2008: The Year in Artists

Billed as a sequel to last year's The Stage Names, the sixth record from Okkervil River, isn't so much a continuation as it is a further rumination on similar themes. Like its predecessor, The Stand-Ins is concerned with the travails of "some mid-level band," but where the protagonists in The Stage Names seemed to stumble dumbly and naively through their misfortunes ("A Girl in Port," in particular, bore the sting of regret), here the characters are harder and crueler and more calculated.

The villains enter early: "Singer Songwriter" is a dead-on evisceration of the kind of privileged folkie that affects penniless bohemianism for the sake of image. Will Sheff's lyrics, which in the past had a tendency to sacrifice clarity for poetry, are agonizingly precise here: "I heard cuts by the Kinks on your speakers," he sneers, "I saw Poe and Artaud on your shelves/ While The Last Laugh's first scene/ On your flat-panel screen/ Lit Chanel that you wrapped 'round yourself." It's blistering and brutal, a 21st-century take on "Positively 4th Street." That the music is a spot-on evocation of Bringin' It All Back Home doesn't hurt. In fact, The Stand-Ins is best when it's buoyant: "Calling and Not Calling My Ex," which this writer would like to argue is about Chan Marshall (um, evidence to come) rolls along on a broad, brash folk strum as Sheff sighs, "She was once mine/ That smile that shines from the glossy magazine/ That's stuck inside the Sunday Times." "Pop Lie" is a hurricane, too, all bash and clatter and chugging Kinks riffs that take to task "the liar who lied in his pop song."

If that last lyric sounds a bit unreasonable, that's one of The Stand-Ins only drawbacks. Sheff has a tendency to treat his artistic miscreants with a kind of acrid contempt, and periodically his declamations of musicians who dare to conduct themselves with anything other than total integrity can be a bit wearying. But if Sheff demands a lot of his creations, it's likely because he demands a lot of himself. On "Lost Coastlines" he howls "Every night finds us rocking and rolling on waves wild and white/ Where we have lost our way/ But no one will say it outright." Maybe that topic is fodder for Part III?

Like the stories of Raymond Carver and the films of Kevin Smith, Hold Steady songs exist inside a specific, self-contained universe. There's a big Catholic church on the corner, a crumbling parking lot where hoodrats hang out and inject questionable substances; there's a water-damaged harbor bar where the jukebox always plays Meatloaf and a series of all-ages hardcore shows where restless teenagers show up to either experiment with toxins or to angrily refuse the same. The characters all know each other, too: Hallelujah and Charlemagne have stumbled in and out of enough Hold Steady songs to warrant above-the-title billing and even some of the second-tier characters are starting to look familiar. Close quarters like these tend to drive away casual listeners, but for die-hards it creates a kind of community — one long, never-ending narrative that just gets more complicated and circuitous with each new outing.

On Stay Positive, the character arcs are still mostly the same — there are screwed-up Catholics trying to get their heads straight, on-and-off drug fiends ambivalent about their habits and lonely girls doing the wrong thing to get attention — the difference is that the sets have gotten more elaborate. No longer content to rely on shaved-down classic rock riffery (though there's still plenty of that), Craig Finn & Co. now drag out the harpsichord and the Theremin and the banjo, preferring texture over power. Finn has changed, too; he used to just bark, but now he sings — and sings well — yanking the songs across their peaks and valleys.

2006's Boys & Girls in America attempted a similar sonic expansion but fell flat due to logey production that waxed the guitars to an unearthly gleam and made the background vocals sound like they were happening in a different song. Stay Positive is tighter and darker, less concerned with the payoff than the setup. People like to compare the Hold Steady to Springsteen, but the truth is that they're doing Springsteen's career in reverse, starting with Born in the U.S.A. and moving backwards to the complexity and relative subtlety of records like The River and Darkness at the Edge of Town. Stay Positive is best at its bleakest: "Joke About Jamaica" is a slow dive downward, a grim tale of a poor used girl poured out over sub-basement riffs and villainous piano; "Both Crosses" — the album's haunting centerpiece by a mile — is another of Finn's strange Catholic visions. Acoustic guitars cluster like gathering storm clouds as Finn croaks out stark prophecy: "She saw the footage right before it got cut/ And she saw the body and she saw the blood/ She saw the angel put the sword in his side/ And baby, that's how we got canonized."

There are still plenty of carousers — "Sequestered in Memphis" is a straightforward shout-along, "Constructive Summer" is Hold Steady Anthem Rock 101 — but the best of these also branch out. "Yeah Sapphire" is a perfect example: patiently midtempo, it lazily repeats a single circular guitar pattern, blossoming slowly into a bright and gorgeous chorus. "I know the last time we touched I came on a bit rough, please forgive me," Finn pleads. This is the Hold Steady Universe circa 2008: a little more subtle, a little bit wider, a little more prone to gentleness. And, underneath it all, just as fucked-up as ever.

A tiny, subtle diamond in a field of ten-foot neon exclamation points, Boxer, the stately, flawless fifth record from the Brooklyn group the National, draws strength from the power of suggestion. "Let's not try to figure out everything at once," Matt Berninger sings softly in the glowing opener "Fake Empire," and that line could be a statement of theme: On Boxer, the epiphanies take their time.

Since their relocation from Ohio to New York, the National has built a career on writing wry songs that express sympathy for the bedeviled. 2003's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers found them merging grizzled Americana with a Flannery O'Connor kind of fatalism, crafting stories about misanthropes whose dreams had dried up and whose only recourse was to blame everyone around them. Alligator, released the following year, took that same anger and internalized it, turning the gun around and tying up acrid metaphysical aggravation in thick, silvery ropes of guitar. That record was mainly about exhaustion, but Boxer is about resignation. Its title is a clever bit of misdirection: they don't mean someone who fights, but someone who confines. The characters here are either burned out or walled in, aware of their limitations but working to accept them instead of becoming incapacitated by them.

