite there not being a "Beehiver I", follows in the same mold, this time throwing Kim Gordon influence into the mix. The album goes through about 15 more minutes of analog noise and guitar noodling before finally giving us a break on "Don't Come Down Here". Finally, Serena Maneesh has allowed us to remove our earplugs and hear again as they do their best Air impression, with soft airy vocals and similar chords on an acoustic guitar and no lack of synth. Problem being, it goes on for 7 minutes with no real direction except for an (admittedly awesome) heavy distorted bridge. This might have been fine on another album, but at this point, I'm sick of it. The freewheeling guitar thrashing (in the chaotic shitty way, not the sexy hair metal way), the analog noise, the voices covered up behind mountains of distortion or reverb, and the pure assault on the ears has gone on long enough. Somewhere along the way on this album, it just gets fucking stupid. The album finally ends with 9 minute long build up of nonsense including a bongo drum loop culminating in the same repetitive noise-over-chords we've heard the whole time. But it wouldn't be complete with out a fade into a 2 minute long pretentious piano piece.

If you like wallowing in tube amp noise, then Serena Maneesh is the album for you. If you like melody, or variety, or music, you can do better than Serena Maneesh; skip it.

The problem here is that there's not a lot of songwriting at work. The first song on the album, "Drain Cosmetics", is a strong exception -- it's a great stomping rocker with hooks that get stuck in your head and a triumphal guitar line to go with the pound of the rhythm section. But after that for the most part we get treated to the same chords and melodies over and over, or to endless rock-outs hung on four-bar themes which are cool and all but are still, y'know, four bars. This does work sometimes -- the album closer, "Your Blood In Mine", takes four notes and spends seven minutes going apeshit with them in a credible Sister Ray impression, even snaking some baritone sax and keyboard wrinkles into the mix. But by the end, you're starting to get tired of it -- it's a reminder of why the Velvets were so great, that they could stretch a theme like this out for seventeen minutes and still keep you inside the song. Serena Maneesh lack the single-mindedness or discipline not to descend into here-is-my-guitar-cock posturing. They do, however, have surprises up their sleeve, as the song disintegrates not in a wash of feedback but as a beautiful little solo piano theme, which itself goes on a little bit too long but is still an excellent way to close out an album that will break your speakers if you're not careful.

All in all, I think I'd be far more excited about this album were its antecedents not quite so obvious. There are moments when they break free of the formula, as on the snarling shoegaze/garage rocker "Beehiver II", but the portmanteau alone should tell you everything you need to know about why that one doesn't work. It's not good when the singer yells "Yeah! Ha Ha! Woo!" during the noise breakdown, as if he were ripping off a bitching solo right then, and I just don't believe him. Oddly enough, I think the album works best when it's about halfway between its two major influences, as on "Sapphire Eyes High", which combines the unstoppable stomp in the rhythm section with back-masked guitar solos for the first half of the song to create a singlualrly Velvety feel and then abruptly aboutfaces into MBV unintelligible layered vox and guitar smear, and then rockets back in the other direction, and so forth, until your ears have been pleasured every which way. And then at the end it lurches into something entirely other, an underwater lurching noisefest for parping feedback and distortion which almost alone among the band's work reminds me of nothing but Serena Maneesh. The whole thing keeps you on your toes and it's a reminder of why the central aesthetic idea upon which this band is founded is a really promising one.

I'm going to award this album a strong burn because Drain Cosmetics and Sapphire Eyes High are both so exceptionally good that they nearly make the album buyable on their own merits. I'm hoping that in the future we see more of that sort of thing out of this band, and less space-fill, jamming and *cough* homage.

Beyond their name causing me to scan for three other parentheses to feel balanced, I am informed they are named after an amp company. This band is a bunch of "amp worshippers" apparently, and it confuses the hell out of me. They certainly get some fabulous tones - their distorted bass is one of the nicest bass distortions I've heard since OK Computer - but they are so metal that their lead guitar tone is the thin, weak, muddy distortion that you hear high school students blaring in the guitar store or at a local venue of some sort. Their guitar tone, unfortunately, is their strongest point.

The music, if you can call it that, consists mostly of guitar and bass guitar droning, occasional utterances by other instruments, and ultra-metal screaming. The resulting collage is basically complete garbage. Not because it is ear-splitting nor is it because it is of poor quality. No, it's because the music is entirely dull and unremarkable. Their guitar riffs are stolen directly from Mel Bay's Classic Black Metal Riffs Vol. 7 repeated over and over and over again, their "spooky" noises have been visited countless times upon countless times (and I mean that in the mathematical sense of "uncountable"))) by horror film music composers, and their screaming is entirely obvious to even the poorest student of the black metal arts. Independent Japanese goth bands are doing circles around Sunn 0))), coming up with more hardcore shit like every single day.

Even their calling card, their guitar tone, takes approximately zero talent and a lot of money. Sunn 0))) has essentially purchased themselves into the Pitchfork 2005 Top 50 list. All you really need is an nice old tube amp, and crank the fucker up as loud as it goes. I can imagine them in the studio tweaking and tweaking, imagining that they are getting subtle benefits out of the amp, listening with broken eardrums to the finer points of their noise, savoring it like a fine wine. But it would be bullshit. Even conceding this point, if they gave out Top 50 spots for technical excellence, John Vanderslice should be on there every year he puts out a CD.

But none of it is Sunn 0)))'s fault. You can't blame them any more than you could blame a wolf for killing a rabbit. It's just in their nature. These guys are fucking metal. It's their job to make dark sounding noises and then scream over them. They aren't bad at what they do (although it would be really hard be bad at what they do), and they aren't insulting like a Johann or Basinski. Those people attach real, honest meaning to their work when it is entirely devoid of any such quality. Those people are really hopeless narcissists: they find depth in their work when really they're just looking in the mirror. Sunn 0))) holds no such prentention. Sure, they're pretentious, but it's the metal kind of pretentious. You know, the kind with the dragons and paganism and shit about the universe and evil mysteries of the cosmos. (Actaully, metal heads are only a demon or two away from being hippies.) But there's a place for them to exist in this world. Just not on my Top 50 list.

See, Sunn 0))) fills a very specific niche: to be cranked up at full volume and piss off your parents after they've grounded you for staying out too late or going to the Gwar concert without their permission. Some bands are successful solely on their novelty. Wesley Willis and Anal Cunt fill a specific niche, but you don't put Anal fucking Cunt on your top 50 unless you are retarded. Bands like Sunn 0))) and Boris need to go on that "fun but embarassingly so" list. Contrary to what I said earlier, I did feel very insulted listening to this album, but it wasn't Sunn 0))) giving me the finger, it was Pitchfork. Buy this album if you own more than 4 metal shirts, or if dressing in a robe and performing an incantation sounds like your idea of fun. But for me, this album is so horribly lacking in skill and significance that you would be much better off to skip this album.

As an aside, I've come to this conclusion: Pitchfork does not know anything about music. Oh sure, they know what they like. And they listen to a lot of music. But they are complete laymen, with no idea about what constitutes "intricate", "clever", or "good". So I'm going to cease all Pitchfork complaining in all future reviews and simply review the album, because Pitchfork bashing is getting old.

OK, you'll have just read Stephen's review. I probably agree with most of it. Let me try to make a case for why this isn't the worst album we've reviewed yet.

Ignore the black metal throat screaming -- it's here as a sort of icing. Ignore the ridiculous song titles. Except "Cursed Realms (Of The Winterdemons)", which should make you lightly roll over in your mind the possibility that this whole thing is a joke that Pitchfork has fallen for hook, line and sinker. Ignore the goth boilerplate lyrics. Ignore the songwriting, which should be pretty easy since there isn't any. Imagine yourself standing in a goth club, face slick from the pig's blood that the opening band spat on you, the air a standing haze of tar and clove, feeling wave after wave of this shit splattering over your body and rearranging your molecules. And by this shit I mean turgid tarmac-gritty distortion, a sort of palpable black sludge. My brain likey the bass -- and this is basically just pure bass, textured like jackhammers or sea monsters or what have you. And then turn it up - way, way up - and close your eyes, and try to recapture that experience. Possibly by smoking a bunch of cloves and rubbing yourself down with meat. When it gets to the point of hurts so good, you will understand that despite the fact that no skill at all was employed in the making of this music it does have utility and thus does not deserve to be shelved with Basinski in the laughably pointless corner.

I think this album got on Pitchfork's list cause the metal fans in the room had seen these shows and couldn't express how nice it felt cause it's hard to record an experience like that. Then this album came out, and its production is sufficiently deep and growly that some modicum of the authentic Sunn 0))) experience is retained, and the people rejoiced. I believe that 95% of people would not particularly want to capture the authentic Sunn 0))) experience-- I think I would, but that's because my head is set up in such a way that these frequencies stroke my pleasure center and tinny cymbals make baby Jesus cry. There is no case to be made for this as art, as music in the arranged sense, as anything other than some people who really like making loud noises and who can afford the proper equipment jerking off. But at least it catches the attention. It's the sort of trick that can work once. And so, I dunno, I guess I'm glad Pitchfork pointed me to it?

But it's certainly not worth listening to more than once unless you get a lot more pleasure out of having your fluids oscillated than I do. Skip.

Jamie Lidell is very much like that station: refreshing, motown, and it's new. To be more precise, Jamie Lidell holds an interesting middle ground between motown, 70s soul, and modern R&B/funk like Jamiroquai. He doesn't make retro motown music, he makes motown (a good composer steals, not borrows, and all that). He does interesting production tricks using acapella sounds and clever layering of vocals. His harmonies and melodies are top notch. He's all over the pop spectrum, too. A song like "Multiply" solidly occupies Four Tops territory, but "A Little Bit More" is an acapella beatboxing song that wouldn't sound out of place with Justin Timberlake on it.

Many of you right now might be asking, but don't you hate pop music? And I'd say that's not entirely true. I hate bad pop music. Actually, more accurately, I hate dishonest pop music. I don't necessarily mean artists who don't write their own music (although most of the worst culprits are those people), I mean music that is either bereft of any soul or that is trying to emulate the former. I've developed what I like to call the "American cheese" test. See, I don't like American cheese for the most part. It has its place, like on greasy breakfast sandwiches. But American cheese has a very unique taste — specifically, while it contains enough cheese flavor to be recognized as cheese, it carries with it an electric sharpness. I don't mean sharp like cheddar cheese, I mean a sensation that goes beyond taste and makes your whole mouth vibrate not unlike chewing on aluminum foil with fillings. This is a taste we call "processed", and it's the price we pay for the alchemy of synthesizing cheese out of its component parts. Bad pop music has the same kind of taste, too, if you look for it. It's as if your senses are confused; it sounds like music, and it tastes like cheese, but something isn't quite right. It's the sense equivalent of being on a stopped bus next to one that is moving slowly. It's the price artists pay for songs that will appeal to everyone.

That being said, Jamie Lidell is pure gouda. And it's good that I've somehow gotten myself into a cheese metaphor, because now is the time in the review where I point out that for being a dead on copy of classic motown acts, Jamie Lidell is white. What's more is that he's not just white, he's fucking English. English white boys do not sound like this; English white boys are mozzerella. Or maybe white cheddar in the case of Sid Vicious. Anyway, I'm sure every single person ever to review this album has said the same thing about Lidell (minus the cheese), but let's be honest: it's the most fascinating thing about this record, and the music on the record is so good that I have to mention it.

For me, this record has the most replay value out of the four. It's also an album I recommend everyone to buy. I don't care if you hate this kind of music, put this on and listen until you do. Your groove will thank me.

Stylistic diversity is the name of the game here. There are songs on this album that could've come straight out of the seventies, and some that sound like they came out of a particularly avant-garde contemporary soul album, and some that are spliced together from a whole bunch of eras at once (the excellent "What's the Use".) There are tracks with a hip-hop bunch, like the slightly-too-simple vocal sample-driven "A Little Bit More". And then there's "Music Will Not Last", which belies its theme by resurrecting Smoky Robinson in a faithful and groovy stripped-down tribute to the Motown sound. And whoever they have playing bass on crazy speed-jazz-funk tracks like "Newme" gets a medal for being solid and deeply weird at the same time. Some experiments don't work quite as well-- "The City" is a chopped-up drum and bass moan that reminds me of nothing quite as much as Public Image Limited, although Lidell trades John Lydon's hysteria for a soulful intensity which isn't quite believable in its desperation. But points should be awarded nonetheless for the attempt, which sounds beautifully out of place on an album that's all about incongruities, experimentation, style blending and artistry. When smoky blues rubs shoulders with Talking Heads-y white funk, complete with Bernie Worrell organ madness, good things happen.

