Check it out: my numbers have gone up. I started out averaging about 6-8 readers a day and somehow, I’ve managed to get up above 20 readers a day in the last couple of months. That’s not shit for other blogs, I’m sure, but it fills me with the warm-and-fuzzies. Much gratitude to the folks who’ve found something fun to read here over the last year and a half. And I want to ask a question of those readers who have been around for a while (new readers can attempt to answer this question too, but it helps if you’ve read several posts). What are the odds, based on your reading, that I will like an album laden with synthesizers, programmed drums, and chirping girlie vocals? I think we can all agree that the odds are extremely long that I will enjoy such an album. Extremely.

The thing is: I think I have some sort of infection (let’s call it Annie-itis), and I think it was caused by Annie’s Don’t Stop album. It has wormed its way into my brain and is stuffing my synaptic clefts with sugary pop songs – if their is a musical equivalent to diabetes, I’m going to get it for sure. And I should fucking hate this album. As an experiment, my second time through, I tried to hate this album. I can’t do it.

Maybe I shouldn’t hate this album. I’ve never disliked good pop (like the Beatles and even Michael Jackson’s Thriller album – astute listeners have been pretending that Jackson died after making that album and experienced no great shock this summer. It’s been a real time saver for me), but I do hate bad pop and our culture is inundated with really awful pop. Now, a lot of pop (even some of the good stuff) can still be lyrically dumb but it usually features a melodic hook that pulls your brain out through your nose and replaces it with sugar, sunshine, and orgasms. These days, a lot of pop is reliant on pre-progammed/sequenced music and beats. Of course, there are exceptions, like the New Pornographers who still play pop with actual instruments. But because the technology is so readily available, it’s now easier than ever before to make a really shitty pop record (“buy yourself a sequencer/ and let the games begin,” Annie sings on “I Don’t Like Your Band”).

My first trip through Don’t Stop was a sugary haze; I rode the first six tracks all the way to Heaven. To quote the late Captain Murphy, it was “like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain.” Subsequent trips through the album have had similar, if diminishing, results. Don’t Stop definitely falls off toward the end, but it’s still better than, say, anything Chris Brown can muster. Throughout, Annie displays an uncanny ability to knock out a memorable, danceable pop tune. Even her bad songs (and there are a few here – “The Breakfast Song” is the most offensive to my ears) are still catchy, and that gives the listener some encouragement to wade through them to get to the good stuff. Because Annie’s good stuff is fucking perfect, as pop music goes. “Hey, Annie” opens the album gloriously and the first half of the album is amazing and unrelenting, right up to “Marie Cherie,” which begins its slow decline. The album never really makes it to Awfultown, but it’s definitely loitering around Mediocreville by the time “Heaven and Hell” closes things up.

And maybe what really hamstrings Don’t Stop is the fact that Annie’s good stuff is so good. Songs like “The Breakfast Song” and “Heaven and Hell” sound all the worse for sitting next to songs like the title track and “I Don’t Like Your Band” (which may be the year’s most perfect pop tune).” I’m not suggesting Annie should repeat herself (a trap many pop artists fall into), but she’s definitely at her best when the tempo is up and she’s being playful.

Apparently, a copy of Don’t Stop leaked last year – when the album was originally supposed to be released – that had a different track listing. This blog offers a correction to the final version of Don’t Stop and it suggests to me that the dropped tracks might indeed be worth checking out (which would mean obtaining them through less-than-legal means. Bollocks! doesn’t officially encourage stealing from anyone except for EMI. Fuck those clowns), especially if they are a little less of a slog than “Marie Cherie”, which is (unsurprisingly) the longest track on the album. Other down-tempo tunes on Don’t Stop work just fine (“Take You Home,” which immediately follows “Marie Cherie,” is excellent. Best line: “I don’t love you/ I want to take you home”), so it’s not that Annie can’t pull off slower tunes. Even “When the Night” has its merits, except that it’s followed by “Heaven and Hell,” which is an aimless and unfitting closer to such a sumptuous pop feast.

Overall, though, Don’t Stop is still a must-have for fans of dancey pop music. Even without the dropped tracks, you can improve the disc by skipping “Marie Cherie” and stopping the album after “When the Night”, leaving you with ten songs that range from good to superb.

Well, kids, I’m off to Seattle tomorrow morning to celebrate the birth of my good buddy Jesus with my future in-laws. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be updating much between now and the 28th, but I’ll probably cough up some year-end listy goodness upon my return, for those who are interested in that sort of thing. Year-end lists are always arbitrary so I’ll be calling my list(s) “my favorite” whatevers of 2009. I don’t presume (despite accusations to the contrary) to know the absolute best of anything. Music is a subjective art form so trying to pretend there are objective criteria for ranking albums is a fool’s errand. There are lots of albums from this year that I have listened to and not reviewed (early trips through Lucero’s 1372 Overton Park are proving fruitful), but I’ll get to ‘em eventually, I promise. If you like to list stuff, feel free to post a comment with your favorite few albums from the year (I’m probably going to do 13 albums because 13 is a nice arbitrary number and I feel it suits the arbitrary nature of the exercise). Whatever holidays you celebrate, I hope they’re merry/joyous/alcohol-fueled.  So Bollocks! to all and to all, a good drink.

Editor’s Note: I said I was going to review Creed’s new album, Full Circle, knowing full well that I wouldn’t like it. Well, in this season of giving, I’ve decided to relent. I sought out someone who would be infinitely more merciful to Creed than I could ever be. My first choice was His Holiness, the Dalai Lama but when I sent him a copy of the album he said, “I love you, Matt, but we Tibetans have suffered enough.” So then I remembered that Creed kinda has a thing for Jesus and I figured I’d let him take the reins and share his thoughts with us about Full Circle. Below, completely uncensored, is Jesus Christ’s review of the new Creed album.

Hi. I’m Jesus Christ. I don’t usually contribute to Bollocks!, but I’m doing a friend a favor (Chorpenning and I get together about once a year; I bring him John Coltrane bootlegs from Heaven and, in exchange, he supplies me with delicious microbrews. Keep this on the do-lo, okay? I don’t want the zealots getting all lathered up about the Rapture – I’ll initiate that particular party when y’all stop speculating about it, savvy?). I am a big fan of a lot of different kinds of music (Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix collaborated on an album last year that literally induces the listener to orgasm – but you can’t get it down here) and I was quite game to give Creed a listen since my pal claims he’s incapable of giving them a fair hearing.