Fittingly, the songs are coiled and quivering — no release or eruption, just a steady, insistent simmer. Sound arrives not in distinct notes but reverberations: guitars echo, organs pool, bass hums and buzzes. The jittery, insistent "Mistaken for Strangers" builds to a groan instead of a shriek and "Guest Room," which is as close as Boxer ever comes to an anthem, blots its big finish with inky smudges of bass and rolling clouds of feedback. This temperance is the album's ace up the sleeve: rather than betting their worth on one hook writ large, the songs unfold a little more with each pass. What starts out foggy and puzzling is gradually revealed to be a bounty of small, elegant moments. Drummer Bryan Devendorf is the group's anchor; his percussion is odd and atypical, strange thrilling bursts of sound that knock the songs off balance. His playing is completely counterintuitive, loaded with sudden stops, unlikely drops and improbable rolls.

Berninger, in his early 30s, is a Tennessee Williams kind of frontman: tired of parties, hyper-aware of his own age but roaming the nighttime city anyway in the restless — and fruitless — pursuit of something more. But instead of getting bitter or nostalgic, Berninger seems to be moving toward a kind of acceptance. "Tired and wired, we ruin too easy," he sings on "Apartment Story," and the key there is the pronoun — it's not the ruining that matters, it's the peace that comes from knowing you have someone to be ruined with. Again and again Berninger finds comfort in companionship, and even when he's singing "walk away now, and you're going to start a war," it doesn't sound so much like an ultimatum as it does a sly, gentle plea to come back to bed.

This, in the end, is what Boxer is all about: the first step after the Big Dream fails. It's a record about the implication but not the explanation, the clues but not the mystery. It's a record full of down-payment dreamers, ruined princes and glowing young ruffians who are learning to be satisfied with everything they haven’t got. They're beaten but grinning — half awake in fake empires, but waiting around to see the sun.

To call Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga one of the year’s two or three best rock albums is to overstate how much it sounds like a rock album. There’s no mistaking its imperturbable swagger and seething refrains for anything else — Spoon still knows how to write a song that could fit into each of rock’s past five decades without tipping toward any one in particular. But even songs on Ga Ga that traffic in guitars don’t sound like they were written with guitars in mind. Spoon sounds more interested now in drums and empty space, both of which sparkle and boom in ways that make singer Britt Daniel sound positively electrified to be in their presence.

The sparse and experimental lean of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga places it closer to the group’s 2002 breakthrough Kill the Moonlight than its bash-minded follow-up Gimme Fiction. “Don’t Make Me a Target” opens on a note of resignation and rage, with portentous guitar and piano that build toward a sort of atonal rockabilly jam about two minutes in. From there, though, the album takes on an air of mystery with “The Ghost of You Lingers,” a gorgeous and terrifying ballad in which Daniel’s distended voice duels with blasts of static and more reverb than could ever sound earthly. The jarring tonal shift into “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb” proves perverse but, as goes for most of Spoon’s moves at this point, not overly pleased with itself: After bells and slappy drums enter like Phil Spector as summoned by David Lynch, the buoyant tune takes over and lodges into that part of your brain where pleasurable pop hooks go and stay mum.

What sticks most on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the grain and range of Daniel’s voice, which must have been miked a dozen different ways to capture his timbral moods in tracks as disparate as “Don’t You Evah” (Spoon’s most funky song yet, by a good measure) and “The Underdog” (Spoon’s most Billy Joel-like song yet, to the same degree). Nothing Daniel does has ever sounded labored, but Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga finds him and his band with a newly refined balance between craft and restraint.

The two tracks that bookend My Morning Jacket’s fifth album attest to that centuries-old Christian body/soul divide that sits at the root of good church folk like Jim James and his cohorts. On the one hand, there’s “Evil Urges,” the other, “Good Intentions,” and MMJ know as well as anybody that hell is paved with both of them — meaning the middle path is best. If anything, My Morning Jacket strike a precarious balance on Evil Urges, being still familiar to longtime fans while also reaching for extremes in their sound.

The opening title track swoops in like something beamed down from Radiohead’s OK Computer, anthemic guitars amid spacy keyboard washes, as the conflicted James realizes that “It ain’t evil, baby, if it ain’t hurting anybody.” Much like another Kentuckian, Will Oldham, James couples his choirboy exterior with the animal desires that lurk beneath, mining the fertile fold where the two meet. Or, simply put, James finally digs that the closest one can get to heaven is through some fine fucking. He fantasizes about a “Librarian” hiding “the beauty the Good Lord put there” and aims to help her to find that heaven within. And, with an orgasmic yowl, he looses heaps of sexual frustration on the sublime disco(!) workout “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 2.”

Such lower-half excursions aren’t always divine though; “Highly Suspicious” will make-or-break Urges for a lot of fans. It’s an odd amalgam of canned '80s keytar, complete with a non-sequitur about “peanut butter pudding surprise” and bolstered by James’s highest falsetto and most robo-baritone. If anything, it sounds like the band’s attempt to do Brazilian funk carioca, complete with “Wild Thing” guitar lick. Thankfully, they just as easily swoop back into the familiar soft-rock beatitude of “Thank You Too!” and the demur keen of “Sec Walkin.’” Here, James gauges his every step carefully, exulting in earthly delights around him. Yet all is not well, as he also notes the “demon eyes are watching everywhere.” And so the dark and light forces continue their push and pull.

After splitting with his former band (DeYarmond Edison, who, after relocating to North Carolina, reformed as Megafaun), Justin Vernon holed up in a remote Wisconsin hunting cabin for four frigid months, recording the tracks that would later comprise For Emma, Forever Ago, his haunting debut as Bon Iver. For Emma was self-released by Vernon in 2007 before being picked up by Jagjaguwar in 2008, and while the record may now be an official, bar-coded release, it still feels more like buried treasure, caked with dirt and full of secrets.

Vernon’s high, lonesome yowls are multi-tracked over (mostly) spare acoustic strums; unsurprisingly, Vernon’s guitar feels secondary to his vocals, which are pretty and threatening, primed-to-pierce icicles dangling from a rooftop. Tracks like “Skinny Love” — which, like most of For Emma, sees Vernon lowing about failed relationships — feel distinctly cautionary, with Vernon earnestly admonishing his listeners to be patient, fine, balanced, kind. For Emma is packed with these sorts of tiny lessons and Vernon’s spooky, otherworldly instrumentation only cements the celestial vibe — the cumulative effect is enough to make you momentarily consider camping out in an ice-crusted hut for a long winter, just to see what you can learn about life.