The more conservative tracks on the album (includinging the opener, "Yougotmeup", which sounds more Stingishly adult contemporary than anything else and gave me entirely the wrong idea to start with) don't please me as much. "This Time" is a slow-burning blues which is entirely impressive in its dedication to its subject matter, and motown piano fills thrown in -- my only objection to it is that it's an exercise in a genre I don't dig much, no complaints about the execution. That's the larger problem with this album... I don't know how often I'll listen to it, as beautifully crafted as it is, because first it's not the kind of thing I'd normally listen to and second digging out the best of Motown would work as an easy (and superior) substitute. But that's quibbling. This is obviously worth a buy, particularly if you're into this kind of music. The dude's a talent.

When the album starts out, it sounds like it is coming directly from 1997 with a textbook perfect indie rock song, "Punks In The Beerlight", that is topped off with the excellent line, "I love you to the max". The Silver Jews' style seems to be to flirt with country without ever actually reaching that point. Leading the band is David Berman's distinctive voice. He can be indie droll, soothing, or even approach Mitch Hedberg timbre, like on "Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed." The tracks are laced with weedly guitar that sounds like a bored college student on a rainy day playing along with his recordings. On "Animal Shapes", the Silver Jews bust out the fiddle, which features country riffs but no country. It's kind of like seeing a tractor do 5 miles an hour down a lonely Portland city street or maybe like finding a Republican in Ann Arbor. It's weird until you realize that the lonely Portland street is next to the city park or that there has to be somebody voting in those Republican booths during the primary. But like the farm tractor, the Silver Jews can be really slow and kind of annoying if you are in a hurry.

The problem with this album is that I can't ever see really liking any of these songs. Sure, there are some great lines, and there are some parts where the instrumental guitar section really works and Berman's voice matches perfectly with the female lead ("The Poor, the Fair and the Good"). But Berman's voice can have a very sedating effect sometimes, and it's very present; at best, it's nice to listen to; at worst, if you're in the wrong mood, it is really annoying. Now I'm being a little tough on this album because I'm reviewing it as a Top 50 Album - it would be better than many other bands' CDs, but I don't find it something that I can really get excited about. There are some lows on the album, too, and the lowest is one called "The Farmer's Hotel", which is one of the dullest ballads I've ever heard, and it also features many really poor and/or pathetic rhymings with the word "Goshen." It's also an odd track on this album. And at 7:03, it's almost 3 minutes longer than any other song on the album.

I'm not exactly sure why this is on the Top 50; if it is a celebration of the return of 90s era indie rock or if it's someone who doesn't like Stephen Malkumus' stuff, or misses Pavement or what. I'm not too impressed by this album, although it does have a lot of pretty strong songwriting on it. It would be interesting to listen to this album to hear all the things the Silver Jews do with fiddles and the choices they make in mixing country stylings with slacker indie rock. Solid burn to the max.

I hate to dis a Portland band, so I'm going to keep this brief. (The album is brief, mercifully - so they deserve leniency.)

When people say they don't like indie music, this is the sort of music they're thinking of. It's clever, but not particularly tight or musically difficult -- the singers can't sing, and don't care -- and the lyrics are "quirky". There are songs with titles like "Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed". And frankly I could be describing my own band here, but that doesn't mean I have to like it when other people do it. Particularly when they're just a little bit country. Or a lot country. Or sound like the Magnetic Fields doing country (the unfortunately spot-on style parody "How Can I Love You (If You Won't Lie Down)".

...OK, it's not so bad as all that. It's weird enough to keep me interested, and there's a fair bit of genre-hopping (we have jammy, spacey numbers, country rock, jangly britpop.) "Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed" is spazzy enough to be early XTC. The execrable "K-Hole" is a tribute to Modest Mouse at its most retarded, with space noises. But the rest of it is basically loose country rock with odd pop breaks thrown into the mix. They deserve points for regularly switching up approaches mid-song, but the curveballs they throw aren't particularly curvy, and tend to land with a wet thud. And the lyrics are quite good sometimes (I got stuck in Goshen / and it made me sad...")

There's maybe two tracks on this album that I'd want to hear again, which puts this pretty firmly in skipsville. And to my credit, I wrote this before I found out that Stephen "Douchebag" Malkmus was involved in the project! Yay.

But back to the race. Bloc Party leaps out of the gate really strong with the opener "Like Eating Glass", which besides betraying them as hopelessly British, shows off their vast potential for songwriting. The hooks are sprinkled throughout the entire song, and they show that they can be exciting without going 50 miles hour and overbearing the listener with pure adreneline. There's no lack of energy, though, especially from the drummer, who, I should point out, is really really excellent. He tends to go the Keith Moon route, hitting as many drums as he can per second, but doing it really really well and in a really tasteful way. I know that recording that kind of drummer can be a real challenge. The producers on this album have decided to go the route of moving the close mic'd drums further up in the mix, which not only gives the drums a cool mechanical sound, but also brings out the natural sound of the drums in an interesting way.

Bloc Party continues to go full force and show no signs of stopping, blowing away the rest of the pack with "Helicopter", is as close to an emo hit as Bloc Party is likely to get, which isn't too far away. There's no whining; the song structure is just similar. They also show that they may have been listening to some Midtown, as well as showing off their skill for starting and stopping on a dime like any pop-punk band should be able to do. Bloc Party makes a brilliant move on "Positive Tension" by leaving this familiar ground behind with a song that starts off with just the basic pieces, and like Magneto summoning bits of iron from around the surrounding area, slowly pulls all the bits together to, finally, at almost the very end of the song, the song transforms into a majestic sculpture, and concludes with a old-school Radiohead-style guitar solo before a 10-second denoument. You never see this kind of song structure, and it's absolutely bloody brilliant. Bloc Party is running as fast as they can, and no one else is even close. "Banquet" is a more traditional song with some good harmonies that remind me of My Hotel Year (now that's an obscure reference). It's not their best, but at this point Bloc Party can afford to slack off a little.

Blue Light gets serious again with "Blue Light", when the singer switches from rock vocals to 80s low whisper vocals. It's an abrupt change, but it sounds good, and the song is constructed very well. It's not quite as catchy as the previous songs, but it's still an excellent song despite this. Now Bloc Party slacks off a little with "She's Hearing Voices". But is he resting up or is he wearing down? No, no, there's a pretty good guitar solo; they must be doing ok.

Suddenly, Bloc Party's side cramps up! His legs are starting to get really stiff, and breating starts to feel sharp. They're trying as hard as they can, but all they can do "This Modern Love", which has really good instrumentation, but they don't have their same flair, and tasteful additions of spoken words just barely saves the track from being completely mediocre. Something's gone wrong. Horribly wrong.

Bloc Party is struggling. They can't keep up the pace anymore. Gone are the wonderful instrumentation, replaced with Walkmen-on-a-bad-day guitar, they've got the hooks, but the same magic that was there with "Like Eating Glass" is gone. It's like Chicago Bulls Michael Jordan compared to Wizards Michael Jordan. Then, on "Price of Gasoline", it's over. Bloc Party slows down to a jog. He's clutching his side, gasping for breath. Gasping, Bloc Party spits out a weak political commentary about the oil industry and rips off nearly the same hook he used in the last song. "So Here We Are" is no better. Bloc Party gets a second chance with an excellent guitar riff and squanders it. We're in bad-version-of-New-Order territory here.

"Luno" is their second wind, but even though they're going good again, it's clear that the race is lost. Finally, Bloc Party decides that puking just isn't worth it and walks to the finsh line with the disappointing and out-of-nowhere tracks "Plans" and "Compliments" which are both lame echoey slow songs that show no sign of the excellent songwriters on the first half of the album. Bloc Party staggers, does some stretches, and gets a lecture from Coach about pacing.

So there you have it: the first half of the album is good, the second half is bad. If that isn't why God invented CD burners, I don't know what is.

Let me start by saying that the laundry list of bands to whom you owe royalties - starting at Gang of Four, angling through the Vapors, passing by the Smiths and then working your way up to Nirvana and Blink-182, with a healthy dollop of your near-cousins the Futureheads - it doesn't matter much to me. There's no such thing as original pop music. It ain't your parents that displease me, baby -- except for a little too much pop-punk in the pedigree, it's blue-ribbon all down the line. It's... well. How do I say this gracefully?

You got no personality. And the reason you got no personality is that your singer got no personality. There is a lack of oomph here, a slidiness -- one minute he's chopping off his declarative statements like a bratty new-wave punk, one minute he's growling like nu-metal, one moment paranoid, one moment sensitive, and all without the chops or emotional integrity to back any of it up. Which is a shame, because you have a bitching rhythm section. Ohh, the bass and drums... particularly early on in this album, when you're biting the post-punk more than the pop-punk, there are moments of sheer propulsive brilliance. "Positive Tension", which is mostly bass and drums with cold stabs of keyboard and guitar, features your singer putting on that every-sentence-is-declarative-and-tuneless style worn comfortable by twenty years of spastic british punkers, but manages to work anyway out of sheer hookiness. I couldn't help but bob my head and throw the horns during the outro, a barking back-and-forth wall of sound, until it cut out so your singer could say "so fucking useless", and a classic emo break rolled in and little alarm bells started going off in the back of my head.

That's right, emo. I said it. You're emo. Admit it. You've got the rock and roll look and the indie cred and you're slightly more challenging than the average butter-slick whine-rock band, but you're emo. You aim for the paralyzing paranoia of Joy Division or Radiohead in your opening track, but you miss -- coming from you I can't believe it. And as things wear on you mostly end up talking about girls. Your jams get sillier, your singer's yelping gets harder to take, and you end up sounding far too young and far too easily influenced. Is that really the opening from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" you're using for your verse on "Banquet"? And did you really decide that those four chords would best be served by a two-note vocal melody and some cymbal skittering?

So here's the deal - I like you. I particularly like the way you bang. But I think if we're gonna get together in any serious way you need to do a little growing up. Stop trying to act like all your friends and dig down deep to find who you really are. And stop trying to front -- the first five tracks on this album hog all the songwriting and leave the rest floppy and formless. (I mean, really, "Plans"? Sounds like Interpol and Blink-182 had a child... the obvious Death Cab parallels aside..) You can do better. It's not me, you understand. It's you. (Who's getting skipped.)

Cuddles, Isaac.

In any case, Beanie Sigel, from what I can hear, sounds like the kind of rapper that fits right in with my image of early-to-mid-90s hip-hop: "Gotta Have It" sounds like what I think Kid and Play sounds like (no idea if I'm right or not), "Don't Stop" sounds like what I figure Snoop Dogg sounds like. Apparently Sigel has some thing with Jay Z or something, and went to prison, and you know. That gangster stuff. For all that, though, he goes the opposite route from The Game and doesn't make a huge deal of it on every single other line of his lyrics. He's not entirely devoid of narcissistic references (he compares himself to Jimi Hendrix at some point), but it's rap. That would be like rock music without guitars.

The problem with me reviewing this album is that it is entirely uninteresting to me, and not because it's boring, but just that it's not my taste. It certainly seems good; there's a lot of technically excellent rapping on here and it sounds like Top 40 rap but without the manufactured commercial taste. The beats are not exactly novel, but they are very layered in parts, and they're really smooth. Actually, now that I think about it, smooth basically defines this album. It's like you brought some rapper clique to a tasteful lounge bar devoted entirely to picking up chic, cosmopolitan hotties, Smoove B presiding, and the entertainer for the night has noticed the famous rappers in the crowd and asked them to come up on stage to do a few verses, and they decide to have fun with it.

I'm going to give this a buy but that's simply a guess on my part. Throw in the fact that the album had a couple technical flaws, and you have the most unsure rating of this entire project.

This album is laden with soulful, melodic beats, which is a fantastic departure -- soulful, melodic beats with a deft sense of rhythmic tension, too, so on certain tracks you feel as if there's a genuine interplay between the rapper and the beat (something we haven't seen here since Madvillain.) The snares and cymbals here are particularly nifty, rushing in and out and fluttering, subtle and never overpowering-- check out "Gotta Have It", with the oddly offbeat snare pops and swelling gamelan tones. And is that show-off mile-a-minute rapping there Twista? A good, good sign, and the guest verse is seamlessly integrated, which is a pattern that continues through the whole album. I love the little touches -- the Regency piano flutterings and britpop harpsichord on the intro to "Bread and Butter", which flows seamlessly into a minimalist banger that always seems seconds away from lurching into funk but doesn't quite let itself til the hook. And it mirrors the development of the song, which is a track about being played by a woman that somehow doesn't come off as misogynistic. Big points there. The rhythms on this album spiral and split, and there's a thematic cohesion here which suggests to me that a live band may have been involved at some point, which is very welcome indeed. There's no jazz, per se, but there's always a little bit implied in the elasticity of the proceedings, even as big memphis horns and cop-show bombast keep us firmly in the realm of soul and funk. And then there are odd departures, like the last track, "Wanted", which is one third 60s-pop song harpsichord, one third James Brown wailing, and one third gangster drum and bass. The end effect is oddly atmospheric, distant, threatening, and then the hook comes in and it's like the chorus of a Byrds song.

