That’s my best guess, at least, as to why his new release, continuing under the name, Phosphorescent, he’s used since 2003, manages to be such a remarkable triumph. Because nothing on Here’s To Taking It Easy, his latest release – and one of the year’s very best – could really be called new or unique. Opener “It’s Hard to be Humble (When You’re from Alabama),” whose title may or may not be a nod to Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to be a Saint in the City,” is a classic rock ‘n’ roll blues burner and features a prominent horn arrangement that sounds more than a bit like something from Dylan’s Street Legal. Similarly, the album’s majestic final track, “Los Angeles,” sounds exactly like the music Neil Young was making circa Zuma. And while on both these songs – and throughout the record – Houck makes his own imprint by slathering on the gorgeous, choir-like background harmonies that have become in a way his musical calling-card, even this move could easily be likened to another touchstone classic rock song; go back and listen to “The Only Living Boy in New York,” and try to tell me otherwise.

Of course, I’d be remiss going on about Houck’s influences as I am here without mentioning that his previous release to this one was last year’s To Willie, a wonderful cover record of some of Willie Nelson’s best work. Indeed, understanding how Houck was able to transition from 2007’s sparse, harrowing and acoustic Pride to Here’s To Taking It Easy’s lush and wide-open musicality can’t be done unless To Willie is taken into account. While the records are musically quite similar – both feature fuller bands than Houck had previously used before, with a special emphasis on lilting pedal-steel guitar – the influence is most apparent regarding the persona Houck tries to transmit as a singer. Prior to To Willie, he was more of your typically atypical tortured indie weirdo; following it, he’s become much more of a weathered roamer of the southwest’s badlands, making music that would be most at home in some raggedy saloon on a dry, hot summer’s day.

But he hasn’t shed one archetype for another so much as he’s integrated the two. In this regard, Here’s To Taking It Easy’s album cover is rather instructive. The dominant image is a palatial view of Los Angeles palm trees and a vast, open sky. But superimposed overtop is something quite more sinister – I can’t quite tell what it is, but it’s clearly got two mean-looking eyes and a whole bunch of sharp teeth. That’s not to say that this is a hidden predator of a record – barring the strangely hypnotizing “Hej, Me I’m Light,” everything here could easily be played for a summer BBQ; the music is always gentle and light. But just underneath the surface of the rousing chorus of “The Mermaid Parade,” or the simply beautiful harmonies of “Nothing Was Stolen (Love Me Foolishly)” are unsettling feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.

Perhaps Houck puts it best himself on the jaunty “Heaven, Sittin’ Down,” singing, “I wish those nights of pleasure and those days of pain weren’t so tightly bound.” It’s a well-worn sentiment in country-rock, the kind of thing Willie Nelson or Townes Van Zandt sang a hundred times in a hundred different ways. But filtered through Phosphorescent’s dreamlike music, and sung through Houck’s distinctly strange voice, it’s almost revelatory.

Alligator‘s follow-up, 2007′s Boxer, is similar thematically, but now the dreams have drifted farther into the past. The young men are not quite so young anymore. And while they’ve accepted – with bitterness and embarrassment – their mediocrity, their youthful fantasies of self-assured freedom haven’t been outgrown so much as replaced. Instead of themselves, they now turn to their lovers for purpose and validation. Songs such as “Ada,” or the gorgeous “Start A War,” indicate that the results aren’t much different. They still drink – a lot – and they still wander about New York City. But instead of having to admit only to themselves that things haven’t turned out quite as they’d hoped, there’s now someone else, maybe in bed beside them, who knows the awful, average truth.

Both of these records have come to be adored by more than a few demographically similar men (and women), and have helped the National grow into one of the “it” bands of contemporary popular indie rock. They’ve earned the group the accolades of figures of no less esteem than Bruce Springsteen and R.E.M. (each of whom one would rank up-high on a list of the group’s influences); and both records have placed high on many decade-end lists. Of course, the band’s earned this audience, primarily, through its music, which is a consistently pleasant mix of many touch-stone indie and alternative rock heroes – Pixies, U2, the Cure, Leonard Cohen, New Order, etc. – and a superb, cathartic live show. But to a significant degree, the band’s continued success can be attributed to the fact that its audience hears itself echoed back in front-man Matt Berninger’s weary, drawling, and at times smirking baritone.