"Don't get any big ideas," goes the first line of "Nude," the third song on Radiohead's haunting seventh record, "they're not gonna happen." This is, of course, hogwash — a willful bit of Thomfoolery designed to accentuate a theme by understating it. In Rainbows is a record full of big ideas, ideas about solitude and desertion and depression and dislocation — to say nothing of its notions about record distribution.

And let's, please, say nothing of its notions about record distribution. For weeks after its arrival all anyone could talk about was how much (if anything) they paid for it, obscuring any discussion of what Rainbows actually is: a stunning sustained consideration of loneliness set to a somber, underplayed score.

Musically, In Rainbows — like Hail to the Thief before it — finds Radiohead winding their way back towards something like conventional songwriting. That an album where the opener boasts jazz guitar, drum 'n' bass rhythms and bursts of cheering children can be considered even remotely "conventional" is a testament to how far afield Radiohead were before this. They're calmer now, constructing songs from blue bands of synthesizers and delicate, twinkling arpeggios. With the exception of the ragged "Bodysnatchers," which hurtles forward on the back of briny guitar, most of Rainbows is disturbingly serene. The songs maintain a kind of steady cruising altitude: "Faust Arp" threads solemn strings through Brit-folk finger-picking; "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" speeds along on galloping percussion and swooping, sine-wave guitars. It's a welcome reminder of how good Radiohead still are at writing plain old pop songs, even if those pop songs are full of ruminations on loss and mortality.

Which, of course, is where Thom Yorke comes in. His writing has grown more direct — on In Rainbows he's fonder of plain old declaratives than on much of his past work — but most times that superficial glibness conceals a deep-seated unrest: "I don't want to be your friend," he sings at one point, "I just want to be your lover," a sentiment that sounds sexy until you realize what it means is that he's not going to call you the Day After. Ditto "All I Need," where he unspools a series of distressing pledges of devotion ("I'm an animal trapped in your hot car" is one) only to end up at "I only stick with you/ Because there are no others." Not the valentine everyone hopes to get.

In the album's final scene, Yorke finds himself before God who, apparently as resistant to new technology as he is sin and death and canoodling, plays back Yorke's life for him on a VCR. As he is for most of Rainbows, Yorke is there by himself, but instead of rifling through his regrets, he has an eleventh hour epiphany. "This is one for the good days," he croons as the piano death-marches behind him, "And I have it all here in red, blue and green." It's a startling redemption, ending album-length isolation with the refrain, "I know today has been/ The most perfect day I've ever seen." This, to say the least, isn't what we were expecting. Where's the longing? Where's the dread? Where’s the hopelessness? Who's the wiseguy? What’s the big idea?

Less than two minutes into “Intervention,” the band's leader Win Butler crumples under the line “every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.” By this time, soldiers and church and crying have already been covered. It’s a demonstration of suckerpunching. But this is the Arcade Fire’s shtick: fifty ticker-tape parades and six screens playing Miracle On 34th Street simultaneously, soundtracked by “Livin’ On a Prayer.” Underdog gumption sells, and in indie rock, former playground for huge egos skulking under cultivated self-effacement, so does bare-assed emotional optimism.

Initial rapture over the Arcade Fire spoke to a broad wanting in indie-music listeners: less wit, more feeling. Where new romanticism toyed with being arch, Neon Bible’s nü-new romanticism — gloriously retarded metaphysics like “my body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love,” ten-ton pipe organs — is almost indigestibly earnest. Then again, that’s the point.

Neon Bible isn’t nearly as immediate or consistent as Funeral. It has the same Bowie anthems and New Order stride, but the brisk hope has turned stone dead. The tunes are simpler, the lyrics are dumber, and the sentiments are wielded like clubs. But that's what anthems are made of — the best of Neon Bible is irresistible. When Win unleashes the title of “Black Mirror” through a curtain of swirling strings and backwards whispers, it’s practically kitsch. At album’s end you realize that “My Body Is a Cage,” a swollen, blankly hopeless slave dirge, is the centerpiece. And even though “The Well and the Lighthouse” apes Springsteen’s heroism (which he nipped from Phil Spector anyhow), the lyrics are about dying, splashing around in the dark, being lost and cod-Biblical yearning — “Resurrected, living in a lighthouse, if you leave them, ships are gonna wreck.” The Arcade Fire, who once sounded like a guiding force or a way out, are now as trapped and lost as any other mook in this frigid downer of a world.

With Interpol/National producer Peter Katis behind the boards, the second album from this Glasgow trio comes invested with its share of high drama. But singer Scott Hutchison, who founded the band with his brother, Grant, prefers directness to theatricality. Overwhelming as some of the album’s lyrics can be, he assured in a recent interview that they’re “not at all metaphorical,” including the one where he contemplates throwing himself off a bridge.

Like their Edinburgh countrymen Idlewild, Frightened Rabbit aren’t afraid to let a dynamic build slowly. “My Backwards Walk” simmers for nearly three minutes before the drums kick in, pitting an anxious strummed guitar against an undulating wash of one-finger piano and gently lapping accordion. Occasionally, as on the somber sea shanty “Who’d You Kill Now,” the band harks back to the more shambling and eclectic sounds of their 2006 debut, Sing the Greys, which was essentially a collection of spruced-up demos. But for the most part, Frightened Rabbit are confident in their insecurities, with Scott Hutchison’s quavering voice fighting through the haze, riding the waves and coming home safe.

Any good concept album has a compelling character at its core, and Skeletal Lamping is no exception. Protagonist Georgie Fruit isn't just any transgender middle-aged black man — he has undergone multiple sex changes, making him the perfect alter ego for charismatic and chameleonic Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes, whose musical persona is capricious, unsettled and over-the-top. And also very horny.

