MODEST MOUSE
Night on the Sun [EP]
Boy geniuses deliver hyper-creative poppery straight out of a Ritalyn bottle, all so mashed and frantic you'd almost mistake irony for commitment. Almost. This kind of indie rock is today's art rock: tons of technique, unquestionable control, no soul.

SMOOSH
"Massive Cure"
"Free to Stay"
I actually heard these two promo tasters months ago, but had to get down a word or two about them. Smoosh are, or were then, two very young sisters, Asya and Chloe, who play their own instruments and write and sing their own songs. Not to be rockist, but that self-determining aspect matters when the songs are this succinctly strange and the playing this subtle and skewed, like a more elegant form of musical Cubism. Spooky, and not so into itself you lose interest.

Note to self: Get Smoosh album.

Note to you: read Steve Almond's interview with the girls from the June-July '05 issue of The Believer.

Le TIGRE
Miscellaneous tracks from various sources
Three women -- one of whom cultivates her mustache and looks like a Dokken-worshipping teenage boy, two of whom resemble, in their beehives, stand-ins for the B-52 gals -- play sprightly, spring-loaded mechano-pop, driven by organ riffs and tinfoil guitar. Listen to their interviews and they're Lilith Fair liberal, which I love in girl singers, as long as it doesn't get goddess goo all over the music. (You know who I'm talking about.) The tunes that stuck to me right away were "My My Metrocard" and "Get Off the Internet," shiny, useful tools from a postmodern garage.

* * * Marginalia * * *
This is supposed to be a blog logging strictly new listening experiences, but I feel I'd be repressing something important if I didn't put down that I've listened to Marvin Gaye's Let's Get it On three times in the last week. There's got to be magic to an album I haven't taken down in years but which has now utterly crept inside me to colonize that dark and squishy space between the heart and solar plexus which we medical professionals call the Pleasure Center.

No Stranded entry tonight. It's late. Man, I'm breaking rules left and right. Anarchy!

VARIOUS ARTISTS
This Bird Has Flown: A 40th Anniversary Tribute to the Beatles' Rubber Soul
The Beatles Chill Out, Volume 1
Lennon Covered
We were listening to the first of these last night and agreeing that, as good as some of the tracks were, what you mainly wished was that you were listening to the originals. It always happens that way. There are maybe five covers of Beatles songs I like better than the Beatles' versions -- though Stevie Wonder's "We Can Work it Out" is the only one that leaps to mind -- but those are anomalous in the extreme. Tribute albums are usually wan little affairs, all good intention and misguided idol worship, and I've become convinced that they're really good precisely to the degree they enable you to forget the artist who inspired them. I realized that about a year ago, listening to A Reggae Tribute to Bob Dylan.

But I, for one, never pass up the chance to listen to a Beatle-saluting or Beatle-themed album, partly because the Beatle mash-up (mutating a Beatles track with another artist's, as exemplified by DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, and certain individual works by the likes of ccc and Go Home Productions) has been such a fertile field these past few years, and partly because even the most misbegotten effort is likely to surrender at least one gem from its pile of coal.

Reminiscent of the 1988 Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father, which put the likes of Sonic Youth, Michelle Shocked and The Fall to work on a song-by-song rethink of the psychedelic classic, This Bird Has Flown replicates the running order of the 1965 album, one song each taken over by some hot hipster artist or venerated indie band. With one or two exceptions, each delivers what he or she has led his or her fan to expect, style-wise. The marshmallow folkie Dar Williams turns "You Won't See Me" into marshmallow folk. The Fiery Furnaces remake "Norwegian Wood" for pump organ and gosh-wow vocal. Such as The Donnas, Low, Sufjan Stevens, and Ben Lee perform admirably, sometimes sticking to the originals, sometimes diverging wildly. Neo-Americana (yuck what a phrase) is brought to bear on "Think for Yourself" (The Yonder Mountain String Band) and "The Word" (Mindy Smith), and these are by far the pleasantest tracks. But all leave the Beatles' versions pretty much untouched and sailing far uppermost in the mind of any listener already familiar with them.

Which, as I've said, is not what a musical tribute needs to do. The one song that does what it needs to do -- that breaks through into that select group peopled by Stevie and the few others I can't remember -- is Cowboy Junkies' version of "Run for Your Life." This was arguably the weakest song on the original album, and certainly one of the thinnest musical dribbles the Beatles ever discharged. So in a sense the Junkies had less to work with; and, in a sense, more. They trade the flippant rockabilly-lite of the original for dark and dangerous dirge-sounds, percussion like syncopated fists and desperate background shouts: "You better RUN! For your LIFE!" And it matters, does it ever, that Margo Timmins is reversing the sexes with utter deliberation, rolling the reversal on her tongue like a ripe olive: "I'd rather see you dead, little boy, than to be with another woman." (When she warns, "Or you won't know where I am," you can see that little boy fearfully searching the shadows.)