And lo and behold, the thematic content is worth the beats. It's mostly gangster stuff, again, but there's so much more self-knowledge at work here-- there's very little glorification of the lifestyle here. It's more a documentary approach, which makes sense, since Sigel is living it (he recorded this album while out on bail.) He doesn't sound proud of the violence. His outlook is almost apocalyptically gloomy -- literally, in the case of "Lord Have Mercy" -- and he doesn't offer a lot of answers. But he keeps us entertained with dark tales of street violence, dysfunctional relationships and (in the tremendously entertaining "Purple Rain") the joys of Promethazine. He has an endless array of highly entertaining guest artists, who range in their approaches from hardcore to fey to tragic. If I told you to buy the Game's shit, I really have to tell you to buy this. Even my hypocrisy has its limits. There are problems here -- most notably, it's another unfeasibly huge rap album, and things start to sag in the final twenty minutes just from sheer fatigue. And there's not a huge amount of variation in the content or in the beats. But the last track is worth hanging on for. So go for it.

Konono No. 1 is, to be fair, very impressive, especially from the natural sounds they get from their salvaged equipment. They sound like your average African-style band, except there is one instrument that sounds like a sampled steel drum mixed with a calliope. However, I cannot rate their composition or songwriting at all because I have zero prior experience with this music. They seem like a fairly skilled band, able to stay together and drumming for around a half hour. This seems to be a recording of a live show, or at least a pieced-together one, and they can play their instruments. The person playing the weird steel-drum sounding instrument seems talented, but the rest of the percussion doesn't seem to be quite so difficult in the least, but the lack of technical prowess exhibited is overcome in good measure by the sheer amount of soul on this recording. This recording really sounds like they are having fun. I bet it would have been a good place to be at, provided there was some like refreshment stands where you could get a bite to eat, and sit down on tarps and drink and have a good time with your friends.

One thing I do have to say, and this seems to apply to many kinds of "world music": enough with the fucking whistle player. I seriously think the whistle is probably the worst musical instrument ever. It seems like whistle players are the people who want to join the band, but are the least skilled members. They want to accept everyone, so they give the guy (it's probably not a girl) a whistle and say "hey, have fun with it, just don't whistle every goddamn second." And of course sometimes they do, but I bet they have someone whose job includes getting them to calm down. The other thing is that, to me, most of the music on this albums sounds exactly the same. And there are only 7 songs on the album. Maybe it's my white male Christian upbringing, but honestly this music sounds like the stuff they play in the drum circle that the smelly annoying hippie on your floor plays in. (Smelly because they've just come from Ultimate practice, and annoying because they insist on making painfully awkward PETA protests and playing their videos of pigs being slaughtered at full fucking blast in the common student area in the Reynolds Club. As if that's going to make me hate bacon or something.)

So, I'm certain that this is on the Top 50 out of some kind of appreciation of this band's ingenuity, but seriously, rewarding people for making cool instruments out of junk belongs on NPR, not on a Top 50 Albums list. None of this music is so incredibly interesting that it is musically superior to any other release of this kind of music in 2005. Knowing this kind of setup, it's probably the case that every purchase of their CD donates to some kind of cause, in which case you should buy it. If not, it's still interesting to listen to, and if African world music is your bag, head down your dormitory hallway and ask your local hippie to let you borrow a copy (you can skip actually making your own copy). Just get out of there before he makes you listen to Phish.

What this music actually is is a kind of organic acoustic/electric trance music. You could dance to this for hours. The call-and-response vocals are the most overtly african thing about the proceedings. The instrumentation itself is just odd, polyrhythmic, sharp and intense, rolling in and out and never seeming to end. The tracks flow into each other, with samba whistles and fast, diverse percussion pulsing away in the background and the thumb pianos (which sound pretty much exactly like what you'd expect overdriven, mildly distorted thumb pianos to sound like) crafting circular, pentatonic grooves that aren't particularly melodic but serve to drive things forward. It's the insistence of the rhythm that carries the day. The drawback is that while this album is divided into seven tracks for the most part you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart. The thumb piano is not an instrument that allows for a huge diversity of approach and Konono No. 1 aren't really trying to vary their game here, basically appending different shouts and callbacks to similar grooves, experimenting with different ways of recording. (I particularly like the approach used in "Undugi Wele Wele", which is the party track, and has the thumb pianos a little further back in the mix, keeping the treble feedback out of my brain and letting me catch a little bit more of the fantastic burbling percussion.

The reason I think this album is worth a buy (beyond the obvious fact that these guys deserve financial support more than the indiest indie act on this list) is that it's really refreshing to hear electronic music made on a culture's own terms. When one wanders into beat-driven music from china, eastern europe, russia, north africa or wherever one tends to hear that culture's trademark solo instrument/chord structure/style of play superimposed on western techno beats of the cheesiest sort. Bucking that trend and creating your own electronica sound from the ground up deserves tremendous respect. And, respectfully, you can dance your ass off to this and feel good about it.

The album ends up being a mish-mosh of different genres, but they don't seem like "Devendra-doing-this-genre" or "Devendra-can't-decide-what-he-wants" - Devendra doesn't ape those genres nor does he lean on them as a crutch to provide variety. Every track on the album sounds natural and is coated with his style. Of course, knowing him, that was probably the easy part. One of the things that stays is the sparseness. It's no longer a guy in a room playing a guitar, but each track contains no more on it than is necessary. "Lazy Butterfly" is set against the backdrop of sitars-on-acid like any good drug scene from the 70s (or more likely, a movie about the 70s), and while it fills up the mix, the track doesn't become a wall of sound. The production itself is excellent because it sounds like someone recorded it with an 8-track or a 2-inch reel in the 60s. As much as lo-fi production is an awful crutch for producers with no imagination or artists that aren't very good at their craft (or a necessity for bands with no budget), the style fits him perfectly. It reminds me of an old Carole King album.

However, this album has its flaws; I'm still not completely sold. Devendra focuses more on the song, but as a result he's gone too far in a direction I would prefer he ignore altogether: the blues. Several songs on the album are your basic 12 bar, 3 chord blues. I said earlier that one problem with virtuosos is that they tend to ignore the song as a whole and tend to focus on the individual parts, making the entire song weaker. They've forgotten how to simplify. Sometimes you need to stop trying so hard and just play a song. Unfortunately, there's the blues, which is an attempt to combine simplicity and guitar wankering that takes the worst parts of both. Blues simply repeats the same 12-bar 3-chord forumla, and its depth lies in the guitar skill of the individual player. This effectively combines the monotony of simplicity with the annoyingness of guitar wankery. (Coincidentally, this is about the opposite of jazz, which highlights the individual player, but its depth lies in the composition.) Sure, you can sing a great blues song every once in a while (Red House), but if you entire repetoire is blues, it's boring. It's almost like the limerick of the rock world. Some people try to come at it from every angle possible, but no matter how you try to decorate it, it's like putting hubcaps on a tractor (Stevie Ray Vaughn).

So there's good and bad. There are some really excellent bits, like "When They Come" and "Heard Somebody Say", an anti-war song with the excellent line, "It's simple / We don't wanna kill". The middle of the album is very strong, and even one of the blues numbers is awesome ("Chinese Children"), which goes something like "If I lived in China / I'd have some Chinese children / and if I lived in Russia / I'd have some Chinese children" and so on. (Remember what I said about limericks?)

But there are just so many songs, and there are bound to be boring ones. He also sings in Spanish sometimes, and when he does, it's in one of two ways: either he's singing in Spanish, or he's singing in Spanish and saying "look at me! I'm singing in Spanish! Aren't I just so fucking cultured?". An example is the peculiar "The Beatles", in which he sings "Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are the only Beatles in the world," and then proceeds to sing some wacky song in Spanish. Wacky. Devendra is (or at least, he should be) known for his sense of humor, and the only way to describe it as an indie music version of Randy Newman, like in "Foolin' Around" or the 50s doo-wop of pedophilia in "Little Children" (which should have exchanged titles with "I Feel Like a Child").

Last time I said buy, but mostly because the Ghostface Killa album was not worth buying. However, this album is decidedly better, so I am required by law to instruct you to buy this record.

This album is possessed of a kind of joyful, folky randomness that went out of style decades ago. Tracks like "Chinese Children", which is a blues with lyrics that aren't so much random or dragged-out as purely silly, make one think of Peter, Paul and Mary, or Pete Seeger, or any of those old LPs that your mom played for you when you were small to get her boomer claws in you and make sure even if you grew up to be an executive you'd still smell faintly of patchouli and buy your granola in bulk. The anthemic stomp "Long-Haired Child" is similarly goofy but taps into that historical or archetypal thrust and makes you feel like you're back in the day, singing along with a legend. And then there're songs where Devendra gets serious, which is occasionally excellent ("When They Come", a mellow yet cutting colonial parable) and occasionally unfortunate ("Heard Somebody Say", a boring, piano-driven exercise in Lennonism.) But there are little moments tossed off here and there that say to me that Devendra has embraced the political roots of folk as well as its aesthetic stylings; on "I Feel Like A Child", for instance, which is a silly song with serious jibes at the establishment peppered in slyly. And then there are songs that have an unexpected emotional weight about them, like the opening track "Now That I Know." This one is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, a fingerpicky folk classic, and you should burn this album to get at it.

Which brings me to why after all my praise you still shouldn't buy it. The two words in question here are "quality" and "control". It's a hugely long album, and if Devendra had cut out about twenty minutes it could've been a classic. The last twenty, particularly. There're a few duds early on, but in general things are strong, inventive, and wonderfully diverse (ranging from gypsy stylings on "Lazy Butterfly" to ridiculous and yet wonderful mariachi antics on "The Beatles.") At around "Chinese Children", though, the album seems to run out of steam and things settle into a rut. Devendra's danger, particularly when he's working with production like this, is that he's talented enough to lapse into adult contemporary banalities which sound sweet but don't amount to much.

So on the whole, for the variety in the production, with flutes and tablas and strings and little lo-fi mutterings weaved in here and there, for the sheer strength of Devendra's voice, guitar and songwriting, and for the excellence of the first two thirds of the album, I'd like to give this one a buy. But...yeah. I'm torn. Buy/burn? Burn+? .... nah. Buy. You can just stop the disc after a certain point.

Fleucht: A better 70 minute-long rave with one really good section. Burn.

My normal reaction to dance-techno like this is "gee, this could use some rap/a melody/some scratching/a few more samples/a little structural variation"... in short, something to give it content, or definition, or a beginning and an end. The point of rave music is that it doesn't end, though, that it just keeps riding from one high to another. This is music that one orders by the foot-yard -- I get a sense that were he not limited by the constraints of the CD format each of these discs could have gone on indefinitely, with kreucht piled on kreucht and fleucht on fleucht until the doomed, dilated dancers drop dead of dehydration. If you'll forgive me. I just don't have the stamina -- I stay hyped for almost exactly a half hour, and then blanch in alarm that there's 130 more minutes of the stuff waiting to give me a headache and uncontrollably twitching limbs. It's not pure breakbeat -- thank god -- which means I can listen to it without becoming spastic. But fleucht particularly is insistent in its demands that you submit to its steamy dancefloor beats. If kreucht und fleucht may be liked to drugs, kreucht is ecstasy -- fleucht is coke.

I don't wish to leave you with the impression that I don't dig it, though. For what it is, this stuff is very strong, flowing seamlessly from one beat to the next, incorporating sounds beyond the usual techno panoply (nice huge booming crashes, bursts of steam, laptop skitterings, a certain sound which I'm always fond of that can be produced a number of ways but sounds like somebody attacking a metal sculpture in a large empty room). Also, there is an undefinable GER-MANity to the whole business which pleases me. As I listen to this music, I can see Eulberg staring at me -- telling me that I will dance -- that this is the time for dancing -- and, particularly on fleucht, that I will dance or he will be forced with the greatest regret to bring out the testicle clamps. I am compelled to move my arms and legs, with an expression of infinite sadness on my face. We dance with the greatest efficiency. The booty-ometer is accurate to .015 nanometers. It is so good. And now we will report to be processed.

