Spoon: Transference (2010)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

Well, here's a surprise: an album by Spoon of the kind of stuff Spoon is good at -- classic-sounding, melodic, razor-sharp boyish rock music. Transference is the band's seventh album; it's as consistent and enjoyable as any of the others. As ever, the band comes off as professional and exceptionally competent, everything coming in the perfect size and dosage -- the vocals break just enough, the atmospheric numbers rollick just enough and the rollicking numbers vice versa, the hooks all pass easily through; the record feels remarkably like listening to modern rock radio in the days when it had some level of decency. "Written in Reverse" is the ideal example, a blissfully controlled vocal and just the right muscle to its easygoing swagger.

Merge Records' cofounder Mac McCaughan once said of hearing Spoon's Girls Can Tell in a bar that the record came off with such a classicist charm that he briefly mistaked it for the Rolling Stones. Spoon does indeed come across with the relaxed confidence of the Stones in the '70s; you can hear it in this album's "Out Go the Lights," the sort of laid-back, addictive late night mood piece that was unveiled so effectively by the Stones at their tightest, or "Goodnight Laura," a classic circa-1973 mood-piece ballad. Spoon periodically displays the reverence for punk that one often assumes is the hallmark for bands in their position, but as on "Got Nuffin," it's always without pushing too hard, always with a certain respectable distance that keeps any strain from seeping through. (On a mostly unrelated note, is it me or does "I Saw the Light" sound like it should have been on the soundtrack to Disney's Jungle Book?)

The consensus on Transference seems to be it's a weaker album than Spoon's prior efforts on Merge; the slight discordance of growth here and there aside (love the studio twiddling on "Who Makes Your Money"), I don't really see the big difference. This band always seems to offer what's expected; the grooves are pleasing, but they're airtight and almost too dispassionate. It's actually possible to hear "Nobody Gets Me But You," here positioned as the danceable climax, and mistake it for a slow burn stoner romp. Though not boring, Spoon's records feel like background music to me; they sound excellent while they're on and it's easy to get caught up in them, but it's difficult to remember much about them after they're over. I don't mean this critically though; I love background music.

Titus Andronicus: The Monitor (2010)

(XL)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Patrick Stickles -- literature major, Harvard student, dyed-in-the-wool rock & roller -- is a whirlwind. Within his capacity as the frontman of New Jersey's epic punk rockers Titus Andronicus, he is a channel for unapologetic emotion: triumph, mourning, disappointment, rebellion. We're so many years away from the Clash and the Rolling Stones, but somehow these basic principles have never been abandoned by the young people who are meant to be reached by pop music; an anthem of displacement or lust or thrilling, depressing drunkenness fires them all up the same way. It takes a special kind of human being, though, to take the plunge so eloquently, so directly, and so unpretentiously.

The Monitor, named for Civil War lore -- the USS Monitor was the Union's vessel involved in the first battle between two ironclad warships -- is everything a rock band can hope for as a sophomore effort: expanding beyond freshfaced promise, it offers intelligent lyricism, conceptual ambition that isn't betrayed by dinky ideas, deeply felt performances, visceral kick, asides and secrets aplenty, and the ability to generate fist-pumping awe. Oh, it's also very possibly the best rock album of 2010. It comes on like some lost marching band pounding its way into the fog. Those unfamiliar can contemplate a Southern rock version of Neutral Milk Hotel, or a more ethereal and bookish Replacements, or a wilder R.E.M., or a historically obsessed Old 97's, but that only begins to scrape at the endlessly affecting, powerful music herein. Some will feel the way they did upon discovering Funeral and remembering that maybe naïve teenage feelings belonged in rock & roll after all.

Only there's very little naïve or teenage about this: Splicing in speech (Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, Jefferson Davis, etc.) and metaphor of the Civil War, it's an inordinately adult record, a document of internal struggle with self, love, self-love, self-hatred, family, anger, drugs, rejection, whatever. (Maybe even murder, on "Richard II," which fits both the bitter spit of hatred and a Scooby Doo reference.) They occasionally shred and thrash with abandon, but on much of the record TA plays with surprising conservatism, almost suggesting a mildly off-kilter revision of The Band. But Stickles pushes them over the edge into beyond-the-pale territory with his vocal fray, half-crazed and half-astonisngly beautiful lyrics, and the entirely believable threat that he could simply fall apart at any moment.

