Tegan & Sara – Sainthood
Key songs:  “Hell,” “On Directing”
How it stacks up in November 2010:  Good, frivolous guitar-pop, but it’s not one that I dig out a lot, aside from “Hell,” which I put on my year-end mix.

U2 – No Line on the Horizon
Key songs:  “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight,” “Moment of Surrender,” “Unknown Caller”
Requisite Post-Achtung Baby Stinker Single Award (past winners:  “Lemon,” “Discoteque,” “Elevation,” “Vertigo”):  “Get On Your Boots”
How it stacks up in November 2010:  Not so great.  I was pretty happy about No Line… when it came out.  In its more atmospheric moments, like “Unknown Caller,” it had superficial similarities to the best of U2′s late 80s material, particularly The Unforgettable Fire.  “I’ll Go Crazy…” takes the stiff white boy funk that they’ve been doing so long that it’s gone from irritating to sort of charmingly misguided and affixes it to a positivity-spouting chorus, that despite a clunker of a title phrase, is on a par with their best pseudo-spiritual pop songs.  But.  Despite the band’s attempt to inject their new songs with the kind of grandiosity they haven’t attempted in years, the songs themselves are just a little too thin, Bono’s lyrics too hit-and-miss.  It had a shelf life of about a month for me.

John Vanderslice – Romanian Names
Key songs:  “Fetal Horses,” “Too Much Time,” “D.I.A.L.O.”
How it stacks up in November 2010:  Not bad, but for Vanderslice, “not bad”‘s not all that good.  Romanian Names is easily his slightest effort since Mass Suicide Occult Figurines (way back in 2000), but this seems to be by design.  As far as I can tell, it’s not a concept album, and Vanderslice seems to have finally gotten 9/11 and Iraq out of his system.  Unfortunately, Vanderslice is at his best when he has a solid through-line (or a set of serious topics, as he did on Pixel Revolt, one of the decade’s largely unheralded best) and, along with a less meticulous approach to production and arrangement, Romanian Names just doesn’t carry the weight his best work does.  Still a pleasant listen, though, and it’s not that out of step with his other albums.

Visqueen – Message to Garcia
Key songs:  “Hand Me Down,” “Jimmy Vs. James”
How it stacks up in November 2010:  Eh.  Visqueen has their sound, which is sort of a supercharged poppy punk thing, but the major appeal has always been Rachel Flotard’s vocals.  Message to Garcia is mostly more of the same (and not as spirited as their previous releases), although the band sounds the best when they step out of their comfort zones, like Flotard showing off some newfound Neko Case-style phrasing on “Hand Me Down” (Flotard has toured as a backup singer for Case), and the band rocking a shuffle on “Jimmy Vs. James.”

Volcano Choir – Unmap
Key songs:  “Island, IS,” “Still” (a dense, double-stuffed version of Bon Iver’s “Woods” from the Blood Bank EP)
How it holds up in November 2010:  Really, really well.  Anyone who was knocked out by the vibe on Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, would have been wise to pick this up last year, as it takes that wintry color scheme and paints it out on a bigger and weirder palette (as for those knocked out more by the folky songwriting on For Emma, I guess mileage may vary).  This isn’t to sell short the contributions of Collections of Colonies of Bees, full collaborators with Justin Vernon on this.  These songs take serious chops to play; it’s to their credit that you barely notice this if you’re not paying attention.

M. Ward – Hold Time
Key songs:  I don’t know – that one tune from the beer ad?
How does it hold up in November 2010:  It sounds as much like an M. Ward album now as it did last year.  Which means I barely ever listen to it.

Wilco – Wilco (The Album)
Key songs:  Maybe “Bull Black Nova”?
How does it hold up in November 2010:  I don’t know.  I don’t want to listen to it again because it disappointed me so much last year.

The XX – XX
Key songs:  They all sound pretty much the same.
How does it hold up in November 2010:  It’s okay for background music, but nothing I need on the regular.

So that’s it for last year’s music marathon (and possibly this blog, at least for a while).  To be continued over here.

Sonic Youth – The Eternal
If there’s an ongoing motif of post-2000 Sonic Youth album reviews, it’s the preoccupation with their ever-impending return to form.  By “return to form,” reviewers and fans tend to be pretty unanimous in their meaning – we want another album like Daydream Nation.  Sure, we music fan types tend to flit around the subject for fear of coming off as nostalgists or being against a band’s artistic growth.  But let’s be frank here… Sonic Youth has had at least 15 years of moving away from that style in an attempt at growth, and they’ve kind of blown it.  So starting with Murray Street, SY fans were all so taken with the idea of the band backing off on the soundscapes and making with the “Teenage Riot”s that they took any bit of propulsion as a good sign.  This kept up through Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped, but in each instance, the performances were too relaxed, the guitars too clean, the vocals melodies harnessed too tightly to the riffs. 

On The Eternal, they’re finally loosening up a bit and letting some of those dynamics back into their music.  Compared to Sister or Daydream Nation, it’s still pretty tightly wound stuff, but there are moments that conjure 1992 SY on their most muscular rock album, Dirty.  “Anti-Orgasm” is a relation to those earlier Kim Gordon-led attack-and-release moments “Drunken Butterfly” and “Swimsuit Issue,” and “Sacred Trickster,” “Thunderclap (for Bobby Pyn),” and “What We Know” fit pretty comfortably next to “Kool Thing” and “Mary-Christ” from Goo.

But all of this comes at a cost.  Sonic Youth’s respectable, but inscrutable, forays into experimentation over the last decade and a half may not have been the best listening, but the drawback to falling back on their former sound is that they now sound a little too comfortable.  Maybe I expect too much from them, but after a run like Sister, Daydream Nation, Goo, and Dirty, it’s hard not to.

Regina Spektor – Far
Regina Spektor walks the line between charmingly forthright in her idiosyncracies and overly precious.  On her breakthrough album, Begin to Hope, this manifested in a song-to-song schizophrenia, with the goofs that missed the mark due to a poorly-conceived lyric or ill-considered musical choice (“Hotel Song” and “That Time”) fighting for space with no-less-distinctive successes like “Samson” and “Better.”

Spektor’s still walking that line on Far, but she’s developed Flying Wallenda-level skills on this particular high wire act.  Even the strangest choices (the peak being the dolphin – or are they really seal? – barks on “Folding Chair”) serve the greater whole, and all of those quirks that may have, on first listen, seemed distancing are now turning out to be central to her expression.  After all, what’s more appropriate for a melancholy tune about forgetfulness than a nonsensical chorus that unsuccessfully tries to recapture the words to a song (“Eet”)?  And sometimes you can say all you need to know about someone is what they do with a lost wallet (“The Wallet”).  Spektor’s always had an unusual sense of what makes for a good song subject, but she seems to have turned a corner when it comes to making all of those subjects equally riveting.

