Nothing and nobody in the musical year of 2011 has stayed with me the way The Weeknd has. What upstart Toronto R&B crooner Abel Tesfaye pulled off over last twelve months is both truly remarkable and in some ways unprecedented. House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence, his three 2011 releases, were advertised as mixtapes, but that sells their worth as albums ridiculously short. Usually when someone mentions the release of a mixtape, I think of a DIY, thrown-together collection of tracks and song fragments. They can be very good, even great, but rarely do they exhibit the consistency and attention to detail that Tesfaye’s work does. That he put out three albums mere months apart that are both meticulously plotted and exhilaratingly rough-edged, before receiving industry backing of any kind outside of Drake tweeting a few of his lyrics, is mind-boggling. This is the kind of streak of high-quality albums we usually see from bands with established fan bases and widespread support, not the opening salvo of a kid that hasn’t even been around long enough for the major labels to open a proper bidding war.

But for as much critical acclaim as Tesfaye has garnered (House of Balloons was a fixture on many publications’ year-end lists, including this one), I still feel like he’s somewhat underrated. To begin with, he has flat-out one of the most mesmerizing voices I’ve ever heard, and that isn’t an exaggeration. It’s an astonishing instrument that’s like a cross between Michael Jackson and Jeff Buckley. And while that alone would be enough to justify the praise he’s earned, it’s the risks he takes with this voice that make him compelling. An asset of this caliber is something most would elect to leave well enough alone. But Tesfaye and producer Illangelo have no qualms about bending and melding it to the point of unrecognizability. That “Gone” and “Initiation,” which feed Tesfaye through a litany of vocal filters, are as affecting as straightforward performances like “Wicked Games” and “The Morning” betrays a set of melodic smarts decades beyond his 21 years.

The Weeknd’s songs mine virtually identical lyrical territory as early supporter/sort-of mentor Drake. However, most of the time they seem to exist in entirely different universes. When Drake airs his personal insecurities and tales of sexual regret, the overarching tone is one of longing for approval and understanding from the outside world. He asks whether he’s deserving of success not out of humility, but because he likes the sound of being reassured. Tesfaye, however, gives no fucks what we think about his coke-and-empty-hookups lifestyle. He doesn’t care how most of the people in his songs view him. And a lot of the time, I’m not even sure whether he cares what he thinks of himself. His music derives its power from its complete sense of detachment from any aspect of reality, something that allows him to be nakedly and brutally honest, consequences be damned.

This defiant libertinism doesn’t come at the expense of Tesfaye’s self-awareness. He explores every dark corner of his lifestyle with uncommon clarity and nuance. Both sonically and lyrically, the way he cycles through attitudes toward his actions over the three albums gives each one not only a thematic unity but helps them function as a larger narrative arc. House of Balloons is an out-and-out celebration of sexual danger and excess; the glee in his voice is palpable on “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” and “Loft Music.” By Thursday, Tesfaye isn’t so much chasing thrills as maintaining status quo. Things don’t truly start to go off the rails until “XO/The Host,” the fourth track on Echoes of Silence. The way he tells a prospective hookup, “If they won’t let you in / you know where to find me” is dripping with a terrifying mix of lust and insanity that lays plain Tesfaye’s imminent downward spiral. The batshit “Initiation” and more resigned melancholy of “Same Old Song” and “Next” are a mere formality after that. His willingness to take risks manifested itself musically in the impossibly ballsy decision to open Echoes of Silence with a “Dirty Diana” cover. But if his lyrics are anything close to reality, the fact that it took until album number three for the self-destruction to truly kick in is nearly as astounding as the music itself.

The completeness and cohesion Tesfaye achieved with the Balloons trilogy makes his inevitable major-label debut both somewhat superfluous and utterly fascinating. The versatility of his voice and his association with Drake make him appear primed for pop superstardom. All the tools are there, but I’m curious as to how it’ll manifest itself. I’m not sure whether I’m giddy with excitement for, or utterly dreading, a future with Tesfaye as a pop hitmaker. Hearing him on Drake’s “Crew Love” was weird enough — Drizzy appeared on Thursday‘s outstanding “The Zone,” but it worked more as reinforcement of the song’s mood than as a feature on a heavily-hyped release by a heavily-hyped rapper. There were none of the peripheral trappings typical of a superstar’s guest appearance on an up-and-comer’s mixtape. When the album was released, the MP3 of “The Zone” wasn’t even tagged as “(feat. Drake).” On the other hand, the entire point of “Crew Love” is to establish Tesfaye as someone with whom marquee names should want to collaborate. But on his records, he exists completely outside of any world we could relate to, let alone one as self-referential and self-conscious as the modern-day pop-radio environment. If The Weeknd can carve out a niche for himself in the mainstream without actively making his music more palatable to pop audiences, it’ll be a minor miracle.

Or, he could flame out, either from all that coke he brags about doing or from the crushing weight of the expectations that are implied for someone doing this caliber of work this early on. If Tesfaye never recorded again, his legacy would be set. But more likely, his upcoming tour (including a pair of performances at Coachella that are all but guaranteed to be among the festival’s most talked-about) will remove just enough of the mystery that surrounds him to raise his commercial profile, while retaining enough genuine excitement about his potential to set him up for a long and successful career. He’s as exciting, fascinating, and singularly captivating as any newcomer in recent memory, and he doesn’t even have a record deal yet. Let’s hope he sticks around for a while.

This sequence defined the show, and by extension the album the two rap giants are supporting. The tour famously got pushed back over a disagreement between Jay and Kanye over the execution. Kanye wanted a lavish, expensive production; Jigga preferred a stripped-down show that would have brought in greater profits. Kanye won that one: the stage featured two rising video-screen platforms, one on a satellite stage in the middle of the floor. Jay opened the show there, and Kanye used it for his mini-set of “Runaway,” “Heartless,” and “Stronger,” the show’s centerpiece and highlight.

This fundamental philosophical difference between the two revealed itself during the duo’s marathon set, which spanned over 40 songs and clocked in at nearly three hours. Kanye’s sections of the show were laden with special effects and improvisations. Jay, meanwhile, took a more straightforward, stripped-down approach to his material. Not that this came as a surprise to anyone with any degree of familiarity with either’s career. Kanye’s always been the perfectionist, the tortured artist; Jay is the virtuosic business mogul. His brilliance comes off more nonchalant and less labored. The back-and-forth structure of the show allowed both to play to their strengths during their solo turns, while their performances of the Watch the Throne material and their other collaborations (such as “Monster” and “Diamonds From Sierra Leone”) managed to strike a balance between their approaches.

Jay mentored Kanye at the turn of the century, but the two are unquestionably equals now, both in the rap game and in each other’s eyes. There was no upstaging and no deference on the part of either one, just celebration of their deep catalogues of hits. And what a pair of catalogues they are. The amount of classics on display from Jay (“Jigga What, Jigga Who,” “Izzo (H.O.V.A.),” “U Don’t Know,” “Public Service Announcement,” “99 Problems”) and Kanye (“Jesus Walks,” “Good Life,” “All Falls Down”) was staggering at times, even to the two men onstage. The Watch the Throne songs felt stilted and overindulgent at times on record, but they’re tailor-made for this kind of big-budget, more-is-more arena production. Even the ones that kinda suck, like “H.A.M.” and “Welcome to the Jungle,” felt suitably epic in this setting.

The show didn’t run flawlessly. Kanye cut “All Falls Down” short and threatened to remove an entire section of people on the floor when someone threw an object onstage (the offender fessed up), and subsequently bungled his verse of “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix),” forcing Jigga to bail him out. Jay, for his part, committed the old-as-time rock-show mistake of greeting the city of Seattle at a show in Tacoma (he corrected himself later on). Kanye cut off “All of the Lights” several times to make sure everybody had their cell phones in the air to his satisfaction, but in this instance it came off as more of a Saturday Night Live parody of his megalomania than a genuine miscue.

You know what else seems like an SNL sketch on paper? Playing “Niggas in Paris” five times in a row to close the show. But they did it. They did it because they could. And the audience loved it.

If this were anyone else, the revelation that the British singer’s tenth studio album, 50 Words for Snow contains a 13-minute erotic ode to a snowman would be the indulgence to end all indulgences. But if there’s one thing Kate Bush isn’t, it’s ordinary. There isn’t another singer on the planet that could sell “Misty.” But as she’s aged, her voice has acquired a warmth and depth that makes lines like “His snowy white arms surround me, so cold next to me / I can feel him melting in my hand” not only palatable, but elegant.

As the album’s title would suggest, the rest of its songs keep with the winter theme, but not all of them are that idiosyncratic, at least content-wise. Out of Bush’s catalog, 50 Words for Snow is the album least beholden to traditional song structures. Its seven tracks are lengthy — the shortest clocks in at just under seven minutes — and she takes her time unfolding them. Many of these songs scarcely feature more than Bush and her piano. Her 12-year-old son, Bertie, the subject of a painfully mawkish tribute on her 2005 album Aerial, takes center stage on 50 Words’ opener, “Snowflake,” handling most of the vocals in a boyish soprano. The song is reflective of how most of the album is constructed. Bush’s songs here aren’t built around hooks, but around space and escalating tension. It isn’t until halfway through the eleven-minute runtime of “Lake Tahoe” that drummer Steve Gadd shows himself for the first time on the album.

50 Words for Snow’s centerpiece is “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” an unlikely duet with Elton John. It’s a story of doomed lovers spread over many decades, and it plays out seemingly in real time, losing and regaining touch from the fall of Rome to 9/11 over a creeping, glacial synth backdrop. Bush and John have a natural chemistry, like two actors in an epic romance film. Both have voices that sound both lived-in and grown-into, far removed from their younger theatrics but no less dramatically alluring.