Later, in the detention center, I am compelled to think about the nature of kreucht and fleucht. Kreucht is cooler, more spare, more inclined to Matmos-y beat experimentation, digital scratching and vocal samples, but less insistently danceable. It can sneak up on you -- there are messages embedded somewhere in there, secret messages, translated oddly but spoken with clear amused indifference by a woman who is probably achingly pretty if you could but decode her mocking remarks and find your way back to her. Fleucht wants none of this romantic nonsense and is simply concerned with making you dance your ass off, the teasingly blank face of Kreucht replaced with a sneer. Perhaps this is nonsense -- perhaps I read too much about music produced probably by the Fleucht-O-Matic 5000 while Eulberg (who is probably not even German, given my track record with these things) is out in the strasse giving puppies cold, emotionless stares. The distinction between kreucht and fleucht, a distinction which I have spent these empty months pondering, is probably just a handful of BPM. But oh lor', does it make you want to move that thing. It is like a burning in your soul. For it is like caffeine, and makes me silly, but my god, I wouldn't want to own it. It makes me want to do aerobics, and we can't have that. And also without the insistent high-speed beats of Fleucht it's hard to keep my attention focused -- and so I would probably end up spinning the instant-gratification disc exclusively whilst Kreucht wandered off, unloved.

But... I cannot tear myself away. I feel Eulberg's dead eyes upon me. And I know that even now, safely spirited away to Brussels and reunited with my lost family, I will never be truly free of him. I will stay awake long into the night, staring into the mirror. And slowly, I will begin to dance.

Whitman, fortunately is not quite so insulting as Basinski or Johann, if only because he does not have the balls to repeat a single phrase for an hour and call it good. (Oh, but it's Art, alright.) The first half of the album is basically the guy playing with his toys: the first two tracks sound like a misguided "Spooky Halloween Sounds" done with a Korg or something, then on "Stereo Music For Serge Modular Prototye - Part Two" he tests out just how annoying he can make the THX "The Audience is Now Deaf" sound. Then, on "Stereo... Part Three", he managed to record him in love with the crazy sounds one of his machines makes. Then comes what I consider to be the turning point: "Stereo Music For Yamaha Disklavier Prototype, Electric Guitar, And Computer" (yes, all the titles are this pretentious and idiotic; they seem to be the names of his precious equipment) is basically a piano loop, but it swells and it decrescendos, and other instruments come in and out of the mix. At 10 minutes long, especially, it's still bad, but you start to get the sense that what he wants to do is make good music, but he is unable to do so for whatever reason.

Then, on track 6 (fuck those names), he does something amazing - he keeps the loops, but he has dynamics. A keyboard loop of chords drones over a (tasteful) drumbeat, other parts come in and then out again, and halfway through the song, the entire song has changed into an organ bit that sounds like 2 bars of a Bach piece looped. By the end of the song, several more parts have been added and subtracted. Ladies and gentleman, this song has been composed, not constructed.

I should stop and note why this is not as good as Bach: Bach's music was deep. Very deep. In addition, it was beautiful - some of Bach's melodies are in my opinion some of the best ever made. Also Bach is easily listenable to the casual listener - they can tune out the music and focus on whatever they are doing. Is this starting to sound familiar? That's right: it's almost the textbook definition of ambient music as given by Brian Eno (the artist that is to ambient music as Weezer is to emo). I think the fundamental point that most ambient artists miss today is that it takes work to create something that is ambient but yet provides the listener with depth when listened to more closely. Gimmicks just don't cut it.

So to sum up, this music isn't great. But it does have a sense of dynamic that comes with treating this kind of music as music and not just something cool and artsy you can bullshit about. Skip this album, but it's a respectable skip for overcoming my incredibly low expectations for an album with song titles like "Stereo Music For Acoustic Guitar, Bucla Music Box 100, Hp Model 236 Oscillator, Electric Guitar, And Computer - Part Two".

We are presented with a series of eight pieces entitled "Stereo Music For...", with instruments ranging from acoustic guitar to Dysklavie to hi-hat in the ellipse. If I were feeling catty I'd call the "music" aspect into question, since the early tracks in particular are formless soundscapes built out of loops and recording artifacts (Whitman likes to play with 'booming', the feedback that happens when certain frequencies resonate in the room and overwhelm other sounds.) There is, however, a genuine progression here from emptiness to form and by the time the last two tracks roll around we are dealing with music that is minimalist and loop-driven but has enough variation and structure to hold the interest of a listener for whom simple texture isn't enough.

I should mention that this is music that needs to be listened to attentively an in environments without a lot of ambient noise. The first tracks in particular rely heavily on dynamic variation and a certain clarity of sound which is impressive and can be lost if you're not listening with decent reproduction quality. (Although they do occasionally beg the "could I do this just as well if I had this man's equipment?" question, particularly on the wall-of-sound synth wash that is Track 3.) It is fun to listen to the synth squirts and ripples of the "Serge Modular Pr" tracks, but compositionally I feel as if they rely a bit too heavily on their medium to the expense of actual musicality, except on Track 4, which is muscular and features a plodding bass thud that stalks forward and back across the soundscape like an electronic mammoth.

The later tracks evince an almost Glass-ian ear for minimalist composition on top of a dramatic but understated sense of texture. Track 5 is like what the M83 album should've been- propulsive and swelling but never manipulative. And it just gets better after that, until you forget that you're listening to a heavily conceptual album and the music just becomes enjoyable on its own merits. Which begs the question of why this album was presented this way, and in particular whether the conceit - a slow evolution of formlessness into complexity - actually works. The way the album is structured, as a slow upward curve, puts a lot of pressure on the final track to put a capper on the whole thing and sum up the artistic statement. What the final track in fact does is to include a looping artifact in its main loop-- a little clip/click where the loop begins and ends, which is obviously kept intentionally but which manifests as an ultrasonic squeak. This makes me very unhappy indeed and renders the climax of the album largely unlistenable. The track before, driven mostly by a looped motif on acoustic guitar with synth swells and stings, is very pleasant but doesn't deliver the climax that the first part of the album demands. What one is left with is the impression of a progression from nothingness to a sort of mundane orderliness, which as a conceptual trope leaves a lot to be desired. And having presented itself as an artistic piece rather than as a simple music album "Multiples" demands to be evaluated (and discarded) on that level.

So as pleasant as it is sometimes, I'm going to recommend that you skip this, because it fails to deliver on its promise.

The Documentary, at least musically, is apparently what they call G-funk (Wikipedia tells me this)? I don't know. If I had to describe it in my own words, I would say it is bass-heavy, slow and smooth beats that have defined what people in loud cars leaning all the way back in the driver's seat are listening to. The album goes over all the familiar ground - The Game is a real gangsta who got shot, bitches, The Game is here to stay, hos, The Game was Dr. Dre's protege, poppin' caps, lovin' your sweet lady, how sexually virulent The Game is, sex, having a child, and how awesome the Game is. If I had one major problem with this album, it would be the severe amounts of repetition on the album. How many times do we have to hear The Game shamelessly attempting to ride Dr. Dre's coattails? At the very least, the message is made loud and clear, like political talking points from the White House. The Game is the rebirth of Dre, and has had a rough life on the west side (it is also the first time in a long time that I have heard someone other than a white suburban youth age 16-25 say "West Siyyyyyde!").

The Documentary is also quite aptly named, as it seems a simple chronicling of The Game's rise... to power! He hasn't quite ridden with kings, but Dr. Dre seems to be enough to satisfy The Game. At some point, on a particularly good track, he gets more specific about the history of his rap schedule than a report on the Kennedy assassination. He also insists on mentioning his connection to NWA, repeating titles of famous NWA songs, and compares his own music to NWA's. The Game is not NWA. NWA had a song called "Fuck the Police". The Game's most interesting song is called "Church For Thugs", and the closest he gets to controversial is when he talks about Haitians at some point. NWA is to The Game as The Game is to Eminem. Speaking of whom, Eminem makes an appearance that surprised me, but only me, because he mentions Marshall about 17 times, and they are both one of Dre's students. Despite the stupid pitch-shifted intro, the song is pretty good, and shows just how different Eminem's style of hip-hop is from artists like The Game or Kanye West or really almost any other rapper that I know of.

So is this album worth it? This album has a lot of high points, like the sentimental "Start From Scratch", the sappy-yet-not-pushing-it "Higher", which has an excellent sample, the title track, "The Documentary", which has an excellent opening bit with kids arguing like adult racial stereotypes in an imagined gas station. The first music track, "Westside Story" is pretty good, but it's the beginning of more of the same, so you really only need one track like it. Pick "Hate it or Love It", "Put You on the Game", etc. The music is pretty decent, and there's some interesting things to hear about for those listening to the lyrics. I'm going to give the album the benefit of the doubt and say buy it.

We were worried about this week's batch, and this album was part of the reason - not more goddamn gangster rap, please? Not more posturing, not more guns and blow? The fact that I like this album, which is self-consciously gangster to the very core, anyway is a testament to Game's mic skills and the sheer depth of production and guest talent that he's drawn into this album. It's listenable, it's interesting, it's funny, and while the Game may not be the most likable son of a bitch ever to roll out of Compton he has some endearing habits that almost make up for his flaws.

Game is marked out by his obsessions -- in another life, I think this dude could've been a nerd of immense proportions, because the degree to which he obsesses over the finest details of rap history, gangster culture and (particularly) his wardrobe is nothing short of monomaniacal. Game name-checks Dr. Dre on nearly every track on this album, and some songs (particularly the hilarious "No More Fun And Games") are basically laundry lists of every MC who he works with, admires, has beef with or just happened to think of in passing. His perspective on what he is and what he's doing is profoundly socio-historical, oddly -- he sees himself as the public face of the resurgence of L.A. hip-hop, the restoration to the limelight of a dynasty that goes back to N.W.A. and the birth of gangster rap. His status as a member of G-Unit, his relationship with New York rap and his rivalry with 50 Cent for the attentions of Dre... the first couple of tracks on this album read like a crash course on the state of contemporary hip-hop. And he is very clear about the details, his gangster lean, his jesus piece, his vintage Nikes (how often do you hear a man who raps about war and crime and gangbanging spit a verse about how he's distracted with trying not to scuff his shoes?) He's not religious, but he needs canary yellow diamonds in his cross -- he claims to have been the first to have put hydraulics on a low-rider -- and so on. He himself is a pretty decent guy, as hardasses go, who loves his wife, loves his son, ain't no racist, and cares for his community. There's a streak of misogyny running through his rhymes that's kind of alarming, if sadly typical, but it's defused by the sweetness of the last three tracks. (Is it a rule that gangster rap albums have to end with love songs?)

Now the beats... the beats are just outstanding. Varied, propulsive, threatening, hearkening back to west coast tracks of years past, funky when appropriate, with sung hooks that never fail to hook. You got "Hate It or Love It", which samples an old soul track and namechecks Eric B and Rakim -- you got "Don't Need Your Love", which comes to us courtesy of Kanye West if I read those pitch-shifted vocal noodlings in the background correctly, and is simultaneously old-school and modern -- and the martial beat of "Put You On The Game", which start-stops and stutters its way past with pure gangster ferocity. Many different producers are at work here (incuding Eminem, who does a guest verse on "We Ain't" which makes up for the standard Em doomed-carnival beat. I swear to god he thinks he invented minor chords.) That guest spot actually reminds us that even though Game is a lot better than he could be as a rapper he's not one of the greats -- he's not dexterous enough, not creative enough. But he's solid, and what he lacks in variety of content he makes up for in clarity, smoothness, and intensity. His ability to tell you what he wants you to know isn't limited by rhythm or rhyme. He can get it all in there effortlessly. And he has a sense of humor... there's a moment on "Higher" which made me burst out laughing, and which I'm not going to spoil for you, but it takes a certain wit to change out your hook just to get in a dis.

So let this be proof that I don't mind if you just talk about crime, bling, and rap, as long as you do it well and there's some fundamental intelligence behind it: buy this sucker. Game occasionally rhymes "bitch" with "bitch" and you could get alcohol poisoning taking a shot every time he says "Dre" but there's plenty good on here, and miracle of miracles it's consistent. No horrible tracks on a seventy-minute rap album. Smells like classic to me.

I am exaggerating a small bit. Many My Morning Jacket songs are basically of the bombastic stadium-rocker Coldplay sound-alike kind, and at times, like for example, on the chorus of "Gideon", he is able to provide the kind of excitement that comes with those bands. One of the bigger problems is when he tries to push those same skills toward more upbeat genres; for example, on the blues-influenced "What a Wonderful Man", they use the same reverb template on his voice, and it sounds out of place and uninspired. "Off The Record" is an exception, where the reverb gets shut off and the band attempts a reggae song (bad idea). It also doesn't help that the song rips off the "Hawaii 5-0" riff (oh but see, it's a little different).

