I don’t know what it is about Scottish bands, but so many of them are just irresistible. Okay, maybe it’s not fair to generalize quite so broadly—there are 5 million people in Scotland, after all—but a disproportionate percentage of Music I Really Love seems to emanate from Scotland. The Delgados, for instance, are perhaps my favorite “discovery” of the last decade (along with Dolly Varden), and since finding the Delgados, I’ve become a big fan of a lot of other artists on their label, Chemikal Underground. There’s Malcolm Middleton, whom I’ve discussed here, and his band Arab Strap, and Mogwai. And then, in another corner of the Wonderful World of Scottish Music, there’s the magnificent James Yorkston and the Athletes, whom I unaccountably left off my best of 2005 list. Not that they had a record out in 2005, alas, but I did want to mention their gorgeous 2004 release, “Just Beyond the River,” as my favorite record of 2004 that I didn’t hear until 2005. And of course, my affection for quirky Scottish pop goes way back before any of these bands to the heyday of the great Postcard label, especially Orange Juice, whom I’ve been listening to a lot lately now that their mid-period stuff has been anthologized (on “The Glasgow School,” which I just put on my iPod last night, to go along with the best-of collection that’s been on there for a while. There are few songs in the world, and I’m not even exaggerating when I say this, that make me as purely happy as “Felicity.”). Not to mention the Delmontes and Josef K and, well, Scotland rules, pretty much.

And just recently, I’ve become reacquainted with another slightly quirky and enormously entertaining Scottish pop band: Spare Snare. I used to hear Spare Snare all the time on Radio K, the University of Minnesota’s often superb student-run station, way back in the mid ’90s, but I’d all but forgotten about them until I found out that a guy in a CD-mixer group that I belong to is a member of the band. They just launched a MySpace page (have I mentioned how much I love it when bands have MySpace pages? Let me mention it again), and after listening to all the songs there this evening, I can’t wait till they have a full-length CD out so that I can give them my money for the import. I’d call them charming, but that makes them sound sort of twee and cute, and they’re not that; they’re just completely original and entirely captivating. (And sort of vaguely lo-fi, which is a bonus for me.) They’ve also got one of the best Websites I’ve seen in a long time, and given how thoroughly over the Web I’ve been feeling lately, that’s high praise indeed.

There’s a fair amount to talk about on the music front lately: an early entrant in the race for CD of the year (that would be the new Rosanne Cash), the allegedly forthcoming Scott Miller record (“allegedly” because it mysteriously disappeared from the online CD retailer site from which I had preordered it, something I didn’t find out until they sent me an order update about a CD I’d never heard of, rather than Scott’s CD; Sugar Hill still lists it as due on March 14, but I’m a little suspicious), the overhyped but still thoroughly enjoyable Arctic Monkeys CD, and more. But just at the moment, I’m all about the Scots,* and Spare Snare in particular. Go listen to them.

*Okay, and the Clientele, of course. Nothing has yet knocked them out of heavy rotation. But hey, their frontguy has a Scottish name, so maybe they count too. Sort of.

I am obsessive by nature, as I may have mentioned several hundred times before, and I even had a full-blown, honest-to-pete obsession with a boy once, as I’ve mentioned in passing (and I think that’s the only way I’m ever going to mention it; I might write the story down someday, but not here). But that’s not the sort of obsession I am referring to at the moment.

No, right now I am in the grip of a much simpler, and much more pleasant (you could even call it beautiful, if you weren’t afraid of sounding like a Leonard Cohen song title) obsession. My life has been taken over by a song. I don’t mean that there’s a song stuck in my head; that’s a much more common occurrence, and I get earworms —I love that term, which sounds even better in the original German: Ohrwurm—pretty regularly, like most people. Earworms are easily treatable, however, at least for me.* This is different. Not only is the song in question playing over and over again in my head, I’m also spending a lot of time thinking about the song—not so much what it means, since the lyrics are both oblique (lots of obscure allusions and unexpected word combinations) and transparent (it’s about having your heart broken), or about its special relevance to my life (it’s about a breakup, which mercifully has no relevance to my life at the moment), but more about how beautiful it is and how I could have lived this long without having it in my life and how many times I should allow myself to play it in a given hour.