Most of 50 Words is an evolution of the understated, graceful aesthetic Bush introduced on Aerial, her first album after a 12-year layoff. But there are moments here in which the manic art-rock siren from the 1980s bubbles to the surface. “Wild Man,” the closest thing to a pop song on the album, features some rare rock muscle and the demented, double-tracked vocals that defined albums like The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. The title track, a blizzard of percolating percussion and synth, is built around guest Stephen Fry reciting, yes, fifty words for snow (highlights: “deamondi-pavlova,” “sorbetdeluge,” “bad for trains”), with Bush counting off. But when she occasionally interrupts to egg him on (“Come on, man, just 22 to go”), her voice reaches the demonic heights she occupied in a past life.

While Bush has been more prolific lately than she’s been since the mid-‘80s (50 Words for Snow is her second album of 2011, following Director’s Cut, a set of new reworkings of tracks from The Sensual World and The Red Shoes), her work is no less painstakingly constructed. These tracks are sparse but airtight, haunting but unrelentingly gorgeous, both logical successors to the stunning second half of Aerial and completely unlike anything she’s done. In other words, business as usual for one of the most singularly captivating and influential talents in rock history.

Achtung Baby is the rarest kind of classic, a daring reinvention in sound and style by a band about as famous as any band could be, an album whose aims are topped only by the degree to which it succeeds at meeting all of them. U2 became one of the biggest musical acts on the planet with the release of their fifth album, The Joshua Tree, in 1987. But the subsequent world tour chronicled by the film Rattle and Hum saw a band on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own expectations every night, playing stadiums and appearing on the cover of TIME but becoming increasingly uncomfortable with what they were coming to represent. They had backed themselves into a tight corner, with no choice other than hitting the reset button.

In From the Sky Down, Edge describes the band’s new approach as “taking the humanity out so that the humanity we leave in means more.” If anything, however, the introduction of electronics into the U2 aesthetic served to make them more human than they were during the Joshua Tree period. On Achtung Baby, U2 balance their personal expectations with their ear for the shifting musical landscape as well as any band ever has. “Zoo Station” and “The Fly” seamlessly marry grunge to the industrial music Edge had taken to in the late ‘80s. “Mysterious Ways” is credible as white funk and devastating as a rock song. “One” and “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” prove that abandoning the stadium-rock mentality doesn’t mean they can’t still write choruses big enough to fill them, and “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World” and “Love is Blindness” prove that they’re just as capable of aiming smaller.

The bonus material on discs five and six of the box set (which also includes Achtung Baby’s severely underrated 1993 follow-up Zooropa and two pointless discs of remixes that likely won’t be of much use even to die-hards) only serve to illuminate how much had to go right for the album to be as good as it was. The B-sides disc features “Lady With the Spinning Head” and “Salome,” both of which were stripped for parts for the songs that ended up on the album. These are fine songs in and of themselves, but hearing riffs and melodies from “Ultraviolet” and “The Fly” in the context of “Spinning Head” only make you appreciate more how much they were made for the songs they ended up as. The Kindergarten disc of demos turn Achtung’s best songs into a game of “spot the influence.” Hearing “Even Better Than the Real Thing” as a Rolling Stones homage and “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” as a Springsteen rip again reiterate how impressive the finished products are. The original, seven-minute version of the album’s gorgeous closing track, “Love is Blindness,” is worth the price of admission here.

The reason Achtung Baby is the most enduring work of U2’s career and one of the defining rock albums of the last quarter-century is how natural the band made this radical transformation sound. The change in sound was labored over and almost broke down several times, but the end result was something both utterly unlike anything the band had recorded to that point and completely of a piece with the rest of their output.

Dear Apple,

When you introduced iTunes Match at the Worldwide Developer Conference in June, it was hailed by many (myself included) as the future of music storage and distribution. The business model is ingenious: for a reasonable fee, the songs in your iTunes library that weren’t purchased from your store would be treated as if they were, and could be downloaded on any iOS device tied to your Apple ID. As an iPhone and iPad owner with a large collection of non-iTunes-purchased music, I was all in.

Well, as it turns out, the “large collection of non-iTunes-purchased music” part of that is a bit of a non-starter. When I went to enable iTunes Match on Monday, I was told that I could not use the service because I have more than 25,000 externally acquired files in my library. Having too large a music collection made me unable to give you money for a service you provide that’s aimed specifically at people who don’t buy the majority of their music on iTunes.

There was no option to choose up to 25,000 songs from my library to upload into the cloud. I could have more than lived with that. There was also no option to purchase extra space. If you wanted to charge $50 or even $100 per year (rather than $25) for a version of iTunes Match that allowed for unlimited songs to be stored, I’d pay it. But for the crime of having too much music, I and others like me are completely shut out of what is clearly an exciting and valuable product.

I know what you’ll say. We should start buying more of our music on iTunes, so as not to have it count against the 25,000-song limit. But there will always be those who like to own physical copies of their favorite albums, as well as those who want their personal library to be of higher quality than the 256kbps files you sell. I have a dedicated two-terabyte external hard drive for my music library, and the vast majority of my CDs are ripped in Apple Lossless. If you’re willing to start selling lossless music in the iTunes store, we’ll talk. As it is, I shouldn’t have to limit the amount of music I keep on my computer at the quality I want just to be able to use iTunes Match.

There are workarounds for the issue, but they’re clunky and not very convenient. MacWorld suggests creating a second library for iTunes Match, which just seems like it takes a lot of energy that could be spent on other things like, I don’t know, appreciating a wide variety of music on several different iOS devices using iTunes Match. Plus, if I did that and then you offered an option to use iTunes Match with a larger library at a later date, I’d be forced to pay for the service twice.

I’m incredibly excited about iTunes Match and the possibilities it presents for the way we consume music. I just think you’re making a mistake by shutting out those of us with large volumes of music, those of us who could maybe use the service more than anyone. I hope we’re able to come to an understanding about this. I want to give you my money for this thing. If only you’d let me.

XOXO

Sean

The first thing that must be noted about Living in the Material World, Martin Scorsese’s new documentary on George Harrison, is that it’s a George Harrison film, not a Beatles film. When their story, the most-told in the history of popular music, comes up, it’s only to explain the role they played in furthering, and occasionally holding back, George’s artistic and spiritual development. It’s a savvy decision from Scorsese. Even a filmmaker of his caliber probably couldn’t unearth new insight on The Ed Sullivan Show or the making of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There isn’t an aspect of The Beatles’ career and legacy that hasn’t been exhaustively covered in at least one of the countless books and documentaries that have been produced over the last 50 years. Yet a sizable majority of the retellings of their story focus on the defining partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. It’s understandable — they wrote the bulk of the songs, and it was their personality clash that ultimately led to the group’s demise. But Harrison, the so-called “quiet Beatle,” led a life that deserves to be explored not only because of his immense musical talent, but because his personal and spiritual transformation says a lot about the underlying contradictions of the free-love era.

In the film, Beatles producer George Martin points to the isolated nature of Harrison’s songwriting contributions to The Beatles as the cause of his frustrations with the group, and this holds true in more ways than one. Not only did the backlog of songs that Harrison wrote that didn’t appear on their albums serve as a cause of frustration, but Martin argues that his exclusion from the Lennon-McCartney partnership/rivalry deprived him of the friendly competition that would have pushed his songwriting to even greater artistic heights. He did fine in that department, of course — “Something” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” are two of the most beloved Beatles songs, and many of his compositions that the group didn’t use ended up on All Things Must Pass, the best album any Beatle made after the breakup. Still, the perceived limitations of his role in the band led to his exploration of Eastern religion as a form of escape and self-betterment.

Harrison’s spiritual quest is what the bulk of Scorsese’s two-part, nearly four-hour film focuses on. All four Beatles famously visited the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968, but the effect it had on Harrison was most profound. He had been playing sitar on Beatles records as far back as Rubber Soul, but he came to the conclusion after hanging around with Ravi Shankar that he did not have the capacity to be a sitarist. Still, that art’s influence on his guitar playing and songwriting during the second half of the Beatles’ run cannot be overstated. It represented a turning point for him, and he began thinking much bigger than being the third-most popular member of the most-loved group in the world. His future contributions to the Beatles would be more diverse and wide-ranging than they were before, but there was no chance of his finding satisfaction within those confines.

Harrison’s new-age leanings also indirectly played a role in the biggest tabloid scandal of his life. To hear friend and collaborator Eric Clapton tell it, George’s attitude about material objects and commercialism was the green light the former Cream guitarist needed to pursue Patti Harrison. He was basically right. George was furious at first (Patti’s account of the initial confrontation between the two friends and the first time Clapton played her “Layla” is one of the centerpieces of the film), but by the time of a mid-’70s interview, all was seemingly forgiven. “Eric is a dear friend,” Harrison said then, “and I’d rather have her be with him than some dope.” That’s more forgiveness than somebody who stole his best friend’s wife should expect, and it says a lot not only about the influence of Hinduism on George’s life but also the vulnerabilities it invited.

Also covered in depth in Living in the Material World is Harrison’s near-fatal 2000 stabbing at the hands of a deranged fan. The incident is recounted in unexpectedly comical fashion by his second wife, Olivia. She characterizes it not as a contributing factor to his death in 2001 but instead as an opportunity for her and George to work out the remaining kinks in their marriage before it was too late. George’s son Dhani, meanwhile, contended that the stabbing expedited his father’s death at the hands of the lung cancer that had been diagnosed some years previously. By all accounts, George handled death as gracefully as one can. It was the final chapter in a misunderstood, fascinating life.