Contrary to popular belief, I’ve never listened to Creed before. I hear that their singer, Scott Stapp, likes to imitate me from time to time. That’s cool, I s’pose. At any rate, I’ve listened to Full Circle several times now and, since I’m the All High Judge of Everybody (what can I say? I love my job), I expect that you will take my word as Gospel.

Full Circle is a great album.

Permit me to clarify: Full Circle is great album if you like trite, empty, corporate rock that fits like peas in a pod between Kid Rock and Nickelback (by the way, if Heaven has a greater musical enemy than Kid Rock, it can only be Ted Nugent). It’s great if you like a singer who sounds like he’s trying to shit out a bowling ball while simultaneously attempting to imitate Eddie Vedder’s sound from the first two Pearl Jam records (try this for me: while you’re listening to any given Creed song, just put on your best Vedder and sing “Jeremy spoke in class today” all weird and elongated – you’ll see what I’m getting at here). It’s awesome if you like a band that likes to sandwich wanky guitar solos between verses of single-fingered, Drop D “power chords” (for non-guitar people: you can tune your low E string down to a D, which gives you the option of playing “power chords” with just your index finger instead of the typical barred-chord fashion). I am only going to say this once, ye believers, so listen up: single-fingered “power chords” are the last refuge of scoundrels and complete pussies.

Lyrically, Full Circle is a mishmash of pain, blood, rain, crumbling walls, shame, heartache, hope, and light. I think Stapp (I assume he writes this dreck) might literally just be pulling words like that out of a hat and pasting them into lines about how tortured he either is now or used to be or both. He starts the album off by singing about how he’s “entitled” to overcome. Let’s examine this phrase, can we? It bothers the piss outta me and here’s why: overcoming things (usually obstacles) has nothing to do with your rights. In fact, obstacles tend to arise in direct defiance of what you think you’re entitled to. You don’t earn the right to overcome an obstacle, you get off your ass and overcome it. I’d have no problem with Stapp singing about “trying” to overcome something (other than the fact that song is by-the-numbers radio rock. Like Metallica meets Switchfoot. And by the way, if that combination fires up your salivary glands, you should know that you’re going to hell) but singing about having the right to overcome something is nonsense. By the way, Mr. Stapp, I overcame motherfucking death and I didn’t need to sing a song about how I was entitled to do so. That’s how you roll Messiah-style.

Elsewhere, Stapp is lyrically preoccupied with fighting and struggling (I guess, implicitly, he’s struggling to overcome. Or to assert his right to overcome if he should so choose at some point), though he never really articulates the nature of these struggles, the foes with whom he’s struggling (and the first person to suggest he’s struggling with himself will be struck by lightning. Don’t test me), or really anything other than maintaining that he’s going to keep on fighting. Over the course of Full Circle, Scott Stapp comes off as a completely humorless person and that makes me really sad. The old blues masters (I don’t mean Eric Clapton, white people. I mean Leadbelly and Robert Johnson) sang songs about being about as busted-ass as you can be – Leadbelly sang about not being able to go places because he was black – but there was always a sense of laughter behind the moaning. In the face of feeling about as bad as you can feel, these dudes maintained their humor (and my friend Mr. Johnson, I can assure you, also maintained a harem of womenfolk across the entire country, women who were willing and able to squeeze his lemon until the juice ran down his leg – this is part of what got him killed, but he hasn’t stopped to this day. Dude still gets all the finest women in Heaven. You can bet your ass Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts were shocked to arrive at the Pearly Gates and find an entire afterlife full of mixed-race blues babies). It’s a life lesson that is apparently lost on Scott Stapp, which is really too bad. Humor gets us through the very worst that life can throw at us. When I was on the cross, the thief to my right recognized me and said, “Jesus! What are you doing here?” I lolled my head over toward him and said, “Oh, I’m just hangin’ out.”

Jesus Christ can be reached through prayer, though he is not always inclined to answer. He wishes it to be known that, of his favorite 10 albums of 2009, only one can be found here on Earth: Middle Cyclone by Neko Case. He also told me to tell Neko Case to call him, but I patiently explained that I have no way to reach Ms. Case. If you happen to be Neko Case and you happen to be reading this (unlikely), I think Jesus has a crush on you. He also said that there’s no war on Christmas, so all the right-wing people who are on about that can “shut the fuck up” (his words, not mine. And his words are gospel, kids).

George Carlin once wrote, “The only good thing ever to come out of religion was the music.” And certainly, spirituality and music go together like chocolate and peanut butter (unless you’re Switchfoot. I have it on good authority that Jesus hates that band. And don’t even get me started on Creed). The Beatles did drugs and went to India to kick it with mystics and managed to get some good tunes out of the adventure (not least of which was “Within You, Without You.” If you like that song as much as I do, you’ll probably love Sonic Youth’s cover of it. You can find it on the second disc of their Legacy Edition of Daydream Nation). Tom Waits has collaborated on two exceedingly beautiful pieces of religious music: Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (I know it should be “Jesus’s” not “Jesus’” but I wrote it the way it appears on the disc) with Gavin Bryars and “Lord, I’ve Been Changed” from John Hammond’s (completely awesome) Wicked Grin record. John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is a love letter to God. So I wasn’t discouraged to read that Nicholas Delffs, vocalist for my much-beloved Shaky Hands (from my much-beloved Portland) went on a trip to India, found some inspiration, and then came back to make a completely sitar-free, meat-and-potatoes rock record.

Let It Die is the third Shaky Hands record (and only the second one I’ve heard. The Shaky Hands won their way into my heart with last year’s Lunglight) and it forefronts the band’s Beatles/Good (read: early) Stones influence where their last album had a pretty heavy (at least to my ears) early R.E.M. influence. At any rate, Let It Die is the poppiest album I’ve heard from Delffs and company (“company” includes bearded badass bassist Mayhaw Hoons), and its clanging guitars and stomping drums are, to say the least, goddamn charming.

There’s really nothing new on Let It Die; it even closes with an “I Went to India and All I Got was this Profound Sense of Peace” hymn called “Leave It All” (Zombie George Harrison would be so proud, if only he could stop chowing on Ringo’s brain long enough to listen). And, up to that point, there are hand-claps, howls and growls galore, and a generally good time is had by all. There is one sort of regrettable track, “Gonna Hold You Tonight,” which, while earnest, still comes across as slightly forced. And being “nothing new” is hardly a bad thing – someone once said there’s nothing new under the sun (my favorite current band, the Hold Steady pretty much traffics in classic rock for people who read poetry and, you know, literature) and they were probably right. It’s what you do with the same ol’ same ol’ that really sets you apart.