You can perceive another influence coming from the rhythm section of the band, and this comes out on the guitar riffs of "What A Wonderful Man", but it can mostly be heard on the jam band/Built To Spill instrumental outros on "Lay Low" and "Dondante", the album's longest songs. Surprisingly, these were the tracks on the album that really stood out for me and it was all because of the raw skill of the band as a whole - they took a 3 minute instrumental outro and made it more than a guitar wankery "Freebird" fest. "Lay Low" is the best example of the competing forces at work here and their fundamental difference. The first 3 minutes is an entirely forgettable alt-indie-rock song, but the last 3 minutes manages to evoke melodies that are memorable and at once render the previous 3 minutes as noticably inferior.

Overall, while it is tempting to write this album off as yet another mediocre mix of modern music, My Morning Jacket remains superior to most other bands' offerings. As boring as they might be, the tracks are quite listenable, which I cannot say the same about other records. It gives the album a surprising amount of repeat value except for "Off the Record", which can get slightly irritating if listened to too many times. A Top 50 of 2005 album, however, should have a certain amount of intensity and ability to compel the listener. So ultimately, burn this album and put it in a plastic sleeve, because it will end up on the floor of your car for quite some time.

This album is notable for two things: first, the 'Verb. It's all over everything, particularly the vocals and the drums, and it varies in character and intensity, which is a good thing in terms of keeping the listener interested and a bad thing in terms of creating a definable character for the band. The second notable thing is how generically rock'n'rolly everything is. They've got style, and when they play breakdowns there's definite evidence of chops, but I don't think it's enough style. We're suffering from a lack of personality here, from a band that doesn't quite have the skill to be a Led Zeppelin but is trying hard by aping every style in that category they can.

Which isn't to say that there aren't some pretty nifty moments. Take "Off The Record", which is shamelessly Clash-y at the top but ends with a wonderfully cool little breakdown section made of vintage keyboard and guitar tremblings, a smooth bass and drum groove, and subtle backward-masked voice crackles. This is followed, however, by an entirely unnecessary song called "Into The Woods" which seems to be a reaction to the Sondheim play of the same name (in the 'stop trying to teach me things' vein) but which more importantly rests on a lurching circus organ figure which has worn out its welcome by the first minute and which persists as the song drags, and drags, and drags. "Gideon", with its ridiculously verbed-out vocals, delay washes and majestic sweeps and swoops might verge on classic if it didn't sound exactly like the Stone Roses. The jammy southern rock of "Lay Low" starts out worrying and goes on way too long, riding mostly on two chords and brushing against some painfully overdriven vocals on the way. And then we verge into all-out country on "Knot Comes Loose", which is the point where you'll be tempted to toss the album gently into the 'maybe I'll listen to this again sometime, possibly' pile. Which is a shame, because the last track turns out to be quite wonderful, even at eight minutes - cool, subtle and grooved-out until it splashes itself out in a spaghetti-western smear of burnt southwestern broodiness.

I'm going to give this album a burn, because there are some very nice moments and I'm cognizant that I'm rewarding them for aping the people I like and punishing them for aping the people I don't. If you're the kind of guy who bemoans the death of the guitar solo in pop music and who wishes people would bring the goddamn rock once in a while, do check this album out, cause it's an old-fashioned band with old-fashioned styles and old-fashioned instruments and old-fashioned chord structures. I just wish they'd bring a little more of the new into the mix, and didn't homage their influences quite so mercilessly, and were willing to be more atmospheric and groove-oriented. These guys could make a fantastic movie soundtrack. The lesson, I suppose, is that rock is on the wane because it's hard to do right-- much easier to write your little songs and hire a genius producer, like the next person on our list...

Flaming Lip Wayne Coyne once said, "If someone asked me what instrument do I play, my answer would probably be the recording studio." Murphy is very much the same way, and I think that you are going to start seeing a lot more artists evolve like that, especially with the advent of cheap digital recording and the Pro Tools era. Murphy, while nowhere near the musical style of the Flaming Lips (though the two groups intersect on the title track "Ruby Blue", which sounds very much like "Free Radicals (A Hallucination of the Christmas Skeleton Pleading with a Suicide Bomber)"), still evokes the kind of playfulness and originality in the studio that Coyne does.

She uses several synthesizers, sampled and tweaked vocal outbursts, and horn sections. Some of the production is understated and subtle: she slides in a backward vocal in the mix for only 15 seconds to establish the mood and pulls it out right away. She slides a saxophone solo in the background on the right channel that is barely perceptible, but it completely fits within the context. On the drunken "Off On It" she samples in someone blurbling in the background. These are just a few examples of the pleasant surprises on this album.

I should also mention that there's not really any unpleasant parts to this album. Unfortunately, however, few of the songs are that great. The best songs on the album include the sultry "Sinking Feeling", which has a meticulously arranged horn section that sounds amazing. For some reason, "Ramalama" really strikes a chord with me, but that could just be my strange taste, and the final song "The Closing of the Doors" is just pretty. The lower points on the album are "Off On It", which is a huge success for achieving its desired effect, but at 5:23, it clocks in way too long for a song that is mostly her singing "it's just a game" and making heavy breathing noises, causing the whole track to sound like a dirty crank call on acid. "If We're In Love", which features the chorus "If we're in love / we should make love / when will be lovers?", sounds like a forgotten track on an Al Green album. The album is fun to listen to in some parts, but the majority of the rest of the album sound like an electronified version of a mediocre soul record, with a touch of New Orleans, as heard on "Night of the Dancing Flame", which to me sounds more like the title of a Sherlock Holmes story.

I think that you should probably skip this album, because there were just too many poor tracks on the album, but some of it is worth checking out, and if your taste is right you'd like it. Personally, the album at some points makes me feel like hanging out with your creepy uncle that is always going to the disco. So I'm going to go with skip, but I recommend those with recording fetishes or a polyester suit to check it out.

On the other hand, the production really is superlative. Whether it's crafting a soulful beat out of a wound-up alarm clock on "Dear Diary" or slapping up an incongruously filthy hip-hop dance groove on "Ramalama", the dude/dudette/coterie behind this album has got chops and intelligence to spare, and isn't afraid to be difficult or abrasive up against Murphy's off-the-shelf soul stylings. I'll come right out and say that the accompaniment here is better than even the more interesting tracks on the Fiona Apple album-- but Murphy's no Fiona, and that of course is where the problem lies. These songs are generic, and the subtlety of the production also means that there aren't any banging, manipulative hooks to latch on to. Stapling bass and drums on to some of these songs might've undermined the programmed-jazz feel that they're trying to create here but it would've made it a whole lot easier to get into the music. Also, Murphy's voice, though it has the inflection and stylings of a soul/jazz singer, doesn't have the raw power or soulfulness behind it to drive things forward on its own. So perhaps even the strength and variety of the production is in itself a weakness... maybe in its complexity it sacrifices the possibility of empathetic connection with the singer.

Still, I can't help but love "Night Of The Dancing Flame", a bouncy, unrelentingly weird groove of which the more identifiable elements are wah-wah trombone, electronic tablas and something which might be a dentist's drill. The songwriting steps up, too, abandoning the usual generic love-stuffery in favor of something a little more tribal and strange. (Although without any madness in the vocals it does come off as a little new-agey, perhaps.) And the aforementioned "Ramalama" is like a slightly toned-down Oingo Boingo, complete with spooky bass line and tiny treble mutterings, which for sheer incongruity on a jazz-pop album gets massive points. Still, when I look elsewhere for highlights I get a lot of boring and a lot of forgettable, despite the best efforts of the orchestrators, who seem slightly uncomfortable trying to get my booty shaking on tracks like "If We're In Love". That last is one of the least sexy let's-get-it-on-songs I've ever heard -- sure, the bass sound is interestingly modulated, but it ain't deep or driving. It's an oddly intellectual approach to the libidinal groove, as is somebody was told how genitals worked but never went and prodded at their own. It just doesn't work.

Skip this, I think. I hope I see the same producer working with a songwriter who would better fit his style.

To start off with, Young Jeezy is probably the slowest rapper I have ever heard. I think the guy from Third Eye Blind could rap circles around this guy. I don't even think that his lines are done in a single take. It sounds like it took him several takes on a single verse to get everything right. I really think that I could do a better job than this guy - the only thing Jeezy has on me is a bad-ass voice and the proper ego to pull off the whole "gangsta rap" thing. The other problem is that he takes "rap affirmations" (you know, 'Yeah' or 'Unh') to a ridiculous extreme. After almost every single line or phrase, Jeezy insists on throwing in some sampled outburst in the space. And boy howdy, does he have a lot of them: "Yeah!", "Yeaaaaah", "Unh!", "Ha-ha!", "Hey!", "Yup", "Dayymn!"; "Ey", "Ehhhhh", and "Eaaayyyyyhhhhh" like he thinks he's fucking Fonzie or something, and my favorite, "Thaaaaassss Riiiiiight." I guarantee you won't have to wait more than a minute before you get an "Ehhhhh" or "Thaaaaas Riiiight." It makes me wonder just how many takes it took to get that "thaaas riight" perfect or if Jeezy was talented enough to nail it in one take. Fonzie jumping over a shark was way cooler than this shit. On one track, he has a "Hey! Hey!" chorus that sounds like a Nazi march or a Marilyn Manson song. These things make the album unlistenable. Let me illustrate.

The rest of the album is pretty much worthless as far as I can tell. Yeah! It is, predictably, ha-ha! about shootin' caps, unh! sellin' crack, fuckin' bitches, daymn! and it seems that every single song seems like a desparate grab to be cool with the target audience; a calculated distillation of all rap up until that point. Thaaaaaas riiiiiight!! Every song is basically an exact copy of the last one, Unh!! and it's evident that no real talent was necessary to make this album. Ehhhhhhh! The beats all Yeahhhhh! came from Thaaaas riiight! - ok, that's en Ehhhh! - no, that's Yeaaaaaah no, stop it!

Thank you.

As I was saying, the beats all seem to come from a CD entitled "100 Hot Beats for "Rap" Music" - they sound like the most generic gangsta rap beats possible. The lyrics themselves are incredibly lacking. In "Let's Get It / Sky's The Limit" he rhymes a word with the same word twice for no good reason: "I see opportunity i'm a opportunist / Nigga you heard what I said i'm a opportunist"; "I commentate the game like John Madden / Cause I played in the game like John Madden". It also includes this line that made me laugh out loud: "Niggers, bitches, bitch-ass niggers, dyke ass hos, black ass, bright ass hos, fag hags and scallywags..." On "And Then What", he says "boom boom clap" along with similar sounding percussion, then later in that same song he says "then I'm gonna hop in one of them cars" like he's a time traveler from 1850. At some point he proclaims that he's a "T-R-A-P-S-T-R" - a trapstr? Did he forget how to spell "gangster"? Is that the name of a new nu metal band? Is he proclaiming his heritage of living in French Canada and hunting beavers for their pelts?

Skip this bullshit and let's all point at Pitchfork and laugh for them trying to look cool.

This (jyuh) is an album by a man named Jeezy (eeeeeeyy) who used to sell coke (jeeyuh) and is sexually aroused by his Jacksons (awwwww yeeah). His current occupation is keeping it real (dayumm) and making funny noises behind rap songs (hey. hey. hey. hey. hey. hey.) Did I mention he used to sell coke? He did. He sold a lot of it. (jyuh. EEEEYYYYY.)

Now I know that m'colleague on the left and I aren't really good at reviewing gangster rap -- call it lack of experience with the genre, liberal squeamishness, or just a cloth-eared disregard for the rainbow of human experience that is selling blow and shootin' niggers. But I for one am prepared to adapt, and thanks to our recent review of the Pretty Toney album I now have a context within which to evaluate the merits of this sort of music. Either an album is better than Ghostface, or worse than Ghostface. This is much, much worse than Ghostface.

The beats are infuriatingly generic and samey and slow so that Jeezy, who sounds perpetually out of breath (he's probably got buckshot in his lungs or something) can keep up with them. One song fades into another without leaving any impression beyond the fact that Jeezy has a lot of coke in his pants, or in his auntie's house, or, y'know, just generally around. And that he's real -- considerably realer than other niggers. He's extremely real. What this means is that he's completely rejected the idea that one's moral universe can be expanded beyond the twin precepts of get yours and make sure the other guy doesn't. None of this crossover shit for him - you'll never catch Jeezy rapping about shit that ain't from the streets, cause the streets made him what he is, and he's from the streets, and he cares about the streets, where he's from. Apparently the streets are mostly about violence and crime plus the occasional barbecue. Keeping it real also means that he can boast, as he does repeatedly, that the real dope dealers and murderers are listening to his stuff. Accept no substitutes.