Of course, Living in the Material World excels under traditional rockumentary parameters as well. Scorsese and HBO rounded up every heavy-hitter you’d ever want interviewed — Paul and Ringo, obviously, as well as Clapton, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Astrid Kirchherr, and countless others — and were granted full access to Harrison’s video and audio archives. There’s plenty of porn for Beatles nerds in the form of unseen photos and footage of Harrison in the studio (highlight: George isolating vocal harmonies in “My Sweet Lord” and “Awaiting on You All” from the All Things Must Pass multitracks). Given the subject and director we’re dealing with, there was no way this documentary wouldn’t have been worthwhile. But the amount of fresh perspective and insight Scorsese is able to wring from this well-covered territory makes Living in the Material World an absolutely essential addition to the Harrison canon, as well as those of the Beatles and pop music as a whole.

It’s nakedly obvious why they’re doing this. The major labels have lost the war against piracy. They declare victory when Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga sells as much in a year as N’ Sync and Eminem sold in a week 10 years ago. The entire system is on life support, and they know this all too well. The one thing they still have is their five-plus decades of material, which they are understandably milking for everything they can get in order to compensate for their inability to sell new music. It flies in the face of everything “rock and roll,” and everyone knows this. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t hold it against them.

As excessive as the constant reissuing of well-worn albums is, as blatantly money-focused these efforts are, I love this stuff. The live Dark Side performance should be required listening for any Pink Floyd fan. Some of U2′s best work could be found as B-sides for Achtung‘s singles. Having all of them on one disc packaged with a remastered version of the album isn’t the worst thing in the world (although for the price of the “Über Deluxe” edition, the “Fly” sunglasses had better be tour-worn). The Smiths’ catalogue, much like that of the Beatles prior to their terrific remastering campaign in 2009, hadn’t really been updated since the original CDs were released in the 1980s. Letting Johnny Marr give Meat is Murder and The Queen is Dead sonic overhauls 25 years after their release feels necessary, just like Francis Ford Coppola’s 2008 Blu-Ray restoration of the Godfather movies was necessary. I like learning new things about my favorite albums. Being able to trace a song’s genesis through demos is fascinating. Want to throw in some extra artwork or liner notes? So much the better. One of the biggest complaints vinyl purists have about the CD format is that some of an album’s aesthetic beauty is lost in translation. I haven’t gotten my hands on the Quadrophenia box set yet, but I’m not worried about being shortchanged visually.

This is why labels will probably never stop repackaging their best-known work, even after every other use for the CD format is gone. The most revered albums will never stop having a fan base, and this fan base will never stop wanting the biggest, most expanded, most modern-sounding versions of the albums they know and love. And I’m fine with that.

On paper, it seems like there’s no way this collaboration could fail, but throughout most of these 12 tracks, I found myself wishing Watch the Throne had been a Kanye solo album. The inconvenient truth here is that Jay-Z’s reputation as an all-time great MC stems almost entirely from three of his 11 albums and a handful of guest appearances. With the exception of 2007’s underrated American Gangster, he’s been on near-constant autopilot since 2003. Not that anyone can blame him — his net worth is well into nine figures and he’s married to Beyoncé; he doesn’t need the rap game to further his career. He released the best hip-hop album of the post-Biggie/Tupac era 10 years ago this September, so he has nothing to prove to anybody artistically. Collaborating on a full-length studio album with Kanye is as much a savvy career move for him from a continued-relevance standpoint as it is a legacy-cementing event for the man he once mentored. There’s nothing resembling a master-and-student dynamic on Watch the Throne — between Kanye’s current critical cache and Jay’s brand value, it’s a wash as to who the bigger draw is here.

And yet, the first voice heard on Watch the Throne is that of Frank Ocean. “No Church in the Wild” and “Made in America” have the Odd Future singer nailing his audition to become hip-hop’s next omnipresent hook man. Kanye, of course, takes a more-is-more approach to production, and his ideas stick about two-thirds of the time. Fans of College Dropout-era Kanye will wet themselves over “New Day” and “Murder to Excellence” — not just for the sped-up-vocal-sample production, but also for the subject matter. On the RZA-produced “New Day,” Jay and Kanye cop to the fact that their future kids’ lives are probably already ruined by their fame (Kanye has what might be the best line on the album: “I might even make him be Republican/So everybody know he loves white people”). “Murder to Excellence,” meanwhile, tackles the problem of black-on-black murder. It’s a rare instance on Watch the Throne where they rap about something that isn’t themselves, and it’s fantastic.

For all the big-budget tricks on this album, though, the two most musically impressive tracks are the two most stripped-down. The opening “No Church in the Wild” rides an ominous, darkly funky bass groove and chilly synths tailor-made for Ocean’s off-kilter crooning. Q-Tip’s production on “That’s My Bitch” is all turntable scratches and ‘80s keyboards (not to mention a killer hook from La Roux’s Elly Jackson), and Kanye and Jay actually push each other as MCs for once. It’s one of the few times that Jay’s verses don’t feel like they were CGI’d in from an online Jay-Z boast generator. And if you can get past the absurdity that is crediting Otis Redding as a featured artist for a run-of-the-mill “Try a Little Tenderness” sample (“My favorite track on College Dropout is ‘Through the Wire’ – you know, the one that features Chaka Kahn?”), “Otis” is actually a pretty good song. Elsewhere, Kanye piles on the horns, strings, synths, vocal samples, and whatever else. It’s all roughly as subtle as the majority of the lyrical content is modest, but does anybody on earth listen to either of these guys expecting restraint? An IMAX production is what we want from them, and that’s exactly what they deliver. And for the most part, it sounds great.

That’s not to say everything works, however. The Beyoncé-assisted “Lift Off” is an unqualified disaster. It’s a plodding, tuneless mess that takes a layup of a Bey hook, does absolutely nothing with it for four minutes, and somehow manages to sound overproduced and unfinished at the same time. “Welcome to the Jungle” features some of their hottest rapping on the album, but it’s absolutely ruined by Swizz Beats’ grating production and contractually-insured ad-libbing (which, by the way, is the single biggest cancer of the last several years of mainstream hip-hop. Forget raising the debt ceiling — Congress should pass a law banning Swizz and Will.i.am from coming within 15 feet of a working microphone on any track they produce for another artist). “Niggas in Paris” is basically a Waka Flocka song with 30 seconds of dubstep stapled to the end. And I still can’t figure out the point of the 15-second horn interlude that runs between several of the songs. It’s almost as if they realized Watch the Throne didn’t have My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s impeccable pacing and cohesion and threw this in to fool listeners into thinking there was something to tie it together. For someone who’s mastered the art of album sequencing to the extent that Kanye has, it feels like a cheap ploy.

But you know what? For all its shortcomings, Watch the Throne is still damn good. Kanye and Jay have a few misfires on the album, but they’re the kind of misfires that come from overambitiousness, not from complacency. For the two most commercially viable rappers of the past decade to care this much about the quality of their art is something nobody could argue is a bad thing.

When Amy Winehouse was found dead in London on Saturday, it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone who had followed the British singer’s tumultuous career even casually over the last five years. She had struggled with drugs and alcohol her entire adult life, something she addressed with tragic self-awareness on her career-defining hit single, “Rehab.” Since her career blew up in 2006, the prodigiously talented Winehouse seemed to exist mostly as a running joke in the tabloids, resurfacing every few months accompanied by headlines involving drug abuse, erratic work habits, and cancelled tours. No, if you asked me whether I was surprised to wake up this weekend to hear about her death, I couldn’t say that I was. In fact, I was most surprised that it hadn’t happened sooner.

When news of her death broke, the internet was quick to point out that she had joined the infamous “27 Club.” Winehouse, like Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain, was a wildly talented but also deeply troubled performer whose life was cut short at that fateful age, as just as they seemed to be scratching the surface of their artistic reach. As rock legends go, it’s as clichéd as they come, and anyone who tries to frame age 27 as a curse is deluding themselves. But in this case, I’m okay with it. Putting Winehouse in a category with Hendrix and Cobain may seem premature, but it looks like she’ll be on the list the next time someone joins this club. Because of this, her music may not be forgotten as easily as it might have otherwise. And she didn’t leave us with much music—just two studio albums and a few scattered singles—but what she did record deserves to be remembered and celebrated.

It’s remarkable in retrospect how fully formed Winehouse’s gifts were in 2003, when the 19-year-old released her debut album, Frank. Although the album was reissued in 2007 to capitalize on the success of “Rehab” and Back to Black, it remains decently underrated. Even back then, she was a throwback in almost every respect. The voice on display had more in common with Nina Simone or Ella Fitzgerald than anything in contemporary pop or R&B. Oftentimes, performers with this kind of raw talent but no professional experience will overuse their gifts to prove themselves worthy of attention. Not Winehouse. Her vocal abilities were apparent from the beginning, but never in-your-face. She showed impressive restraint on the ballads “You Sent Me Flying” and “What it Is About Men,” songs a less astute singer would have bludgeoned to death with vocal acrobatics.

But even as she seemingly devoted herself to emulating icons of a bygone era, the album’s stunning centerpiece, “In My Bed,” brought hip-hop into the equation and suggested that she could easily have had a fine career as a Lauryn Hill or Erykah Badu type if she were so inclined. Watching the video for “In My Bed” today is surreal. The teenaged Winehouse had barely any tattoos. She had some semblance of a normal person’s weight. And there was not a lot on Frank that foreshadowed the direction her career would take a few years later. The singles “Fuck Me Pumps” and “Take the Box” displayed a self-deprecation that was fresh and charming rather than destructive.