So should I be so surprised that High Violet, the group’s latest – and the record which could potentially launch them into the next echelon of acclaim – represents their most, self-serious, dour and morose release yet? After all, the National’s catalog is not exactly one known for its buoyancy. Still, I’ve had difficulty knowing what to make of a song like “Sorrow,” which features the lyric – delivered in utter earnestness – “Sorrow found me when I was young/ Sorrow waited, sorrow won”. Or “Afraid of Everyone,” which finds them channeling Joy Division/New Order perhaps more than ever before and ends with Berninger chanting, “You’re the voices swallowing my soul”. I’m accustomed to Berninger throwing a lyrical left-hook and opening up the darker recesses of his brain to extract a line that’s at once vile and humorous, but how to explain the album’s stand-out “Conversation 16″ and its refrain: “I was afraid that I’d eat your brains/ ‘Cause I’m evil”? Are things for the kids – well, the former kids, I suppose – of the National’s New York City really so bad?

My worry isn’t so much that the National have begun to enter that phase (which, to be fair, seems inevitable for all but the very best artists) in which they write the songs they imagine their audience expects of them, rather than the songs which result from a more natural, authentic process. If that’s the case and the results continue to be records as listenable, lovingly crafted, and affecting as this one, then so be it. True, bands that have shifted into this gear rarely bless us with masterpieces – new releases inevitably become nothing more (or less) than signposts by which they and their audience note the passing of yet another year or two. And, true, once this phase is entered into, it’s only a matter of time before some angry young critic – maybe someone with plans to move to the Big City and make a mark of his or her own – unleashes the dreaded aspersion of “self-parody.” But the National are big boys; they can take it.

Although, listening again to “Lemonworld” – one of the record’s best songs – and the chorus: “You and your sister live in a lemonworld/ I want to sit in and die” – maybe they can’t.

Sad news today from Memphis: legendary, beloved, and woefully under-appreciated singer, songwriter, guitar player and all-around genius Alex Chilton has passed. Preliminary reports indicate that the singer, days away from reuniting with the band for which he’s most well known, Big Star, at SXSW, reported feeling ill before being taken to the hospital. Details are currently not clear, but it appears that Mr. Chilton died of a heart attack. He was 59 years old, and he was a musical hero to perhaps more than he knew.

(Via Commercial Appeal and NY Times Arts Beat)

That’s not to say the whole record fills me with this antipathy. The first 10 (of 20) tracks are pretty good. For the most part they’re melodic – most notably “Them That Do Nothing,” which sounds a bit like the Kinks – and you don’t have to be focusing primarily on the band’s intellectualism in order to enjoy them. “Each Time Is a New Time” is agreeably rockist, opening with an almost CCR-like guitar riff that would really be better described as a series of “licks” (shudder, I know…) and “Let’s Write a Book,” with its skronky, herky-jerky rhythms would not sound totally out of place on Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca. So that’s the good stuff. It’s about 35 minutes worth of music. The record is 1 hour and 10 minutes long.

After the halfway point, Measure devolves into a bunch of conceptualized non-song bullshit that I don’t even have the patience to discern, detail or describe. Vast swathes of the album from this point on are dominated by a lack of anything audible whatsoever, punctuated by brief moments of crashing cymbals, hushed repetition of phrases where singing should be, and, really, just a general lack of anything you could reasonably describe as rock or pop music. The song “See You Later” largely consists of the sounds of passing vehicles and footsteps on pavement. At some point I think something is slowly sung while strings ascend and a piano goes plink-plink-plink – but again, I don’t care.

Now, if you’re reading this and thinking, “This is a bad review; he just doesn’t like art-rock,” then fair enough. When art-rock means Talking Heads or XTC, I like it; when it means Grizzly Bear or Genesis, I don’t, and the second half of this record is much more GeneBear than XTHeads. If you like rock ‘n’ roll but just wish it were more like school, then this is the record for you. Personally, I just wish Field Music had made a regular ol’ single album that focused on similarly old-fashioned things like songs.