The song is “Since K Got Over Me” by the Clientele, who are my new favorite band even more than the everybodyfields and the Morning After Girls are my new favorite band.And I think I’ve listened to it about eight times per day, on average, all week long, through various means—the stream on their Website, the one on their Myspace page (if you look at the stats that tell you how many plays their songs have gotten on the day of your visit, figure about 40 percent of them are me), and of course the iPod. I’ve even decided to order the actual record that it comes from, even though I legally downloaded it from eMusic and therefore have already paid a little bit for it. This may seem to be in violation of my recently imposed rule that I can’t buy CDs that can be legally downloaded from eMusic or the iTunes Music Store unless I really need the package, but the fact is, I need the package. I need the cover art, which looks cool from the small, blurry images I’ve seen on various sites, and I need the lyric sheet if there is one, although the lyrics are quite easy to decipher, and I need photos of the band, not because I think they’re hot but because I want to know which one is which. Specifically, I want to know which one Alasdair Maclean, the singer (and lyricist, I think), is, because his voice has temporarily taken over my life.

It’s that having-a-crush-on-a-record thing all over again, except that, though I am in love with the album as a whole, I am truly obsessed with this one song. In the best possible way…though it is beginning to make me slightly delirious. Fortunately, I’ve been almost as obsessed with a totally different song these past few weeks—Phyllis Boyens’s version of Jean Ritchie’s amazing “Blue Diamond Mines,” which I think I might put up on the Twangblog if I get around to it tonight—so I can switch back and forth between the two to keep from going completely loopy. So far, at least.

*(I have a foolproof—seriously, foolproof, never fails—method for chasing them away: I think of my favorite Beatles song, “And Your Bird Can Sing,” which is so catchy and so intricate that just hearing it my head chases away any pesky transitory earworm. I can’t guarantee that this will work for anyone else, however.)

I’m feeling guilty about neglecting the blog, which isâ?¦very me, somehow. Part of it is that things always seem to get so busy this time of year, even nowadays when you can do the bulk of your Christmas/Chanuka shopping just by calling up people’s Amazon wishlists. (I have mixed feelings about that; it makes life easy, for sure, but it also takes away the surprise factor that’s half the fun of giving and receiving gifts. Me, I get around that problem by having such an enormous wishlist that I could never possibly get everything on it, which makes the eventual gifts at least a semi-surprise. ) Part of it is that all I seem to want to do lately when I get home at night is knit; I have four different projects on the needles at the moment, which is a personal record for me to say the least. Part of it is inertia; I wouldn’t say I’m depressed at the moment, but I am feeling a tad unenthused about things, let’s say. Maybe the winter darkness does get to me after all. And part of it is that I haven’t had a lot to blog about lately, I guess.

But I’m still feeling guilty, and as of tomorrow I’ll be in a frantically busy cycle at work again, so before I pick up the knitting needles tonight, I figured I might as well make a second attempt at getting the rest of my Replacements saga finished, finally and finally. I might not get it all into one installment; we’ll have to see how long it takes before my typing fingers start itching to knit instead.

Part of my Replacements thing, as those of you who know me already know, was a girl thing, a little fling with one of the boys. I’m not going to write about it here, because it’s fundamentally kind of irrelevant. I wasn’t exactly the only one; hell, there was practically a network of us. So it’s not all that interesting, really. Ask me by e-mail or something if you really want to hear the girl parts.

Anyway. So our story resumes on October 15, 1985, which was the day that the band’s major label debut, “Tim,” was released.* Back in those pre-Web days, I don’t think I’d ever bothered to make sure I bought a record on the exact day it was releasedâ?¦but I bought that one on release day, boy howdy, at the old Record Exchange on the Drag in Austin. It killed me on first listen; how could it not? It starts out with “Hold My Life,” one of the most devastating songs Paul ever wrote. I’m powerless to resist Paul’s heartbreaker songs, from “Within Your Reach” to “Answering Machine” and even “Go.” And the hook line in “Hold My Life”—”hold my life/because I just might lose it”—was simultaneously like nothing I had ever heard or imagined and immediately right on target, immediately relevant to me and everything I felt. That’s part of what I mean when I talk about sometimes not being completely sure that Paul and I weren’t the same person—and as I’ve said before, I know I’m far from the only person, male or female, who felt that way.