Since Winehouse lacked obvious the marketability of a Norah Jones, she may never had much more than a cult audience had she stayed in that lane. The Mark Ronson-produced follow-up, 2006’s Back to Black, was bigger, bolder, and flashier, but no less of a throwback. If she sounded on Frank like a modern incarnation of Sarah Vaughan, then Back to Black positioned her as a lost member of the Motown roster. The vocal performance on this record was no less virtuosic than that of its predecessor, but what was staggering was how smooth a transition it was for Winehouse from jazz to soul. The title track and “Some Unholy War” came from the same place as her debut, but gone were any traces of cabaret. The horns were still there, but on Back to Black, they stabbed and punctuated her songs, rather than carry them.

The hit singles “Rehab” and “You Know I’m No Good” dealt with her drug use and personal problems head-on, and lines like “I don’t never wanna drink again” didn’t exactly discourage British tabloids from making a sport of publishing pictures of her and her scumbag husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, in every unflattering physical and mental state imaginable. Winehouse seemed to relish the attention, even as it was clearly tearing her life to pieces. Nobody in the press seemed to be rooting for her to get help—headlines playing on “Rehab” accompanied by drunken photos were too profitable. It seemed at times as though Winehouse was playing herself in a TV show, giving the audience what she believed they wanted, a junkie caricature. The way the media treated her, she could have just been any addicted celebrity. The fact that she made music, let alone music this fresh and vital, never seemed to cross people’s minds. Her tours seemed to exist only to be cancelled and set off a new round of Daily Mail headlines. Reports of Winehouse working on new music surfaced only when the word was that she was too fucked-up to function. Now we’ll never know what she would have done with her career had she gotten it together.

What little music Winehouse has recorded since Back to Black has largely signified what would have been yet another stylistic shift. Judging from the B-sides “Cupid,” “Monkey Man,” and “Jey Little Rich Girl,” her next move was reggae. And, surprise, she crushed that too. Of course she did. She had the kind of voice that could have probably pulled off anything you care to name, and do it with poise, nuance, and a killer musical instinct. It’s tough to assess how Winehouse will be remembered. It was a foregone conclusion that Michael Jackson’s death would allow people to move past his issues and bring his world-class talent back into focus. Winehouse’s body of work is much smaller, of course, but her influence is still felt on pop radio. But while the similar-sounding Adele and Duffy are fine singers, neither of them are as transcendently talented as Amy was. We could have been watching an all-time great. We’ll never know. Her self-assuredness in the recording booth was never matched by her stability outside it, and when a talent like that goes this early, we all lose.

Born This Way and Goblin are intriguingly analogous of one another because, on the surface, their makers seem to be polar opposites. Gaga is the biggest star in the world at the moment, while Tyler and his LA skate-rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All are, despite the recent influx of hype, still a decidedly underground movement. Where the songs on Born This Way seem like they were designed in a laboratory to appeal to as many people as possible, Goblin positions itself as the most insular, restrictive, and uninviting supposed “pop” record in years. Tyler can barely go five words without a “bitch” or a “faggot”; Gaga, on the other hand, seems bent on becoming the face of the entire gay-rights movement.

At the same time, though, I can’t help but think that they fascinate us for many of the same reasons. What makes them both compelling figures is their shared ability to bend the interests of mainstream audiences to fit their own visions, rather than the other way around. I have a difficult time picturing Tyler’s “Yonkers” getting radio play next to Drake and Rick Ross, but this obviously must happen, or else there wouldn’t be New Yorker investigations into the whereabouts of his MIA cohort Earl Sweatshirt. By the same token, for as indelible as “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face” are as radio fare, Lady Gaga is legitimately weird, which doesn’t always translate to Top 40 success.

Their latest records have been hyped in much the same fashion, and deliver strikingly similar payoffs. Gaga has been built up to the second coming of Madonna, the type of star who will never entirely drop out of the top 10 most important celebrities on earth, and will probably intermittently top that list throughout the rest of her life. Tyler, meanwhile, has become this kind of star on a much smaller scale. The last several months of Odd Future hype, particularly the time since their star-making performance on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon in March, have vaulted Tyler into the upper echelon of Pitchfork figures of interest, right next to your Animal Collectives and Arcade Fires. In both cases, their outsized personalities are informing their notoriety just as much as their music. Gaga has crafted some of the most memorable pop songs of the last several years, but her bonkers award-show outfits have netted her just as much attention. Tyler’s singles “Yonkers” and “Tron Cat” betray a grasp of dexterous wordplay well beyond his 20 years of age, but his Twitter feed is nearly as quotable. Neither of these records would likely hold as much interest if they were released by anybody else.

These are also their first releases since becoming the musical and cultural icons that they are, and Tyler and Gaga have responded in pretty much the exact same way: by throwing a fucking lot of music at their audiences and letting them make what they will of it. Born This Way and Goblin are sprawling, wildly inconsistent works. Listening to these records, I don’t get the impression that either one of them makes a habit of surrounding themselves with people who would tell them their ideas sucked. These are purely their visions, for better or worse. This means that we have to take the “Marry the Night” with the “Americano” and the “Yonkers” with the “Bitch Suck Dick,” but it also means that Gaga and Tyler have given us complete, warts-and-all pictures of themselves.

What this could be is a sort of unconventional reaction to the music industry’s transition back to a primarily singles-oriented culture over the last decade and a half. Where bands like Radiohead and the Mars Volta defy the trend by releasing ornately crafted concept records that demand to be listened from start to finish, Goblin and Born This Way seem to take the approach of acting as sounding boards for every idea bouncing around their makers’ heads. If they have any inkling that people would describe either of their albums as “bloated” or “self-indulgent,” they likely don’t care. People like me who spend way too much time thinking about pop records love to play the game of debating how many tracks from a particularly long album could have been cut (and this dialogue has been had as far back as the White Album). But Tyler, the Creator and Lady Gaga are such complex, multifaceted characters that a short, concise album with nothing potentially controversial or polarizing would do a disservice to either one. What you see (or hear) is what you get.

The obvious blueprint for this more-is-more school of thought among this new crop of pop icons is Kanye West’s analyzed-to-death 2010 masterpiece My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The difference, though, between that album and either of these is that West mastered the art of record-making with four singularly brilliant, meticulously crafted albums before attempting something on the scale of Twisted Fantasy. By the time he recorded that album, he was already thoroughly aware of his own artistic identity and was operating at the height of his creative powers. Neither Lady Gaga nor Tyler, the Creator are there yet, but the fact that they’re attempting these veteran moves as a vehicle for musical self-discovery makes the prospect of either one of them as a mature, fully-formed artist all the more tantalizing.

The releases of Goblin and Born This Way have been met with no shortage of controversy, mostly from the places you’d expect. The religious right has objected to Gaga’s at-times gratuitous use of Christian iconography in the video for the single “Judas,” most of which seemed like it was designed specifically to draw ire from those very sources. Goblin, meanwhile, has been widely condemned in the gay community for its Eminem-circa-1999 levels of homophobic language. GLAAD has put Tyler on its watch list, while Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara called out fellow musicians for buying into a movement this supposedly hateful. The influential rock critic Jim DeRogatis recently conducted an unintentionally hilarious interview with Pitchfork editor Ryan Schreiber that was intended to take the indie tastemakers to task for the messages they support, but came off more like Bill O’Reilly accusing Marilyn Manson of personally instructing Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to kill a dozen of their classmates. It’s all pretty predictable, not to mention contrived. It’s the exact same dialogue we had about Eminem and the Insane Clown Posse a decade ago. If Tyler and Gaga are as talented and creative as we think they are, they’ll outgrow these easy shock tactics in time. Manson didn’t, and he can barely sell out a state fair these days. Eminem did, and he’s practically an elder statesman of rap at this point. Talent always wins out, and Tyler and Gaga both have it in spades.

In the end, that’s what makes Goblin and Born This Way worthy of this type of attention and scrutiny. They aren’t merely collections of beats and hooks — they certainly are that, but they also act as windows to the singular visions of two of the most diametrically opposite yet similarly significant pop-music figures of our time.

The most telling moment of Beats, Rhymes & Life, director Michael Rapaport’s terrific new documentary on alternative-rap pioneers A Tribe Called Quest, was this from Phife Dawg: “I love hip-hop, but at the rate it’s going, I could do with or without it.” It’s not uncommon in 2011 to hear rap’s elder statesmen bemoan the commercial direction the genre has taken in recent years, but it’s particularly fascinating in the case of this group, which hasn’t put out any new music since 1998, but can be counted on most years as a fixture on the summer festival circuit. Hip-hop may just now be entering the stage in its development where it’s viable for legends to exist as nostalgia acts, and if there’s one thing this film makes clear, it’s that Tribe are leading the way here just as they did 20 years ago in the booming jazz-rap movement.

Intentionally or not, Rapaport’s film builds a case for A Tribe Called Quest as hip-hop’s answer to the Rolling Stones in more ways than one. In fact, if you squeezed the Stones’ career arc from 50 years down to 20, you’d end up with something a little like Tribe. The importance of their first three albums to the last two decades of hip-hop cannot be overstated any more than that of the opening riff of “Satisfaction” on every rock guitarist of the last 45 years. Virtually every rapper that could be described as “conscious” or “underground,” or, really, anyone who doesn’t identify with the idiom of gangsta rap, is indebted to Tribe in some way. Q-Tip and Phife Dawg were one of hip-hop’s first truly great emceeing tag teams, blending and intertwining their distinctive deliveries as deftly as Keith Richards and Mick Taylor wove their guitars during the Stones’ late-‘60s/early-‘70s glory years. When it comes to influence, innovation, and creating a body of work that stands up several decades after the fact, you’ll never hear anyone call either of these two groups “overrated.” It wouldn’t even be an argument worth entertaining, and anybody who tried to make it would be laughed out of the room.