But back to that non-mystery; the problem here isn’t Pusha or Malice – they’re as sharp as ever when rhyming about their bread and butter (selling cocaine), while deepening and expanding their repertoire by focusing on little-discussed themes within hip-hop, like entering one’s middle years or raising a family (I must confess, though, to wincing when Malice drops a reference to the kids’ movie Madagascar in “Champion”). Yes, I think it’s clear that they’ve somewhat simplified their rhymes and, however slightly, prettified their content, but overall Pusha T and Malice aren’t to blame for the record’s failures. Or rather, they’re only to blame insofar as they chose to use this hodgepodge of weak, boring, milquetoast beats.

And I mean it when I say these beats are weak. One of Hell Hath No Fury‘s unquestionable strengths was the group’s choice to use the Neptunes for every single track; it gave the record a cohesive flow that’s exceedingly rare in hip-hop. Further – and, obviously, this is more important – the collection of beats the Neptunes provided was likely the best Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo had ever produced. On the new record, for one, the Neptunes no longer are the sole collaborators. Secondly, the beats they provide (well, besides “Popular Demand”) just straight-up suck. “I’m Good” is all squirrelly synths and fuzz – a lesser version of “I Know” off of Jay-Z’s American Gangster (which wasn’t a very good track, either) – while “Champion,” “Door Man” and the rest are laconic and meandering.

So let’s finally solve that non-mystery, shall we? The problem with Til the Casket Drops is that it presents a version of Clipse that’s almost indistinguishable from countless other MCs. There’s little to no fire here and, in an attempt (I imagine) to finally win the commercial success that’s eluded them thus far, Pusha and Malice have smoothed out all the edges that made them interesting in the first place. If you’re a real hip-hop head, you’re probably going to be at least satisfied by the majority of the material here; as I said, Pusha and Malice are still, more or less, Pusha and Malice, and there’s plenty of clever wordplay here to appreciate. But, if like me, you were drawn to Clipse in the first place because there was something a little different about ‘em, there’s nothing here to keep you coming back. I don’t begrudge ‘em for trying to reach a wider audience and make more money – I’d perhaps just remind Clipse that you don’t make big money by following someone else’s lead.

Once this gem of analytical providence struck me, it became far easier to comprehend Raditude (which, it should be noted, was named by Rivers’ buddy Rainn Wilson, AKA Dwight from “The Office”). But the moment of clarity wasn’t when you’re thinking, either, during Lil Wayne’s quarter-assed drawl of an imitation of a rap verse that enters at the song’s midway point. Instead, it seized me right before that calamity, when Rivers didactically, “ironically” moans the song’s title for the 2nd chorus. He intones the hook like some sort of ghostly robot (and, by the way, the song isn’t so different from “Monster Mash”) and, after listening to it for about 2 minutes and realizing there were two minutes more, my mind rebelled. This can’t be what it sounds like, I thought; He went to Harvard – he can’t be this utterly batshit! And that’s right around when Weezy tumbled, nearly unconscious, out of the closet and into the, erm, “Party.”

Wayne’s verse is terrible, mind you, but more than the song’s “We Are All On Drugs”-level shittiness, what makes it so educational is the sensation that overcame me then, and my realization of the only other times I’d endured such a strain. The only other times in my life I’ve felt the befuddling mixture of shame, schadenfreude, and loathing for both myself and all humanity that Raditude provokes have all involved watching what some people call cringe-comedy. You probably know exactly what I’m talking about just from the name, but for clarity’s sake – the work of people like Larry David of “Seinfeld”/”Curb Your Enthusiasm” or Ricky Gervais, creator of the UK’s “The Office” and executive producer on its US counterpart, starring one Steve Carell as middle-management fool, Michael Scott. Only once I realized that, like Michael Scott, the Rivers Cuomo of Raditude is not a figure to connect with, but rather to gawk at, did I see the record for what it really is: a bad joke.

Cuomo has, of course, always had a sardonic or detached sense of humor, and he’s always been one of our few, rare pop-star intellectuals (a title whose worth is self-evident). In short, to see him write a song or record with the meaning of his very act of writing it in mind is nothing new (consult his extended conversation with himself that is “El Scorcho” for more). But not only were Weezer’s songs better back then, the lulz were, too. Too much of Raditude’s appeal, if it can be said to have one, is based on an attempt by Cuomo to play on both sides – to produce utterly focus-grouped and soulless tripe (the type of songs you hear and immediately know the kind of movie that will use it for a trailer) while, at the same time, wink and smirk with those enlightened few who understand that he’s deconstructing pop or, like an uncool Warhol, complicating our understanding of “product” by embracing its essence. Or some other nonsense.