Bruce Springsteen – Working on a Dream
Bruce Springsteen has an unlimited number of Get Out of Jail Free cards.  Don’t try to argue with me on this, because I’ve got Born to Run; Nebraska; the Wild, the Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle; Greetings…; and Darkness on the Edge of Town backing me up, and you’ve basically got a couple of mid-life crisis albums and a bummer of an Iraq War album (that was soon invalidated by a more-subversive-than-it’s-given-credit-for collection of trad folk songs).  But, as with most of Springsteen’s output this decade (again – Devils and Dust aside), Bruce doesn’t need to lay that card down here… much.

Though Working on a Dream is uneven and its best tracks probably just above average (a slight surprise after the magnificent Magic), it only fumbles dramatically on its opener, “Outlaw Pete,” a long, unwieldy bore with none of the sparkle of his 70s forays into epic songwriting.  Most of the rest is Bruce on autopilot, and that’s not so bad – “Kingdom of Days,” “Surprise, Surprise,” “What Love Can Do,” and “My Lucky Day” are appealing rockers, “Tomorrow Never Knows” is cute, and even the much-maligned “Queen of the Supermarket” manages to convey a silly, over-romanticized interest in a checkout clerk without getting into condescending or stalker-y territory (IMO, sidestepping the sentiment that plagues My Morning Jacket’s “Librarian”).  Not counting “The Wrestler” (appended here as a bonus track) Springsteen really only brings his A game on “The Last Carnival,” a sequel to “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” and a fitting tribute to late bandmate Danny Frederici.

While it’s disappointing that Working on a Dream doesn’t quite live up to the standard set on Magic, it’ll do.

St. Vincent – Actor
Judging by her bizarrely straightforward head shot album covers and unassuming stage demeanor, Annie Clark aka St. Vincent might come off as something less than one of the best, most original, most encouragingly and delightfully fucked up songwriters out there.  Don’t be fooled, for she is absolutely all of these things, and if it wasn’t clear on her debut, Marry Me, it definitely is on Actor.

Actor is like Marry Me on steroids, an expansion on the pretty/ugly extremes of that album.  Clark apparently listened to a lot of Disney movie music as inspiration for the foundations of these songs, and it shows.  There’s usually a strong melody underlying the songs, wispy string arrangements come in and out, and Clark’s voice has a soft innocence to it when she sings in her upper register.  But the key is in how Clark plays with these foundations – generally speaking, they’re lullabies gone haywire.  The rhythms go jagged, the arrangements get stuffed, the lyrics turn skewed, and the guitars turn gnarly.  Of these, the last might be the most impressive – Clark tends to downplay her technical ability and knack for generating skronky sounds from her pedals by thoroughly integrating them with other instruments into a harder-to-identify wall-of-sound, but they noisily inform most of the album’s best songs (“Marrow,” “The Strangers,” “Actor Out of Work”).

If Actor has any drawback, it’s that it’s front-loaded with the loudest and most dynamic songs.  It fades out in a four-song (five, if you count the bonus track, “Bicycle”) slow and quiet haze that just doesn’t match up in intensity if it does in quality (oddly, the same was true when I saw her live last year).  One of the best of 2009, nonetheless, so you get three videos (two of “Marrow,” because the proper video is so delightfully weird, but the live version is more informative).

The Swell Season – Strict Joy
Hey, do you love the Once soundtrack?  I friggin’ love the Once soundtrack.  Well, this is a follow-up of sorts, although it seems that the Hansard/Irglova partnership has now expanded somewhat more officially to include Hansard’s friends from his other, longstanding band, The Frames.  So it kind of sounds like a down-tempo version of the Frames with a little more piano and Irglova’s vocals added to the mix, plus a sprinkling of Van Morrison soul.  It’s perfectly nice background music, but it probably won’t stick with you.

Paramore – Brand New Eyes
So help me, I’m a sucker for this band.  As I wrote about their 2007 album, Riot!, “They’re basically a 14-year-old girl’s idea of the most rocking band ever, but I have to admit listening to Riot! (or at least parts of it) far more than a 33-year-old man should be comfortable with.” Update those references by a couple years, and you’ve got my blurb for Brand New Eyes.  It’s a slightly more introspective release than its predecessor, but one that’s still bursting with enough hooks, youthful vigor, and tight musicianship to make you ignore (or place in an appropriately adolescent context) lyrical wtf?s like “It’s just my own opinion, but it’s one that I believe in.”

Like Riot!, Brand New Eyes is immaculately produced and suggests that someone in the band has an ear for arrangement – instruments drop out and come in exactly where they need to, and the backup vocals pour in in all the right places.  Hayley Williams tweaks her delivery just enough so that no two verses or choruses to a song sound exactly the same.  Her voice is stronger this time out, too – the notes she hits on the chorus to “Turn It Off” make the song.

If it suffers by comparison to Riot! in any regard, it may be that their slight toward turn subtlety (and this is very, very relatively speaking) keeps them away from the overtness required for revved-up pop songs like “Misery Business” and “That’s What You Get”.  But it also makes for a more consistent album with room to spare for a couple of uncharacteristic acoustic ballads and a slow, dynamic closer that highlights the band’s jones for 90s melodic guitar bands like Far and the Deftones.

Pearl Jam – Backspacer
The party line on Pearl Jam’s self-titled 2006 album was that it was a return to form – an embrace of their early, straightforward sound, while incorporating the major experimental strides they’d made since.  This may have been slightly overstated at the time, but it stands as a worthy addition to their catalog, notable for how it gives equal time to all facets of the band’s personality.

So if Pearl Jam was the band’s return to its roots, what exactly is Backspacer?  Judging from the number of simple (almost simplistic), up-tempo rock songs, it comes across as another return to roots, but, oddly, these particular roots have never quite been Pearl Jam’s.  While Pearl Jam has occasionally dabbled in basic garage rock (sometimes to career-best-level effect, most notably on Vitalogy), these songs have always been detours – an exuberant unleashing of skillful musicians on material that’s way too easy for them.  They could simplify the material, but not the performances – they were always over-achievers, which led to an endearing messiness as they sought to leave their unique marks on the guitar solos and drum fills.

On Backspacer, they’ve written some of the most uniformly straightforward songs of their career, but the playing is only competent and professional, not enthusiastic.  In some cases (like first single “The Fixer” and “Just Breathe,” which would be just as at home on Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild soundtrack), the songs get by on writing alone, but the rote performances make it feel like the band’s most ephemeral album.

Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Popular opinion holds that Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is one of the pop albums of the year, and I like the band too much to argue with that position entirely… but for argument’s sake, consider the tracks that aren’t “Lizstomania” and “1901″ (two indisputably great songs of 2009) for a moment.  It’s very good stuff, but you wish all of it hit like those two songs, right?  “But what’s the use of developing hypothetical Phoenix albums?” you ask  “Surely, we only have the Phoenix albums we’re dealt.”  Too true.  This is why you should seek out Phoenix’s previous album, It’s Never Been Like That, which is also a slightly imperfect beast, but is front-loaded with five songs that nearly match “Lizstomania” and “1901″ in pop appeal (with at least “Long Distance Call” surpassing).