Most days, I’ll tell you that objectively, “Let It Be” is the better record of the two (partly because of the production), and of course it’s particularly important to me because it’s the record that made me a Replacements fanatic. But “Let It Be” grabbed me by surprise; I eagerly anticipated “Tim” (and the tour that I expected would accompany it) for months and months, so in some ways, it’s the Mats album that’s closest to my heart.

And because I’m secure in my fandom I’ll just go ahead and state something that some fans and many critics (especially those critics who were a little late to the party when it came to the Mats and became excessively adulatory to compensate) often skirt: every Replacements record has a few filler tracks, and some of the filler tracks, well, kinda suck. “Suck” is a relative term, of course; I’d rather listen to “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” than plenty of other bands’ “best” songs. But let’s face it, “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” is not a classic, and neither is “Lay It Down Clown.” They’re okay as filler, and they’re better than the few songs from later albums that really do suck, like “Asking Me Lies” andâ?¦okay, that’s actually the only example of serious suckage from the later records that I can come up with, but that’s not the point.

Erâ?¦what was the point again? Oh yes. For a long time, I argued that the filler songs on “Tim” were better than the filler songs on “Let It Be,” but I’m not so sure I feel that way anymore. In any case, it’s a rare record that doesn’t have a single weak moment (I can think of some, but not many), and “Tim” is no exception. But oh, the high points of that record. It starts with “Hold My Life” and ends with “Here Comes a Regular,” and really, not very many albums can claim a beginning and ending with that much power and eloquence and heartache. (“Let It Be” can make that claim too, though.) And the one-two punch of “Left of the Dial” and “Little Mascara” is also pretty hard to top. I’d bet big money that I’m not the only sort-of-guitar-playing girl (“Oh, do you pretend to play an instrument?” Paul once asked me in his inimitable, is-he-teasing-me-or-insulting-me style, when we were getting to know each otherâ?¦but I’ll get to that later) who ever half-wished, half-pretended that “Left of the Dial” could be about me, despite the fact that I knew even back then that the song was about Lynne Blakey. And “Swingin’ Party” was another lyric that seemed so completely right that it was hard to believe no one had ever thought of it before. It’s quite a record, that “Tim.” (Too bad about the production. And the artwork.)

Geez, I haven’t gotten very far and I’m already tired of typing this. I’ll try to get the next installment done soonish. But no promisesâ?¦after all, I still need time to obsess over my best-of list.

*I remember the release date exactly because my beloved and constantly mourned cat Tim, who was named after the record—though I used to tell him that the record was really named after him—came into my life as a five-month-old kitten in March 1986. I figured that since that meant he was born in October 1985, he should have the same “birthday” as his namesake album, and though I am not nearly enough of a cat weirdo to actually celebrate cats’ birthdays or give them birthday presents or anything, it did help me remember the release date for the record.

Sometimes being an habitual listmaker is kind of a pain, and the close of this year is providing a prime example of that: I am having the hardest damn time coming up with my year-end best-of list. For about a week, I had actually convinced myself that I just wasn’t going to do one this year, because it was too damn hard. Too many worthy CDs, too many different genres to integrate into one list, too many CDs that I either didn’t spend enough time with* or didn’t get to hear at all, for various reasons. My top 3 records have been set in stone since they were released, but after that, it gets almost impossible to come up with any kind of order that makes sense.

But I’m a listmaker. I make lists. I can’t not make a best-of list. So it’s driving me completely nuts, and I’m torn between wanting to just toss one out off the top of my head—even if it would differ from the list I’d make a day later—and wanting to put everything in order carefully and write up annotations, the way I usually do. I may end up doing both, who knows.