Stickles tosses in lyrical references to Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, and the Velvet Underground, but his suspicion of all things, his determination to push himself in the wrong direction, is somewhere closer to the Hank Williams school. On the opening track, he snarls "I want to realize too late that I should never have left New Jersey." There are certainly times that Stickles' words are suffocatingly personal, and it seems physically painful for him to sing them ("So all I want for Christmas is no feelings, no feelings now and never again... I have surrendered what made me human and all that I thought was true / So now there's a robot that lives in my brain and he tells me what to do" simultaneously belies and fits perfectly with the emo march behind it), but there is also effortless, frank beauty to be found. The stunningly moving (and hilariously labeled) drinking song "Theme from 'Cheers'" will remind many of Rhett Miller at his peak, clashing hedonism with resigned, knowing self-awareness ("Let's get fucked up and let's pretend we're all okay") as it pictures a wasted weekend of drinking passing into an infinite number of them and finally closing on the eventual discussion of grandchildren at a bar, and the ride out of the world on a stretcher. The clear-eyed vision is tempered by wails of protest: "Those dreams are lying in the still of the grave, what the fuck were they for anyway?"

Titus don't really document contented moments, nor are they concerned with overblown dramatics. All of the flourishes feel justified, partially because something like "God knows how many times I've said this before, but I really don't feel like doing this anymore" actually reads and sounds like a man who's had it, for real. No clue how much the ring of truth translates to reality, but the record wouldn't be the same without it: "Down in North Carolina, I could have been a productive member of society / But these New Jersey cigarettes and all they require have made a fucking junkie out of me." The delivery of a line like "If you talk and nobody's listening, then it's almost like being alone" renders its slight angular, arhythmic nature shattering.

The aim of much of the rage and uncertainty is deliberately vague, but at least some of it -- "The enemy is everywhere, but no one seems to be worried or care" on the dual rallying cries "Titus Andronicus Forever" and "...And Ever" -- seems inevitably political. "Four Score and Seven" raises the stakes: "After 10,000 years, it's still us against them / And my heroes have always died at the end... It's still us against them / And they're winning." But the most impassioned, fiery cries are saved for the chaotic, cathartic but intensely focused finale, "The Ballad of Hampton Roads."

Epic punk is undoubtedly not a new idea, but this certainly seems to carry the stripped-bare attack of a punk anthem to the limit of its literary possibilities. Sure, "Sister Ray" (17:27) is three minutes longer than this (14:02), but the steady building and release of its tension, and certainly the not-at-all-coolheaded vocal, offers a more multifaceted screaming into the void. The song amounts to a haunted cry, a protest against everything, a rejection of dread and an embracing of uncertainty, and most of all, an unadorned primal-scream emptying of frustration. "Is there a girl at this college who hasn't been raped? / Is there a boy in this town that's not exploding with hate? / Is there a human alive ain't look themselves in the face without winking / Or said what they mean without drinking / Who will believe in something without thinking 'what if somebody doesn't approve' / Is there a soul on this earth that isn't too frightened to move?" After turning the gun on himself ("Half the time I open my mouth to speak it's to repeat something that I've heard on TV"), Stickles makes suicidal promises ("When I drink I'm going to drink to excess / And when i smoke I will smoke gaping holes in my chest"), and no, dad, he's not making this up, before pleading pathetically, comically, humanly "I'd be nothing without you, darling, please don't ever leave." It also has bagpipes.