This is not to say that there's nothing of redeeming value in here. In small doses the stuff (JYUH) is completely hilarious-- you occasionally have a hard time believing that something so thoroughly and unremittingly dumb wasn't calculated every step of the way, that Jeezy didn't sit down before he recorded the album to carefully pluck out every scintilla of nuance, that he wasn't chuckling to himself and making bets with his friends about how many times in a single song he could mention his bricks. And then there're a track like "My Hood", which comes out of fucking nowhere with a hugely upbeat eighties after school special beat, over which Jeezy explains that he is, in effect, keeping it real for the children. For his hood...and for our hoods. And there's Jeezy's omnipresent eeeey-- just imagine a big black fonz. But all this is sort of negated by the fact that the album clocks in at well over an hour and fatigue has set irretrievably in by track four.

This is gangster -- this is dirty south -- this might be crunk, whatever crunk is -- it's the face of Georgia. And that makes me really sad, because I want southern rap to be like Cee-Lo and like Outkast, smart and musically innovative and not dumbed down to the point where even the beats feel like they were made by the special class down at bangin' school. Urgh. A skip for this and everything it represents.

I decided to put this to the test. I played her album alongside a Britney Spears album and listened to see which one came out on top. Unfortunately, the Britney Spears album was a "greatest hits" one, so it wasn't quite as objective as I would have liked. In any case, the results were mixed. The first few songs were clearly a victory for Britney, with "Toxic" proving to be a towering victory over anything Robyn has ever recorded. By that point, though, it went back to the older Britney hits, which instead of being bad, like Robyn, are offensively bad. Advantage Robyn. Surprisingly, after those songs end, the two artists are nearly indistinguishable. Only by Robyn's voice are you able to tell the difference.

There are some songs which aren't completely awful. "Should Have Known" which sounds like Annie, actually, and "Crash and Burn Girl", which sounds like a simple house song. "Anytime You Like" and "Eclipse" are also not-so-bad songs, but only because of their sparseness and lack of anything. But the rest is not tolerable. "Who's That Girl" is an excellent Cyndi Lauper impression, "Handle Me" is a sassy Kelly Clarkson song (in which she informs us that we can't handle her. I'm sorry, Robyn), "Be Mine!" is a good study of Britney Spears-style over-production using non-obvious instruments, "Bum Like You" borrows Avril's melodies over Mirah's band (a shame, that), and "Robotboy" is just about the worst song I've ever heard. "Robotboy" sounds like a nerd with no writing skills (like me) teamed up with The Matrix songwriting team. She also suffers from a severe case of Drew Barrymore-like sassiness, and when she has audio skits showing her being the HSIC (Head Swede In Charge) of the production, I don't care if it's accurate; it's annoying.

The lyrics aren't that great either. "Be Mine!" is the biggest culprit: any song with the phrase "and I remember every word you said" clearly suffers from lazy lyric writing. She sings, "It's a cool thing you'll never know all the ways I tried." Why? What's cool about that? She uses the word "cool" like your mom uses it. There's also a cheesy voiceover in the bridge: "I saw you at the station. You had your arm around what's-her-name. She had on that scarf I gave you. And you got down to tie her laces...you looked happy, and that's great...I just miss you, that's all." Such great drama has not been reached on tape since "Car Chase Terror!" or even "But I thought the old lady threw it to the bottom of the ocean..." Well, baby, I went down and got it for you.

So while it's not so horrible, the real thing is better. Skip this and purchase a copy of (Current Hot Pop Star) instead.

This is purest guilty pleasure and after some of the dreck we've had to wade through it makes me cry tiny little tears of pleasure. It's not unlike that other girl with one name and retro electronic leanings, but Robyn was around ten years ago, and she still sounds less assured and less hipstery. She's just adorable, in fact, in a manipulative and yet entirely plausible way. And she's managed to finagle herself a producer who can make everything smooth and bright and shiny without turning me off. I mean... take "Handle Me". It's an electro pop-R&B song, spare and beat-driven and radio-ready, and then a little extra-reedy cello (patch?) sneaks in, and then the chorus comes in and oh my god with the superclean acoustic guitar chords it's like every song that was on the radio when I was in high school and yet somehow I'm still digging it. This album goes effortlessly over the top again and again but still manages to be spare and to use negative space effectively, keeping everything elastic and tight. As for Robyn herself... well, when her intro track features a man with an impossibly deep, gangstery voice explaining that she invented the AIDS vaccine and was specifically banned by United Nations article 202 from wearing tight sweaters on international flights....

Oh, and she has a song called "Konichiwa, Bitches." And it sounds like M.I.A. with a sense of humor.

It is hard to be objective about this, becuase it's designed to sit right on my pleasure center and kick hard. There's a moment in the already almost too-adorable-for-words song "Robotboy" where to top off a line where she's been singing through a radio filter she gets to do a three-note three-part harmony with herself that's so utterly plasticky and pitch-corrected that it could only lead into the huge boof in the bass drum and the violas and the warm, heroic-pop-moment piano chords of the final chorus. There will be some who will listen to those five or so seconds and remain unmoved -- there will be some who will roll their eyes and wonder how anybody could be so cheesy, so cynical. l I prefer to think of it as swinging for the fence. And the next track, "Be Mine!" is a perfect pop song constructed mostly of staccato string attacks. It's like you took a Britney and injected her with bis. The lyrical content is pretty great, too-- from the opener "Who's That Girl?", a song about how your dream girl only exists in your dreams and you're going to have to end up settling for a human girl, to "Bum Like You", an unexpectedly straightforward four-piece indie rock song about how her man is poor, sketchy and ugly but that doesn't really matter much cause she loves him. The stylistic gamut that the album runs is worth mentioning, incidentally... there's R&B, electropop, indie rock, and "Eclipse", a spare, nearly empty torch song scored for piano, upright bass and a keyboard echoing the chords panned way the hell back and run through a very hard, very quick tremolo, which is the sort of production trick that operates almost subliminally but makes the goddamn song.

The album falls off near the end (almost inevitably-- you can't keep a rack of stylistically diverse pop songs consistent for more than seven or eight tracks without breaking the genius barrier). "Should Have Known" is boring by-the-numbers R&B and "Anytime You Like", although it features some nice atmospherics and squelching, is forgettable sub-Madonna popstuff. But it's a minor complaint, really.. there's more than enough here to keep me happy. Buy, yo.

Despite all this nonsense, the music itself is strong enough that you can just ignore all that crap. The album itself seems to define exactly what Fiona Apple is - sultry jazz-influenced singer with a feminine edge that's not feminist like Ani DiFranco or "empowering" like Tori Amos; rather it's realistic, unpretentious, and unpronounced. The music is mostly the typical piano, bass, and drums with the occasional strings, but other formulas show up that you don't see very often in rock anymore: the Burt Bacharach-style horns, the playful clarinet, honky-tonk style rhythms, late era-Beatles string sections and even a modern showtunes style (similar to Sondheim), cramming as much verse into a single space as possible.

The album starts off with "Better Version of Me", which like I said above is everything you'd expect out of Fiona Apple, with a creeping piano line and a heavily processed organ synth background. It's immediately engaging, and she sounds almost like a beat poet spitting out short rhyming lines. (I should note that when I listened to this the first time, somehow an alternate version of the song ended up on my playlist immediately after this song, making the song into a quine.) The next song "Extraordinary Machine" combines a 60s wind ensemble style with musical theatre, and by this point in the record you get the feeling that everything coming out of your speakers is going to be interesting at the very least.

It also should be said that Apple puts on a hell of a performance. She doesn't hold back on her vocals, and plays the piano with a great deal of passion - on "Not About Love" espeically (she smacks the piano in rhythm during the huge but sparse chorus). The negative side to the album, though is a certain degree of monotony throught the album. The lyrics tread over the same ground in a way that is unvaried, as she sings about painful, angry or ambiguous feelings about love. The lyrics also seldom offer anything singular for listeners to pick out (the exception is the aforementioned "Extraordinary Machine").

Despite those faults, however, this is a very strong album that is a great deal of fun to listen to, even if you aren't going to be singing along with it a great deal. I say buy it simply for having such incredible amounts of style.

The now-forgotten internet squawk-fest that surrounded the release of this album largely passed me by. For those (like me) who weren't really paying attention, the skinny is that Fiona started recording the album with dude A, and then decided to rerecord large chunks of it with dude B. People at the time screamed that she'd been pushed by her label to seek out a more consumer-friendly approach, and when the version with dude A was leaked they proclaimed it far superior to the dumbed-down commercial tripe that dude B was pushing, despite the fact that Fiona herself liked dude B's stuff better. Pitchfork has chosen to include dude A's version on their list, making yet another case where I can't reasonably give a buy rating cause it ain't for sale at any price, and my critical judgment is weakened anyway by the thought of someone who, having recorded nearly a full album, with all the work and expense that requires (some of these tracks feature freakin' orchestral accompaniment), has the resources to just chuck it and start again. If I had your budget, lady, my band would be on the radio right now. And my vocals would sound like Britney's.

Anyway. Fiona Apple is a chanteuse both jazzy and soulful, and a few of her songs are produced and scored here with extraordinary creativity and aplomb. If the subject matter of her songs is a bit on the predictable side, the delivery (in terms of songwriting, inflection, you name it) is quite unique and quite wonderful. It's ultra-dramatic in a winking, cabaret-style way, and the best songs on here are like show-stopping numbers from the kind of quality musical nobody seems capable of writing anymore. "Not About Love", elastic and expressive and clever and diva-tastic, is a textbook example of how to use a string section effectively (apparently you can do things with a violin besides big reverb-drenched whole notes! Somebody shoulda told Mr. M83...) It happens to be a great song, too, shrewdly constructed, intelligent, sly. Now if only every other song on the album was up to that standard... and if you think you're tired of reading that phrase, think of how tired I am of writing it....

I am inclined to think that many of the songs in the pod I'm currently listening to weren't entirely finished or mixed at the point of their release, because this album comes off as hugely frontloaded, and what's the point of frontloading a bootleg? The first five songs on the tracklist are all pretty wonderful, using nontraditional instrumentation and creative scoring to great effect. (I am excluding here the version of "Better Version Of Me" marked "version 4". The version marked "alternate" is the better version. Can you see why reviewing something like this is headache-inducing?) But the production gets more conservative and more repetitive as the album progresses, with only a few exceptions. Much of this might perhaps be blamed on the songwriting, which having exhausted its initial stylistic novelty begins to feel samey. But hey, the good stuff is really pretty darn good, filled with juddering start-stops, tension and attitude. And the sort of bass drum hits that go right to your ass if you're feeling swanky.

Still, on the whole, I'm not overwhelmed and the sheer silliness surrounding this album's inclusion on the list makes me tired. Let's call it a burn and have done.

For a lot of you, that's all I need to say. You're already enthralled. Everyone old enough to drink actually remembers the 80s, and those younger than that probably remember the 80s, too. We all look at the 80s with nostalgia so powerful that we invent unwarranted nostalgia for other decades because we are nostalgic for 80s nostalgia. The Japanese have a great word for it, natsukashii, but maybe it's just great because the Japanese language allows you to simply say that word (and only that word) when something makes you nostalgic. Similarly, all one needs to do is mention something iconic from the 80s, and you're guaranteed to have the ears of the majority of people listening. I may even use this device somewhere in this review.

M83, fittingly, sounds like it comes from around 1983. Its music similar to that era's prog rock (evoking such bands as Tangerine Dream), but far more simpler, and with vocals that sound something like The Cure at times. It's almost as if three major 80s elements - punk, new wave, and prog rock - combined to form a single band. A "supergroup", if you will. When I listen to the album, I feel like I've been transported to the land of 80s movie soundtracks. I see a post-apocalyptic desert world, or maybe some barbarian smiting a dragon on some ancient Earth B-movie set somewhere. Or maybe flying Falcor as I rush to protect the world from the Nothing. The keyboard patches swell and hold majestic chords in counterpoint to cheesy string synth and even cheesier choir synths as someone softly sings a simple melody over them. What I'm trying to get at is that this band set out to recreate the feeling they got when they thought about the 80s and completely and utterly succeeded.

Mind you, I'm not saying that this sounds like anything that was necessarily around in the 80s, but instead it's just vaguely reminiscent. The other things is that a band can have as much style as it wants, but it still all hinges upon the music itself. The opening track, "Don't Save Us From The Flames" is a high speed mix of synth, falsetto voices and the Toms Of Doom, and it's quite catchy for not containing a whole lot of melody. The next few songs, however, tread in the same dreary repeatative soft-and-pretty zone of boredom. The song only offers a couple high points: the aforementioned opening track, "Teen Angst", which is along the same lines as that song. Musically, the rest of the album continues along fairly predictable lines but never becomes interesting enough for me to want to stop and listen to it. The lowest point musically comes on "Can't Stop", which sounds like 80s top 40 radio at its worst.