At least the first three are definites:
1. Son Volt, “Okemah and the Melody of Riot.” Some people will tell you that whenever Jay Farrar puts out a record, that record will automatically occupy my number 1 spot, but they’re lying. There have been years when he’s put out records that have come in as low as number 3. This is my number 1 not just because of near-blind devotion to Jay’s work—though I confess that I’m somewhat guilty of that—but also because it’s the record that drew me back in most often this year, the record that excited me most, and the record that I consider the most successfully realized overall. And hearing Jay rock out again, well, rocks.

2. Robbie Fulks, “Georgia Hard.” Hand on heart honest: if this record were two or three tracks shorter, it would be my record of the year. (I think.) The first three tracks on this record are as powerful a beginning to a record as I’ve heard in years, and though the pace of the record isn’t always quite right (it seems to sag a little in the middle, even though I can’t identify any one song that causes this), it’s a masterpiece of songwriting and performance overall. Of course, it helps that I share Robbie’s fondness for the particular brand of ’70s mainstream country that influenced the record, but the record is a lot more than the sum of its influences. There’s no one like Robbie—probably a good thing, on balance—and he’s once again outdone himself with “Georgia Hard.”

3. Malcolm Middleton, “Into the Woods.” It’s possible—not definite, but possible—that I would be less completely captivated by this record if the rueful, biting, and often very funny lyrics weren’t sung in Malcolm’s deadpan Falkirkian accent, but they are, so that’s a moot point. As it is, I am completely captivated by it. The music on its own is strong enough to win me over—kind of lo-fi pop, which is right up my street—and then when you throw in lyrics like “You’re gonnae break my heart, I know it/But if you don’t/You’re gonna break my run of unhappiness/And destroy my career,” well, how can I resist?

I thought the number 4 spot was easily the property of Steve Dawson, whose wonderful, soulful side project “Sweet Is the Anchor” dominated my CD player for weeks after its release. But some serious competition has come up in the latter half of the year: the everybodyfields, The Clientele, The Morning After Girls, Gary Allan, John Doyle⿦I think Steve will probably still be at number 4 because I’m endlessly loyal to him and Dolly Varden and anything related to them⿦but it’s going to be a tough call. And after that, it gets even tougher.

So, back to tearing my hair out.

*On that subject, I would like to “thank” Sony BMG for the fact that I’ve only listened to Patty Loveless’s current release twice because of the copy protection, arguably the single most idiotic strategy ever pursued by a company. (“Hey, here’s a great marketing idea. Let’s punish people who buy the record legally and make it vastly preferable to download it illegally!”) I’ll be trading in my copy-protected disc for a new, “safe” one as soon as I remember to stop by the UPS Store, but that won’t give me enough time to fairly assess the record for year-end purposes. Good thing it’s a little bit of a disappointment after her last couple of records anyway.

As hinted at in the last post, I’m collaborating with some fellow twang fans on an MP3 blog. It won’t be exclusively twang-focused, but of all the gadzillions of MP3 blogs out there in MP3-blog-land, there are shockingly few that include anything resembling country music (at least that I’m aware of—I would welcome recommendations if anyone reading this knows of some), and we’d like to help remedy that in some small way. There are only two MP3s available right now, but both are well worth listening to, in my not at all objective opinion, and I hope some of you will give them a listen.

I’m going to continue to keep this blog going, and I’m even going to continue to write about music here, so there may be some redundancy between the two…except that I won’t be posting any MP3s in this blog. So you’ll have to read both. It’s all part of my nefarious plan. (Nefarious plan to do what? I’m not sure. Something to do with world domination, no doubt, since that’s my usual goal in life.)

I’m hoping to find time to post something longer and/or weightier this weekend (I always say that, don’t I?), but in the meantime, I did want to let you all know about the new MP3 blog, which is called the TwangBlog, because I just don’t think you can ever go wrong by sticking the word “twang” in front of some other noun. And no, I don’t really mean that.

Philip’s comment a couple of entries back got me thinking about just what it is that separates how I feel about the likely top four or five in my personal best-of list this year from how I feel about the rest. I think his second paragraph hits on it pretty clearly, though. There are all sorts of different ways that music moves us, and I was using the word “passionate” in an extremely narrow sense: what I mean when I talk about being passionate about a record is—to use a metaphor that I think I may have beaten into the ground by now—that I develop a feeling for it that can best be described as romantic; I fall in love with it. I want to date it. I want to tell everybody in the world about it. I want to take it out (or more accurately, play it) and just gaze at/listen to it adoringly at every opportunity. As with most romance, the intensity of that passion may fade over time, but it can be called up again nearly every time I hear a note of the record in question, often even if it’s decades later.