Far be it from me to suggest you not buy Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, though; just plan on picking It’s Never Been Like That up, as well.

R.E.M. – Live at the Olympia
Last year was the first time I can remember caring about new R.E.M. music since the mid-90s.  Accelerate stands as not only the best album they’ve released since Bill Berry left the band, but a reclamation of their rock legacy, complete with a lot of the touches associated with their most assertive work in the late 80s – Mike Mills’ backup vocals; strong, distinctive choruses; and hooks, hooks, hooks.  Personally, I’m just as keen on the early, mumbly albums, and especially the 90s chamber pop, but I’ll happily take R.E.M. in Life’s Rich Pageant/Document mode, and that’s what Accelerate served up for the people (automatically, even).

Live at the Olympia is a 39-song behemoth of a live album, recorded at a set of Dublin shows that served as rehearsals for Accelerate.  That album’s back-to-basics sound was no accident, it appears.  If the selection on Live at the Olympia is truly representative of those shows, the band dug deep into its archives (almost all of the Chronic Town EP!), barely bothered with the hits, and made a good case that at least some of the new material could stand with the fan favorites of old.  The slow and mid-tempo tracks fare the worst of the new material, just as they do on the album, but there’s simply so much here and so much good stuff (including a couple of Accelerate-era discards that should have made the final cut) that it’s hard to notice.  If Accelerate couldn’t sell you on R.E.M.’s renewed (and hopefully not temporary) relevance, Live at the Olympia should.

7 Worlds Collide – The Sun Came Out
Check out the lineup:  Neil, Tim, Sharon, Elroy, and Liam Finn; Johnny Marr; 2/5ths of Radiohead, Sebastian Steinberg of Soul Coughing; most of Wilco; and a bunch of other singer-songwriter types like Lisa Germano, KT Tunstall, and Bic Runga.

Check out the pedigree – in 2001, Neil Finn got together with many of the same people and put out a charming and surprisingly coherent live album called 7 Worlds Collide composed of previously released Crowded House and solo songs, and contributions (new and old) by the other participants.

Check out my disappointment at how much the double album The Sun Came Out (also available as a single disc) doesn’t live up to the promise of all of that.  Much like the new Wilco album (with which it shares a song that’s simply not good enough to require two versions, much less two versions in the same year), it’s so innocuous that it barely registers at all.  There’s something impressively democratic about how the songwriting and lead vocal credits are distributed among the members, with the less popular or proven songwriters (Phil Selway, Don McGlashan, Steinberg, the Finns not named Neil, Tim, and Liam) sharing the spotlight with the bigger names.  But, almost as if they’re afraid of standing out too much, the big names don’t seem to be bringing their A game.

Shudder to Think – Live from Home
To spare me from having to write the back story, read this .  Reader, I did go to that show, stood in the front row, and loved hearing so many songs that I never thought I’d hear live.  But if Shudder to Think, reunion-style, fully met my expectations, it didn’t surpass them, and the same goes for this album, a document of their very brief 2008 tour (which includes a few recordings from the Chicago show, I’m sure, but the liner notes are annoyingly vague in this respect).

Not too surprisingly, the focus of the shows was largely 1994′s Pony Express Record and 1992′s Get Your Goat, but it seemed strange at the time that the band only paid some lip service to its post-Pony Express output (50,000 B.C. and some outstanding soundtrack work).  I’ve since read that Craig Wedren and Nathan Larson consider the soundtrack stuff to be a transitional moment (both went on to do a lot more film work), but it’s still bizarre that the band’s most celebrated lineup, which includes Larson on guitar, managed to reunite for this show and still chose to lean so heavily on pre-Larson songs (including Get Your Goat, but also the band’s earlier work on Ten Spot and Funeral at the Movies).  On Live from Home, 50,000 B.C. is only represented by “Call of the Playground” and “Red House” (although the latter was a Funeral at the Movies remake already), and the soundtrack work is completely absent (unless you count “Day Ditty,” which showed up on the First Love, Last Rites soundtrack, but was also on Funeral at the Movies).  At the show, at least we got Wedren’s pitch-perfect Bowie knockoff, “The Ballad of Maxwell Demon” from the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack.

As for the performances, they’re solid, but a little restrained.  Probably a fans-only purchase – newbies should stick to the studio albums.

Or maybe it’s just that his sound, newly tightened though it may be, has gotten a little too mellow.  The best thing about Isbell with DBT is that the guy may be a pop writer at heart, but his collaborators brought out his dark side, lyrically, and his rocker side, instrumentally.  Judging from the performances I’ve seen with the 400 Unit, his current band is fully capable of doing this, as well, but Isbell seems to be going for a lighter, tidier sound on his albums.  He’s gone a little more classic southern soul this time, and he manages to wear this style remarkably well for a young white guy, but there’s still something a little predictable and disappointing about Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit.  There was something about songs like “Goddamn Lonely Love” and even “Decoration Day,” a song that’s decidedly not autobiographical, that made them seem heartfelt.  The love songs and character studies on this album are still generally well-designed and I’m actually pretty fond of most of them (especially “Cigarettes and Wine,” the best of the three slowburning R&B waltzes here), but they don’t sound like they were begging to be written or played like his old stuff does.

For the record, I’m completely torn on “Good.”  I go back and forth on whether it’s evidence that he has another “The Day John Henry Died” (his best straight-up rock song to date) in him or merely a calculated and hamhanded attempt to make the album more “rock.”  (Admission – even with the worst lyrics Isbell’s ever written and a ham-handed post-bridge key change, I still turn it up in the car.)

Marked Men – Ghosts
People keep telling me how good this is, but it just sounds like a whole bunch of straightforward, melodic, well-played punk rock to me.  Nothing wrong with it; I’m just not sure why an album like Ghosts stands out in what I assume is still a fairly crowded genre.

The Mars Volta – Octahedron
I’ve given up on Mars Volta a couple times.  The first time was right after De-Loused in the Comatorium, which delivered on the technical end, but left me kind of cold on the emotional end – too many go-nowhere solos, impenetrable lyrics, and compositions that piled on the parts but never really cohered.  Then I gave up on them again after Frances the Mute, which was said to deliver on songs that were actually… songs, but largely didn’t.  But a friend told me that Octahedron was easily their tightest yet in terms of songwriting, and I was pleased to discover that he was absolutely right.  In fact, I can’t believe the musical press isn’t all over this album, in fact:  “The Mars Volta Finally Releases an Album Non-Diehards Would Want to Listen To!”

In fact, the first pair of songs (“Since We’ve Been Wrong” and “Teflon” – yes, this album features song titles and even prominent lyrics that don’t require a Mars Volta-English dictionary) is so good that I was just waiting for the band to blow it.  But they don’t.  If not all of the material quite reaches the heights of that auspiciously melodic, creepy, and compellingly off-time beginning, it generally comes close, and “Cotopaxi” might even raise the stakes.  Coming across like Radiohead’s “Myxomatosis” as played by Led Zeppelin, it’s catnip to time-change freaks like me who can’t deal with proggy and mathy unless there are hooks and structure to go with it.