Skeletal Lamping is packed with blush-worthy come-ons draped in imitation-Prince squeals. Georgie, throughout the album, comes across alternately as a savvy bedroom connoisseur and a disposable plaything for the sexually curious. He's a product of the disco era, and his after-bar stories are set to limber bass lines and a driving beat. But the quieter moments reveal his insecurity, his damaged self-esteem and contemplation of yet another surgery.

Despite the personal crisis that shapes the album's narrative, Barnes, perhaps unsurprisingly, never loses his playful side. In "For Our Elegant Caste," for instance, he refers to Georgie's transformation as "a freaky permutation, something like Voltron," making clear that Georgie's stints under the knife didn't sacrifice his sense of humor.

As they have graduated and mutated from modest indie pop to extravagant, massive glam-pop, Of Montreal's vision has become grander, and their approach more intricate. An album like Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? with its kaleidoscopic sound palette (and album cover) piled sounds and ideas and moods and approaches in elegant layers. Skeletal Lamping takes it even farther, with results that require patience. But with its majestic three-part falsetto harmonies and engrossing narrative, it's patience well spent.

With Interpol/National producer Peter Katis behind the boards, the second album from this Glasgow trio comes invested with its share of high drama. But singer Scott Hutchison, who founded the band with his brother, Grant, prefers directness to theatricality. Overwhelming as some of the album’s lyrics can be, he assured in a recent interview that they’re “not at all metaphorical,” including the one where he contemplates throwing himself off a bridge.

Like their Edinburgh countrymen Idlewild, Frightened Rabbit aren’t afraid to let a dynamic build slowly. “My Backwards Walk” simmers for nearly three minutes before the drums kick in, pitting an anxious strummed guitar against an undulating wash of one-finger piano and gently lapping accordion. Occasionally, as on the somber sea shanty “Who’d You Kill Now,” the band harks back to the more shambling and eclectic sounds of their 2006 debut, Sing the Greys, which was essentially a collection of spruced-up demos. But for the most part, Frightened Rabbit are confident in their insecurities, with Scott Hutchison’s quavering voice fighting through the haze, riding the waves and coming home safe.

The Eels song “I Like Birds” could’ve been written about Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg. This Austin, Texas frontman is a graduate student in ornithology, has named the band he started with Okkervil River’s Will Sheff after a seabird, and has titled Shearwater’s fifth album after a European crow. It’s nearly impossible to think of Shearwater’s intimate, emotional music — in particular, Meiburg’s seemingly airborne tenor — without such words as soaring, swooping or sailing. Both the quartet and its singer seem to be, like the winged life with which they’re clearly obsessed, on the verge of defying gravity.

Meiburg’s no longer an Okkervil River member, and unlike previous Shearwater albums, Rook does without Sheff's contributions. This is as it should be: Meiburg's found himself as Shearwater’s guiding force and focus. His wafting vocal performance here and the fluttering arrangements gliding around it transcend Shearwater’s initial side project status as a repository for Meiburg and Sheff's quiet songs. As the grinding midsection of opening cut "On the Death of the Waters" makes clear, Rook gets quite loud in parts. With its lopsided rhythms, multiple distorted guitars, and enraged Meiburg vocal, "Century Eyes" is unabashed post-punk.

These brief excursions in clanging fury heighten the hushed beauty of Rook’s fragile bulk. The band’s austere presence on muted guitars, keyboards, and percussion is magnified by strings, woodwinds and horns that maximize Meiburg’s poised sense of dynamics and drama as the instrumentation rises and falls in support of his keening cry. In "I Was a Cloud," the seemingly aerial accompaniment hovers as the singer lovingly contemplates a sparrow. This would be ridiculous if it wasn’t done with such disarming, heartfelt care.

Lots of late-2000s indie bands boast archaic and/or exotic influences, but few use them with the energy and creativity that the Dodos do on Visiter, their first officially released album. Country-blues fingerpicking meets West African Ewe drumming meets metal meets indie pop sounds like an all-too-wacky description on a band's MySpace page, but the Dodos turn these far-flung elements into delightfully natural-sounding music. What holds it all together is Meric Long and Logan Kroeber's strong pop sensibilities -- that's "pop" in the sense of memorable melodies and ear-catching hooks, because the Dodos' songs are too full of ideas to stick to a verse-chorus-verse format for very long. Visiter gets off to a simple, almost shy start with "Walking," which shows off Long's boyish voice (it sits somewhere between Ben Gibbard and Paul McCartney). Then the album really takes off with "Red and Purple," which crashes in on toy pianos and Kroeber's extravagantly syncopated drumming, creating a massive backdrop for the song's limpid melody and vocal harmonies. Visiter rarely lets up from there, coming in such a rush of vibrant words, melodies, and rhythms that it often feels like one ever-changing song. That makes highlights difficult to pick -- although the gleeful "Fools" and "Jodi," which sounds like a timeless folk song revved up to modern-day speeds, are among them. Though the Dodos play mostly acoustic instruments, they generate a lot more energy than many plugged-in bands, and with their rapid dynamic shifts, at times they even rock harder, too (that's where the metal influence comes in). It's a good thing the band only has two core members, since Long and Kroeber have so much going on already that there isn't much room for many other sounds or players. They push and pull against each other, adding the same creative spark and tension to snippets like "Eyelids" that they do to the aptly majestic final track "God?." Long's guitars are especially inspired on "Paint the Rust," where his swift picking and snarling slide work sounds a bit like John Fahey or Jim O'Rourke after several pots of coffee, and on "Winter"'s delicate, descending guitar riff, which swirls and falls lightly like a flurry. Kroeber's drumming is often elaborate, but never too showy, especially on "Park Song," where he gives Long's rambling internal monologue a playful sense of purpose. That purposefulness never flags, even when the Dodos slow it down on wistful but not too-precious ballads like "Ashley," or take one turn too many on the seven-minute patchwork "Joe's Waltz." Visiter's experimental pop is so joyous and liberated-sounding that it's difficult not to get swept along in its wake.