The Shaky Hands’ greatest asset in that department, the thing that prevents me from dismissing them as another band with the same record collection I have (mostly), is Nicholas Delffs’s voice. He has an all-time great rock ‘n’ roll yelp and he sings every word with conviction, tearing into album opener “Let It Die” like a lion tearing into the slowest zebra in the herd (for those of you who are wondering how ferocious that is, consider that a single lion is successful on the hunt only about 15% of the time* – so, assuming Delffs is a lone lion, just imagine how you’d tear into some food if you skipped meals 85% of the time and calibrate accordingly). His growly warble is actually more melodic on this album than it was on Lunglight and you can actually understand more of what he’s saying, which is a big plus. Although I have to say that one of my favorite things about this band is that their singer actually sounds like a guy who has shaky hands.

Let It Die is an almost surprisingly tuneful album – it’s one of those treasures that I find myself listening to several times a day, a feat I didn’t achieve with Lunglight until I’d had it a while. Of course, it helps that I keep forgetting my CDs when I leave the apartment and Let It Die is the disc currently in my car’s player. But I haven’t gotten sick of it (listening to it right now in fact, for about the 9th time in three days) and, in fact, I find a new favorite song each time  I listen to it. Right now, my current favorite is “All You Recall” which marries Rolling Stones guitars to a Beatles pop melody carried on Delffs’s shaky voice and featuring some really pleasant harmonies on the refrain. Where Lunglight was pervaded by a sort of quivering paranoia, Let It Die wants to rock out until it breaks itself. The spirit Nicholas Delffs found in India moved him to shake his moneymaker and craft a killer rock album – I’ll even excuse the “Hare Krishna” bollocks on “Leave It All” because, at the end of the day, it’s a really lovely song. Although the best spiritual moment on the album still comes from the title track, a raucous ode to impermanence (“there’s a world that’s comin’ on/ you gotta/ let it die!“). If I ever meet the Dalai Lama, I’m gonna clap that shit on his headphones, let him rock to it for a minute or two, and then I fully expect him to remove the headphones, look me dead in the eye, and say, “Matt, that’s what I’ve been saying all along.”**

* according to naturalist George Shaller. In the 60s, I think. Your lion mileage may vary.

** had a friend in college who saw the DL (Tenzin Gyatso, to his parents. And seriously, if your kid grows up to be the Dalai Fucking Lama, you get all time bragging rights in your neighborhood. “Jimmy is going to med school.” “Oh yeah? Tenzin is the 14th Dalai Lama. Suck it, Jimmy.”) speak and said that His Holiness was snacking on caramel chews quite enthusiastically throughout his speech. I only bring this up because it seems kinda funny to me and it may also be a sign of enlightenment. Discuss.

I’m going to be 30 next month. I wasn’t quite a teenager when Pearl Jam’s Ten came out and their music resonated very strongly with me. At the time, I thought, “This is my music. I will love this music forever.” And I still love a lot of Pearl Jam’s early stuff (Vs. is flawless), but I’ve approached their last few records with a mixture of trepidation and skepticism. Early reviews of Backspacer (their new album, available semi-exclusively at Target. They made a deal with the indie shops to release the album as well, which has muddied the debate over whether or not the Target deal was a 100% dick move, but I know this much is true: 1992 Eddie Vedder would never have done that, and was probably missing more meals than 2009 Eddie Vedder) seemed to suggest that Pearl Jam had begun to rock again. My hopes, because they’re stupid, soared.

I think one question can help us narrow down whether or not you’ll like Backspacer. At first, the question will seem unrelated, but I’ll tie it all together with, to borrow a phrase from my (dead) hero George Carlin, my usual flawless logic. Here’s the question: Are you going to watch the Who perform at the Super Bowl halftime show? Subquestion within a question: are you going to watch it enthusiastically? Sub-subquestion within in a question: Really? Everyone in their right mind loves Who’s Next and would love to have a time machine so they could go back and see the Who play live. But do you really want to see Roger Daltrey (whose hopes were clearly dashed – he didn’t die before he got old) and Pete Townshend stumble about on stage in front of… of who, exactly? They sure as fuck won’t be playing with Keith Moon and John Entwistle, so why should I care? Pearl Jam is not quite that advanced a case (i.e., all of Pearl Jam’s most stable lineup is still living), but here’s what I’m getting at: the great albums of our youth may be great forever, but the bands that made them might not be (might not be. Some bands/artists can age amazingly gracefully – I’ve trotted out examples all over this blog in the last year and a half, so I’ll let you fill in the blanks on your own) and we’re doing ourselves a disservice to pretend that they are.

Backspacer makes me cringe from start to finish, resulting in a roughly forty minute frowny-face. Pearl Jam still sort of recognizes the essential elements of rock ‘n’ roll, but Vedder’s lyrics have gotten at least half-stupid (“I’m gonna see my friend & make it go away”?! Also, he rhymes “everything” with “friend” by pronouncing it “every thin”) and it feels like Pearl Jam has devolved into awesome guitar solos surfacing in the middle of a sewage leak. Yes, Pearl Jam’s two guitar players, Stone Gossard and Mike McCready, are still the best part of the band. It’s just not enough any more.

Over the last several albums, Eddie Vedder has relied more and more on what I call his Screamy Voice. Vedder has a pretty nice baritone but these days, he’s singing like he resents it. Even the croony tunes on Backspacer are now augmented by a reedy, nasal twang – the kinda thing coffee house dudes add to their notes to let you know that they’re being soulful (this absolutely ruins “Just Breathe” for me by belaboring its rather obvious melodic hook. It’s a shame, too, because “Just Breathe” is one of the two songs on this album that I could nearly like). Seems to me that Vedder used to have a better grasp of when to growl and when to actually sing.

I’d be remiss in my disappointment with Backspacer if I didn’t devote some attention to its lead single, “The Fixer.” It’s Pearl Jam’s poppiest single to date (maybe “Last Kiss” comes close), which wouldn’t be so bad if “The Fixer” wasn’t so…well…dumb. “When something’s gone/ I wanna fight to get it back again” sings Vedder, like a guy who just wants to help you out, man. The intention is laudable but the phrasing is lazy and here’s why: you should be specific about what you’ll fight to get back when it’s gone. For instance, the Third Reich is gone. I wouldn’t fight to get it back but, within the context of “The Fixer”, Eddie Vedder will. “Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah,” (that’s the chorus!) sing the dancing Nazis. Am I really suggesting that Eddie Vedder would fight to bring back Hitler? Of course I don’t think he’s a fascist, but I agree with George Carlin’s assertion that “the quality of our thoughts is only as good as the quality of our language” and the quality of Vedder’s language on “The Fixer” is somewhere between poor and embarrassing. Please see me after class, Eddie.