You see, he’s trying to be a meta-pop-star, and every airbrushed, force-fed, and sterilized note on Raditude is simply an intellectual exercise: “I’m Your Daddy” isn’t embarrassingly stupid, because Rivers gets that he’s so old he could easily be your daddy; it’s “stupid” and “embarrassing.” And, along with the single “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To,” this is one of the two songs on this entire record that privileges the immediate, physical experience of listening to music above the tedium of acknowledging Cuomo’s many veiled witticisms. Literally everything else here – from the parody of machismo that is the Neanderthalic “The Girl Got Hot” to the All American Rejects-like “Put Me Back Together” (and just guess who Cuomo wrote it with), to the positively Nickelodeon “In the Mall” – it’s all just a swirling abyss of self-aware bullshit, a hideous pastiche of countless tongues jammed forcefully into countless cheeks.

And there, standing in its center, wide-eyed and grinning, is Rivers Cuomo, the beloved head of your local Weezer-Mifflin branch.

I could provide a track-by-track synopsis of the record’s failings, but, really, its failure is not one of enough bravura or passion to deserve such scrutiny. The record’s true handicap – and this has been a flaw in the band’s work from the start – is the sense of near-apathy it elicits in the listener. And not only regarding one’s opinion of the music – rather, Bonfires on the Heath is so meandering, so uninvolving, so utterly flaccid that it is sometimes difficult to imagine how MacLean & co. bothered to get out of bed long enough to write and record it. Perhaps I’m failing to recognize some of the record’s more subtle, intellectual virtues – as always, the production, musicianship, and general arrangement of the music is impeccable, and evidence a meticulous, loving devotion to craft that one sorely wishes had been applied to the songwriting, as well – but, listening to this release, I’m overcome with the feeling that this is not music to be listened to by living, oxygen-inhaling-and-carbon-monoxide-releasing human beings. Rather, this sounds like music designed for that most odious of creatures – the music critic.

Indeed, I can’t imagine more than a few non-members of this sect bothering to understand how, although Bonfires on the Heath may sound repetitive and monochromatic, to the seasoned ear, the record is a veritable treasure trove of subtle twists and turns – oh, look! – a timeless ballad of gentle (sexless) affection, evoking a midnight waltz under the stars with your wife of 20 years (5-and-counting celibate). Watch out! – another tastefully underplayed “garage rocker,” like God Save’s “The Garden At Night” (but not as incorrigibly loud). You see, you can’t really understand the erudition of Bonfires unless you spend far more time thinking about what you’re listening to than actually listening.

And at the core, that’s my biggest problem with this record. For an ostensible “pop” release, it has absolutely no emotion; it’s a big, gauzy mothball of self-conscious ennui. I mean, c’mon, “a big gauzy mothball of self-conscious ennui” – who would enjoy a record that could reasonably be described as such? I read once that MacLean worked at a book publishing firm before the Clientele “took off,” as it were, and in an interview, as he reminisced about his days in the ink-trade, he recalled an anecdote wherein he had read the manuscript of a book about a boy at a wizarding school by an unknown British author named J.K. Rowling – he thought it was trash, and told his coworkers as much. They passed. After finding that Bonfires on the Heath is, despite what my subjective sense of time may have told me, only 41 minutes, I wonder if that little story tells you more about this record’s priorities than this entire review ever could.

The weariness evident throughout Beatles For Sale was likely intended to some degree by the band. Certainly, opening, as the record does, with a 1-2-3 sequence of jaunty, catchy, and thoroughly bummed out tracks like “No Reply,” “I’m a Loser,” and “Baby’s in Black” lends us some creative psychoanalytic license. Throughout the record, but especially in its first three songs, you can hear a band who no longer can truly get excited singing about holding hands or other childish things (remember – the vast majority of the work’s output at this juncture concerned some combination of girls, dancing, and oral sex). But I don’t want to oversell a narrative in which Beatles for Sale represents some sort of lofty existential crisis for the group. Although one detects an artistic restlessness in songs like “No Reply” or “I’ll Follow the Sun” (a rather fatalistic little song, this time about life impugning upon what was the security bubble of young love), the glut of covers found here – a step back from A Hard Day’s Night in that regard – is likely best understood as the first signs of a band burning out.