I don’t expect even one record like that to come along every year; a handful per decade might be more reasonable. I’m not yet completely convinced that even this year’s top two contenders qualify; time will tell. Robbie’s record is just a little too long and overstuffed to set my heart soaring the way “Couples in Trouble” (most people’s least favorite Robbie record, and probably my favorite) did and still does, and I’m pretty sure I’m in love with the Son Volt record—that’s what I do with Son Volt records, after all—but I’m not sure about its staying power. (That was true for “Wide String Tremolo” too, though, and it’s turned out to have far more staying power than I ever would have imagined; I’m still in love with it for sure.) My current darlings, the everybodyfields and the Morning After Girls, are maybe more like crushes; I’m hopelessly smitten with them right now, but I think I’ll calm down a little bit about them after a few months—though I expect to remain pretty passionate about them.

And then there are the rest, which I feel a different sort of passion for. Philip is absolutely right in thinking that if I didn’t feel any passion for them (and I realize that’s the impression I gave because of the way I worded the reference to them), it would be pretty weird for them to be in my personal top ten. They might—probably not, but they just might—be on a list of the records I considered the best of the year, because I’ve always felt the distinction between “favorite” and “best” was crucial. But I’m long, long past putting records on my list just because they’re critical faves or even peer-group faves (hell, I’d have had the Long Winters on my list a couple of years ago if peer-group faves were that much of an influence, and I can’t stand the Long Winters, to name just one example). So what I’m left with are different varieties of passion: Brakes amuse and amaze me with their wit and originality and the pure entertainment that they provide, so they’re going to be high on the list; Dogs affect me on a visceral level that I can’t escape and wouldn’t want to; British Sea Power both call up appealing echoes of past eras of music that I loved and wow me with their outstanding songwriting. All of that is passion too, unquestionably, and so those records (and others about which I could say similar things) will be on my list. I also heard a lot of records this year that I admired, or wanted to like more than I did, or rooted for because I like the people in the band or whatever (can’t think of any examples of that third category off the top of my head, but it’s one that’s come up in years past), and I can say for sure that I didn’t feel anything like passion for those. So they might get honorable mentions or something—I always have a category on my endless year-end list of “Other Records That I Liked Quite Well”—but they won’t be among the best-ofs.

I think all of the varieties of passion mentioned by Philip and reiterated by me in that last paragraph are important and even necessary. I don’t think I could handle it, honestly, if there were 20 records a year that pulled my heart right out of my chest and simultaneously filled it with joy and shattered it into little pieces, as my favorite records—my records for the ages—do. (I know at least two people who actively avoid those kinds of heart-shredding records, in fact, and I can understand that, although I’m not capable of it myself.) And I think this has been a pretty well balanced year for those different types of passions. But in 2010, when I’m thinking back on the last ten years of records, I’m pretty sure that, say, Dolly Varden’s “The Dumbest Magnets” is going to have had more of a lasting effect on me, and inspired more passion in me, than, say, Dogs’ “Turn Against This Land.” I’m confident I’ll still think they’re both great records; it’s just that the one that does all sorts of funny things to my heart is nearly always going to beat out the one that moves me in a more physical sense (or a more cerebral sense, for that matter).

(It’s worth noting that this isn’t absolutely always true even for mush-queen me. One of my favorite records of the last ten years or so is The Libertines’ “Up the Bracket,” a magnificent record that entertains me and surprises me and affects me physically and gives me huge amounts of pleasure but does not, in fact, rip my heart out of my chest and chomp on it. There are exceptions to every rule, even in my heavily rule-governed world.)