So, yeah, I’m giving a Mars Volta a good review with barely any qualifications (the usual caveats are in place, of course – Cedric Bixler Zavala will always be an acquired vocal taste of Geddy Lee proportions and if you’re into lyrics, this probably isn’t for you).  I didn’t even give the Decemberists that much of a pass this year.

Mastodon – Crack the Skye
Sounds like Mastodon but with more singing, slower tempos, etc.  Which means I like it well enough, but probably won’t listen to it all that much.  That’s usually how it goes with me and Mastodon.

Monsters of Folk – s/t
As far as supergroups go, Monsters of Folk is about as unassuming as they get.  Then again, of the four collaborators, only Jim James (My Morning Jacket) is particularly well-known as a stomper of guitar pedals and partaker of classic rock moves.  The others – Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and Mike Mogis (Oberst’s chief collaborator in Bright Eyes and clearly the Jeff Lynne of the bunch) – tend to stay on the lyrical, acoustic pop side of things, even if Oberst has occasionally turned up the volume in Desaparecidos and Ward does engage in some brill-building with She & Him.  But the overlap of these four artists is really in low-volume, thoughtful folk rock, and they generally stick to that mode to good effect on Monsters of Folk.

There probably aren’t any songs that quite stack up to the best work of either Oberst or James (I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Z, respectively), but some come close.  The James-sung “Losin’ Yo Head” could have fit on either of the last My Morning Jacket albums (potentially improving the frustrating Evil Urges), and the pretty “Magic Marker” probably wouldn’t have made sense anywhere but here.  Oberst’s best tracks are “Say Please” and “Ahead of the Curve,” both of which could be Bright Eyes songs, but since Oberst and Mogis are the only two constants in Bright Eyes, that shouldn’t surprise anyone (on the downside, “Man Named Truth” carries some of Oberst’s worst lyrical tendencies along, as well).  I’m more lukewarm on Ward, generally, but he rises the occasion here.  I’ll take “Whole Lotta Losin’” over anything on his solo album from this year (whoops – spoiler alert).

Maybe not essential for anyone who isn’t already invested in one or more of these guys, but it’s a nice, pleasant listen, and the artists’ distinctive styles manage to shine through while being incorporated into a satisfying whole.

The Mountain Goats – The Life of the World to Come
I like John Darnielle’s music.  I like when artists use unusual frameworks to present their songs.  I even like the idea, specifically, that each of the songs on The Life of the World to Come is meant to represent, in very loose terms, a particular verse of the Bible.  But I’ve listened to The Life of the World to Come probably 10 times now, and barely any of it sticks with me at all.  The sound isn’t all that removed from his last album, Heretic Pride, which I reviewed very positively last year, so I can’t figure out what the problem is.  I do like “Genesis 3:23,” though.  Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a video up for that one.

A.C. Newman – Get Guilty
Much like my problem with the new Mountain Goats album, I’m not sure what it is about A.C. Newman’s solo stuff that just doesn’t hit me like his work with the New Pornographers.  I still like it, mind you, but the best New Pornographers stuff knocks me on my ass, and the best A.C. Newman solo stuff sounds kind of like the New Pornographers on auto-pilot.  I’m tempted to attribute it to a stripped-down sound, but it’s hard to square that with all of the extra percussion and other production touches on Get Guilty.  It’s just that, even with all of this extra stuff (and even with notables like Mates of State and Nicole Atkins pitching in vocally where Neko Case and Kathryn Calder would in the NPs), the songs still feel slighter, the arrangements and performances too restrained.  It probably says something (maybe more about me than him) that the most ornate productions like “There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve” and “Prophets” stand out as both the best and the most like Newman’s current main project (although, interestingly, “All of My Days and All of My Days Off” could have been on an album by Newman’s previous band, Zumpano).

Upon buying Veckatimest, I was disappointed to find that “Cheerleader” was considerably more subdued on the album… but soon it didn’t matter, because “Cheerleader” turned out to be a strong enough song to work in both contexts.  And, even better, it was no anomaly.  If I was disappointed in the lack of rhythm in the studio version of “Cheerleader,” the punchy “Two Weeks” more than made up for it.  Plus, these stabs at a more direct style put the floaty stuff that’s more reminiscent of their old material into an understandable context for a pop guy like me.  The contrast makes for a great, well-rounded album.

P.J. Harvey & John Parish – A Woman A Man Walked By
Perhaps more than any major female vocalist today, P.J. Harvey isn’t afraid to get ugly for the sake of a song.  Right from the start, she would whisper, shriek, and shout to get the point across, but it’s only in recent years that she’s really taken to pushing her vocal and instrumental limits in deliberately non-musical directions to make musical points.  In other words, despite having an elementary understanding of the piano and being known for having a relatively low range, if she thinks it’ll best serve the songs, she’ll put out a piano-driven album (White Chalk) that forces her to sing in a quavering near-falsetto.  And it’ll be good!

It’s probably unfair to John Parish to focus too much on Harvey, since she didn’t write the music or play any of the instruments on A Woman A Man Walked By, but her presence is enormous here – for better or worse.  The album’s success is on her shoulders, and, unfortunately, she doesn’t quite pull it off, perhaps specifically because she had too much room for experimentation without having to concern herself with the music.  The tired droning on “April,” the squeals and hollers on “A Woman A Man Walked By/The Crow Knows Where All the Children Go,” and the deliberately tuneless moaning on “Pig Will Not” seem to be excess for the sake of excess.  Perhaps for once, Harvey fares best when she plays it relatively safe like on album opener, “Black Hearted Love,” a polished gem in the Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea mold.

Patterson Hood – Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)
If you’re a Drive-By Truckers fan, you’ve been hearing about Murdering Oscar for years and were probably even familiar with a song or two from it years before its release (it seems like “Grandaddy”‘s been out there for ages).  So despite the wait, it never had much of an air of mystery to it and perhaps that’s part of why it feels so predictable.  Despite the solo album tag, Hood doesn’t deviate from his usual DBT style much here (aside from going a little heavier on the Crazy Horse-isms and the lyrics on fatherhood) and even employs some of his bandmates for backing.

So you get a few simple, heartfelt ballads, like “Pride of the Yankees” and “Grandaddy,” a couple of mid-tempo rockers that sound kind of similar (“Pollyana” and “I Understand Now”), and some forgettable throwaways like “She’s a Little Randy” and “Foolish Young Bastard.”  Best of all is probably “Heavy and Hanging,” a suitably slow and guitar-heavy relic that Hood apparently wrote shortly after Kurt Cobain’s suicide.  Hood once mentioned something about “(Something’s Got to) Give Pretty Soon” on DBT’s Decoration Day originally being part of a planned power-pop-oriented set of songs he wrote after his divorce.  I’d love to hear him focus on a genre like that; both Oscar and Hood’s first solo album, Killers and Stars, sound scattershot – too many influences spread over too much time in development.