Vedder and company sound like they’re having fun on Backspacer and I don’t want to begrudge them that – in the past, they’ve had a tendency to sound like they weren’t enjoying the hard work of being rock stars. But the fact remains that, if Backspacer is Pearl Jam letting their hair down and having a good time, maybe some sticks need to be reinserted in some asses – I mean, Ten was nothing if not a Very Serious Album (honestly, some of it was melodramatic) but the music was kick ass. I just listened to “Alive” a minute ago (I need to take breaks from Backspacer at this point) and it still works wonders for me. But I’m not having a helluva lot of fun listening to Backspacer. Instead, I’m having doubts about why I ever liked this band in the first place. Of course, I still have their old stuff to remind me of the power they used to have. I’m not sure where Pearl Jam lost it, but it’s definitely gone now. (Will you fight to get it back again, Eddie Vedder? I sincerely hope so.)

So what now? There are plenty of people out there who will watch the Who on Super Bowl Sunday and tell everyone how amazing their performance was (probably some of the same misguided souls who dug the epic fail parade that was the Cream reunion concert). But there are people like me who will listen to their recordings of “Baba O’Reilly” and recognize that the guys performing on the TV are merely a joke about a formerly amazing band. And there are people out there who can still defend Pearl Jam no matter how bad they get (these people are enablers of Pearl Jam’s worst tendencies and I wish they’d stop) and those people will find some way, dog knows how, to love Backspacer and call it a triumph. This Rolling Stone review (and the comments below it) will give you a picture of what I’m talking about. Not that Rolling Stone can be considered credible these days. Any publication that will list fucking Stadium Arcadium as one of the best albums of the decade is not to be trusted.

Here’s what I’ve decided (just now): everyone gets to pick one strummy-hummy acousti-troubadour to like for free. You don’t have to justify it to anyone (not that you have to justify what you like to anyone anyway), you can pick any one you want – and we all know the kinda guys I’m talking about here. Anyway, you pick your guy and then you root like hell for that guy until he’s the last guy standing in the coffee house (you can also root for a female acousti-troubadour, but they seem harder to come by. I think the equivalent is the twenty-something street corner chanteuse). You buy his albums, go to his shows, and basically support the dude with your whole heart. Share his music with others, but don’t be a missionary prick about it – if people don’t like your guy, that’s their business and their right. They’re probably just rooting for a different guy.

I chose Mike Doughty a long time ago. Like the first time I heard Skittish. I think Doughty is the best at what he used to call “small rock” (although he upgraded to “medium rock” around the time he made Haughty Melodic, I still like describing his stuff as “small rock.” If you are Mike Doughty and you’re reading this, I’ll buy you a beer next time you’re in Los Angeles, and we can discuss) because, as he showed on Skittish, he has an earnestness about him that dovetails nicely with his innate weirdness and produces more interesting small rock than that of, for example, Jason Mraz (yeah, I’m gonna pick on Jason Mraz. You know why? The thing I hear underlying every Jason Mraz song I’ve ever heard – and I’ve sat through more than one of his albums – is a sense that Jason Mraz thinks that Jason Mraz is really fucking clever and he needs you to know that he knows he’s clever. And he’s not. He’s insipid. Sorry, Mraz, but I’m definitely not yours).

Two albums separate Skittish from Doughty’s brand spanking new Sad Man Happy Man and the early buzz is that Sad Man Happy Man is some kind of long overdue trip back to the Skittish well. I guess I can see that, but I’m not one of these people who has been sweating every Doughty release since Skittish waiting for another “Sweet Lord in Heaven” (although that will forever remain my favorite Doughty tune. It’s just too fucking beautiful). I liked Haughty Melodic a lot; I didn’t like Golden Delicious a lot, but I gave Doughty a pass on that one because I want him to keep making music and, as I said, he’s my guy. I’m rooting for him. I figure that I’ll love about 90% of his stuff and Sad Man Happy Man probably bumps that up to 96% (it’s a complicated formula I used to determine that Golden Delicious is equal to precisely four percent of Mike Doughty’s solo output and I won’t bore you with the details. Just trust that the numbers don’t lie).  It’s really awesome, really basic, and occasionally silly – everything I want a Doughty album to be.

I often get the feeling that Doughty records all his stuff in a small apartment, and the cover of Sad Man Happy Man does nothing to convince me otherwise. It suits the feel of the album, which opens with the Doughty-folkish “Nectarine (Part Two)”, a great little ditty that should hopefully shut up the “Make another Skittish” crowd. The truth of the matter is that Sad Man Happy Man synthesizes all the stuff Doughty’s done right since Skittish with the brevity-is-the-soul-of-awesome aesthetic that dominated that record. There are drums and weird cello bits on many of the songs and Doughty even gets his scream on at the end of “Lord Lord Help Me Just to Rock Rock On”, which is something I’ve never heard him do before.

Doughty has always been one of the best phrase makers in music and he’s not lacking in that department here: on “Lorna Zauberberg”, he says, “At breakfast, we get by on charm alone.” Later, he has a girl who “treats me like a parole officer” (“I Want to Burn You Down”) and later points out that “time tells butter-fat lies/ sweet lousy cupcakes of lies.” (“Year of the Dog”). Butter fat lies, I surmise, are like normal lies but they give you heart attacks. The other thing I love about Mike Doughty is the way he plays freely and fearlessly with word pronunciation and vowel sounds – his prowess here is best exemplified on “Pleasure On Credit” (where he pronounces “persuasion” to rhyme with “smart girl/ not the crazy one”), “Diane” (where the name that is the chorus sometimes sounds like “Diane” and sometimes sounds like “dyin’”) and “(He’s Got the) Whole World (in His Hands)”.

“Pleasure On Credit” (also features “John Paul Jones/ bustlin’ the hedges”) and “Whole World” (Sorry, Mr. Doughty – I already overuse parentheses on this blog and I can’t have you cramping my style) are two great examples of something that I will only let Mike Doughty get away with: half-assed speak/rapping. It’s too rhythmic to be simply talking but also not facile enough to rival, say, Atmosphere. Doughty has done this off and on since back in his Soul Coughing days and I guess I have to chalk it up to how much I like the wordplay because I know if, say, Jack Johnson did it, I’d fucking hate him (more).