Speaking of passion…a wander through some very good MP3 blogs* the other day made me stumble on an old (1996, I think) “Morning Becomes Eclectic” snippet featuring Mark Eitzel and band (including an old college pal of mine, Marc Cappelle, who I enjoyed re-encountering when they were touring that record) performing stuff from his first (well, second, if you count the live UK-only release “Songs of Love,” which came out while American Music Club were still active) solo record, “60 Watt Silver Lining.” Sometime I’ll write about Eitzel and American Music Club and the profound effect his songs have had on me and the weird mix of emotions I felt when his musical direction and my musical interests finally, and probably permanently, diverged completely. But for now, I’ll just say that although a few songs on “60 Watt” signaled (though I didn’t realize it at the time) the beginning of that divergence, other songs on that record remain among my very favorites of Eitzel’s exceptional body of work.

On “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” the last song they performed was my favorite one on the record, “Sacred Heart,” and, well, talk about passion. Geez. It’s an extraordinary, heartbreaking, devastating song, even by Eitzel’s standards, and it’s one of the best he’s ever written. I hadn’t heard the song in a long time, and I was disappointed that on the radio broadcast, they turned it into kind of a dirge (probably because they hadn’t been playing together for very long at that point). But it’s been replaying over and over in my head for the last several days, and you know what that means, right? Yup, I’m going to type out the lyrics.

(from memory, typos and other errata mine):

Now I’m out walking
On Saturday morning
Without a direction, I’m a dime a dozen
A worthless tourist
A walking target
With his eyes stuck on
Glue and paper
No roof to crawl under
With a heart full of rain
A heart full of rain

Full as the clouds
My throwaway map
Should throw me away
And where will it take me?
Streets long since flooded
Raindrops and heartbeats
But Noah doesn’t want me
You won’t let me drown
I don’t need to see you
I just need to feel you
When we make love
Feel you in the dark, feel you in the future
When we make love

Up in heaven
Do we make them burn up?
Or do they ignore us?
Bigger fish to fry
Waiting with the others
At the Sacre Coeur
Many different colors from all over the world
Here in the City of Love
No one wants me here
But I remember
The sweet things
We did together
When we made love…

Saturday morning
Waiting with the others
Listening to Messiaen
Waiting in the dark
At the Sacre Coeur
The future doesn’t matter
Nothing lasts but the dark
Where we feel loved

Track me down and I’ll give you
My pomegranate heart, my throwaway heart
Track me down and stop me
I’m ripe enough for the terror
That lies at the center
Of our hearts’ desire
I’m always alone
I’m always alone
I’m always alone
And I don’t wanna be
Always alone

(Self-pitying? Maybe, I dunno. Eitzel’s not exactly incapable of that. But also, in my opinion, utterly devastating, with the beautiful melody and arrangement making it even more so.)

*Speaking of MP3 blogs, which I could spend my whole life exploring if left to my own devices, there’s a rumor—a rumor started by me, right here and now—that a friend and I are going to be starting an MP3 blog of our own, inspired by our fondness for actual country music and our frustration at the near-total absence of country- and twang-oriented MP3 blogs. It won’t be limited to twang, and certainly it won’t be limited to mainstream country, but those genres will be represented. Details this weekend, I hope.

I’ve been listening to so much old stuff lately—mostly Sandy Denny and the Delgados*, though not at the same time—that it’s refreshing to have spent the last couple of weeks mostly focused on new records, at least enough so to come up with a brief pimp list. We’ve hit that pre-Christmas point in the year when not much interesting new stuff is coming out, and I’m using that as an opportunity to catch up on records I bought earlier in the year and haven’t listened to enough yet. But here are three recent acquisitions that are floating my boat in a big way.

1. Bettye Lavette, “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise.” First of all, a rule of thumb: if you come across a vintage soul comp and the artist’s name is Bettye with an “e” at the end, it will be good. That’s because (unless there are more soul singers out there named Bettye in whom there has recently been a revival of interest) it will be by either Bettye Lavette or Bettye Swann, two very different but equally compelling soul singers who got their start in the 1960s. Swann retired in the 1970s; Lavette is still going strong. There was a superb Bettye Swann retrospective released last year by the wonderful people at Honest Jon’s Records, and I hope someone will do an equally definitive comp of Bettye Lavette’s career one of these days. In the meantime, though, Lavette has released a fine new record of covers of songs by female artists ranging from Joan Armatrading to Rosanne Cash to Fiona Apple. It’s not a perfect record, but the high points are extremely high. Her version of Aimee Mann’s “How Am I Different?” is utterly magnificent.