But where Tribe’s first three albums – 1990’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, 1991’s The Low End Theory, and 1993’s Midnight Marauders — were the stuff of legends, they entered their Steel Wheelchairs phase almost immediately thereafter. Their next two albums, 1996′a Beats, Rhymes & Life and 1998’s The Love Movement, were a shell of the group’s former greatness. The sound was there, and the songs (like “Phony Rappers” and “1nce Again”) were occasionally memorable (remember, the Stones were still capable of the occasional “One Hit [To the Body]” during their ‘80s and ‘90s run of forgettable albums), but something was off. A Tribe Called Quest were going through the motions, and when they called it a day following the Love Movement tour, it seemed more of a formality than a tragedy.

This, of course, is where Rapaport’s film gets interesting. Tensions between Tip and Phife had been mounting for a few years by this point, with Phife’s health problems occasionally derailing the group’s performances and Tip’s musical ambitions alienating the other members. Hearing Phife explain his supposed marginalization at the hands of Tip, all I could think of was Keith Richards’ recounting of his falling-out with Mick Jagger in his recent memoir Life. According to Keith, the majority of his disdain for Mick stemmed from the frontman’s leveraging of the Stones’ record contract into a solo deal for himself in the mid-‘80s. Talking to Rapaport, Phife seems to draw similar conclusions about Tip’s intentions.

When Tribe did reunite in the mid-2000s, the motivations were purely financial. Phife’s health had worsened following the breakup, and when he needed a kidney transplant, the group was finally resigned to biting on one of the many reunion offers that had been pouring in since they disbanded. The most sadly poignant moment in Beats, Rhymes & Life comes near the end, when Dave Jolicoeur of fellow rap legends De La Soul, then on tour with the reunited Tribe at Rock the Bells, remarked that he wished his old friends would break up again, knowing the condition of the relationship between Tip and Phife offstage (Tribe’s other two members, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White, mostly come off as innocent bystanders to this infighting in the film and don’t get nearly as much screen time as Tip and Phife). All four members stress repeatedly that the group has no plans to continue to make music together, and there’s no sense that Tip and Phife would have any relationship at all today if they weren’t raking in the festival dough every summer.

This is where A Tribe Called Quest’s similarities to the Rolling Stones come full circle. By Keith Richards’ own admission in his book, he and Mick don’t consider each other friends today. The Stones continue to tour only because it’s what they’ve been doing for most of their lives (and, you know, because of the hundreds of millions they pull in every time they hit the road). This is the stage Tribe is at in their career, and it’s a relatively unique one in the world of hip-hop.

The genre is still young enough that there aren’t too many out-and-out oldies acts yet. The Wu-Tang Clan doesn’t put out too much music as a group anymore, but there’s so much cross-pollination among members’ solo projects that touring as a unit only seems logical. Jay-Z’s and Nas’ creative peaks are almost certainly behind them, but they both still release new music regularly and it’s (usually) reasonably popular and well-received. Ditto Snoop Dogg. But Tribe? They tour constantly now, most recently performing Midnight Marauders in its entirety at last summer’s edition of Rock the Bells, and they don’t even release new music to have something to sell at merch tables. Nobody’s begrudging them this — God knows they’ve done enough for the development of the genre to earn them the right to cash in on those peerless first three albums until the day they die. I’ve seen them twice since the reunion, and like the Stones plowing through “Brown Sugar” for the millionth time, hearing Phife spit his seminal opening verse in “Buggin’ Out” is enough to remind us why we still care, something Rapaport’s film only reinforces.

When Jobs announced the iTunes Match program at the close of the WWDC keynote, he carefully danced around the notion of piracy. He characterized the hypothetical person who would be interested in the service as someone who has a lot of music ripped from their personal collection, or is just missing a few songs that aren’t available in the iTunes store. But make no mistake, Apple is well aware of the reality of the situation, which is precisely why the iCloud, and iTunes Match in particular, are nothing short of game-changing.

There are no two ways around it: what Apple has essentially done with iTunes Match is monetize piracy. This is something everyone—and I mean everyone—has struggled with since Napster’s heyday. Apple themselves have arguably had the most success with their iTunes store, but they’ve hit speed bumps along the way in the form of low-quality files and controversial DRM protections. Subscription services like Rhapsody and the rebooted Napster had potential, but since neither of those services let you keep your songs if you stop paying the monthly fee, they will never be more than antiquated streaming services. Spotify, massively popular internationally, has struggled with record-company licensing in its attempts to cross over to America.

I haven’t seen a breakdown of the numbers, but considering the dificulty Apple experienced getting the major labels to sign off on the iCloud in the first place, I have to imagine they get a cut of the $25 annual fee. This is tremendous news for the subset of people who pirate music out of convenience but have some moral hang-ups about not supporting artists financially. Think of the $25 per year as a (absurdly reasonable) penance for the years of compromising your favorite artist’s ability to make a living. In all honesty, the fee should be two or three times what it is. I’d pay $100 a year for this if Apple asked me to. It’s the least I can do. It’s the least any of us can do.

A large part of the appeal of piracy, and the reason some people still cling to physical formats, is the availability of lossless, CD-quality files. Compressed MP3 and AAC files sound fine coming out of earbuds or laptop speakers, but if you, like me, have spent serious money on quality stereo equipment, they simply don’t get the job done. iTunes Match meets this group of people halfway: by giving you access to their store’s versions of songs you own, they allow you to keep your files on your computer. If you use Apple Lossless or higher-bitrate MP3s, you now have the ability to get those songs on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad without wasting time converting them to more device-friendly sizes, which is both time-consuming and clogs your hard drive with duplicate files.

It’s a genius solution to the most obvious problem Apple would otherwise face in attempting to do this. Even charging $25 a year, it would be impossible for them to provide the necessary storage space for this many people to upload all of their files. Jobs showed the crowd images of a new data center dedicated to the iCloud that looked like something out of The Matrix, but Apple understands that music piracy wouldn’t have crippled the industry the way it has unless a lot of people possessed a staggering amount of files, which would have been insanely impractical to store. Simply giving everyone access to files that Apple already has available in the iTunes store is a perfectly rational and sensible workaround.

Amazon and Google have rolled out cloud-based music services recently, but the iCloud has one significant advantage over either of those companies: the iPod and iTunes. It doesn’t seem possible for this advantage to be underrated, but people tend to take for granted the fact that Apple’s MP3 player has been at the top of that market, prohibitively so, for a decade. There isn’t even a consensus on what the second-best MP3 player is, because no other product is close to relevant. Microsoft, Creative Labs, and iRiver have tried and failed to seize a share of the personal music player market, but at this point, it’s unlikely that any other company will even make a run at Apple’s dominance in that area. When choosing which, if any, of the new cloud-based music services to support, that has to factor into some people’s decisions, right?

The iCloud and iTunes Match don’t fully launch until Fall, and as usual with these things, it will likely take a while to evolve and fulfill its potential. Apple has struggled for over a decade to figure out the future of the music business, and with this embrace of cloud technology and the understanding that they’ll have to meet the pirates halfway, they’re getting dangerously close to solving it once and for all.

Photo by Christopher Alvarez

When this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival sold out in record time, it further solidified the venerable California festival’s status as one of the most important institutions in modern rock. It’s been going this way over the last few years—the names have gotten bigger, the event expanded from two days to three in 2007, and more and more celebrities every year have made it a point to be spotted in Indio. The near-immediate sellout of this year’s festival, which featured newly minted world-beaters Arcade Fire and all-around superdupermegastar Kanye West, was something of a victory lap, and to combat the unprecedented demand, the festival’s promoters, Goldenvoice, announced this week that next year’s edition of Coachella will be held twice, on consecutive weekends, with the same lineup each time. While it is certainly noble of them to go to these lengths to make sure as many people as possible can experience their festival, twin Coachellas present a wide array of challenges and leave just as many unanswered questions, and I worry that they may not know what they’re getting themselves into.

Goldenvoice is well aware of what it means to play their festival. What Lollapalooza was two decades ago to up-and-comers like Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden, Coachella is to Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem. An indie-rock band’s ascent from a day slot in the Mojave tent to a headlining gig on the main stage in the span of a few years has become the modern-day rags-to-riches tale that every artist’s publicists (not to mention music journalists) love to play up. When long-dormant luminaries like Daft Punk, Portishead, or Rage Against the Machine want to stage a high-profile comeback, the road almost always runs through the Empire Polo Fields. When baby-boomers such as Paul McCartney and Roger Waters want to expand their fanbases by a generation or two, Coachella is the gateway. As the concept of success in the music industry becomes more and more splintered, playing Coachella is one of the few things remaining that can almost universally be thought of as a big deal, no matter the act. Goldenvoice knows this.

With the decision to clone their festival, Goldenvoice are making the statement that their power and influence are so vast and set in stone that they think it realistic to expect all other parties to bend to their schedule. The 2012 incarnation of Coachella is over 10 months away. Presumably, most if not all of the acts have yet to be booked. By making the announcement this early that both weekends will feature identical lineups, they have essentially told any band that wants to play next year that they have to plan their tour itineraries around two separate weekends in the same market. Lesser-known acts may be willing to do this for the exposure, but if they’re hoping to book a Radiohead or Coldplay-level headliner? Forget it. There are plenty of other festivals those bands can play that won’t require them to abandon anything resembling a sensible touring schedule.

Maybe a Coachella built around smaller bands without as much star power would work, but I have a tough time believing two of them would. This year’s festival sold out as quickly as it did because of Kanye West. Offer someone of his caliber enough money and they’ll commit to planning one weekend of their tour schedule around a festival, but probably not two. Of course, getting a superstar headliner to agree to play both weekends might just be a matter of ponying up that much more money, but can Goldenvoice afford to do that for an entire three-day weekend’s worth of bands?