(A thing about the Junkies: I loved their Trinity Sessions album when it came out in 1988, and still do. Between then and now I thought they were pretty much over, dried up. Then a few months back they came with Early 21st Century Blues, an album of covers -- including unusual solo picks from Lennon and Harrison -- and it had much the same thrust, the surprising edge as this new "Run for Your Life." Here's to second acts.)

Chill Out, Volume 1 offers a continuous suite of loungey, dancey, beaty interps piloted by a breezy femme-voice and thick rhythmizing. It conjures a disco on the beach: nice if that's your mood. It's a new and unusual addition to the Beatle-tribute corpus, and it certainly imparts the chill its title promises. Lennon Covered is a bonus CD affixed to a recent issue of the British pop glossy Q: again, a daunting line-up of contemporary heavyweights throw in on personal faves. The split is 50-50 between Beatle and solo tracks, and, no surprise, the better work is done on lesser songs. Joseph Arthur's "Look at Me" is an airy, haunting take on a slight tune; Feeder make a substantial pop ballad out of the heretofore twerpy "Beautiful Boy"; and The Subways manage a fine "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" mainly by not veering too far from the sound of the original. (Eddie Vedder did the same a few years ago on the I Am Sam soundtrack.) Also notable is Madonna's live "Imagine," with crypto-English accent and quivering back-of-the-throat notes.

Anyone out there besides me find Stereophonics ("Don't Let Me Down") to be the slimiest, smarmiest, most insufferable shovelers of fake-emotional manure since Michael Bolton? Fuck, they're detestable.

CAT POWER
The Greatest
Not exactly a disappointment, but nothing like the KO punch I was wanting after picking up the title track as an Internet teaser a few weeks ago. "The Greatest" is a gorgeous ballad wafting forward on melody, piano, and light strings: Cat's vocal is, as usual, pure smoke, a moody mist. You don't listen to the words, you got no idea who or what "the greatest" is, because you don't need to know. The chords are vaguely predictable, the feel is familiar, it's got the vibe of something that has hooked you a hundred times in the past and has chosen now to make its way around again. Welcome back, whatever you are.

And the rest falls in line, more or less, mist following mist. It's all of a piece, chording and instrumentation consistent, with just a few tasteful tosses to mix up the mist: horns here, thumping drum there. Not bad, good in fact, but even mist needs a reason -- has to go somewhere, get larger or dissolve intriguingly, envelope the world or at least leave moisture behind. This one deserves another listen, as Cat Power's LPs usually do -- 2000's The Cover Record is due for another spin on the CD carousel -- but on first appraisal, it's too much mmm and not enough grrr.

MADONNA
Confessions on a Dance Floor
The opening track and lead-off single, "Hung Up," bonks you on the head instantly. Classic Madonna: a propulsive, atmospheric dance epic up there with "Into the Groove," "Open Your Heart" and "Ray of Light." The rest is pretty good, if lacking in (yes, that old demand) variety. There's no killer ballad like "Gone" or "What it Feels Like for a Girl," and the record's disco ball has two speeds -- fast, slightly less fast -- and never stops spinning.

I like it though, because I like Madonna more as the years pass. Not the woman personally, as I don't know her, but her presence in the culture. From hating her years ago, to feeling benign contempt every time she mistook herself for a movie star, I've come to a position of not-so-grudging respect upon a recognition that her musical worth can't all be due to fashionable producers and canny trend-hopping. She's got something else going, and out of it she's made a little mountain of undeniable singles and a few strong, tight LPs. Let's not get all weepy about it, but she's won something from me, finally, if that matters -- a little piece of my heart, maybe?

NATALIE IMBRUGLIA
Counting Down the Days
Now here's something that hit me from behind. Or from the side, lightly. All I knew of Ms. Imbruglia was that her flawless gamine face gleamed from a highly-touted debut a few years ago, and all the pudgy middle-aged white guys at Rolling Stone and the New York Times and every other mainstream outlet got to drooling over another beautiful tight-bodied songstress with precocious musicality and a voice like sex. (Think Alanis, Alicia, Fiona, Norah, Joss, etc.) Next time we see her, she's doing L'Oreal commercials. I questioned her emotional commitment to being a serious songstress -- even though I hadn't heard her music and didn't really care one way or the other. (That's full of shit of me, undeniably, but hey, I'm as full of shit as the next person, sometimes more so.)

But Imbruglia's third album, which despite a lead single ("Shiver") has gotten almost no attention in America thus far, is weightless pop that achieves substance simply by being so perfectly calibrated, so subtly engineered. It's all basically one song -- a tuneful romantic arabesque delivered by a plucky love-girl to her imperfect geek-boy, the desire behind which is to show that she loves him even though she's too smart and sensitive for him. The tunes do not differ terrifically in text or melody, the sound levels are even, and yet there's enough variance in the vocals and tempi between laid-backness and chin-forwardness, between (as I cleverly put it earlier) mmm and grrr that you never get tired of listening out for the next little shift.