(Apparently, “Heavy and Hanging” was featured on Criminal Minds, and this is the only decent-sounding clip of it on Youtube.  So please enjoy the song and the lovely picture of what I assume is a fine cast (never seen it).  Hey, it’s Joe Mantegna!)

Ida Maria – Fortress ’round My Heart
When Raina bought this album, I was kind of skeptical.  I’d heard “I Like You So Much Better When You’re Naked” a couple times, and it was cute, but in a souvenir shop kind of way.  It was a charming little knicknack that seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s still sitting in the bag a few months later and you eventually forget to put it wherever it is you’d originally planned on displaying it, and you’re definitely glad you didn’t get nine more similar items at the time, since they’d still be sitting in that bag, too.

But, then again, some of the best pop songs ever were disposable by design, and it’s often up to us to give them a chance to work their cheap power over us.  After a few listens, I don’t think Fortress is destined to be one of those pop albums for the ages (in my or others’ estimation), but it’s quite good and a lot better than that seashell art you bought at the shore some years ago.  “…Naked” and “Oh My God” are the high energy attention-grabbers, but I’m pretty taken with “Stella” (about a hooker, a drug dealer, and God… I think), too, and Ida Maria’s appealingly scratchy voice works surprisingly well on the ballads, as well.

Iron & Wine – Around the Well
A two-disc set of b-sides and outtakes by an artist who generally demands close listening… where to begin?   Since coming around in a big way on Iron & Wine’s big game-changer, The Shepherd’s Dog (and this took a while), I’ve gotten less interested in Sam Beam’s earlier, stripped-down stuff.  Since this era takes up a large part of this set, I haven’t given any of the songs on Around the Well the attention they likely deserve, including the later stuff.  I particularly like the epic “The Trapeze Swinger,” though.  And the covers (all in the early, Sam Beam-only mode) are nice:  Flaming Lips’ “Waiting for Superman,” New Order’s “Love Vigilantes,” and Beam’s infamous contribution to film and commercial, the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights.”

The set focuses largely on outtakes from Decoration Day and The Dirty South, a period of high quality and productivity that saw the band expand from a two-man singing/songwriting/guitar-playing operation with occasional contributions from supporting players to the three-headed Patterson Hood/Mike Cooley/Jason Isbell beast that yielded a disproportionate number of the decade’s best songs.

As with most DBT releases, the prolific Hood gets the most songs here.  “George Jones Talkin’ Cell Phone Blues” is the big winner (especially with a slide lead that wasn’t on the original web-only release of the song), and “Mrs. Claus’ Kimono” is a cute, ribald Christmas tune that probably doesn’t need to be heard more than a couple of times seasonally, but it’s a welcome DBT entry in the holiday genre.  The others are decent, second-rate Hood, including a new, upbeat run at “Goode’s Field Road” from the band’s last album, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark.

Cooley, who seems to be undergoing a bit of a creative renaissance lately with his songs on BTCD, only has two songs here, one a spirited, but unnecessary, remake of his own early DBT nugget “Uncle Frank” and the other a forgettable acoustic tune.

Isbell, no longer a member of the band, is represented by two original tracks, “When the Well Runs Dry” (previously issued on a Dirty South b-side), and a studio version of “TVA,” a heartfelt ode to the New Deal that (I think) dates back to Isbell first joining the band.  “Well” is easily the weakest of the five songs Isbell wrote for The Dirty South, but when the other four are “Danko/Manuel,” “The Day John Henry Died,” “Goddamn Lonely Love,” and “Never Gonna Change,” that’s not a huge slam.  “TVA” stands with some of his best work, though, and one suspects that the only reason it didn’t make the cut for Decoration Day is that the other two Isbell songs were also mid-tempo 3/4 ballads.

Covers fill out the rest of the collection and provide both the highlights and lowlights.  Their spirited take on Tom Petty’s “Rebels” is nothing short of incredible.  It’s a perfect fit for the band, and delivers on every level.  Similarly, a crunchy cover of Warren Zevon’s Skynyrd tribute “Play It All Night Long” sounds so much like an outtake from the band’s own Southern Rock Opera that fans could probably be forgiven for thinking it was an original.  Their version of Tom T. Hall’s “Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)” is nothing special, though, and the less said about their overly faithful, every-vocalist-takes-a-verse cover of “Like a Rolling Stone” (previously released in a few places over the years), the better.

One of the nice things about collections like this, though, is that you don’t need to worry about cohesiveness, so track-by-track downloading makes a bit of sense.  So here’s what you need:  “George Jones…,” “Rebels,” “Play It All Night Long,” “TVA,” and maybe “Mrs. Claus’ Kimono.”  The rest are negotiable, except for “Like a Rolling Stone,” which might actually take your respect for the band down a notch.

The Flaming Lips – Embryonic

… some of my favorite records – thinking Beatles ‘White Album,’ Zeppelin’s ‘Physical Graffiti’ and even some of the longer things that the Clash have done – part of the reason I like them is that they’re not focused. They’re kind of like a free-for-all and go everywhere.  – Wayne Coyne on double albums

Okay, here’s the problem with Wayne’s thinking.  Those albums (unless he’s talking about the Clash’s Sandinista) may be sprawling, they may be unfocused, but the individual songs are, generally speaking, focused, well-constructed, and varied.  Embryonic has the sprawl and the lack of focus, but it’s basically a long experiment in sound and tone, not content.  There’s nothing happening on Embryonic that the band couldn’t accomplish in about a third of the running time, and, if they’d been a little more scrupulous, they’d have a career highlight with this album.

It’s easy to be taken in, given the album’s powerful beginning.  “Convinced of the Hex” establishes the band’s jagged, percussive new sound, a merciful change from the sugary-sweet pop that made At War with the Mystics one of the most disappointing albums of the 00′s.  But by the time “See the Leaves” (track 5) rolls around, the band’s already given us every permutation of this new identity.  Rhythm’n'skronk tracks like “Hex,” “Leaves,” and “The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine” trade off with repetitive and spare ambient pieces like “Evil,” and unstructured jams like “Your Bats” and “Aquarius Sabotage.”  Repeat, repeat, repeat, don’t bother with a memorable lyric or melody.  Things tighten up at the end with “Silver Trembling Hands” and “Watching the Planets,” but this is decidedly not a “songs” album, which is sort of the problem.  The great double albums may give the artists room to move, but it’s not like The White Album is full of five other songs that sound like “Back in the U.S.S.R.”; “Kashmir” isn’t surrounded by a bunch of repeated arpeggios shaped vaguely into songs; and London Calling doesn’t arty and boring for a long stretch in the middle.  And even as noisy conceptual albums go, there are ways to do it without being so damned predictable (see Kid A, the Liars’ Drum’s Not Dead, even Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising).

In short, I love that the Lips decided to go in an entirely new direction, but wish they’d taken the time to write the songs to go with it (seriously – this is the band that wrote The Soft Bulletin, a spectacular combination of atmosphere and songs).