Paying big names for two weekends isn’t even a guarantee that both Coachellas will sell out. I’ve been to Coachella twice, and it’s a blast, but it’s also a significant commitment of time, money, and energy. In the last few years, Goldenvoice has introduced a successful and popular “layaway” plan, which allows festivalgoers to pay for their $269 three-day passes in installments. This year, they’re only making this option available during the presale, which takes place, um, this week. Nobody knows what the lineup will look like this far out, meaning Goldenvoice is essentially asking fans to buy passes purely on brand loyalty.

Typically, the Coachella lineup is unveiled around January or February. If next year’s lineup is underwhelming, those who are on the fence about going won’t have the wallet-friendly layaway plan to use to talk themselves into it. Conversely, if they do something truly earth-shattering like, say, coax David Bowie out of retirement, or settle Morrissey’s beef with Johnny Marr, they’re still asking two festivals’ worth of people to commit a large amount of money at once. Goldenvoice could wind up taking a huge loss on the 2012 festivals, and as a result may have to scale back future events, and that wouldn’t be good for anybody. As it is, the media outlets that cover the festival will have to commit their resources and manpower twice over, lest they pick the wrong weekend and miss out on something once-in-a-lifetime, which could lead to a lot of redundant coverage. And God knows there’s already enough nearly identical festival coverage on the Internet.

There are two ways that Goldenvoice could have handled the overwhelming demand for Coachella that would have seemed more rational than what they’re doing. One would be to hold the events in two different locations, allowing those who travel to the festival to pick the one closest to them. This would also make it easier for the bands they want to book to fit both weekends into their schedules. If, however, they have their hearts set on keeping both Coachellas in Indio, it might make sense to cut the festival back to two days, as it was constructed through 2006. Not only would this make the idea much more feasible from a logistical standpoint (less acts to convince to block off two weekends), but it would allow them to lower ticket prices significantly, making it more likely that enough people could go to justify having two festivals in the first place.

Make no mistake, Goldenvoice’s hearts are in the right place here. This year’s Coachella sold out almost instantly, and people get frustrated when high-demand events sell out, so it makes plenty of sense to try to open it up to more fans. But Goldenvoice may be overestimating their festival’s reach by promising twin lineups for the two weekends before any acts have been booked. There’s a good chance they’re setting themselves up for disappointment both in terms of quality of lineup and turnout, and it would be a shame to lose one of music’s most well-regarded institutions to this kind of overambitiousness.

Nine Types of Light is a logical follow-up to Dear Science. The latter record tempered Cookie Mountain’s experimental tendencies with an increased emphasis on groove. Three years later, Nine Types of Light balances this danceability with something resembling calm. The record is split between nuanced, slow-burning dance tracks (“Will Do,” “No Future Shock”) and gorgeous ballads, highlighted by the stunning “Keep Your Heart.” Drummer Jaleel Bunton, who powered so much of the last two records, still brings the monster grooves on tracks like the closer “Caffeinated Consciousness,” but often it’s vocalist Tunde Adebimpe, and not Bunton, that commands attention on Nine Types of Light.

The album’s biggest strength is the way it mellows out TV on the Radio’s sound without sacrificing any of the intensity. It’ll be easy to pick Nine Types of Light apart and fault the band for not pushing themselves enough, but when the songs are as good as “Repetition” and “New Cannonball Blues,” that stuff is irrelevant.

The buildup to the release of Nine Types of Light has been somewhat understated, a stark contrast to the insane hype Dear Science received. But TV on the Radio aren’t a band that lives and dies by what the press says about them. They’re perfectly content to mellow as they mature, accolades be damned. Nine Types of Light sounds familiar, but it’s a good familiar. Whether this is the band they are now or they’re just gearing up to take a turn for the edgier again, most bands would kill to have a “comfort zone” this high.

Fortunately, R.E.M. themselves seemed to realize this, because on their fifteenth studio album, Collapse Into Now, the group has stopped pushing against itself and started concentrating on just writing good songs. Traces of past R.E.M. albums are all over Collapse—“Oh My Heart” is straight off Automatic for the People, while “Mine Smell Like Honey” recalls the fire of their I.R.S. albums—but these similarities never feel forced or intentional. These are old tricks for them, but these old tricks are just bits and pieces of who they are.

Since the departure of drummer Bill Berry in 1997, Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills have largely sounded like a band struggling to find an identity. Collapse Into Now marks the first time in the last decade or so that I get the impression they’ve started just doing what comes naturally to them. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but R.E.M. are still a pretty great rock band when they want to be. “Walk it Back” and “Every Day is Yours to Win” are gorgeous on their own terms, and harder-rocking material like “Discoverer” and “Alligator/Aviator/Autopilot/Antimatter” comes off like a band comfortable with who they are, rather than one trying to be something they’re not anymore.

After a certain point, rock lifers like R.E.M. can’t really help but to sound like themselves. U2 reached this point a decade ago, and Pearl Jam arrived there more recently. Collapse may well be R.E.M.’s first true late-career record. If it marks the start of this band churning out a solid album in this vein every two to three years, would anybody complain? What makes Collapse Into Now so satisfying is that it isn’t a return to form so much as a realization that the band R.E.M. are now isn’t necessarily a bad thing to be.

Even the few songs, such as “Words I Never Said,” on which Lupe is allowed to cut loose on his favorite social issues (he’s not a fan of Glenn Beck or the war on terror) are bludgeoned to death with interminable, bloodless, personality-free beats tailor-made to capitalize on the “Love the Way You Lie” blueprint. The album’s producers stick him with hooks that mistake “loud” for “memorable.” The worst offender, “State Run Radio,” is ostensibly a screed against tightened national radio playlists, except it boasts a hook so vacuous and by-numbers it would make Dr. Luke blush. Well-known, accomplished singers like John Legend (“Never Forget You”) and Trey Songz (“Out of My Head”) are on equal footing with no-namers MDMA and Matt Maheffey in the worst way possible. You could have stuck absolutely anybody on these songs and it wouldn’t have made a difference.

The best track on Lasers is “Till I Get There,” which cuts through the gloss to recapture some of the off-kilter bounce that made his first two records interesting. However, it’s hard to ignore the irony of the song’s chorus, on which Lupe declares, “I’ma do me/it is what it is and that’s how it’s gonna be.” In reality, he isn’t even remotely himself on Lasers, and he even admitted recently to The Guardian that Atlantic threatened to shelve the album unless he recorded “The Show Goes On,” a Modest Mouse-sampling pseudo-anthem that seems like it was designed specifically to be ESPN bumper music. Unfortunately, “The Show Goes On” is the rule rather than the exception on Lasers. It is at times hard to differentiate between one slab of synth-drenched, mid-tempo sludge and another, and after a while trying just creates headaches.

At a certain point, Lupe probably just got tired of fighting and caved to Atlantic’s demands. Lasers is more an indictment of the state of mainstream rap than anything. This is the absolute worst-case scenario of what can happen when commerce is placed above art, and in this instance it’s especially offensive because Lupe is someone who doesn’t need to bend over backward to be accessible.

The King of Limbs makes clear, arguably more so than anything else they’ve released, just how big the gulf is between Radiohead’s cultural notoriety and the kind of music they make. Even by the standards of the band that released Kid A and Amnesiac a decade ago, these songs are challenging and frustrating. As opening tracks go, “Bloom” makes “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” sound like “Airbag,” as Thom Yorke’s voice floats formlessly over a single, syncopated, mechanical drum loop and washes of haunting, vaguely orchestral keyboards. Even when the pace picks up, as on the jittery “Morning Mr. Magpie” and closer “Separator,” the closest thing to a straight-up dance track on The King of Limbs, the hooks don’t get any more pronounced. One song, “Feral,” doesn’t have a discernible vocal melody to speak of. This is one of those albums that, as they say, take time and attention. If this were any other band, everyone would have tweeted their reactions after one spin and moved on to the new Lykke Li album or something.

And yet, there’s no way The King of Limbs won’t be the talk of the music blogosphere the entire year. Chalk it up to force of habit. Ever since Radiohead became the most capital-I “Important” rock group in the world with the release of OK Computer, nothing they’ve done has been allowed to simply represent them. Given their stature, there was no way that 2007’s In Rainbows and its accompanying pay-what-you-want distribution scheme could simply be a band in between record deals trying out creative ways of putting out their music—everyone else made it into this game-changing “future of the music industry” narrative. Even in the summer of 2009, when they released the one-off single “These are My Twisted Words,” I wrote that they may have been ushering in a new renaissance of “serious” rock bands releasing singles as standalone pieces of art. That didn’t exactly happen, but you couldn’t blame me for thinking it would. That was just what we were used to from these guys.

What The King of Limbs proves is that the band’s members don’t care about any of this stuff. Maybe they did a decade ago, when their overwhelming desire to step away from conventional rock tropes drove them to make Kid A and Amnesiac. Limbs is certainly Radiohead’s most abstract, electronic-based record since that tandem, but this time, it doesn’t feel like a reaction to anything. In fact, it might be the first true “transitional album” of this band’s career. The rumors of a “second half” to the album that started circling certain corners of the Internet practically the minute it was released are probably nothing more than the usual conspiracy-theory BS, but listening to The King of Limbs, it’s not hard to see where such speculation comes from. This album feels like it’s building towards something more cohesive—it’s a reasonable simulacrum of how their career might have played out had they released Amnesiac before Kid A instead of the other way around. It may be better judged once we’ve heard their next album.