Many modern acts aim for the soulful, but they rarely accomplish it to the same extent that Dr. Dog do on their latest release. “The Beach” warns that “fate has a funny way of coming around” with a slow build reminiscent of the altar call at a sweaty, down-south gospel revival. “The Ark,” “100 Days” and “Army of Ancients” play in the same apocalyptic manner, with bluesy guitars and wailing vocals that take hold of the heartstrings and never let go.

“The Rabbit, The Bat & The Reindeer” and “The Old Days” showcase Dr. Dog’s more quirky and fanciful side with jaunty piano and playful sing-a-longs. With “Hang On” they strike a beautiful balance between the dark and the light with a simple, expressive love song that cries “I don’t need no doctor to tear me all apart/ I just need you to mend my heart.”

The two tracks that bookend My Morning Jacket’s fifth album attest to that centuries-old Christian body/soul divide that sits at the root of good church folk like Jim James and his cohorts. On the one hand, there’s “Evil Urges,” the other, “Good Intentions,” and MMJ know as well as anybody that hell is paved with both of them — meaning the middle path is best. If anything, My Morning Jacket strike a precarious balance on Evil Urges, being still familiar to longtime fans while also reaching for extremes in their sound.

The opening title track swoops in like something beamed down from Radiohead’s OK Computer, anthemic guitars amid spacy keyboard washes, as the conflicted James realizes that “It ain’t evil, baby, if it ain’t hurting anybody.” Much like another Kentuckian, Will Oldham, James couples his choirboy exterior with the animal desires that lurk beneath, mining the fertile fold where the two meet. Or, simply put, James finally digs that the closest one can get to heaven is through some fine fucking. He fantasizes about a “Librarian” hiding “the beauty the Good Lord put there” and aims to help her to find that heaven within. And, with an orgasmic yowl, he looses heaps of sexual frustration on the sublime disco(!) workout “Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt. 2.”

Such lower-half excursions aren’t always divine though; “Highly Suspicious” will make-or-break Urges for a lot of fans. It’s an odd amalgam of canned '80s keytar, complete with a non-sequitur about “peanut butter pudding surprise” and bolstered by James’s highest falsetto and most robo-baritone. If anything, it sounds like the band’s attempt to do Brazilian funk carioca, complete with “Wild Thing” guitar lick. Thankfully, they just as easily swoop back into the familiar soft-rock beatitude of “Thank You Too!” and the demur keen of “Sec Walkin.’” Here, James gauges his every step carefully, exulting in earthly delights around him. Yet all is not well, as he also notes the “demon eyes are watching everywhere.” And so the dark and light forces continue their push and pull.

After splitting with his former band (DeYarmond Edison, who, after relocating to North Carolina, reformed as Megafaun), Justin Vernon holed up in a remote Wisconsin hunting cabin for four frigid months, recording the tracks that would later comprise For Emma, Forever Ago, his haunting debut as Bon Iver. For Emma was self-released by Vernon in 2007 before being picked up by Jagjaguwar in 2008, and while the record may now be an official, bar-coded release, it still feels more like buried treasure, caked with dirt and full of secrets.

Vernon’s high, lonesome yowls are multi-tracked over (mostly) spare acoustic strums; unsurprisingly, Vernon’s guitar feels secondary to his vocals, which are pretty and threatening, primed-to-pierce icicles dangling from a rooftop. Tracks like “Skinny Love” — which, like most of For Emma, sees Vernon lowing about failed relationships — feel distinctly cautionary, with Vernon earnestly admonishing his listeners to be patient, fine, balanced, kind. For Emma is packed with these sorts of tiny lessons and Vernon’s spooky, otherworldly instrumentation only cements the celestial vibe — the cumulative effect is enough to make you momentarily consider camping out in an ice-crusted hut for a long winter, just to see what you can learn about life.

Conventional wisdom holds that jam bands write ten-minute songs with yawning solos in place of enormous choruses and the blank goodwill of a Have a Nice Day button. Plants & Animals are most certainly a jam band — the limber structures of their songs betray a fondness for improvisation — but they also understand the importance of economy. The songs on their first full-length dally only as long as they need to, a few of them stumbling into big finales, most of them just ducking out as humbly as they ducked in.

Like the Band — an ensemble they frequently evoke — Plants & Animals are Canadian. Their songwriting is terrifically incidental, the result of long hours taking slow tours of the same chord progressions, filling in the spaces with stray licks and conversational melodies. With the exception of triumphant opener "Bye Bye Bye" — the one time P&A choose the exclamation point over the ellipses — Parc Avenue proceeds at a hobo's amble. The guitars spill out like a babbling brook, a series of rippling notes that glide over stone-smooth percussion. The players follow each other's lead. A little organ waggle begets a curlicue of acoustic guitar, that acoustic guitar tips off a grizzled electric.

Lead singer Warren Spicer's timbre is reedy and weedy, falling into the tiny crevice that separates Bob Dylan from Mark Knopfler. He wheezes out his lyrics, changing volume more than he changes pitch. He leans hard into arbitrary words, turning his verse into a series of freewheeling tone poems. "I saw a woman and a maaaaan/ become a huzz-band and a wiiiiiiife," goes "Mercy," but you get the sense that those itals could have ended up anywhere. It all depends on how the mood strikes him.

Their chief lyrical concerns are mostly pragmatic. In "A L'oree De Bois" they worry the din from rowdy soccer fans in the street will screw up their album, but it sounds like it's gonna be alright, man; just close the window and keep on chooglin'. They even manage a bit of slacker profundity; Spicer at one point sighs, "It takes an enemy to help you get out of bed." The sentiment is profound, but a little hard to buy. After all, who could hate such good-natured loafers?

"I am seriously depressed about my level of energy," Diva Dompe sighs at the outset the aptly-titled "Energy Song." Really? You are? Because if you're low on energy, the rest of us are stone dead, sad pale excuses for viable human beings. Throughout Blackblack Diva and sister Lola (with some assistance from ex-Phantom Planet vocalist Alex Greenwald on guitar) bound, leap, squeal and shout, barreling through eight gloriously ragtag pop songs, focusing on the frayed edges and the big blemishes instead of the shiny centers. Blackblack make imperfection perfect, proudly brandishing ragged guitars, pounding on busted drums and choosing a giddy holler over a practiced croon.