Florence & the Machine – Lungs
I’m coming around on this one, mostly due to Raina’s pressuring.  You see, I have a built-in aversion to post-80s British rock that draws too heavily on American blues and gospel.  There’s this tendency to overdo things – pitch-perfect choirs augmented by big, gothic synths, and drum machines.  I’m pretty sure this has something to do with late 80s/early 90s MTV “alternative” outlet, 120 Minutes.  Y’see, I’d stay up late watching this thing waiting for the Pixies and Sonic Youth, and I’d have to sit through an awful lot of ill-conceived UK experiments that brought in gospel-sounding choirs to achieve “big”-ness (everyone from the Happy Mondays to the Sisters of Mercy tried this move).

So my initial response to F&tM may be somewhat irrational, but the sound of Lungs does seem more rooted in this sort of UK indie-rock/American roots experimentation than in the more current bluesy, soulful British pop like Amy Winehouse.  Anyway, I’m working to overcome it, because Florence does have some serious vocal chops (bringing to mind Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano, of all people), and the compositions are pretty interesting, if not quite as subtle and well-conceived as Bat for Lashes’ songs, which are cut from a similar epic cloth (but minus the soul stuff).  It’s worth a listen, but it’s just not a slam dunk for me.

Girls – Album
I don’t get the hype, but it’s a pretty listenable collection of lo-fi pop songs, somewhat compromised by some unfortunate vocal tics.  The more I listen, the more I like it, including the single “Lust for Life,” which I hated at first.

But all of the aforementioned goodness (except the New Pornographers track) are on Disc One, which I recommend with no reservations.  Disc Two, though…  it’s a bit heavier on those outtakes.  “Lenin” is one of the slightest Arcade Fire songs to date, Spoon phones it in on “Well Alright,” and Conor Oberst and Gillian Welch fall back on one of Oberst’s tried’n'true Bright Eyes songs.  In fact, the only essential tracks on the second disc are the New Pornographers tune, My Morning Jacket’s horn-filled “El Caporal,” and Andrew Bird’s “The Giant of Illinois”; plus, it’s tonally all-over-the-place with Sharon Jones sounding like nothing else, Riceboy Sleeps putting things to a stop with a sleepy instrumental, and Buck 65 doing an unnecessary remix of Sufjan Stevens’ song from the first disc.  Caveat – you’re hearing this from a guy who doesn’t care all that much for Blonde Redhead, Beirut, or Cat Power; thinks Kevin Drew hasn’t put anything out since the self-titled Broken Social Scene album; and thinks Dave Sitek would be wise to let the other guys in TV on the Radio do the vocals.

But you’ve got to hear that first disc.

The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love
For all of the people Colin Meloy turns off by virtue of his voice, verbosity, and tendency toward the meek and folky, The Hazards of Love might have functioned as a fine response.  After all, he has esteemed company in the singing department this time around, his lyrics are pared down somewhat to make way for an album-length narrative, and if the music were just folky before (and it wasn’t – at least not if you were paying any sort of attention), here it’s an electric guitar-heavy prog-folk mix, like a showier, riff-heavy early 70s Fairport Convention.  But if the naysayers continued to say nay, Hazards won over some folks previously unaware of the band who seemed to admire it for its geeky scope and didn’t exactly turn off existing fans.

Still, as one of those existing fans, I can’t help feel a little let down by Hazards.  It’s more impressive than it is listenable, especially on a song-by-song basis.  This is meant to be a single piece and, perhaps fittingly, most of the tracks just don’t work that well out of context.  But as a single piece, it has some problems, as well.  The story has peaks and valleys, but it doesn’t have an entirely satisfying structure – the characters pop in and out, but seldom have much to do other than state their positions.  And the overall flow doesn’t quite work, possibly due to a “casting” coup, of all things.  Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond) voices the Forest Queen in Meloy’s folk tale and basically steals the show in the few appearances she makes (Lavendar Diamond’s Becky Stark also guests as heroine Margaret, but Worden’s the real get here).  You want to hear more of her, but the story doesn’t support it.  Instead, we’re left with some good, but not remarkable and certainly a little repetitive, Decemberists songs to fill things out.

Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca
In most years, Bitte Orca might be a contender for my favorite album.  This year, there’s no contest.

There’s nothing in their previous work to suggest that Dirty Projectors would be taking part with Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear in the unified indie move toward accessibility.  Sure, some of us found a lot to like in their last album, Rise Above (a total bugfuck reimagining of Black Flag’s Damaged), but who would have thought to apply those jarring tempo changes, tweaked guitars, and perfectly synchronized wobbly vocals to pop music?

Dave Longstreth’s first genius move, it seems, was finally broadening his definition of Dirty Projectors from a solo project with a backing band to an outright band project.  Those disembodied background vocals from Rise Above are now crucial, with Angel Deradoorian (who joined after Rise Above, but that’s splitting hairs) and Amber Coffman almost stealing the show on their respective star turns, the plaintive “Two Doves” and “Stillness is the Move,” an R&B-diva-meets-avant-rock song that’s so undeniably chart-ready that Solange Knowles’ cover of it barely had to shave off the rough edges (for further proof that Coffman’s voice was, until recently, the Dirty Projectors’ secret weapon, see her amazing verse from “Knotty Pine” on Dark Was the Night).

Longstreth is still the frontman here, though, and he proves his vocal worth on gorgeous opener “Cannibal Resource,” “The Bride,” and “Useful Chamber,” among others.  Overall, though, Longstreth’s and his bandmates’ worth can’t really be measured strictly on vocal terms.  This is difficult music that manages to balance mess with finesse, and it’s a wonder they can all keep up with the guy’s muse.  And keep up they do – by the end of the year, the band had debuted another new vocally-boggling song, “When the World Comes to an End” on Jimmy Fallon, and they managed to impress no less an authority on holding a song together than ?uestlove.  Tellingly, the Roots and Dirty Projectors played a show together not long afterward.

John Doe and the Sadies – Country Club
Eh.  I love John Doe’s voice and his songwriting (particularly with X, but also otherwise), and tend to like the Sadies as a backing band.  This collection of country covers and original Doe songs that sound like country covers doesn’t really do much for me.

Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
On some of Middle Cyclone‘s most impressive moments, Neko Case gives voice to the natural world in its most awesome, fear-inspiring manifestations.  Killer whales, a lovestruck tornado, and Mother Nature herself all make appearances, and with a less powerful presence at the helm, it would be tempting to pass these off as mere devices – metaphors for all-too-human foibles.  But as Case made clear on Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and reinforces here, she’s not uncomfortable with fables and anthropomorphizing.  She doesn’t need to pass her tornado off as a stand-in – in “This Tornado Loves You,” she is a goddamn self-aware tornado, and she’s coming this way! All of those animals chomping down on fresh human in “People Got A Lotta Nerve”?  Those aren’t a cute way of illustrating relationship troubles – it’s the food chain asserting itself.  And, I think Case would argue, people got a lotta nerve thinking of ourselves as any better than the tigers, foxes, and whales that populate her songs in the first place – “I’m an animal,” she sings here in one of Cyclone‘s big showpieces.  “You’re an animal, too.”