With all of that said, most of these songs are really, really good. Radiohead may not be pushing the boundaries of rock music like they used to, but neither can they be accused of spinning their wheels. In Rainbows was Radiohead’s mellowest record to date, and probably the closest the band has ever come to being in a holding pattern. If there was one complaint about that still-solid album, it was that they were playing it a little too safe. That’s one criticism that can’t be leveled at The King of Limbs, which nearly rivals Kid A for the least guitar ever on a Radiohead album. But beyond that, Limbs has even less overt hooks than either that record or Amnesiac. The closest thing here to a “Pyramid Song” or “How to Disappear Completely” is the gorgeous “Codex,” and the only potential “Idioteque” is “Lotus Flower.” Most of the rest of the album is dark, weird, skeletal electronica made palatable by Yorke, whose utterly distinctive tenor sounds as captivating as it ever has. “Little by Little” and “Give Up the Ghost” could have been on Yorke’s 2006 solo album, The Eraser, and I mean that as a compliment (As for those who say this album sounds more like a Yorke solo album than a Radiohead album, The Eraser wasn’t made in a vacuum, and Yorke’s bandmates are by all accounts just as into Flying Lotus as he is).

The fact that “Separator” closes with the line “If you think this is over then you’re wrong” has played into the baseless “second half” theories (and by the way, how fucking meta would it be for a band to comment on the nature of its album’s release within an actual song on said album?), but that lyric may not be completely insignificant. The material here is as strong as we’ve come to expect from this band, but its pleasures aren’t nearly as surface-level as even Kid A’s. The best way to judge The King of Limbs in the long run may simply be to hope someone spurs Radiohead on in this direction.

The album’s title is an obvious allusion to one of the Decemberists’ most prominent influences, the Smiths, but the primary alt-rock touchstone on The King is Dead is midperiod R.E.M. Peter Buck plays on three of the album’s strongest songs (“Don’t Carry it All,” “Calamity Song,” and “Down by the Water”), and while collaboration with the band is clearly just a few-songs-and-the-seal-of-approval arrangement (as opposed to a Modest Mouse/Johnny Marr thing, speaking of the Smiths), his stamp is all over this album: “Down by the Water” and “Rise to Me” would sound right at home on Green or Out of Time.

People who find Meloy too clever for his own good—and this is a fairly large contingent—should embrace The King is Dead. There are a few nods to the group’s wordier past (like “I could grab you by the nape of your neck,” from the closer “Dear Avery”), but for the most part, Meloy stays out of the way and lets the melodies do the talking. After the last two records gave them all the room they wanted to stretch out, guitarist Chris Funk and keyboardist Jenny Conlee are oddly restrained. So much so, in fact, that there are times when The King is Dead feels like a Colin Meloy solo album rather than a full-band effort.

In retrospect, the country direction The King is Dead takes could have been predicted by two of the best songs on The Hazards of Love, “Annan Water” and “The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned).” But on the new album, the uncharacteristically light and unassuming tone works both for and against the band. There’s no doubt that the writing is solid, and there’s not a bad song to be found here. On the flip side, there also isn’t a lot that ranks with their best work. “Rox in the Box” and “Rise to Me” come close, but the lack of depth takes away somewhat from the band’s personality. The King is Dead is a few layers of vocal harmony away from being a Fleet Foxes record, which is fine, but the Decemberists are at their best when they sound like themselves.

Valhalla Dancehall’s opening track, “Who’s in Control,” retains most of the previous record’s intensity and lands somewhere between the Clash and Arcade Fire. But the song, as it turns out, is something of a red herring: it’s not so much that this record is a radical change in sound from the last one, more that it’s kind of stylistically all over the place. There are some tracks that wouldn’t have sounded at all out of place on Rock Music, but there are also nods to the revved-up punk of their 2003 debut and more hushed balladeering than any of their previous work. None of this is out of their wheelhouse, which is both a good and a bad thing.

Even when British Sea Power blow their sound up to stadium proportions, it doesn’t feel forced. The way the hazy production blends softens the overdriven guitars on some of the louder tracks on Valhalla can make a lot of these songs run together, but there’s no denying that “Georgie Bay” and “Observe the Skies” are fine pieces of songwriting. It’s the ballads, however, that truly shine here. The gorgeous “Luna” showcases Yan’s airy, breathy voice, which, as it turns out, is more well-suited to the ballads than the rockers. The standout track is “Living is So Easy,” a likeable pastiche of mid-‘80s Cure and mid-‘90s U2.

It’s only towards the back of Valhalla Dancehall that British Sea Power begin to wear themselves thin. The early part of the record succeeds largely because it doesn’t stick with one sound for too long, but too many mid-tempo tracks towards the end—including the unnecessarily 11-minutes-long “Once More Now”—make the record feel longer than it is, which is a shame, because an album with this many winners shouldn’t feel like a chore to listen to.

For most of Valhalla Dancehall, the diversity in sound works to British Sea Power’s advantage, but it also leaves the album feeling weirdly unsatisfying. It’s not that any of this is bad—quite the opposite, actually—but this record doesn’t feel as complete as their others. This is a band with big ambitions but not too much hype, which often makes them come across as unpretentious and unassuming, but what’s missing here that made their last few records great is a sense of purpose. Valhalla Dancehall is a solid album, but it begs the question: so what?

The first thing that jumps out about Michael is its relative brevity: its ten tracks clock in at just over 40 minutes, making it his shortest album since 1987’s Bad, the last album he made as the kind of superstar he was before his troubled personal life became the focus of public attention. As Jackson became more of a tabloid fixture during the ‘90s and ‘00s, his studio albums grew longer, more overstuffed, and less consistent, often dragged down by screeds against the paparazzi. There’s only one such track on Michael (“Breaking News”), and it’s the album’s low point, but for the most part, the producers keep the focus on Jackson as a musician rather than a celebrity, which—given the world-class talent he was—is always a good decision. Since Jackson’s death, as often happens with this sort of thing, there has been something of a public rediscovery of body of work, and the general consensus on his legacy now is less reclusive train-wreck and more Sinatra/Elvis/Dylan-level creative icon. As such, the less-is-more approach taken by the producers of Michael is probably to Jackson’s benefit.

Jackson was known in his lifetime to mine years-old tracks from his vault, so it comes as little surprise that the songs on Michael evoke different periods of his career. The album is split evenly between lush ballads that resemble his ‘80s smashes and abrasive, hip-hop-informed tracks that would have fit right in on Dangerous or HIStory. The songs in the former mold are better, but even the more recent tracks are surprisingly finished-sounding. The relative lack of celebrity guests on Michael is refreshing, and the three that are included come off well. The album’s first and best track, “Hold My Hand,” is a duet with Akon. The 2006 R&B hook-man of choice has musical compatibility with Jackson that is well-documented—his remake of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” was the only bonus track on the 2008 reissue of Thriller that wasn’t a complete waste of space—and here, his reedy tenor blends nicely with Jackson’s still-soaring voice. 50 Cent’s verse in the “Thriller”-aping “Monster” is kind of pointless, but not embarrassing, about as good as you could expect from a 50 Cent-Michael Jackson collaboration. Lenny Kravitz does his best to carry the Slash/Eddie Van Halen torch on the token rocker-with-a-celebrity-guest-guitarist “(I Can’t Make It) Another Day,” and acquits himself just fine. Crucially, all three of these collaborations were recorded during Jackson’s lifetime, a refreshing contrast to any of the dozens of posthumous albums released under Tupac’s name featuring guest verses from rappers who were in diapers when he was murdered.

As for the questions about whether this is Jackson’s voice on these recordings, well, it damn sure sounds like him, so I’ll give Sony the benefit of the doubt. And he sounds great, especially on the ballads. At its best, his vocal acrobatics on songs like “Keep Your Head Up” and the gorgeously understated closer “Much Too Soon” can still induce “Human Nature”/”Earth Song”-level chills. The heavier tracks are more of a mixed bag, but “(I Can’t Make It) Another Day” and the outstanding “Behind the Mask” have real teeth.

The parade of new Jackson albums will in all likelihood only go downhill from here, but for now, the King of Pop’s estate has released an album that in no way tarnishes his musical legacy. Who knows whether the notoriously megalomaniacal Jackson would approve of this album—people on both sides of that argument have valid points—but as a start-to-finish collection of songs it’s more enjoyable and less filler-stuffed than anything he’s released since Bad, a minor miracle given the circumstances.

From the opening juxtaposition of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” with Ludacris’ “Move Bitch,” All Day works on two levels. Half the fun of listening to Girl Talk has always been identifying samples of songs you know, but Gillis somehow makes his collages work as music in and of themselves. The vast majority of the samples he uses are songs you know, but he makes you think about them in new light. And occasionally, he makes music that transcends its source material. You haven’t heard Big Boi’s “Shutterbugg” until you’ve heard it over Portishead’s classic “Sour Times”; ditto Soulja Boy’s “Pretty Boy Swag” and Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker.”

But beyond simply being an exceptionally good mashup artist, Gillis also serves as something of a lens through which to view the entirety of the Twitter generation’s media consumption habits. Forget albums—most people don’t even have the attention span these days for an entire song. Not only that, but most people don’t identify themselves as fans of one genre anymore. This is why Gillis is so popular. Not only does he have a knack for condensing any song you could name down to its 30-second essence, but he gives equal credence to every type of music, no matter how frivolous. This is why he can get away with layering the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” over Rage Against the Machines’ “Killing in the Name.”

The irony, of course, is that the man who has made a career out of pillaging nothing but the beats and hooks from songs has made an album that works fantastically as a start-to-finish listening experience. All Day is every bit the equal of 2008’s excellent Feed the Animals. Those who weren’t sold on Gillis’ act before aren’t going to change their minds, but his records are consistently great, and All Day is no exception.