It's the revival of a lost aesthetic, the same kind of ragged charm favored by old-time indie heartthrobs like BMX Bandits and Talulah Gosh and Marine Girls, the order of the day before someone showed up with the soap and water and singing lessons and turned the whole enterprise into a crash course in good manners. "The Most! The Best! The Greatest!" is impish and hyperactive, Diva and Lola belting out the chorus — "The most! The Best! The Greatest! Foreverrrr! Foreeehhveehhrrrr!" — over and over as guitars collide behind them. They veer beautifully off-pitch again and again — which is precisely what the song demands.

It doesn't hurt that the sisters sound like grade schoolers, their voices brash and naïve. In "I Wish I Were a Scientist" Diva could be a 6 year-old dropout, pouting, "I wish I were a scientist/ but I've never been good in school" as guitars twitch and cymbals crash haphazardly. Elsewhere she's introspective, sighing "do you like sugar in your tears" atop moping bass. And if the music is just as green -- a cluster of bare guitar chords, some out-of-time drums – so much the better. It's the kind of wild abandon some people call "amateurish," some call "winning," some call "punk."

Here's something else you can call it: energy.

For all their wrangling to stockpile cred in the dance music world, In Ghost Colours still finds Cut Copy leaning heavily on the retro pop style of 2004 debut Bright Like Neon Love.

The flurry of trumpeting synths that announces album-opener "Feel the Love" soon melts into a prominent three-chord acoustic strum, with singer Dan Whitford breathily emoting about "all the clouds [having] silver linings." In a turn that could define the sonic push-and-pull of the album, the song then swivels into an arpeggiated synth stomp, complete with panned vocoder chants. The first third of In Ghost Colours builds on this theme, incorporating dance sounds new n' old (check the 4/4 bass thump and Italo-style clipped keys on "Out There on the Ice" and "Lights & Music"'s cascading, almost-trance synth line). The credible dance production here could be due in large part to the album’s co-producer Tim Goldsworthy, part-owner of white-hot NYC disco-dance label DFA.

Despite the techno dabbling, Cut Copy’s strength still lies in crafting — and adorning — a concise pop hook. “Unforgettable Season” pairs pillowy synth gauze with chiming guitars while (real!) drums gallop through a dreamy Neon Love-like melody from Whitford. Inevitable-single “So Haunted” is the most immediate gut-punch here: a submerged Kevin Shields-ian guitar squall and one-chord piano pound dominate the verses before a soaring chorus that manages to sound both delicate and anthemic. It’s the perfect illustration of Colours’ m.o.: a uniquely thrilling straddle between thumping dance and sparkling pop.

With all due respect to Springsteen-loving outfits such as the Hold Steady and Arcade Fire, the Boss already has some local boys who seem to have the apprenticeship locked down tight. The members of New Brunswick, N.J.’s the Gaslight Anthem are young and hungry, earnest to a fault and apparently very eager to impress upon us their warped-cassette copies of Born In The USA: “No surrender, my Bobby Jean,” sings frontman Brian Fallon on the band’s second full-length, economically fitting together his Springsteen references like Tetris blocks. So it’s no surprise that The ’59 Sound is filled with songs about working-class heroes and hard-luck teenagers cruising around in the backseats of cars and washing away sin with cheap whiskey and beer. The shocker is that the Gaslight Anthem has taken these well-worn Jersey-rebel themes and revived them through the sheer power of youth.

Opening with the crackling speaker noise of a needle hitting vinyl, The ’59 Sound echoes all around the ragged-rock corners of a record collection. It particularly tends to linger in mid-period Replacements (circa Tim and Pleased To Meet Me) on “Casanova, Baby!” and the title track, with Fallon nailing the raspy anxiety of Paul Westerberg and small-town malcontents everywhere. Guitarist Alex Levine alternately chugs and chimes, never settling too deep into Social Distortion-style punk riffing or Tom Petty pop jangle, resulting in songs that are more durable than derivative. Even those who would scoff at Fallon cribbing song titles from movies (the single-gal lament “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues,” the ex-girlfriend weeper “Here’s Looking At You, Kid”) have to admit it’s kind of endearing. The Gaslight Anthem is trying too hard in all the right ways.

Any good concept album has a compelling character at its core, and Skeletal Lamping is no exception. Protagonist Georgie Fruit isn't just any transgender middle-aged black man — he has undergone multiple sex changes, making him the perfect alter ego for charismatic and chameleonic Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes, whose musical persona is capricious, unsettled and over-the-top. And also very horny.

Skeletal Lamping is packed with blush-worthy come-ons draped in imitation-Prince squeals. Georgie, throughout the album, comes across alternately as a savvy bedroom connoisseur and a disposable plaything for the sexually curious. He's a product of the disco era, and his after-bar stories are set to limber bass lines and a driving beat. But the quieter moments reveal his insecurity, his damaged self-esteem and contemplation of yet another surgery.

Despite the personal crisis that shapes the album's narrative, Barnes, perhaps unsurprisingly, never loses his playful side. In "For Our Elegant Caste," for instance, he refers to Georgie's transformation as "a freaky permutation, something like Voltron," making clear that Georgie's stints under the knife didn't sacrifice his sense of humor.

As they have graduated and mutated from modest indie pop to extravagant, massive glam-pop, Of Montreal's vision has become grander, and their approach more intricate. An album like Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? with its kaleidoscopic sound palette (and album cover) piled sounds and ideas and moods and approaches in elegant layers. Skeletal Lamping takes it even farther, with results that require patience. But with its majestic three-part falsetto harmonies and engrossing narrative, it's patience well spent.

Mark Eitzel, patron saint of sad bastards, first hung his halo with San Francisco-based American Music Club way back in 1982. Over the next 13 years, the singer/songwriter — along with core members Vudi (guitar) and Dan Pearson (bass) — cast a narrow but intense ray of light on slow-burning rock songs dedicated to boozy introspection and romantic loserdom. Eitzel went on hiatus from AMC in 1995, only to reform the band eight years later for Love Songs for Patriots, an album that’s a touch twangier and more contentious than its predecessors, perhaps due to its wartime coincidence.