It’s not all bluster; like nature, itself, Middle Cyclone is dynamic, probably moreso than any Neko Case album to date.  The tracks that emphasize the louder, more rockist Case are all winners, and while not all of the more subdued tracks that are more in line with the sound of Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, surpass that amazing album’s best moments, they’re more of the same, which is hardly a bad thing in this case.  The dark “Prison Girls” and the longing title track are classic Case, and her cover of one of my favorite Harry Nilsson songs, “Don’t Forget Me,” is practically as good as the original.

If Middle Cyclone feels like a lesser accomplishment than Fox Confessor, it may only be because Fox Confessor carried the surprise of Case settling into an assured, original writing style that played to all of her vocal strengths.  Middle Cyclone is proof that she knows when she’s on to something.

Kelly Clarkson – All I Ever Wanted
It’s probably some cosmic coincidence that I’m covering pop radio’s preeminent big female rock voice with indie rock’s.  Look, can we all agree that “Since U Been Gone” is one of the best pop rock songs of the last 10 years?  If you can’t, you might consider skipping this review, because, frankly, all evaluations of Clarkson’s subsequent work must necessarily start from this basic universal truth.

Okay, that said, I gave Clarkson’s Breakaway a shot, and “Since U Been Gone” and maybe another couple of tracks aside, it was pretty disappointing.  I totally skipped My December, although I’m curious and may eventually get around to it.  But when Clarkson put out the very “Since U Been Gone”-like “My Life Would Suck Without You” and then followed it up with the even better “I Do Not Hook Up” (which has me reconsidering my whole position on Katy Perry, who co-wrote it), I figured it was time to give Clarkson another try as an album artist.

As Raina remarked as we listened to it for the first time, radio pop albums are weird.  There are a lot of writers, and they play with a lot of different tried-and-true styles in the expectation that something will stick to the charts.  In addition to the singles I knew (the aforementioned rock tunes, and the “Halo” rewrite “Already Gone”*), there’s Pink-like dance pop (“If I Can’t Have You”), Top 40 country style ballads (“Cry”), and, so help me, a title song that so completely references Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On” musically that the writers (among them an ex-member of Color Me Badd – Color Me Fucking Badd) seem to have felt morally obligated to start the song with the winking line “tear up the photographs.”

So, in short, the material is all over the place.  It’s hard to evaluate an album as a whole when it’s clearly designed to be taken apart and doled out in little pieces.  But Clarkson sounds great on the whole thing, and the various producers know enough not to throw too many audible effects on her tremendous voice (see video below – the woman can belt and hit those high notes).  Plus, she seems to be including more radio-friendly rockers these days, which highlights her talents.

I’ll close with a random observation – who elevates teen colloquialisms with the grandeur that Clarkson does?  “I’m so moving on” from “Since U Been Gone,” the use of the frank and unpoetic term “suck” in the chorus of an enormous guitar anthem, proclaiming that she will defiantly not “hook up” in a song about finding something deeper (which I’m sure the celibacy movement is misinterpreting and repurposing as we speak)…  It’s easy to use terms like this in understated humor or to toss them off in a verse somewhere, but to balance a whole song on one and make it work?  That’s some pretty amazing Ronnie Spector/Darlene Love stuff happening there.

*  Kelly, I’ma let you finish, but Beyonce…  eh, you know where I’m going with this.

Elvis Costello – Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane
I’m something of a Costello apologist, but the guy’s put out enough average or subpar material this decade that the scales have fallen from my eyes enough to consider his work critically.  I almost skipped the acoustic, country-flavored Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane entirely after reading some of the mediocre reviews and finding out that it wasn’t quite the King of America Part II that I’d originally heard it was going to be.  But I saw him live this summer (an Imposters-backed show that only featured a couple of the songs from this album) and tried it out on Lala, and thought it might bear some repeat listens.

As it turns out, it’s not the utter failure that some critics named it, but it’s also too slight to really hit like his best work.  Still, its best song, the goofy “Sulphur to Sugarcane,” may be its slightest, while Costello’s attempts to be a little more serious just sort of float right by.

Cursive – Mama, I’m Swollen
Man, this is disappointing.  Starting with Domestica, Cursive has had such a consistent track record, with each album or EP either improving or, at the very least, innovating upon the last lyrically and musically.  WIth their last album, Happy Hollow, the band started experimenting with horns and chief songwriter Tim Kasher, until then a great self-mythologizing solipsist on the level of Greg Dulli, started looking outward and proved to be capable of creating detailed and affecting, if occasionally cliche’ed, character sketches.  The songs amounted to a powerful Spoon River Anthology-type review of a repressive small town that took aim at hypocrisy while staying sympathetic to the plights of the city souls stuck there, the young people preyed on by their flag-waving families, and the gay priest caught between his theology and desire.

So what does Mama, I’m Swollen have to offer?  Mosty a bunch of vague bullshit about a guy who can’t commit and/or grow up (he even clumsily revisits the Pinocchio trope he used in “Driftwood: A Fairy Tale” on “Donkeys”).  And the music?  Probably the most straightforward and least interesting they’ve produced since the 90s.  I guess it’s not all bad (see video below for one of the highlights).  If this were the first Cursive album I’d heard I might be less annoyed with it, but this is a huge drop-off for these guys – an almost total lyrical and musical regression.

Despite upping the production values considerably, Two Suns is everything one could have hoped for as a sophomore effort.  Turns out Khan is just as good with a full arsenal at her disposal as she is at making the best of what she’s got.  The thicker production never overwhelms the songs, and she wisely keeps her voice up in the mix, and she turns up the neat percussion tricks (both electronic and otherwise) that pinned Fur and Gold‘s ethereal vocals and keys to something more primal.

And she also manages to overcome a new potential obstacle.  To be this melodramatic, to engage in this sort of free floating spirituality (“Glass” quotes the Song of Solomon, but there’s a lot of mythic flighty stuff on here that’s far less direct and possibly Khan-originated), to be this… serious.  I mean, there’s a nearly impossible-to-parse multi-song narrative going on with Khan’s imaginary alter-ego, Pearl.  It’s one thing to pull this sort of thing when the cracks are showing and you need to use some ingenuity to get your unique voice across.  But when you can just lay the production on thick with these tendencies toward the flowery, you can easily end up in New Age territory.  It’s a problem I nearly always have with Kate Bush, with whom Khan is often compared.  But Khan never falls prey to these urges (if she does fall prey to occasional Bush-style video corniness – see below).  Two Suns balances its ambition and outlandishness with a sort of modesty.

Also, you’ve gotta love an album that bounces between the extremes of invoking the Karate Kid in its lead single and managing to get the reclusive Scott Walker to add a weirdly Bela Lugosi-sounding vocal to the final track.  (Maybe I overstated Khan’s seriousness a little.)