Hmm, let's cogitate a moment: I carp about lack of variety above, and here I count it a virtue. Well, it all depends on what the artist is or is not variating from, doesn't it. Counting Down the Days would suck if its basic unit of melodic significance, to borrow the scientific parlance, were not right, as they say, in my box. Because the dance-thump and disco-drone of the Madonna record are invigorating for me only in moderate doses, a whole near-hour's worth of that one thing tends to wear me down. But because I'm a sucker for the harmonious placement of notes (melody) and the sensitive orchestration of vocal and manual instrumentation to maximize that assonance (production), 45 minutes of well-judged, well-mixed pop-craft leaves me feeling cool and good, my ears atingle, my eyes open, my head up.

Thanks, Natalie.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Beg, Scream and Shout! The Big Ol' Box of '60s Soul (Disc 1)
A Rhino-released and rhino-heavy comp notable for its insistence on obscurities, also-rans and never-weres, lost classics placed alongside classics we've never stopped hearing. On this first disc -- it always takes me an age to get through one of these big boxes -- the real finds are "That's How it Feels" by The Soul Clan (an all-star assemblage with Arthur Conley, Joe Tex and others), Brenda Holloway's "Every Little Bit Hurts," and Otis Clay's "That's How It Is (When You're in Love)." Enough obscurities in a row and it's like you're hearing an alternative history of the Stax-Motown-Philly story you already knew. But then, just when you think you're in the Land of the Lost, The Delfonics show up to sing "La La Means I Love You," or Smokey breezes in on "The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage," and you're reminded this is all coming from one unified universe of sadness and love, one heaven here on earth.

And there is nothing on this earth like good commercial '60s soul music. It's dream radio, silk and skin and sexual politics played out over horns and strings and scraped guitar strings. Screw ditherings about commerce and sell-out, what's not black enough or what's too white -- this is American music. And there are five discs to go.

THE RAY CONNIFF SINGERS
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
Sweet and clean as a candy cane. So sue me!


STRANDED -- The Countdown (6)

BEATLES, Live! at the Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany (Bellaphon/W. Germany). What have we here? I've always been drawn back to this noisy squall, badly recorded and frantically paced, so full of presence, up-front noise hiding voices and moments between band and audience you have to imagine for yourself. Marcus, bless him, is the only critic I've seen give this hot, ferocious document the rating it deserves. So it's not studio sterile or even intelligible half the time, but when did rock and roll ever have to be about that? Would I take it to an island? For "To Know Her is to Love Her" alone. 1962.

----. Please Please Me (Parlophone/UK). Not quite. It's a beginning. 1963.

----. With the Beatles (Parlophone/UK). This is the thing itself. It gets to places the later, sophisticated, more vaunted work doesn't get to and doesn't want to, even though it remembers being there. This is magnificent for the Motown and girl group stuff, and all Paul's loving and "Till There Was You" and the Ringo song and the George song -- Oh, hell, the whole thing! 1963.

----. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (Capitol). Heresy, but I don't have to hear this ever again. 1964.

----. "She Loves You" (Capitol). Whereas this I do have to hear again -- right now. 1964.

----. A Hard Day's Night (Parlophone/UK). Oh, beautiful and beauteousness. A deep blue and purple velvet album, love and valiant soaring voices, and desperate love. Yes I said yes I will yes. 1964.

----. Beatles for Sale (Parlophone/UK). Lovable slobs, the Beatles grin almost all the way through, high and hilarious with exhaustion, funky late-night shouts and honks with shots of paranoia and a demon or two. 1964.

----. "Help!"/"I'm Down" (Capitol). For the B-side. 1965.

----. "Yesterday" (Capitol). You almost don't need to take it with you -- you've got it in your head. But put on the record itself and you feel all over again the low stroke of those strings on your sternum. God, could anyone sound as innocent as Paul, as broken-hearted and soul-crushed? I don't care how many bad albums he makes, I'll always love him. 1965.

----. "Day Tripper" (Capitol). Oh, man! Love that riff. Those voices, that sizzling tambourine. They're the coolest. 1965.

----. Rubber Soul (Capitol). Well, yes, but it has to be the Parlophone version, which has "Drive My Car" and "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone." What is this, anyway? Rubbery psych, modernist garage fuzz, Euro-ballads for cafe sophisticates, what? 1965.

----. Revolver (Capitol). Greil lists it, then damns it with faint praise. I like it better, far better than he. In fact it's their best, after the White Album. It's what "Day Tripper" and Rubber Soul lead right up to, it's the natural peak of all that sizzle, that brass-tacks focus, that subtle burning as it surrounds the heart and creeps up the gullet, that idolized grin as it goes frozen: a record of stabbing riffs and mercury-flavored organ, bitter love and weathered innocence. 1966.

----. "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" (Capitol). Obviously. 1967.

----. "I Am the Walrus" (Capitol). This goes on my island, for sure, but it's so scary I'd only play it when the sun was out. 1967.

----. The Beatles (Apple). It's all in there, if you listen for it. Brutal as falling through the sky, mystical as a drunk shouting in your ear. So harsh and human and right in front of you. Pardon me while I stagger off. 1968.

----. "Don't Let Me Down" (Apple). One of those many, many Beatles songs that took me years to hear. The 15-year-old thought it was dull, the grownup finds it indescribably moving. 1969.