2. The Clientele, “Strange Geometry” (and others). I’m all fired up about this band at the moment, though “fired up” is an incongruous phrase to use in connection with a band whose sound is not exactly fiery. The Clientele (terrible name) are not a new band; they’ve been around since the late 1990s, I guess. But I only found out about them this year, and it took me a few months to get around to grabbing their records from eMusic. I finally did the other night, and I spent all day yesterday listening to them. I’m not sure when I developed a passion for swirly, dreamy, lush, atmospheric pop, but it’s a relatively recent development, so I’m still excited when I find another band that scratches that itch, and the Clientele do so very effectively. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. So far, I’ve mostly just been letting the sheer sonic beauty of the songs wash over me, though occasionally a sad yet witty lyric will catch my ear. (Sad but not mopey, I should add; generally, I’m not so much for the mope.) It’s possible that I’ll end up preferring their previous album, “The Violet Hour,” to this new one, but it’s too early to say. In any case, an adjustment will definitely have to be made to my top ten list.

3. Gary Allan, “Tough All Over.” There’s a defense-of-mainstream-country post that’s been forming in my head recently, but I’m going to have to wait until the bad taste left by last night’s thoroughly ghastly CMAs has dissipated before writing it down. For now, I’ll just note that I like lots of mainstream country, though not a lot of the stuff that gets played on country radio and honored at the CMAs. (God, that show was just wretched last night. I haven’t watched the CMAs in a couple of years, and now I remember why; this year’s version was possibly the worst I’ve ever seen. Billy Joel and Shania Twain, Elton John and Dolly Parton: together again, and with any luck, never again. I’m still shuddering. But I digress.)

Anyway, Gary Allan is one of my very favorite mainstream country artists. He’s got this voice that…well, I’d borrow my friend Deborah’s description of its effect on her, but I think I need to ask permission first, so I’ll just borrow a phrase from Sam instead and say that his voice makes me want to undress. It grabs me on a visceral level that I can’t even describe adequately. He still hasn’t quite made the record I want him to make, but that’s okay. His previous record, “See If I Care,” came close, and so did 1999’s wonderful “Smoke Rings in the Dark.” And so does this new one, which, like all of his records, features a dud or two but is nonetheless a very impressive achievement. I hate to use stupid rock-crit clichés like calling a record “brave,” but this one really is quite brave: Gary’s wife, the mother of their six children, killed herself last year, and he addresses the aftermath of that horror head-on on several songs on this record—including songs that he wrote, like “Putting My Misery on Display,” “Puttin’ Memories Away,” and the devastatingly good “I Just Got Back from Hell,” but also on other songwriters’ songs, like “Promise Broken” and “Ring.” It all combines to make a very affecting and powerful record that also sounds great and can be appreciated and enjoyed without any knowledge of the backstory. And that voice…yow.

Oh, and one more, because it occurs to me that I haven’t really said much about it, even though it’s my undisputed #1 record of the year:

4. Son Volt, “Okemah and the Melody of Riot.” Because it’s fierce and passionate and exciting, and it rocks, and I get more out of it every time I listen to it. Seeing the band live really made me appreciate some of the songs that hadn’t fully grabbed me, like “Who” and “Atmosphere,” and the songs that I loved right off the bat, like “Jet Pilot” and “Bandages and Scars” and “Medicine” and “Ipecac,” still never fail to excite me. I loved “Terroir Blues” and Jay’s magnificent, underrated soundtrack for “The Slaughter Rule,” and I’ll be perfectly happy if he does more acoustic stuff in the future—but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t absolutely thrilling to hear him rock out again. No new record I’ve heard this year comes close to this one.

*I’ve been mourning the Delgados particularly acutely lately, and I may have a little homage to them coming up, not sure yet. I just hate the fact that I will have to spend the rest of my life without the prospect of a new Delgados record to look forward to.