It would be a mistake to overlook the album's more textured songs. The calm, (even) sadder, gospel-tinged "To Old Friends and New" is an anthemic dysfunctional-family lament. Piano aggression, cathartic strings, and a slapped-together Beggars Banquet or Sister Lovers sound mark "Four Score and Seven," beautifully wounded. The gleefully insane "A Pot in Which to Piss" builds to defiant wiry punk but opens up on a brooding dirge that suggests intimacy, hope, and crippling fear. My favorite line is "You ain't never been no virgin, kid, you were fucked from the start" but there's another, quite telling bit in what sounds like a psychodrama about a band's attempts to make it: "You can't make it on merit, not on merit and merit alone / Dan McGee tried to tell me, 'There ain't no more Rolling Stones' / They're all going to be laughing at you." That an album like this could be issued to no more fanfare than it's received suggests the only reason there's no more Rolling Stones is we're too lazy to find them. The Monitor is real shit. It's dangerous, it's addictive, it's harrowing, it includes a recital of a Walt Whitman poem, it's playful, it's rock & roll -- if you've any kind of a taste for the weird and true, waste no more time getting to know it.

No Age: Everything in Between (2010)

(Sub Pop)

!! CAUTION !!

That yellow warning print is probably not deserved, but I find this record frustrating enough that it seemed appropriate.

There's apathy and there's apathy. There's Pavement and there's this. There's awkwardly wailing above a beautiful din and there's painfully whining over an anonymous wall. There may be a glitch in the punk rock fan who can't see the good in this, the same issue I have with virtually all metal, but it's not impossible for it to come off as terrible. Perhaps some of us have become overly accustomed to a modern understanding of punk that verges on pure pop.

It's tempting to think of Wire when confronted with Everything in Between, which amounts to art-skate music the way Pink Flag amounted to an art-rock renovation of punk itself. That's one of many elements of No Age's new album that are great. To boot, who isn't all for bouncing beats and trashy guitars and minimal evolution past the core? We all love low-fidelity noisemaking and the hard hit of a beyond-basic band setup. But there is also something to be said for the universal impact of precision and clarity, and -- if the record's not meant to encompass either -- barring that, beauty to our beloved muddiness.

The songs on this record squeal and fade for a nonstop half hour without much of a direct hit. The set of influences and aesthetic purposes seems all mismatched and flipped around; these songs that would sound so convincing with a more varied sonic approach, and this compelling, terse sound that is too massive to properly fit these songs. There is no reason to doubt that the adolescent anthems here are as secretly eloquent as has been reported. The way in is just damned hard to find.

Delorean: Subiza (2010)

(Matador)

RECOMMENDED

Delorean is a fascinating DIY case study writ large -- a band tasked with creating not only their own audience but their own entire scene. Based in Barcelona and unhappy with the near-nonexistent dance music community, they inaugurated, developed, promoted, and ingrained in the localized music universe an intriguing style of electronic composition. Determined to share it, they worked and worked and worked until something stuck.

Today they are a widely acclaimed Spanish treasure, signed to True Panther Sounds (now a subsidiary of Matador) in the U.S., thus bringing their third album Subiza to a world’s worth of curious folk with expansive tastes. Only problem: the record opens slowly with three draggy numbers, revenge-of-the-drone Jock Jam "Stay Close" to torture chamber pop "Real Love" to featherweight easy listening "Endless Sunset," all overly reliant on pedestrian skittering and currently-in-vogue vocal noodles.

With track four, "Grow," Delorean begins to feel like a functioning band, and the back two thirds of the album bring consistent pulsing pleasure for dance floor reflection. "Grow" initially comes off as another bit of sample burlesque but the precise, pleasing beat kicks in, a lite-jazz riff blasts through, and the gently passionate, faintly accented vocals of Ekhi Lopetegi wash over with imperfect faux-digital drive. Insistent but politely so, the track aptly defines intelligent dance music in five minutes.

The remaider of Subiza happily lives up to that promise. "Simple Graces" suggests mid-‘60s R&B without aping it, and Lopetegi translates the musical tension of the four prior tracks into purebred joy. The samples, at times conjuring the Avalanches, at last fall into line seamlessly. The populist bent of "Infinite Desert" and "Come Wander," both celebrations of early Hi-NRG, makes them must-hears for any Pet Shop Boys fans lingering around the indieverse.