But here’s the thing about Pretty Hate Machine: it really isn’t very good. It’s that simple. It’s not Reznor’s fault, either. This was exactly the kind of album a 23-year-old Ministry fan with girl problems should have been making in 1989, and the deeply tormented “Head Like a Hole” and “Something I Can Never Have” struck a nerve. But while Reznor’s other pre-sobriety full-lengths, 1994’s stone classic The Downward Spiral and 1999’s eternally misunderstood The Fragile, only get better with age, Pretty Hate Machine in 2010 plays like a collection of mediocre Depeche Mode outtakes.

“Terrible Lie,” “Head Like a Hole,” and “Sin” were permanent fixtures at NIN shows right up until Reznor put the group on hiatus last year, and with good reason. Given the proper full-band treatment, these songs are pretty ferocious. Listen to the studio version of “Terrible Lie,” and then to the one on NIN’s excellent 2002 live album And All That Could Have Been: the original is so toothless by comparison that it’s almost laughable. And these are the good songs. Reznor’s diehard fans swear by this record, but is anybody going to tell me with a straight face that “Kinda I Want To,” “That’s What I Get,” and “Ringfinger” aren’t the most embarrassing things he’s ever recorded?

The new remastering job is an upgrade from the original in that the guitars have a little more bite and the drum machines have actual dynamics, but the synthesizers date themselves painfully to the late ‘80s on most of these songs, something Reznor has basically admitted in the last few years. And his lyrics—let’s not even get started. Reznor’s never exactly been Lennon, but he was eventually able to turn his heavy-handed introspection into something at least reliable. This stuff is seventh-grade poetry: “How could you turn me into this?/After you’d just taught me how to kiss/I told you I’d never say goodbye/Now I’m slipping on the tears you made me cry.” Yeesh. I can’t even fathom how embarrassed Reznor probably was when he went back into the studio to remaster this album and realized that millions of people have heard these words coming out of his mouth.

But this is all hindsight. Just because an album doesn’t stand up 20 years after it was recorded doesn’t mean it didn’t serve its purpose at the time. Reznor truly mastered the recording studio when he made the still-astonishing Downward Spiral five years after this album; here, it’s painfully clear that there’s room for improvement. The only added track, a cover of Queen’s “Get Down Make Love,” is something most NIN fans already have, but it’s better than most of the songs on the proper album, and the ones that aren’t embarrassing can be heard in far superior versions on any number of bootlegs and official live releases. NIN completists could do worse than to pick this up for the improved sound, but I can’t see how this album would be of much use today to anyone who hasn’t already heard it.

It’s not enough that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a masterful synthesis of the best bits of Yeezy’s earlier albums, or that every song packs in twice its length in ideas—Kanye’s pushing creative boundaries like this while operating decidedly on the LeBron/Obama/Michael Jackson level of fame. And there’s no doubting that those are his cultural peers now: since 2007’s Graduation made him as big as it’s humanly possible to be in the rap world, Kanye has had the kind of three-year stretch that would kill the career of a lesser artist. He released an insular, autotune-soaked breakup album that nobody liked except me, upstaged the one person at the VMAs that was guaranteed to make him the most enemies, cancelled a planned tour with Lady Gaga just as she was on the cusp of becoming Madonna 2.0, created the most schizophrenic, self-absorbed Twitter feed in existence, and released a short film to accompany this album’s second single, “Runaway,” that made Axl Rose’s “November Rain” trilogy look restrained. The fact that he bounced back from all of that with any public goodwill intact, let alone remained the biggest pop star on the planet, tells us all we need to know.

About a decade ago, Bono famously said that U2 were applying for the job of greatest rock band in the world; Ye would never be so modest. As far as he’s concerned, he’s been the best in the game since the release of 2004’s The College Dropout. This cockiness is something you love or hate about the guy, but only a fool would deny that he takes this self-given title seriously on a creative level. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is mainstream hip-hop reimagined as prog rock, and not just because “Power” samples “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Any time Kanye has to make a choice between under- and overdoing something, he always opts for the latter. Adding a four-minute vocoder solo to the end of “Runaway”? Sure, why not? How about working the guitar riff from Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” into “Hell of a Life”? Is that even a question?

Yeezy’s maniacal perfectionism often brings out the best in his collaborators. Jay-Z hasn’t been as dialed-in as he is on “Monster” and “So Appalled” since at least The Black Album. Rihanna’s hook on “All of the Lights” is every bit as indelible as “Umbrella” or “Love the Way You Lie.” I’ve been decidedly on the fence about the whole Nicki Minaj thing, but she annihilates some pretty esteemed competition on “Monster.” Kid Cudi comes into his own as a hook man on “Gorgeous,” which also features a blistering verse from Raekwon. Kanye admirably refrains from including Drake on the album, but the way the rest of this thing goes, he would have probably even been able to coax a halfway-decent performance from Drizzy.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sheds new light on the mental breakdown Kanye experienced after the death of his mother in late 2007. If 808s & Heartbreak’s angle was “why does this always happen to me?,” Fantasy is more “why do I do this to everybody else?” He openly refers to himself as a “douchebag” on the album’s nine-minute centerpiece, “Runaway,” and the John Legend-assisted ballad “Blame Game” amounts to a laundry list of his troubles with girls. (And speaking of “Blame Game,” give it two weeks before answering questions with “Yeezy taught me” becomes the new “I’mma let you finish.”) But despite the unprecedented vulnerability on display here, Kanye’s desire to be all things to all people is unchanged. The album opens with a monologue by Nicki Minaj and closes with a Bon Iver interpolation. In a perfect world, “Power” would do for King Crimson’s cultural profile what “Stronger” did for Daft Punk’s. Even old-school Kanye purists will have to give it up for “Devil in a New Dress,” which wouldn’t have sounded at all out of place on College Dropout or Late Registration.

Everything Kanye has ever done well, he does better here. Graduation’s streamlined stadium-rap attack is blown away by the opening three tracks on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. “Runaway” boils 808s’ bedroom pop down to nine minutes. The sprawling posse cuts “Monster” and “So Appalled” are logical extensions of the Late Registration victory-lap jams “We Major” and “Celebration.” Listening to Fantasy is like watching Jordan in his prime. Comparing him to other rappers is pointless: there are other guys with much more technically-sound flows (although Ye is as wickedly funny as he’s ever been), but nobody else possesses the combination of hubris, imagination, neuroticism, and drive it takes to make a record like this. And you’re telling me this is probably going to end up one of the biggest-selling albums of the year? It makes Ke$ha and Taio Cruz a lot easier to forgive.

[From the upcoming album Nothing, due out November 2nd]

As disheveled as his life was during the making of Station to Station (by all accounts, his cocaine intake during this period was somewhere between David Lee Roth circa 1978 and Tony Montana circa 1980), Bowie has never sounded more assured or locked-in. The music is an outgrowth of the so-called “plastic soul” of the previous year’s inconsistent Young Americans, but this time, Bowie wisely dropped the soulman presentation and focused on the songs.

And the songs are some of the best of his career. “Word on a Wing” is an all-time great Bowie ballad, up there with “Life on Mars?” and “All the Young Dudes.” The sprawling, 10-minute title track and “TVC 15” hit upon an absolutely devastating fusion of the R&B of Young Americans and the angular art-rock he would explore in greater depth on his next three records. And then there’s the straight-up funk stuff: Bowie’s falsetto shines on “Golden Years” and “Stay,” as does the guitar work of Earl Slick and Carlos Alomar. Discussing the best Bowie album is no small task—there are around 10 for which you could make a pretty convincing case—but to my ears he’s never been better than he was here.

As for this particular reissue of the album, Bowie has created an industry around repackaging his classic work that is rivaled only by Elvis Costello and KISS, but the three-disc Special Edition of Station to Station is probably the best of the bunch. The remastered version of the album sounds stellar, and it’s coupled with a blistering New York concert from 1976, often bootlegged but released officially here for the first time. Backed by a killer band, Bowie rips through most of Station to Station and revamped funk-leaning versions of Ziggy Stardust-era standards.

(It should be noted that an ultra-pricey “Deluxe” edition of the album was also released that adds vinyl versions of all three discs, a DVD of surround-sound mixes, and two extra CDs, one featuring the original 1987 reissue of the album and the other featuring single edits of five songs. Because, you know, who hasn’t said to themselves, “I really want to listen to Station to Station right now, but I don’t want to have to listen to full-length versions of the songs that add up to a total of 38 whole minutes. If only there was a disc of shorter versions of every song. Somebody at RCA needs to get on this”?)

Photos: MusicFest NW, September 9, 2010, Crystal Ballroom – Portland, OR

Even the best songs here (“Memory Serves,” “Lights”) would be filler on Turn on the Bright Lights or Antics. “Success” and “Always Malaise (The Man I Am)” take the first minute that most good Interpol songs would spend building to something resembling a hook and stretch it out to four or five minutes. This is the pattern on most of Interpol, and the result is an unsatisfying collection of ideas that need to be developed into songs. The music sounds mighty impressive at surface level (Daniel Kessler can still rip off the Edge as well as anyone), but they don’t hold up to any kind of closer scrutiny. They may be going for “dark and brooding,” but all they’re coming up with here is “dull and boring.”

Banks’ Ian Curtis-meets-Morrissey drone is remarkably effective when armed with a song as good as “Evil” or “Obstacle 1.” However, when left to flail around without a real hook, he can be pretty damn grating, accentuating the monotony of the music rather than counterbalancing it. The closest he comes to sounding like his old, enjoyable self is on the single “Barricade,” but that’s only because that song has a melody you might remember when the record is done.

Listening to Interpol, it’s easy to see why bassist Carlos Dengler quit—the new album makes painfully clear that the Interpol formula has been worked dry. Everything this band does can be heard, to much more flattering effect, on their first two records, as well as in places on Our Love to Admire. This one is just overkill.