War still rages around us during The Golden Age, but aside from “The Windows on the World” — a ruminative song whose title refers to the restaurant that once occupied the top floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center — American Music Club is in a particularly mellow mood. Eitzel’s trademark voice, somewhere between Morrissey moan and Dando drawl, still lays bare a weary heart. But he’s often hoping instead of hurting (opening track “All My Love” is a come-hither slow jam on fingerpicked acoustic guitar); encouraging instead of self-pitying (the ’70s soft rock affirmation “Who You Are”). As a result, The Golden Age is one of AMC’s prettiest records, with guitarist Vudi mostly muzzling his feedback forays and the band taking detours into Lambchop-like orchestral country territory. With some new blood (drummer Steve Didelot and bassist Sean Hoffman, both formerly of country outfit the Larks) and a relocation to Los Angeles (where Vudi drives a city bus), Eitzel and Co. seem sunnier than ever.

But who buys an American Music Club album to hear a well-adjusted, content Mark Eitzel and his more polished band? Truth be told, the 49-year-old Eitzel is outgrowing his myopia and replacing it with stellar storytelling. “A Patriot’s Heart,” a character sketch of a male stripper, was the centerpiece song of 2003’s Love Songs for Patriots. On The Golden Age, he looks back at the city he just left with “The Grand Duchess of San Francisco” and “All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco,” the latter of which is a fond remembrance of the misfits, barflies and bohemians Eitzel encountered over the years. Though his bandmates and address have changed, Eitzel remains steadfast in his belief that you can go home again.

Breathe Owl Breathe sing of folklore and homespun miracles, oral histories left to thaw in the earth's crust until pre-history's giant ice cubes rolled their wet bulk down the North Pole and into Canada, finally settling into extinction in what we now call the Great Lakes. It's from the shores of these bodies that Breathe Owl Breathe come (Ann Arbor, Michigan, to be precise), and it's in the shadows of those hollowed troughs that these eight songs rest. These are songs about being left behind, songs about being dead, songs without geography, songs worth repeating.

The music is very economical — guitar, cello, drums, piano, other organic sounds — and the vocals float between folk and country, a very earnest mood. It sounds a lot like Smog — singer Micah Middaugh and Bill Callahan have similar voice boxes — and at other times early Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams and, in the case of "Your Cape," even Loretta Lynn. There's a distinctly — and very specifically — American folk tradition at work here, and I don't get the feeling that Breathe Owl Breathe at all mind their limited scope.

The kinda stuff that drew Alan Lomax and Harry Smith deep into Appalachia and the American South forms the foundation of Breathe Owl Breathe's spare, rustic sound. When singer Micah Middaugh belts, "I've got a toboggan," in the last cut, it could easily pass for a boast, a cataloguing of lower-class luxury the way bluesmen might sing of women and whiskey. Mostly Middaugh and his Colombian co-vocalist/cellist Andréa Moreno-Beals sing about ghosts and winter (it is a descriptive album title), sometimes literally ("Playing Dead," "Toboggan," "Sabertooth Tiger") and sometimes in the context of a relationship ("Your Cape," "Sylvia Plath").

The marriage of their music and lyrics is the sort of chance meeting that becomes a 60th anniversary in a blink. Middaugh, Moreno-Beals and drummer Trevor Hobbs are easy and fluid with one another, enabling their songs to (deceptively) feel more like happy accidents than serious, premeditated songwriting. That's where their charm lies. And that's why we chose them for eMusic Selects. Whether or not you're listening hardly matters: this music has always existed, and always will.

Long after we've been through sluggish winters and big empty beds and weekend trips to Gloucester, New York quintet Ra Ra Riot state, without pretense or opacity, what it is they are all about. It's simple and direct, and repetition makes it stick: "We’ve got a lot to learn from each other, we have got to stick together."

This is no idle sentiment. Over the course of a fistful of months, Ra Ra Riot went from the center of a whirlwind of hype to the ¬backend of a harrowing tailspin, buffeted by bum label deals, bailing band members and, tragically, the death of drummer and songwriter John Ryan Pike in 2007. If there was any group of people uniquely suited to weigh in on the question of staying together versus falling apart, it's this one.

Tellingly, there's not an elegy in sight on The Rhumb Line — it's all triumph and celebration and unity, turning floodlights on the dark shadows and blowing rude raspberries at the Reaper. There's a brightness that radiates from the record, each song giving off a soft, serene glow.

Maybe it's the strings. Ra Ra Riot uses cello and violin the way other bands use electric guitar: as backbone, carrying the melody instead of complementing it. The instruments make everything sound stately: "St. Peter's Day Festival" would be a simple speedy pop number, but it ascends the second the strings swoop in, gaining poise and stature. It's as if every song were wearing a tuxedo: "Winter '05" is a miniature waltz, just a simple backbeat, the gallant cello and violin and Wes Miles’s plummy, pleading voice. Even the faster ones — and the album is full of faster ones — seem refined. "Each Year" skips giddily forward, guitars twitching, drums tumbling forward, but violin tucked neatly front and center like a pocket square. And they turn Kate Bush's "Suspended in Gaffa" inside out, letting the strings sub for Bush's strange vocalizing and straightening out the cockeyed melody line.

The bulk of the record was written before Pike's passing — many of the songs were written by Pike himself — so any reflection on the tragedy is incidental. It's hard to listen to the ee cummings-cribbing "Dying Is Fine," though, and not notice the prescience. It's a rollicking, breathless number, built around a simple refrain: "You know that dying is fine, but maybe/ I wouldn't like death if death were good." Like most Ra Ra Riot songs, it starts slowly, a few guitar palpitations, a dapper cello, a moody vocal. But it gets to the chorus and it's off, and the glorious melody undercuts the song's somber message. This, of course, is Ra Ra Riot's greatest feat: in their hands, even mourning sounds like celebration.