Of course “Pleasure” and “Whole World” are a couple bits of comic relief on an album that has plenty of beauty to offer. “Year of the Dog” is one of Doughty’s finest moments, and “Diane” is also a steaming hot cup of lovely. I don’t know if Sad Man Happy Man will win Doughty any new fans because I feel like you either like him immediately when you hear him or you’re not going to like him. His style is singular and won’t appeal to the broadest audience, but that’s part of his charm (to me, anyway). Doughty is a treasure that will be found and adored by a lucky few and I’m just happy to be one of ‘em.

Given that, when they’re not in Monsters of Folk, I only care about the musical doings of half of Monsters of Folk, I’m not sure why I expected Monsters of Folk to blow my freakin’ mind. But I kind of did. And they kind of didn’t.

For those of you who don’t know (or care – either one is acceptable in this case), Monsters of Folk is an indie “super group” consisting of a dude named Mike Mogis (I think he produces Bright Eyes records), Conor Oberst (he definitely makes Bright Eyes records which I mostly don’t like), M. Ward (he is M. Ward and half of She & Him – he is also half of the half of Monsters of Folk that I care about outside of Monsters of Folk), and Jim James (he’s the bearded grizzly who sings and plays guitar – awesomely – in My Morning Jacket). Now, I’m a pretty big fan of M. Ward and a huge fan of My Morning Jacket, so I was somewhat interested in this whole Monsters of Folk thing.

And the tracks that mostly feature Ward and/or James are mostly all right. The only really outstanding track on the album, “His Master’s Voice,” comes at the end and is sung by Mr. James, perhaps the best vocalist in rock music right now (I often admit to liking less polished singers like Craig Finn or Tom Waits, but Jim James is a certifiably excellent singer). And when I listen to Monsters of Folk, I get ’round to “His Master’s Voice” and revel in it while I realize that what I really wanted from Monsters of Folk was M. Ward and Jim James in a room with acoustic guitars, playing whatever they felt like. I was never gonna get that because there are these two others dudes in the band and they don’t really add much to admire.

Monsters of Folk have been hailed (or not, depending on how you feel about them) as an indie-rock Traveling Wilburys and, I suppose, there’s some comparison to be made. A lot of the Wilburys’ songs were silly to the point of being ridiculous, but they were also undeniably awesome (especially on Volume One, when Roy Orbison was still alive). Monsters of Folk frequently hit on the ridiculous part without always making it all the way to the awesome part. James, as is his wont, steers the Monsters’ songs toward the arena of unrelenting beauty (something I’m not sure the Wilburys ever did), but he’s not the main dude on most of this album and (can you believe Pitchfork and I agree on this?) Monsters of Folk ultimately suffers because of it.

There are some good moments (the album opener, “Dear God” is not one of them, though it gets points for wanting to be a Smokey Robinson song) early on: “Say Please” deserves favorable comparison to, say, the Traveling Wilburys’ “Handle with Care.” “Whole Lotta Losin’”, which is mostly handled by Mr. Ward, is actually great – and it would fit perfectly well on an M. Ward album. Although its Jim James harmonies in the background make a compelling case for what I wanted this album to be – namely something that doesn’t feature Conor Oberst. One of the things I don’t like about Bright Eyes is how humorless Oberst seems, even when he’s cracking a joke. Monsters of Folk, sure enough, starts to bog down around “Temazcal” and – sure enough – Oberst is our featured vocalist (although I like the line “love we made at gun point wasn’t love at all”). There are good harmonies on the song but, and I can’t stress this enough, I could get that from My Morning Jacket and/or She & Him and come out much happier for my trouble.

Allow me to posit a theory: the Jim James tracks on Monsters of Folk are the best tracks because, of the three biggest players in the band, James is the one who is most adventurous at his day job. Oberst has been cranking out the same dreary, emo-troubadour stuff for all of the Aughts. Even Ward, who I like, doesn’t really stretch himself much on his albums (with the exception of the dreamy title track to this year’s Hold Time). But My Morning Jacket has gone from indie Lynyrd Skynyrd to… well, pretty much one of the best rock bands there is, indie or other wise. Evil Urges was a bold declaration of genrelessness and that, if you ask me, is why James is so capable of pushing Monsters of Folk out of the boring territory it so often visits in the hands of James’s collaborators. He takes the lead on the only real rocker on the album, “Losin’ Yo Head” (ridiculous title, I know, but the song kicks ass), follows it with the charming “Magic Marker”, and closes the album with its finest five minutes on “His Master’s Voice.”

I’ve waded through Monsters of Folk several times now and it has done all the growing on me that it is likely to do. I loaded the disc into Songbird (do you have Songbird? It’s essential if you listen to music on your computer. Get it here) and proceeded to remove the tracks that were the most offensive. What I’m left with is nine of the fifteen original tracks and I even kept an Oberst tune (“Ahead of the Curve”, which is actually fairly lovely, even for that dour Nebraskan). I didn’t resequence the nine, but I might later.

Even counting only the nine songs I liked, I’m still not wild about Monsters of Folk. I’m wild about Jim James and will listen to anything he does and I’ll keep listening to M. Ward (and She & Him, who are rumored to be putting out a new album next year). I guess if you love Bright Eyes as much as I love My Morning Jacket, Monsters of Folk might bring to life some musical wet dream you had and/or inspire you to write disturbing pornographic fan-fic (is there non-pornographic fan-fic? And if so, is it still terrible?) but you might do better purchasing the tunes you like from Amazon (no, not I-Tunes. Amazon songs are cheaper, they have better deals for albums, and they’re DRM-free) and letting them come up on random on your freshly downloaded and installed Songbird.

(Okay, brief review of Songbird: it has its buggy moments, but it’s really new. On the plus side, it organizes your music waaaaaaaay better than Winamp ever dreamed of doing and it will tell you when bands in your library are playing shows in your town. Also, it has a better playlist feature than Winamp and you can tell it to monitor your music folder so it automatically adds new stuff to your library when you rip it or download it. So Songbird is awesome. Try it. You’ll like it.)

Okay. I got the new Jarvis Cocker album, Further Complications, on the day it came out. Because I loved his first solo record, Jarvis, that much. But here’s the thing: Further Complications is bad. It’s really bad. I got rid of it (thank you, Second Spin) and I’ve decided to put it behind me. I know Cocker will come back with something better in the future and I’m willing to let this little mishap slide.