Blakroc – self-titled
“Slide out your clothes and baby take off your shoes/
That coochie got me so confused that I don’t know what to do.”

As Raina pointed out as I repeatedly made her listen to “Coochie,” the hypnotically catchy opening track from Blakroc, “coochie” might be said to function as a synecdoche.  I suppose it kind of depends on whether the narrator (as voiced alternately by Ludicrous and a back-from-the-grave Old Dirty Bastard) is obsessing over the object of his affection directly or just her… coochie.

In any case, it’s a crude device that, along with the greasy musical backdrop provided by the Black Keys, provides a perfect introduction for this album, a collaboration between said Keys and a number of hip-hop folks that I won’t feign utter familiarity with, but whose names should ring a bell for pretty much anyone (RZA, Mos Def, etc.).  I also won’t feign utter familiarity with the blues lyrical form, but it seems to me that Blackroc doesn’t have to make a particularly strong case that blues led straight to hip-hop.  But through this blues-rock/hip-hop fusion, the Keys and their collaborators do so, just in case you missed it.  There’s nothing lyrical in “Coochie” that, conceptually speaking, wouldn’t be right at home in a blues song.

Nothing else on the album will stick in your head quite as much as “Coochie,” but “Dollaz & Sense” (with RZA and Pharoahe Monch) and “Why Can’t I Forget Him” (with Nicole Wray) are equally good at what they do.

Considering that I’m lukewarm on blues rock (including the last Black Keys album) and hopeless when it comes to hip hop, I’m enjoying this album quite a bit.  Not essential, but fun.

BLK JKS – After Robots
“The Mars Volta meets TV on the Radio,” said the advance reviews.  I can hear that, but possibly not as much as “Yeasayer meets King Crimson.”  Either way, these collisions don’t add up to as much as you probably want them to.  The band is clearly talented, and I hear they come across better live, but the result of all this technical skill is a somewhat stilted, undynamic album.

Bon Iver – Blood Bank EP
Most artists choose to highlight innovations in their sound on proper follow-up albums; EPs serve up the leftovers from the last full-length or preview songs on a soon-to-be-released album.  By this logic, Blood Bank should have been a shallow, b-sides-quality victory lap after the success that was For Emma, Forever Ago.  So why is Justin Vernon, the man behind Bon Iver, doing all of this stretching on a mere four-song EP?  Sure, the title track is just a more propulsive take on the wintry folk of For Emma (and it sounds even more propulsive in its live form) and “Beach Baby” doesn’t stray too far from that sound, but the Steve Reich-style minimalism of “Babys” seemingly comes from out-of-nowhere, and the excellent autotune a capella “Woods” is, perhaps, the last thing anyone could have reasonably expected [despite the single, notable and mysterious appearance of an autotune effect on For Emma's "The Wolves (Act I and III)"].

This mystery would ultimately be partially explained by Vernon’s other major release of the year, Volcano Choir’s Unmap, a collaboration with Collections of Colonies of Bees, an outfit with a more overtly experimental (and, yes, very minimalist-inspired) sound.  In fact, Blood Bank functions as a nice bridge between For Emma and Unmap, with Unmap even re-using “Woods” in a slightly different context.  It also suggests that Vernon isn’t content to continue mining the same territory, a legitimate worry given the specificity of For Emma‘s sound.  So those innovations on Blood Bank might end up sounding kind of slight, after all, upon the release of his next album.  But I’m getting ahead of myself… Blood Bank is that unusual EP that may prove just as essential as the artist’s full-length works.

While, as in the past with this band, I can’t go quite as far as some of the critics in recommending Merriweather Post Pavilion (there are still a few too many grating moments like the recurring organ runs on “Daily Routine”), its high points are simply too good to pass up.  And I can’t help being impressed that a band I previously associated with unlistenability could make something so thoroughly listenable.

Antony & the Johnsons – The Crying Light
Perhaps even more than Animal Collective (particularly on their most recent pop-friendlier outing), Antony Hegarty is an acquired taste.  Equipped with a Tiny Tim falsetto, an impossible-to-miss lisp, and a lyrical preoccupation not with the kind of dramatic morbidity favored by the Nick Caves and Ian Curtises, but with the mundane, slow, quiet fade-to-black kind, he’s the dictionary definition of “hard sell” to most rock fans.  But wait – it gets better.  He’s also a rather big guy, has a very interesting relationship with gender, and his backup band would probably more appropriately be called a mini-pit orchestra.

So what to make of a problem like Antony in this post-Hold Steady world?  Well, you can’t accuse him of not being ballsy, that’s for sure – he goes right for our insecurities and not just the ones you’d expect.  For someone as… confusing… as he is, gender-wise, there’s probably not a line on The Crying Light that relies on it to make an easy, uncomfortable point.  Instead, it’s frailty – frailty of our planet (the album’s fraught with nature references), of our loved ones (opening track “Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground” seems to be about his mother), and of ourselves (“Epilepsy is Dancing,” “Another World,” the list goes on here).

As with his other releases, The Crying Light isn’t for all occasions (don’t throw it on at a party or when you’re trying to set a romantic mood – y’know, maybe you shouldn’t play this at all when other people are around…).  But, like them, it’s uniquely touching, and, perhaps a little unlike them, it’s a strikingly coherent album, more thematically unified than the others, specifically because Antony is increasingly fearless in plumbing the depths of his preoccupations for our entertainment.

Atlas Sound – Logos
After thoroughly dismissing Deerhunter’s Cryptograms a couple of years ago, I came around on them in a big way with 2008′s Microcastle, a tighter, focused rock album that worked singer/songwriter Bradford Cox’s love of gauzy distortion into actual songs.  I’d always heard that Cox’s ongoing solo project, Atlas Sound, was on the less structured, ambient side than Deerhunter, so I’d been reluctant to dive in.  In my post-Microcastle change of heart on the guy’s work, though, I tried Cryptograms again, and quite liked it, so I figured I’d give Logos a shot (okay, I was partially going on Aziz Ansari’s recommendation – who doesn’t like Aziz?  Terrorists and America-haters, that’s who).

As it turns out, Logos sounds like a side project.  It’s unfocused and skitters back and forth from barely-there mood pieces to pretty terrific songs.  The standout, as Aziz says, is “Walkabout,” which, yes, features the aforementioned Panda Bear of Animal Collective notoriety and, yes, sounds a bit like the newer, poppier version of that band (although perhaps even more accessible).  But “Shelia” is another highlight, as it takes the Microcastle sound into sunnier territory and “Quick Canal,” which features another notable guest appearance in the form of Laetitia Sadier from Stereolab and rides a Neu-ish groove.  Not an entirely satisfying album, but worth a listen, especially for these songs.

(By the way, in the interest of expediency, I may be eschewing album artwork on marathon posts this year.  Any thoughts?  Are the posts too text-dense?)

Edit:  I’ve decided to go with youtube links instead of album art.  More informative if less stable.