But, of course, the Beatles burning out sounded a lot like most bands lifting off. Indeed, the frantic, manic energy of the brilliant “Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!” (featuring on of Paul’s best vocal performances) proves that even when they were stumbling, the Beatles were eminently capable of producing simply perfect pop/rock. “Eight Days a Week” is in one sense indicative of the band’s material up to the point – lyrically, the song is a generic early-Beatles song about how awesome it is to love you, Babe – but it nevertheless, in its chiming intro and outro, hinted towards the greater experimentation with electric guitar the band was soon to persue.

Still, as enjoyable as everything here is – and as wonderful as the truly top-tier stuff is – it is undeniable that Beatles For Sale is a rare minor work from the Beatles. It’s an understated record in many ways, quiet and somber – the aforementioned “Kansas City” aside, even when they rock, the mop tops sound a little listless – but, in some ways, it’s all the more loveable for its unassuming nature. For those who may find some of the band’s future experimentation to be, as John once called Sgt. Pepper, an empty show, Beatles For Sale is a fantastic corrective – offering a rare view into the Beatles’ vulnerable, semi-fallible side.

Perhaps this is because, although I wouldn’t count myself as a serious Why? fan, before hearing Eskimo Snow I was familiar enough with their work to know that, well, there should be some rapping atop the herky-jerky time changes and vaguely psychedelic production flourishes. I thought the group’s previous release, 2008’s Alopecia, was pretty cool, really. You mix very modern sounding indie rock/pop with the rapping sing-song of leader Yoni Wolf – a man who, more successfully than not, manages to channel Burroughs and Jay-Z in equal measure, creating an artistic persona that I imagine is not that different from what Woody Allen would’ve come up with if he were less into Django Reinhardt and more into Ultramagnetic MCs. At the best moments, you end up with something like “The Hollows” – a menacing-but-catchy song that transports you into Wolf’s world, a bourgeois nightmare of privilege, sexual frustration, and self-loathing. (But with jokes!)

Eskimo Snow, on the other hand, is about as hip-hop as, well, Woody Allen. According to a recent interview with Wolf by the Fork, the band recorded both this and last year’s record at the same time (but mixed them at different times), and in some ways, listening to both records, this makes sense. Like Alopecia, Eskimo Snow can have a sort of kaleidoscopic feel to it (I don’t know how syn aesthetic you happen to be, but if I were to describe how these records might look, I’d reference Yellow Submarine and Edward Gorey and let you take it from there.) and, like Alopecia, it veers wildly between quirky pop and prog rock. But, beyond all the inherent similarities between two records by the same group, that’s about where the similarities end. For one, Eskimo Snow finds Yoni singing every song (rather than the usual occasional). For another, Why? implements traditional song structures here far more often than they had previously (which is not to say that this is like listening to a New Pornographers record).

Still, it’s hard not to be taken aback by something like “Even the Good Wood Gone,” a song that, if you squint, might even be alt.country. Or how about “The Shadow of My Embrace” – a song that begins sounding a bit Motown before, with a perky snare pop, jumping into a chugging, Velvet Underground groove. And then we’re back into something that might be blue-eyed soul (and is that the sound that begins Weezer’s “El Scorcho”?). If this sounds disorienting, it sort of is, but at the same time, you can’t deny that Wolf and co. have a distinct (if idiosyncratic) ear for melody, and that keeps everything tethered together – at least as much as possible. Indeed, as weird as “Embrace” is, it’s also pretty fuckin’ great – my favorite on the record, and one of my favorites of the year. Maybe it’s the upper-middle class Jewish male in me (winning the war against the upper-middle class gentile male in me), but there’s something about Wolf’s at-times uncomfortably honest lyrics that is endearing in its unvarnished fucked-upedness. As the band careens towards a triumphant finish on “Embrace,” Yoni whines, “Am I clean? Lord, please, why me?” and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that statement as affecting as anything else moaned to song from this year.

Those who follow politics – and those who follow those who follow politics – are familiar with the term the concept of an “echo chamber.” When pompous political pundits – or greasy good-for-nothing blogger hippies – talk about the echo chamber, more often than not, they’re referring to Washington, D.C., and the city’s unfortunate habit of talking directly and exclusively to itself.