Why am I letting Jarvis Cocker off so easy? I mean, I could rip him a new ass for Further Complications. I’m known, where I’m known, for being really good at not liking things and it would be easy to pelt Cocker with a thousand words of fury. But I’m not going to do that because I really fucking like Jarvis Cocker. A lot. He is a genuinely awesome musical misanthrope and pretty much everything he’s done prior to Further Complications has been excellent. After polishing off the 1990s with This is Hardcore, Pulp (I assume that, if you read Bollocks!, you know Jarvis Cocker was in Pulp. If you didn’t know that, you do now) started off the 21st century with We Love Life and then broke up so Cocker could release a solo album that still makes me exceedingly happy (Jarvis features, among its many gems, a song about being murdered by morbidly obese kids and “Running the World,” one of the greatest songs of the decade, in my opinion). So I can pretend that Further Complications never happened because I know how consistently great Jarvis Cocker has been in the past and I have faith that he’ll return to greatness in the (hopefully near) future.

Did I forget to mention a little Pulp album called Different Class? It appears that I did. Let’s talk about it for a second, can we? If you’re reading this, you probably don’t have anything better to do. So: in 1995, when Britpop was still a (sort of) legitimate musical genre, Pulp released the snarky-as-fuck Different Class, an album that is musically a pop masterpiece and lyrically a class warrior’s wet dream. Cocker looked around at the comfortable British middle class and decided that they could all just fuck right off as far as he was concerned (a theme that continued right up through “Running the World,” where Cocker mutters, “Though in theory, I respect your right to exist/ I will kill ya if you move in next to me”). Different Class has no time for social graces and no interest in cushioning the blow – right out of the gate, Cocker shouts, “We want the things you won’t allow us” and he’s just getting warmed up.

Different Class contains some of Pulp’s biggest hits, and perhaps their biggest is “Common People,” arguably one of the best songs of the 1990s (like maybe top five. Or top three. Or top one). “Common People” chronicles the adventures of a beautiful, young, rich girl who makes the mistake of telling Jarvis Cocker that she wants to do “whatever common people do.” Is Cocker setting up a straw man (or woman in this case) to knock down for the next five minutes? Absolutely. But is the sentiment of the song inaccurate because of it? I don’t think so – the line “If you called your dad/ he could stop it all” rings true for a lot of kids I went to college with, whether or not they came from Greece and had a thirst for knowledge. And the song’s underlying assertion that people born into privilege end up in the gutter far less than those who are born into poverty is completely evident, unless you view capitalism through the thickest rose-colored glasses you can find (and even then, come on). If George W. Bush wasn’t born into the Bush family – say he was born into my family – he would be working the night shift at a McDonald’s right now, maybe climbing his way up to district manager in a few years. If he was really lucky. And, lest I be accused of partisanship, the same is probably true of Patrick Kennedy. Paris Hilton would be either a c-list porn star or a herpes-riddled ho on the streets of Los Angeles (I suppose the two aren’t mutually exclusive) if she wasn’t born rich. She didn’t earn shit and people like her are one hundred percent deserving of the scorn of Jarvis Cocker and pretty much everyone else.

Different Class is riddled with fuck-the-system idealism that is completely shattered by the time Cocker got around to making his solo debut (and really, on Pulp’s last album, We Love Life. Cocker literally views humanity as weeds on that record – but it’s gorgeous). By the time Jarvis rolled around, Cocker’s disdain wasn’t just reserved for the congenitally wealthy – it was aimed at pretty much everyone and, like George Carlin, Cocker had (has? We’ll see) a gift for hating people and making them love him for it. What makes Further Complications so disappointing is that Cocker had a good idea (make a loose, loud rock record) and couldn’t be bothered to follow through with it. It feels incomplete and uninspired and those are two things Cocker has never been before. Next time out, Cocker could marry the fuck-you tone of his previous output to the stomping rock that he attempts on Further Complications and come out with a real winner.

I believe Cocker will do it, too. I know he’s got a lot more amazing music in him. If you need inspiration, Jarvis, why not take a trip to the good ol’ U.S. of A. and stop by a Sarah Palin book signing or spend a few hours watching Glenn Beck? You’ll be back to your cheerful, misanthropic self in no time. And we’ll all love you for it. Well, I will at least.

Sixty years ago today – the day after Leadbelly died (for those of you who believe in reincarnation, this could be regarded as auspicious), right here in southern California, lightning struck a bottle of moonshine, shattering it into thousands of tiny shards, one of which pierced the pregnant belly of a school teacher, opening her up wide enough for her newborn son to step out into the light. He was born walking – he made a bedroll from his umbilical cord and set off on the road that very day, bumming smokes, bread, and beans as he went. He got a few gigs here and there crooning country/jazz in shitty little bars; no great shakes, but it kept him in cigarettes and whiskey until the early 1980s when he took folk, jazz, rock, beat poetry, Kurt Weill, and everything else, threw ‘em in a blender with some stale beer and train smoke, and became one of the foremost songwriters in American music history.

I’m talking, of course, about Tom Waits. Happy birthday, Mr. Waits. You are an American hero; you are, in fact, both a folk hero and a maker of folk heroes and not even Bob Dylan is that anymore. And, in all seriousness, thank you, sir, for the music you’ve been making for most of my life. Thank you.

But to get down to business: live albums, if we’re being honest with ourselves, are almost always treats for diehard fans and no one else. You don’t generally put on a live album as a way of introducing someone to your favorite band. The live album is typically “Greatest Hits with Cheering” but every so often, you get a live album that is a treasure for fans and newcomers alike. Glitter and Doom, by our Birthday Boy Tom, is one such album. There is everything Waits fans love on this album and an energy that is only adequately described as a force of nature. One spin through Glitter and Doom and you will understand why the man doesn’t go on long tours anymore. He puts everything he has into every show he plays, and Tom Waits has a lot. I can confidently say that, if you’re going to like Tom Waits, you’re going to like Glitter and Doom. If you love Tom Waits, you’ll love the album’s second disc, which is Tom Waits bullshitting for half an hour. I know I love it.

One of the bigger problems live albums face, in my humble (ha!) opinion, is that the songs sound like the recorded versions, but there are more assholes singing along. Waits is not content to leave his songs alone, and that creates a very compelling argument for seeking out his live shows. Ideally, you’ll get to see the man in concert but, if you’re like many people who cursed the ill luck of living in a city that Waits didn’t visit on his “Glitter & Doom” Tour last year, you’ll grab a live Waits album and revel in its awesome weirdness, its blustering theatricality, and its distorted beauty.