The Bright Eyes frontman could scarcely be making it clearer that he is returning to basics. He's ditched the name under which he is best known, disassociated himself from long-serving producer Mike Mogis, holed up in a mountain villa in Mexico with a few compadres ¬ known collectively as the Mystic Valley Band ¬and produced a record upon which he has stamped his own name as a title. The unmistakable subtext of Conor Oberst is: "This is me."

As it turns out, all of the above are as much bluffs as genuine upheavals. Oberst is still thankfully ¬ recognizably the prodigy who animated Bright Eyes' wondrous 2007album Cassadaga. Though the arrangements on Conor Oberst are less fiddly, the songs are no less ambitious: complex, wordy, infused with an air of crepuscular fragility that reminds of the earlier works of Elliott Smith and the more vulnerable works of Oberst's obvious idol Bob Dylan. If there is a difference, it's that though Oberst's stock-in-trade remains lachrymose balladry ("Lenders in the Temple" and "Eagle on a Pole" are worthy additions to his canon of heartbreak), this album also benefits from a flourishing of a more playful impulse: "Moab" revels grinningly in its self-pity ("There's nothing that the road cannot heal," Oberst promises himself), and "Sausalito" has the irresistible feel of having been as much fun to play as it is to hear.

Ex-marching band drummer-turned DJ-turned producer from Spokane, WA, James Pants explains the spirit of his first full-length -- on the same label responsible for breaking underground hip-hop mavericks Madlib, J Dilla, and Guilty Simpson -- by saying, "It's just the sound of really cheap equipment, listening to a lot of records, and goofing off." Left of center even by Stones Throw's eclectic standards, Welcome isn't a hip-hop release, per se. Instead, it appropriates and revitalizes electro sounds of the '80s, adding elements of soul, new wave, post-punk, and techno along the way. Made up of primarily old-school sounds from vintage synths and drum machines that he scored from thrift stores, Pants played the remaining drum, keyboard, bass, and guitar parts himself in his garage studio, and the record sounds remarkably true to the era that he's emulating, mainly due to his pile of analog gear. "Cosmic Rapp" is flavored with claps from a Roland CR-8000 CompuRhythm, gummy synth-bass, and robo-vocals sung through a vocoder, turning it into a pop-locking jam worthy of a block party DJ set, right between Whodini's "Five Minutes of Funk" and Newcleus' "Jam on It." While carbonated synth gurgles and 808 beats are the heart of the first couple tracks, other cuts are more progressive. "My Girl" and "Finger on the Knife" are drum-heavy shout-alongs that share more in common with indie rock than indie rap, and "Crystal Lite" and "Ka$H" (which both feature soul singer Deacon Leon Davis) could practically be Gnarls Barkley B-sides. Unfortunately, consistency isn't Pants' strong point, and the latter half of the CD falters with a spattering of sparse instrumentals that feel more like skeletal after-thoughts than fully developed creations. At the grandest moments, Pants accomplishes his mission of re-creating the dance-happy fun funk of Chromeo and Cameo, and the cardboard-spinning electro boogie of Arabian Prince and Egyptian Lover. If you're feeling retro, you can't ask for much more than that.

Stephen Malkmus is indie rock's North Star: he is constant; he is omnipresent; he is full of hot gases. Pacing the entire genre with clever verbosity, loosey-goosey melodies and so much style that it's wasted, Malk has been indie's mainstay ever since "Box Elder" bowled folks over in '89, all the while remaining detached and aloof from what he has wrought, popping in to occasionally chastise when warranted ("Range Life") or to uncork a real beaut when we least expected it ("Church on White"). No one can claim Malkmus — not Pavement, not Portland, not you.

Real Emotional Trash is Malkmus' fourth solo record and maybe his best. My Pavement fandom began to wane with Brighten the Corners (too goofy for me) and kaputted with Terror Twilight, and Malkmus' solo stuff hasn't done much to change my mind. But Real Emotional Trash is solid through and through (peep the title track, "Gardenia" and "Dragonfly Pie"), with one song in particular, "Out of Reaches," rivaling anything on the beloved Wowee Zowee, including its inspirational cousin "AT&T," which was as good a song as any Pavement ever wrote.

"Out of Reaches" is Malkmus melancholy, punches pulled. He's straight bumming, cracking on "gale-force intimacy" (great phrase!) while a sustained guitar note shadows his melody (shades of "Pueblo"). All of which is well and great, but it's the Billy Preston middle-eight that brings this thing home: fuzzed-out keys grooving along early-'70s coke-rock style to Malkmus' guitar wheelies. It's not terribly different from what he's done over the past decade, but, for me at least, it clicks in a way that his previous solo stuff has not.

As to where to affix praise (or blame) for indie-rock's suddenly global tastes, innumerable factors come to mind: borderless bit-torrenting, the globe-trotting epicurean tastes of the Soul Jazz imprint and downtown New York record emporium Other Music, as well as the oeuvre of Animal Collective. The latter no doubt factors into the music made by El Guincho (aka Pablo Díaz-Reixa), but here that current is reversed: Díaz-Reixa hails from Spain, and seeks to make such "world music" distinctions a quaint 20th-century notion.

El Guincho's Alegranza! is a headswimming sampledelic swirl along the lines of Panda Bear's Person Pitch, but where that album frequently drifted into a beatific haze, Díaz-Reixa keeps the ecstatic joy and heart-bursting hand-percussion beats strictly foregrounded throughout. Rooted in thundering tribal drum lines, handclaps, untranslatable group chants and metallophone melodies snatched from who-knows-how-many Lyrichord and Folkways field recordings, the album aims to go around the world in 80 seconds with each and every song. "Prez Lagarto" barrels forward despite outcrops of odd noises and Díaz-Reixa's yelped vocals while "Buenos Matrimonios Ahí Fuera" takes children choruses and chimes at a slightly more languorous pace (evoking Animal Collective's Feels). That's the only breather though, as "Antillas" loops a golden Afrobeat guitar line (Franco perhaps?) to promptly resume El Guincho's gleeful globetrotting dash.