For example: Senator John McCain “suspends” his campaign during the opening salvo of the economic crisis back in the fall of 2008; Pundit A says, “This is a brilliant political move by the McCain campaign, showcasing the candidate’s essential Maverickness.” Pundit B realizing that he has no fucking idea what to say about the move – his gut may tell him it’s gimmicky and stupid, but what if he’s wrong, and worse still, what if all the other pundits disagree? – he skims some more and finds Pundit A’s assertion that the move, if nothing else, showcases Johnny Mac’s Maverick haunches, glistening in the sun, and says to himself, “Yeah – horsies!” So then Pundit B goes and writes up an ode to McCain’s moxy before quickly returning to his Business Casual rewrite of A Modest Proposal. Cut to Pundit C…etc. Pretty soon all of the pundits are on-board that McCain’s move was absolutely the smartest thing anyone’s ever done. The only problem – neglecting to actually consult anyone outside of the echo chamber, they’re all caught off guard when it turns out that the country (at least for the moment) isn’t quite as cynical and stupid as they are or as they thought, and McCain’s move is an unmitigated flop.

I bring all of this up (laboriously, it would seem) in order to make this point: I’m concerned that as the internet has changed everything else about the world of popular music, so too is it changing how we plugged-in music fans talk to one another. I’m afraid that we’re walking into an echo chamber of our own, and we may not even know it. And while the consequences of the political echo chamber are certainly more destructive than they could possibly be for music – I can’t imagine a scenario wherein everyone’s overrating of the new Arcade Fire record leads to thousands of dead Iraqis – it’s still a move we should be wary to make.

Exhibit A in my presentation would undoubtedly have to be Pitchfork’s recent review of the much-hyped (and not-so-much listened to by me) Veckatimest by Grizzly Bear. So as to not make the same mistake the reviewer made, I won’t assume you’ve read the piece, but as is often the case with online zine’s reviews, there’s not much worth quoting, much less at-length. Suffice to say that although the record receives a very high score – a 9.0, which generally guarantees the record will end up around the top 10 for the site’s influential end of the year list – instances of the scribe making the case for such a high score are few and far between.

True – there’s references to the record’s very early, very low-quality leak, and there’s references to the twitter feed of one of Grizzly Bear’s two primary singers; further, there are times when the review seems to implicitly push back against criticisms against the record. Yeah, it’s a bit studied, he says. And, yes, it’s also, perhaps, boring but…he continues. So you know there’s another way of viewing that 9.0 (hey, y’know, if you flip it upside down and give it a little spin, you might even get a 6.0) but you don’t really know how that argument would be made, or where it would come from. Reading the review is like hearing only one half of a conversation – in all likelihood you’ll be able to follow along, but you won’t get enough information to form your own opinion.

And that’s because the review was seemingly written only for people like me (and most likely you); people who at least considered grabbing that initial, shitty leak; people who then went on messageboards and saw the deluge of praise, followed by the inevitable backlash, and then the bloodless internecine warfare that is inevitable when people feel they must either love or hate a record; people who watched Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion become the album of the decade before it even leaked etc.
I understand why this is happening and in many ways it’s only logical. But that doesn’t mean it’s good. For one thing, it’s going to lead to shitty writing. Although we should always be wary whenever someone says, “Something is ____” authoritatively, bear with me here for a second: Writing isn’t about communicating with those who you’re already on the same page as. At least good writing isn’t. Good writing should be somewhat transcendent of those barriers between niches (barriers that are calcifying to an unprecedented degree in the blog era); Lester Bangs was writing to a select audience of music die-hards, sure – but he wasn’t calling up his friends’ and frienemies following Metal Machine Music’s release, seeing what the “consensus” was. Fuck the consensus – he listened to it, and wrote a rambling, self-indulgent (like this article) poem to what he thought was a glorious piece of music.

We should not be content to watch what remains of music journalism descend into a dank cesspool where the most anticipated records of the year are reviewed on the most popular webzines and the result is little more than a cut-and-paste collage of blog and board comments. That may be good enough for those that make decisions impacting billions worldwide in Washington, D.C. but the new Spoon release deserves much, much more.

At 5.20 PM today, the celebrity gossip website TMZ.com reported that Michael Jackson had suffered a major cardiac arrest this afternoon in his LA-area home. Reports indicate that Jackson had stopped breathing by the time paramedics arrived.