Tom Waits avoids the pitfall of sounding like “Greatest Hits with Cheering” because he doesn’t have any hits. The radio is not ready for Tom Waits (except for National Public Radio, which is just college radio for college-educated grown-ups – and that’s clearly not driving our culture right now. If it were, you’d hear more Waits and Flaming Lips on American Idol and Sarah Palin would have no supporters) and he steadfastly refuses to let people use his music for commercials. Despite being the only guy I know of to win both the Best Alternative Rock and Contemporary Folk Grammys, Waits has what I consider an extremely healthy disdain for awards. Having said all that, Glitter and Doom does cover some familiar territory to Tom Waits fans. But the songs do not remain the same. “Singapore” ends with Waits simulating a bombing, while “Such a Scream” becomes a chugging funk number (it’s like a Bizarro Prince tune) and “Goin’ Out West” becomes a twisted homage to T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On).”

Waits was surrounded by incredible musicians (all the bass on this album is upright bass, played by Seth Ford-Young) for this tour, including his son Casey on drums and percussion (Casey also played the ass-beating drum part on Waits’s cover of “The Return of Jackie and Judy”), but Waits’s voice remains the most versatile instrument in the ensemble. Whether whispering, howling, or growling, Tom Waits has one of the most distinctive voices in music, and he uses it to inhabit his characters fully. On “Lucinda/Ain’t Goin’ Down,” Waits brings William the Pleaser to life as a wounded, terrified, and haunted man who “left Texas/ to follow Lucinda/ Now I will never see Heaven/ or home.” Glitter and Doom tends to mine from Waits’s darker stuff, relying heavily on Blood Money, Bone Machine, and Real Gone for the bulk of its material. The only song that is a repeat from Waits’s other live album, Big Time, is “Falling Down” which was a studio track on that record. It’s nice to see Waits take that tune back after that uber-dilettante Scarlett Johansson mangled it on her ill-advised album of Tom Waits covers (it’s called Anywhere I Lay My Head, for those of you who think I’m making it up. Johansson commits the cardinal sin of thinking that prettying up Tom Waits songs will somehow 1) pay fitting tribute to them and 2) please fans of Mr. Waits. Her album, of course, does neither. I listened to the album shortly after starting Bollocks! and hated it so much that I couldn’t find the words to give it a sufficient review).

Though the album is cobbled together from the fistful of dates Waits played across the American south and parts of Europe last year, it’s sequenced like a proper Waits concert, with all the roaring loud moments (“Lucinda,” “Metropolitan Glide”) and low-moaning soft moments (“Trampled Rose,” “Fannin Street”) that entails. It’s surely no substitute for an actual ticket, but Glitter and Doom is still a nice bone to throw me for not making the road trip to Phoenix to see him in person. I can’t really blame Waits for not wanting to come to L.A., but if he can make it as far as Bakersfield, I’ll be the first in line to see him and I’ll even bring him dinner.

Tony Kushner, who is only one of the most important playwrights of the last fifty years or so, told the 1995 OutWrite Conference, “Pretentiousness consists in attempting an act of bold creation regardless of whether or not one has sufficient talent, emulating the daring of which only genius is truly capable.” For some reason, Kushner’s speech (called “On Pretentiousness”; it can be found in his collection of essays, a play, two poems, and a prayer called Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness) always comes to mind when I’m listening to Yo La Tengo, especially their last two albums: 2006’s excellent (and wonderfully named!) I’m Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass and this year’s even better Popular Songs.

Bear with me here.

Yo La Tengo is an iconic indie band (some smartass might be inclined to joke about how you can’t be indie and be iconic, but 1) independent music has to do with distribution, not hoping that nobody likes your stuff 2) anymore, “indie” is a meaningless genre title for “rock and pop that the radio doesn’t like.” While I think the radio would sound better if it played some so-called “indie” music, I don’t think all indie music is somehow inherently superior. I believe, for instance, that Wavves is considered indie and they are fuck-awful), co-occupying the pantheon with the likes of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and maybe Guided by Voices (Tom Waits is in there somewhere too – he’s like the Originator, from whose thigh entire armies of indie artists sprang fully formed). As such, they can be frequently dismissed as hipster rock, despite the fact that what Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan, and James McNew are, when you get right down to it, is a triumvirate of musical dorkitude. They’re nerds who love to listen to music and play music and when either of those activities is going well, they want to go on doing that forever. If that sounds like I’m trying to justify the three long jams that end Popular Songs, maybe I am. With one exception, which we’ll discuss later.

Over the last decade and a half (really, since McNew joined the band permanently), Yo La Tengo has seamlessly blended myriad musical styles into some of the most beautiful pop I’ve ever heard and Popular Songs might just be their most beautiful record from start to finish. But it’s not without out its pretension. You can tell from the song titles: “Avalan or Someone Very Simliar,” and “Periodically Triple or Double” (which also features a pretentious and squally organ solo) come to mind. And then there’s “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” which is nearly ten minutes of repetitive pretentiousness that is also possibly the crown jewel of Popular Songs.

At the end of the day, the degree to which I can forgive a band’s pretentiousness depends on the degree to which their music is, on musical merits alone, listenable. And Yo La Tengo is fast becoming one of my favorite bands (I know they’ve been critical darlings for a long time, but I don’t blindly leap on bandwagons) because their songs are, on the whole, pretty fucking amazing. “Here to Fall” opens Popular Songs with sweeping orchestral rock, but the album (true to its title) contains several short, sweet bursts of great pop: “Nothing to Hide,” “If It’s True,” (a great duet between Kaplan and Hubley) and “All Your Secrets” number among the best pop songs of Yo La Tengo’s career.

Over that career, YLT has dabbled in the occasional film score (including the score for the Don DeLillo-penned Game 6, starring Michael Keaton as a delusional Boston Red Sox fan) and some of their slower songs feel like they’re paced to underscore cinematic moments, which can be both good and bad. On “The Fireside,” it’s too much – the song is too repetitive and far too long to be of any use. “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven”, however, feels like the sort of music you’d want near the triumphant climax of your film. Its lush strings and shimmering guitars roll out a red carpet down which the vocals leisurely stroll, stacking harmonies upon themselves unto infinity. You want pretentious? If “More Stars” was a blanket, I’d be wrapped up in it while I write this. Tony Kushner also told the OutWrite conference, “…the joys of pretentiousness are more alluring than its humiliations are forbidding.” “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven,” then, is simultaneously one of Yo La Tengo’s most pretentious moments and one of their most alluring.