The real unfortunate side to this album is the spoken parts. In a couple places on this album, a woman (who may have come from the 80s movie set I mentioned) does some very unnecessary spoken word bits. The first, which I assume is engineered to sound like an 80s movie quote, is forgivable, but only because it's so short. The next, at about 3/4 of the way through the album comes on "Car Chase Terror!" which is an audio recording that is half 80s horror movie, half Blair Witch, and all badly acted. I suppose the cheesiness is supposed to be endearing, but in this case it's so bad it's impossible to like.

Between the bad acting and lack of inspiring songs, skip this album. However, it's got such style that I say it wouldn't hurt you to spend a CD-R and burn it if you were feeling in the mood. However, I honestly can't see any sane person buying this thing.

I hesitate to say this, cause the competition has been pretty darn stiff, with many worthwhile contenders throughout this noble project of ours, but this album may be the worst thing we've yet encountered.

M83 were at one point two frenchmen, one a multi-instrumentalist with a fetish for big swelling eighties-movie-soundtrack grandiosity and cheesy synths and the other a fairly wicked beatmaker and loop-chopper. Together they produced an album which was not perhaps an item for all occasions but which brought adjectives like "majestic" and "triumphal" to mind, and had the power (at least in my case) to increase one's stamina to Rocky Balboa levels. Pretty much the perfect soundtrack for biking up rain-slick mountains or scaling cliffs. Then the beatmaker left, leaving the other dude to indulge himself. The beats are replaced by Big Eighties Drums, the synth voices and samples by breathy girls and boys with mushy accents and questionable English (a species I have grown to loathe over the course of this project), structure and crescendo by sprawl, and implied heights of passionate emotion by big, wet, steaming, unsubtle, manipulative schlock-turds. It starts out mediocre and gets steadily worse until we reach the likes of "Teen Angst", which is like Enya turned up to 160 BPM (the lyrics, by the way, of that song: "teen angst", repeated over and over and over again.) This is new-age music for hipsters. Criminal. Mr. M83 tops it easily with "Safe", though, which is lifted mostly from Vivaldi's "Spring" and features an echoey breathy voice expressing sentiments so wet that a sponge, sitting on the bottom of the ocean during a particularly vicious rainstorm whilst being pissed on by a passing shark, would say, "damn, that's pretty wet." If he were listening. And could speak english.

I was at this point convinced that things couldn't get any worse and had dedicated myself to at least getting through one complete listen of the album so I could lambast it properly. Then I hit "Car Chase Terror!", which consists of an astonishingly cheesy and completely incongruous instrumental (largely indistinguishable from all the other instrumentals on this album, all of which basically use the same chord progression and mega-quick beats which slightly different lame string and keyboard patches) being talked over by a soap-opera grade actress delivering a bewildering and poorly-written monologue, the gist of which is that she's frightened-- I can't tell you any more than that because at a minute and a half in I gave up. If you can get through that track without suffering internal bleeding you're a stronger man than I. And then... well. I think if I tell you that track 14 is called "A Guitar And A Heart" you can put together the clues from the rest of this review and hear the ensuing Karate Kid soundtrack wankery in the theatre of your imagination.

As a tribute to Stephen Colbert and to celebrate the midterm election results I hereby introduce a new category for this album and award it a should never have existed.

Lookaftering is basically an Enya singer/songwriter album. It's got guitar store style acoustic fingerpicking, simple flute parts, occasional mandolins or violins, a few piano songs, and an airy, beautiful female voice that sings so softly that you have to listen pretty closely to tell that she's singing at all. The result is very beautifuly and pretty predictable - but it's probably the perfect album for this genre. The arrangement of the instruments is impeccable, and there's a great deal of depth to it. For example, on "Against The Sky", there's a faint feedback or resonance that sounds like (and partly fills in for) a flute part. There's a noisy, quickly vibrating harpischord like noise on "Turning Back" that ushers in a particular section now and again - it fills the role that a bouzouki or fast-picked mandolin might play, but it instead adds an ethereal quality to the music and the harsh frequencies that are amplified on the recording complement the oboe and piano quite well. The album is full of excellent instrumentation and quality engineering.

The only thing that stops me from recommending this album wholeheartedly is that I have no desire to listen to the darn thing. Every song, while done well, seems simply a variation on the last. Her vocal lines are practically identical on each song, and as a result it doesn't seem like any real effort has gone into them. Not only that, but every song is the same tempo. Seriously, no song on this album is more than a few beats per minute different from another. Similarly, the mood of the songs ranges from "sadly sweet" to "sweetly sad."

So basically, burn it and hand it out to your friends down at the coffee shop or guitar store, who will absolutely love it and probably form a songwriter's guild to write and record CDs that sound just like it. As a musician, I totally and unironically encourage this, though - just make sure to add some variation to it.

Vashti Bunyan has a weird history-- she made a psychedelic folk album in the 70s which slotted comfortably in the Undiscovered Classic category, where the actual quality of the album becomes secondary to the satisfaction derived from its obscurity. Then she went away for a while, until the fine fellows of the Animal Collective decided they'd like to do an EP with her, and behold -- it's the comeback trail. Given that CV it's remarkable that this album is as good as it is. This is folk music, lushly produced with flutes and strings and the occasional recorder swirling around soft-fingerpicked acoustic guitar, sort of like the Espers but with more songwriting muscle, variety and lyrical content behind it. Bunyan's voice takes a little getting used to, though, and some of the tracks here (including the opener, unfortunately) are sweet in construction and production to the point of cloyingness. Given the crowd that she's hanging out with it seems a shame that Bunyan didn't choose a more daring style of production, with less of the smooth and buttery and more of the organic. Whoever recorded Devendra Banhart's 2005 album might've worked wonders with this material; even though Bunyan isn't as talented a guitarist or a singer as Devendra, surely there are ways to deal with that other than smothering it in layers of sweetness. That's the point of indie rock, surely?

As it is this album's presence on the Pitchfork list is incongruous at best and is yet another example of an album's backstory landing it in a position that might've been filled by many other similar artists who didn't happen to have the hip credentials of the moment. I suppose her voice is strange enough to get her indie points, breathy and almost flutelike, pitch-accurate but oddly uninflected. And then there are little touches like the vintage-as-hell keyboard that kicks off "If I Were" before it's swallowed by dual harpists closing in from the left and right sides of the audio landscape. (This album is worth checking out for that effect alone, really.) "If I Were" is a pretty darn beautiful song, anyhow, simple and touching slow-waltz renaissance pastiche. There are a bunch of songs like that on here -- good melodies with good lyrics not overwhelmed by the production, like "Hidden", which is wistful and pensive and honest and gets extra points for use of an entire recorder quartet. I just wish that the album itself had been constructed more thoughtfully (on an album this short, do we really need to close with a stripped-down and hummed version of the third track? Mightn't it have been better to just use this version in the first place?) And it would've been really helpful to have the production reigned in on some tracks, as on "Feet Of Clay", where not even recorders can save the track from sinking under the weight of its own sweetness. It's sad that on an album like this, where the material is so deeply felt and has been simmering for so long, questionable calls from the producer can make so big a difference. Were the strings easier to swallow and the sugar less sweet I could see buying this, but as it is, it's a sometimes food (what we in the business call a burn.)

Gimme Fiction is a record that is definitive but at the same time has a lot of variation. "My Mathematical Mind" is typical piano-driven, dark Spoon, and "I Turn My Camera On" tends towards funk. This kind of variation is rather expected from Spoon, though, which shows their diversity as a band. This album has a lot of tracks, and goes all sorts of places, from a slow, bouncy "I Summon You" to the drumless, piano-recital feel of "Carryout Kids", which features some kind of motivational speaker sample. However (and this is what's always bugged me about Spoon), very few songs stand out, and the ones that do feel like they are carrying some kind of sludge over the whole thing. If it's the singer's voice or the chords that Spoon tends to pick, I'm not sure, but they remind me of Franz Ferdinand in that I can't ever listen to them for very long stretches. Not too many songs stand out for me, but this just could be my taste talking. The production is excellent, and Daniel can find interesting things to sing about, but it somehow fails to inspire me in any way. "I Summon You" is probably the album's best track; a nice shuffly acoustic number that you can dance too. It's also telling that I can't really find a poor song on the tracklist.

Usually it's a good sign that my reason for not liking a band is purely in taste when I find it very difficult to write a review about them, and such is the case with Spoon. So I'm going to go ahead and assign this a flexible burn-plus kind of deal. You should definitely buy it if you liked previous Spoon releases or you have always felt that rock just needed more roll.

The sound of Spoon is old-school, minimal, british-inflected rock with some twisty interesting chords thrown in, constructed of sharp and beautifully-recorded guitar, keyboard, bass and drums. One thinks of the Beatles and the Stones and...y'know...that whole crowd, the side of the british invasion who were more interested in song structure and pop sensibility than concept and weighty themes and interminable solos. You get a riff -- it repeats -- little squirrely production tricks weave in and out -- the lyrics are largely cool-sounding and meaningless, quoting old songs just like the music (he mentions at least twice that he's looking through me.) Some songs sound kind of like Dylan and the Band ("Sister Jack" -- do I smell another classic rock reference there?), some sound oddly like the New Pornographers, which probably means they sound like all the people A.C. Newman is ripping off with whom I am shamefully unfamiliar ("I Summon You.") The song here that everyone was raving over when it came out is the black-leather-and-sweat falsetto disco strut "I Turn My Camera On", which as far as I can tell is notable only because of the concept -- Spoon does a Bee-Gees pastiche and gays it up a little. Cool. The song isn't really worth listening to more than once, through.

The thing that made Kill The Moonlight such a great album was that it took an already very crisp sound and cut it down to its bones, leaving bits which other bands would fill with guitar strumming or drum fills stark and empty. This brought their great room reverb stuff out and made for quick, minimal songs which dropped in, punched you in the face with their sheer cool and then departed. Daniel has gotten a little more indulgent with this album, and the white space has as a general matter been filled with noise. On those occasions where he takes it all the way and provides a sort of loping wall of sound, as on the three-four stomper "My Mathematical Mind", this works in its own way -- but for the most part the album feels caught between concepts, and the songwriting just ain't there much. The two longest songs on the album, "Mathematical Mind" and "Was It You?", make an interesting pair -- they exemplify Spoon's two different approaches, the maximal and the minimal -- they're both extremely repetitive but feature a central riff awesome enough to keep my attention, particularly the latter -- and they're my favorite songs on here. The lesson to be drawn here is that this band is at its best when it explores what makes it unique. A little more quality control and a little more effort all around might have earned this album a buy, but as it is it's a definite burn with Better Luck Next Time in big letters underneath.

Unfortunately, it ended up being as uninteresting as prog metal could possibly be.

Let me describe it to you: it starts off with a minute of the same guitar noise hit in straight eighth notes (it sounds surprisingly similar to the beginning of a Rival Schools song) and then turns into a rapidly played guitar lick with the drums playing the same rapid beat for another 2 or 3 minutes. Then the lick changes a little bit. Then it does it again.

That's right, ladies and gentleman. They recorded band practice. And this is the 50th best album of the year.

This is essentially a guitarist practicing the same parts of "Eruption" over and over again. I mean, I can understand why they do this - you're in prog metal band Orthelm, you HAVE to keep your chops tight. So at what point were they practicing their sweet licks and paradiddles when they thought, "Shit! Let's record this!" Did they have to prove to the world how fast they could shred? Were they going for the Guinness Record for "Tightest Band"? Or is it simply indicative of how retarded prog bands can be to think that an album comprising of only guitar licks is going to be entertaining or some kind of brilliant artistic statement? (See also: Mars Volta.)

The only thing that could make this album worth anything would be a recording of the band after they fuck up at 36:45 on like the 43rd take. "Fuck! We were almost there!! Goddammit Mick, this is fucking simple!! Look at me!"

As it is, I don't want to spend anymore time on this, so if you want to buy this album I suggest you go on YouTube and watch 14 year olds shred instead. It's far more entertaining. So skip, but more importantly a fuck you to Pitchfork. Oh, you're so fucking cool, this stuff is so awesome, can I borrow your copy of Metal Machine Music some time?

WRONG. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Oh, Pitchfork.