Jackson was set to embark upon an ambitious world tour. No word yet on how (or if) those who had already purchased the rather expensive tickets will be reimbursed.

This is all (somewhat) breaking news, and we’ll try to keep you updated on any major new developments.

For the time being, suffice to say R.I.P. to one of the most important, successful, influential and controversial figures in pop music history.

EDIT: The LA Times has confirmed that Jackson is indeed dead.

But, of course, Dinosaur Jr. didn’t choose to reunite simply to trot out the same old (and beloved) songs from two decades ago. Instead, they re-burst out the gate with 2007’s Beyond, a record so surprisingly good that many were tempted to call it an anomaly. Well, is it a fluke if it happens twice? This year’s Farm, is at the least Beyond’s equal – another thoroughly satisfying, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll record . Like Beyond, Farm manages to sound so much like music from the band’s heyday, you might worry that you’re hearing Dinosaur Jr. do Dinosaur Jr. But, thankfully, also like Beyond, this record manages to avoid that pitfall through excellent playing and songwriting. As musicians, the band hasn’t lost even a half-step. J. Mascis in particular is in top form, mixing virtuoso playing with emotional intensity. In terms of songwriting, Farm’s first half is the strongest, with “I Want You to Know” and “Plans” being the standouts. But the best thing about Farm is its overall consistency. It’s an easy record to listen to front-to-back – nothing sounds out of place or demands patience, and every song has at least one hook, drum fill, or, more frequently, guitar lick that’ll keep you entertained.

The negative aspect of such consistency is the fact that while everything on Farm is good, nothing is remarkable (there’s nothing here that’s rivaling “Freak Scene” or “In a Jar”). And in truth, if we were to nitpick, this is the one fault with Dinosaur Jr.’s return – they’re making really good, solid rock music here; but nothing that blows you away. Of course, for many (myself included), this is in some way part of the charm – it’s comforting to put on a record that will give you exactly what you want, exactly the way you want. There are no surprises on Farm – least of which is its quality.

The important thing is that their third album, Touchdown, is one of the most immediately endearing new rock records I’ve come across in a very long while. Frontman Eamon Hamilton served as British Sea Power’s touring keyboardist until 2006, so it is not surprising that the two groups often sound alike. Like BSP, Brakes aren’t afraid to write fast, loud, and brazenly accessible guitar rock. But, songs such as “How Will I Ever Find My Way Home?” and “Atom” aside, Brakes is much more straightforward in their songwriting. Songs such as opener “Two Shocks” and “Don’t Take Me to Space (Man)” rock just as hard as anything on Do You Like Rock Music? – but they’re shorter, punchier, and free of the exhaustion many felt by the end of BSP’s 2008 disc; in fact, the best thing about Touchdown is that its melodies are so catchy, the songwriting is so tight and varied,

I find myself continuously wanting more. Maybe it’s because, in a good way, the band can’t stay still – some songs here are pensive, feedback-drenched ballads, others are relentless punk freakouts à la Mclusky; on the surprisingly enjoyable “Eternal Return,” they even pull off a sort of brit-pop honky tonk. What they do best, though, is sound like most of my favorite rock bands from the late 80s and early 90s: Yo La Tengo, Oasis, the La’s, Lemonheads and, most of all, Pixies.

Besides the 1-2 opening combination of “Two Shocks,” and “Don’t Take Me…,” the band most brilliantly recaptures the aggressive, quirky and thoroughly melodic aesthetic of that Cobain era with “Crush On You.” Through repetition of a reliably chunky and muted barre-chord riff, Hamilton shares a very Malkmus-like list of random names, objects and phrases before being overtaken by a killer fuzzy guitar riff that’s vintage Breeders. But although Brakes have 1991 down perfect, Touchdown is enjoyable no matter which genre-tag is most applicable – even the relative misstep “Ancient Mysteries,” with its forced sing-along fairy tale of teenage pregnancy and domestic abuse, is salvaged by another irresistible melody.

Give this record a listen – I’m sure that by the time you hit the lovely, yet painful drone of “Oh! Forever”, you’ll agree that if any band in 2009 deserves to take a leap in popularity, it’s Brakes. Brakesbrakesbrakes, too.