And it doesn’t matter who’s doing the singing on much of Popular Songs either. All three are capable (if very quiet) vocalists and they all showcase their talents here. While most of the album is dominated by Kaplan and Hubley, James McNew takes the mic for “I’m On My Way,” a charming and meditative love song that admits, “I tried to be brooding and dark/ but it all fell through.” Pretentious or not, that’s a pretty earnest sentiment and the song’s promise just to be there should ring true for a lot of listeners, unless Yo La Tengo has an entirely heartless fanbase.

Tony Kushner, in his great lecture, told his audience that “Pretentiousness, if it’s done well, performs a salutary parody of carving out, in the face of the theorilessness and bewilderment of our age, meta-narratives, legends, grand designs… By pretending that such grandeur is still possible, we acknowledge how absolutely necessary, and indispensable, an overview, a theory, a big idea still is.” On Popular Songs, Yo La Tengo built a ladder to their biggest musical idea yet, a song so beautiful that it renders the two that follow it almost completely unnecessary. “And the Glitter is Gone,” the actual album closer, is actually fairly tolerable despite its length; but “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven” has a finality to it that would rival Radiohead’s “Street Spirit” for an album closer, if Yo La Tengo were to resequence Popular Songs. But, like Neko Case’s incredible Middle Cyclone, cutting the album off at the right moment (for Neko, just skip the last track; for YLT, stop after “More Stars Than There Are in Heaven” or skip “The Fireside” and listen to the noisy 16 minute epic if you dare. Most people won’t like it, but I do – it reminds me of “Third Stone from the Sun”) will leave you with the impression that you’ve just heard something monumentally beautiful.

See if this sounds like enough of a novelty for you: a bunch of drummers in a bunch of Ohio bands (one of which is the Black Keys) get together and form their own band, called (naturally) Drummer. With the attention they might get because their bass player is Patrick Carney, Drummer could be dismissed or otherwise judged differently as some sort of side-project or musical lark. In fact, you might almost expect Drummer’s Feel Good Together to stumble in the same ways the Monsters of Folk album stumbles (more on that later): you might expect it to be astoundingly (or even offensively) less than the sum of its parts.

But albums, regardless of personnel, sink or swim on the music and it turns out that these Ohio drummers have put together a refreshingly solid, musically muscular rock album, one of the better ones I’ve heard this year. I approached Drummer with a lot of trepidation, vowing to listen to  the album at least twice before I rendered a verdict (standard Bollocks! disclaimer: I listen to every album I review a minimum of three times before I write anything about it. Most albums, unless they’re unbearable, make it to 8 or more listens), thinking that it might be a pretty hard slog. But Feel Good Together is stuffed to the gills with stellar musicianship and it is almost shockingly good. So good, in fact, that it makes me want to check out the other bands in which the drummers in Drummer drum. Drummer’s drummer, Greg Boyd, is from Ghostman & Sandman; as previously stated, Black Key Carney plays bass; the awesome lead guitar work on Feel Good Together comes from Jamie Stillman who comes from Teeth of the Hydra; there are keyboards by Steve Clements of Six Parts Seven; and Drummer’s singer is Jon Finley, who sounds like a cross between M. Ward and the Cult’s Ian Astbury and comes from a band awesomely named Beaten Awake. Of all these bands, I’ve only listened to the Black Keys (though I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of Six Parts Seven) and there’s nothing on this album that sounds even remotely like a Black Keys song. I could suggest, therefore, that Drummer sounds like bits of all those other bands but – and here’s something I love – I will have to listen to them all to find out. So it’s like Drummer has given me five new bands to listen to instead of one. And I still loves me some Black Keys. Maybe even enough to check out their rap-rock project, Blak Roc. Maybe.

Feel Good Together is a brief listen at ten tracks, and those tracks are almost gleefully schizophrenic, often burying the vocals deep in the mix (which I don’t always like, mind you, but Finley is able to growl out some catchy melodic hooks here and there and Drummer has some facility for harmony, especially on standout tracks like “Connect to Lounge.”) and cranking the guitars to eleven. The album opens with a keyboard riff straight out of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Mr. Crowley” before tearing off on its own little rock adventure. Later songs will remind astute listeners of Franz Ferdinand, Broadcast, and other danceable indie, but you can’t really say that Drummer is ripping off those artists either. Feel Good Together, as its artworks suggests, is its own half-melted sundae of pop and rock. Parts of this album, as I make my nth trip through it, even remind me of Hum. Remember Hum? You’d Prefer An Astronaut? “She’s out back counting stars?” No? That’s too bad. They were awesome. (If you do remember Hum and miss them, you can hear their only hit, “Stars”, on the soundtrack for Saints Row 2, where you can drive around killing people and pretending it’s because they didn’t buy Hum’s albums when they had the chance.)

Anyway, there’s not much to discuss regarding Drummer as a lyrical entity because (have I mentioned this?) I have no clue what Jon Finley is singing about. There’s part of one song where he sings, “Are we happy?/ I have no clue.” His vocals are barely intelligible when they’re not buried under every instrument on the album and I am genuinely perplexed as to why this doesn’t annoy the piss out of me. I suppose it could be that Feel Good Together is benefitting from my exceedingly low expectations. The reviews that I read before I heard the album prepared me for, at best, a somewhat interesting mishmash of musical styles that provide a bunch of drummers (well, except for one) a chance to step out from behind their kits. But the album manages to be pretty engaging throughout and though the songs wander a bit, they all fit neatly under five minutes.

Another thing I like about Drummer is that they’re basically an anti-supergroup. In this age of Them Crooked Vultures (I’m still trying to decide if I will listen to that album or not), The Dead Weather, Monsters of Folk, and whatever group the drummer from Cheap Trick and the Fountains of Wayne guy were in, it’s nice to see a band of bandmembers where the most famous dude is one half of a garage blues band from Ohio that is still fairly below the radar for most of America. Drummer, then, is the musical equivalent of the “No-Name Defense” of the 1972 Miami Dolphins; they’re not big stars, but they’re out there every week, kicking ass and taking names. At least, I assume that’s true of the guys in Drummer. And I’d love to believe that the members of the ‘72 Dolphins starting D are just running around the country tackling dudes at random. How cool would that be?