I heard this was "prog metal", which it isn't. I was hoping for some kind of dexterity. There is no dexterity. This is pointless, unpleasant, self-indulgent claptrap. One guitar, one drum set, one 45 minute track of endless repetition, pointless shreddy licks on top of furious but poorly-recorded and grooveless fills. Sort of like if you stripped Van Halen down to two pieces and then chopped up the tape into half-second lengths and put it back together randomly. The only way this could possibly be considered worthwhile is as a feat of endurance by the performers, and I'm sorry, but that doesn't really work on a record. I DON'T CARE HOW FAST YOU CAN PLAY YOUR GUITAR. I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR DOUBLE KICK PEDAL.

The worst, the worst thing about this is that they don't even start showing off until twenty minutes into the album. Up until that point it's one short repeated motif which just makes me want to claw my bits out. At least once the drummer starts to really hustle there's a slight compelling element in sitting there and imagining what it must look like to see somebody playing their toms that fast. There's a 2-second pattern that starts about a half-hour in that I kinda like just because it's unusual to hear organic beats going at that clip and regularity. But it just. Keeps. Going. Until all the novelty is gone. And then after that we get such an utter guitar-wank look-I'm-playing-a-high-note moment that it's all you can do not to laugh. And then... drum solo.

Why is this here? What sort of mind could actually sit down and listen to this all the way through for enjoyment? This album is for the kind of musicians (not music listeners - musicians) who measure their success in the number of notes they can play in five seconds. Technique fetishists. Which has about as much to do with actual music as stamp collecting. And is inspired by the same masculine evolutionary artifact.

Skippy skippy skippy skip skip.

Despite that, the tracks are a little different on this album, in that they are more focused. Instead of jumping back and forth between parts, each idea neatly separated into different tracks, often strung together by common beats or sounds. The lowest point of the album is unfortunately the opener, "Single Again," in which a Britney Spears "Toxic"-esque synth kicks off the song, which is a "ballad" about being married to a horrible man. The lyrics of the song are uninspired at best; they're by far the worst lyrics that this group has put out. In addition, even at 3:51, the song is way too long, offering no new musical or lyrical ideas along the way. It would be tolerable if it was just a minute long, but instead she drones on and on, singing, "oh I wish I was single again / and I wish I was single again / cause when I was single / my pockets did jingle / and I wish I was single again."

What made "Blueberry Boat" a success was its novelty and its plethora of interesting ideas. It was spastic and fun. But to listen to this after "Blueberry Boat" has me yelling, "stop trying so hard to be weird!!" The album does get better as you go on, though. "Tropical-Iceland" is as catchy as they come, and features an attempt to get intelligible lyrics from backwards vocals. It doesn't work, but it's interesting to listen to. The short (and perfectly sized) "Duffer St. George" has a weird take on "Jimmy Cracks Corn", "Smelling Cigarettes" and "Cousin Chris" both revisit the drunk clown-type story telling present on "Blueberry Boat."

Overall, though, this album is exactly what it is - a collection of material that wasn't released on their main album, and with good reason. Skip it unless you feel that "Blueberry Boat" just didn't give you enough Fiery Furnaces and you're not quite ready yet to be pulling vegetables out of the ground.

Fun fact: this is not actually an EP! It's an EP/b-side compilation, bringing together material from diverse eras in the band's history. Which, predictably, means that things get a lot better as they go along.

This is the first half of the album:

You remember my review of Blueberry Boat? Tone down the weirdness, make the songs actual song-length, inject some pop sensibility, but keep the bizarre synth noises and the random blues riffs. Then you got this stuff. Which I find....very...very...boring.

The progressions here are either standard pop progressions or don't happen at all. Take "Evergreen" -- unreverse the drum track and take away the blarting synth keyboard and it's an unspectacular pop ballad that could've been farted out by just about any mid-level band.

I guess the issue is that minus orchestral/compositional gimmicks I don't find the Friedbergers to be particularly compelling as pop musicians. "Tropical-Iceland" has the sort of riff that wouldn't be out of place in a Cranberries-style pop hit, strung out with the Furnaces' trademark wailing intentional dissonance. And it does get me bobbing my head and tapping my foot. It's a damn good song. But listening to it I sort of wish I was listening to the Magnetic Fields, who did the tortured/off-kilter instrumentation on a bubblegum hook thing ages ago and better. I'd be more generous about the Furnaces' attempt at the same sound if I thought their real talent didn't lie elsewhere. And thankfully, "Tropical-Iceland" marks the transition into their 2004 sound.

Which brings me to the second half of the album, which is far more reminiscent of Blueberry Boat, mini-orchestral sensibility and all. The lyrics get a lot more interesting, the progressions become unpredictable, but some pop elements from earlier in the album are retained. Which means you can tap your toe and have your brain stimulated at the same time! What a concept. "Sweet Spots" is particularly good, with a driving beat, a Chicago story (for which I am a sucker), a cool, weirdly asian melody, and a roiling synth pattern in the background that I recognize from the BB title track.

There're great moments aplenty scattered across the latter half of this album -- I mean, there's a freakin' bassoon on the last track, "Sullivan's Social Slub", a song which could've come right off of Blueberry Boat. So I give the latter half the sme solid burn I gave that album, and the first half an easy skip. I guess that adds up to a Burn-, which I will average down to a Skip cause I'm sad that we're reviewing this instead of "Rehearsing my Choir", which is all about Chicago and features Eleanor Friedberger's grandma on vocals. A stone classic, that.

Really, there are two reasons that this band doesn't completely disappear under the radar. The first is thanks to their lead singer. He has a distinct voice and delivery, and is capable of singing passionately in a way that is endearing. Okkervil River doesn't sound like a band; it sounds like a solo project. I'm not certain how much influence the rest of the band has on the writing, but it feels like this is more like the result of one man's effort. It could just be that this style of music is usually more populated by solo artists. After all, Weezer and Wilco are pretty much the work of Rivers Cuomo and Jeff Tweedy respectively, but they're still viewed as a "band", and Tweedy at least doesn't lack any charcter. Perhaps there's some kind of narcissism that comes through in his voice, but regardless it makes the music interesting.

The other part of this album that makes it more noticeable is its production. It was recorded at the renowned Tiny Telephone studio, and as a result this album is very pretty. In addition, there's a lot going on: trumpets, mandolins, cellos, and other instruments that are tastefully added rather than your standard "rock cello bridge." Every song is arranged excellently, every part working towards the overall atmosphere of the song.

The worst part, however, is that the atmosphere is exactly the same on many of the songs. This album's biggest problem is simple: it's excellent, but immediately forgettable. Some songs, however, stand out. "For Real" is a "quiet/loud" single with creepy lyrics about a bloodthirsty bipolar boy that comes out of nowhere, especially after hearing the subdued 1 minute acoustic-only opener. "For Real" is strong enough in my opinion should have been the opener, but it still works like it is. Other high points include "Black", that has Long Winters-inspired instrumentation, the penultimate marathon "So Come Back, I Am Waiting" that stays interesting at 8 minutes only because it furthers the "concept" of the album, and "A Stone" which has the best lyrics on the album.

Overall, this isn't a bad album to listen to, and you might even enjoy yourself doing so. I had thought about suggesting you burn the album, but I think that if you buy the album, you'll find yourself smiling a few times when you put in the album, thinking, "Why don't I listen to this more often?" before it ends up at the bottom of your CD collection, just waiting for the next time you remember you own the album.

I saw Okkervil River live once, opening for John Vanderslice. The most striking thing I remember about them is that the lead singer looked as if he might pass out at any given moment -- like he was so demolished there was whisky comin' out his pores -- and yet he still managed to command the audience. On here, that force of personality isn't really apparent. I think he's allowed himself to be eaten by the spirit of John Roderick. "Black" is basically a Long Winters song, from the indie pop-rock hustle down to the way the lyrics are constructed and the timbre of the singer's voice. Now, I like the Long Winters, so that shouldn't be a problem, but it gets really unnerving. Is this a ripoff? A tribute? A pastiche? Or is there just a factory somewhere that stamps out Barsuk-ready pop songwriters? And is there just a touch of Bruce Springsteen in there, too? I think there is. Freaky.

It's not all like that, of course. Sometimes it sounds like Calexico. There's a touch of the Magnetic Fields here and there. "A King And A Queen" sounds like the Long Winters covering a Magnetic Fields song, plus lush orchestration which reminds me of someone else, who I can't put my finger on. Wait....got it! Eels! He also sounds like the Eels!) As such, I like the song, but I keep having the vague feeling I've heard it somewhere before.

He sounds the most like himself when he's performing stripped-down acoustic numbers, as on "In A Radio Song" and "A Stone" (which sounds oddly like the old oft-covered favorite "Sam Stone"... sense a pattern?) Problem is those aren't too compelling on their own merits. I guess I should mention that this is sort of a concept album about being sad -- themes like the black sheep boy character and his stoney lover recur here and there, and the tracks bleed into each other with clever studio transitions. But that doesn't add much, really. And for indie rock, does melancholy even count as a concept? It's like calling a sandwich special because it has bread.

There's a lot of very pretty here, and the whole album is tremendously comfortable -- I feel like I'm sitting in a big fluffy armchair, floating in a big indie constellation where I can pick out all my favorite bands in the echoes of the pleasant, heartfelt sad sweetness. And sure, maybe you want to hear the Long Winters and the Eels and Death Cab and everyone at the time. It's economical. Particularly if you don't buy it, and burn it instead. Feel free to leave off the last ten minutes of the album, which crawl past as the central conceit finally collapses into droopy wallowing.

The album itself is mostly sacchrine sweet country/bluegrass-influenced singer/songwriter that sounds like it was recorded by one guy with a copy of Garage Band. It is pretty catchy, but it is in a way that is starkly opposed to the Okkervil River album. It's happy and reverby, and except for the slight lisp, there's nothing special about the lead singer. The production quality is clearer but every instrument sounds kind of like a cheesy sample, making this album kind of like the safe, pliable, molded plastic Fisher-Price children's playground in the mental ward down at St. Maryland's. Which are a hell of a lot of fun to play on, believe you me, but sometimes it just feels too sterilized.

This album also suffers from the same problem as the Okkervil River album, namely that the atmosphere remains static throughout pretty much the entire album. It doesn't help that the singer's voice is processed exactly the same on each track. Almost none of the songs stand out - the exception would have to be "I'm Glad I Hitched My Apple Wagon To Your Cart", which is one of the few songs on the album that isn't complaining about being miserable.

Overall, I find myself with an utter lack of anything to say about this album. It was promising when it started, but it really gives the Fiery Furnaces album a run for its money for runner-up in this batch's "hardest to listen to" award. I think even in my best mood, I would be hard-pressed to argue for this album's inclusion anywhere. It's well done but completely dispensible, where as Okkervil was forgettable but still worth record shelf space. I'll never want to hear this album again, I think, so skip it.

So...twee... they don't even mess around, it's just out with the banjo, the xylophone, and the sensitive boy-child, buoyed along by a happy poppy rhythm section. All they're missing is the claps -- which, along with a tambourine, obligingly come in on track two. I swear I'm psychic.

The Boy Least Likely To enjoy singing about fluffy things. (And war, for some reason.) Nobody does twee like the British (with the possible exception of New Zealanders -- I am very much reminded of the Brunettes and their ilk) and these guys are absolutely shameless about being wide-eyed and childish. At their poppiest, as on "Paper Cuts", they're absolutely unbearable, sprinkling everything with corn-syrup and sending me spiraling into the depths of insulin shock. They walk a fine line between charming and nauseating, and I'm a guy who can listen to a Japanese voice actress singing a song about pandas in the scrunched-up voice of an eight-year-old with every outward sign of pleasure, so I know whereof I speak. I could see some people turning green and toppling over at the first rhythm-stick rasp of "I'm Glad I Hitched My Apple Wagon To Your Star", but the pseudo-country stomp of it tickles me. It goes on a little too long, and the chorus is pushing it in the cuteness department, but hey. Why not.

And there are little touches on here that I really love, like "Warm Panda Cola", which is fifty seconds long and spends half of that on a harmonica solo. And somehow remains awesome anyway. And I get a kick out of songs like "Sleeping With A Gun Under My Pillow", which sound like John Lennon suddenly developed a passion for slide guitars. That song doesn't quite work, but it deserves props for sheer conceptual niftyness, which is a pass I end up giving quite a lot of this album. There's a quick test, though, to see whether this album is for you-- listen to "My Tiger My Heart", a song about how the problems with growing up and with not growing up, scored for guitar, upright bass and children playing. If you like it, or find it touching, you'll at least be able to tolerate the rest of the album. If you find it cloying, this stuff is really, really not for you.

It's not an album that I could listen to all the way through without hovering over the skip button, but there are bits of it that would be perfect for making mix CDs or tweaking one's mood on a cloudy day. Overall, therefore, a burn for sheer utility.