Never deliberately a dance unit until their circumstances demanded such a reaction, Delorean’s pop roots come through, beat notwithstanding, as the record draws to a close: despite the club soundscape, "Warmer Places" is Beach Boys purity at heart, shimmering harmonies and all, proving it’s not only the BBs’ weirder shit that merits modern attention and influence. Feverish optimism and an infectious beat render any context for "It’s All Ours" irrelevant. It is just delightful, lounge-tinged pop with the slightest, warmest hint of the weird. This is where the band’s heart seems, admirably, to truly lie. My sole wish for album the fourth: less Caribou, more LCD Soundsystem.

Deerhunter: Halcyon Digest (2010)

(4AD)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

So I'll tell you right off, cover art's not something we'll be discussing much around here because that's what design blogs are for. But take a good long look at that album cover above. See it enlarged here. Bizarre as it sounds, the image defines this recording almost frighteningly well. Its classicist, very old and ghostly atmosphere; its deceptive mystery; its infinite distance from our or any reality; but its tangible sampling of something that was once an actual moment. The viewer is compelled to consider all of the record's themes before s/he even hears it -- memory, loss, unrequited want, and the dreamlike haze of passed years -- or knows the title. Take the song "Basement Scene" as a theis statement; sounding like a great, scratchy old record heard from many rooms away somewhere deep inside another apartment or room, it effortlessly beckons those introspections. That night, that look in his or her eyes, the reason we didn't do this or that, and then the real reason we didn't do it.

When you look at that picture, you're seeing a man named Dennis Dinion dressed in drag for a 1982 pageant at an Atlanta venue called the Star Lite Lounge, which closed the following day. According to this (the source for all of what I'm telling you, so I hope it's accurate), Dinion was a substitute teacher by daylight. Years later, the Star Lite became a sign shop that once employed a man named Bradford Cox. Around two decades after this photo was taken, Bradford Cox formed a band called Deerhunter.

Deerhunter is a rock band that plays rock music, not "ambient punk," the term they seem to prefer, at least not anything that can be pared down to "ambient punk," or "ambient," or "punk." The only word that isn't overly reductive for them is "rock." Their stock in trade, depending on your perspective, is either a grasping at classic, emotive pop form from within a fuzzed-out bubble or a grasping at abrasive heat and release from within the framework of classic, emotive pop songs. I say the latter, because the feather-touch pop hook on "Memory Boy" sounds not the least bit labored, nor does the straightforward and reflective garage sound of "Coronado," but does it really make a difference? Halcyon Digest sounds like night time. It has the mystery and intensity of actions taken, hedonistic or desperate, that will result in who knows what after sunrise. The key to its enigma is surprisingly simple: Deerhunter is hardly emotionally aloof, it's just that the feeling is all in the music, not the vocals, which are cool and disaffected, unfazed by the enchanting kicks of joy from a room full of guitar persuasion. But there's beauty in the casual. Witness the way it tempers the high punk rock drama of "Desire Lines" until it begins swimming in circa-Bunnymen college jangle pop; the song ends up teeming with life, demanding to be revisited.

Although the band's chosen to open with their strangest offering here, the dynamic stop/start slow burn "Earthquake," this isn't experimental music; it's an experimental recontextualization. Even "Earthquake" ultimately is a warm bath. If you buy the notion, which isn't entirely unbelievable, that all the core ideas of rock & roll were explored by 1969 and most of them by 1959, and that we've just been refining and delving deeper in those same ideas ever since, then Halcyon Digest won't persuade you otherwise. Like the Walkmen's Lisbon and Hot Chip's "Slush," it is 2010 recorded music that is built from 1950s ideas. Plainspoken expression, sure, but to be more specific, Deerhunter here tackles not just doo wop, like both the Walkmen and Hot Chip, or Sun Records, like the Walkmen, but lush mainstream pop and country, even a shade of lounge and Beautiful Music, somehow a symbol of all of the faraway importances and expired sensibilities that seem so gently acknowledged and lampooned by the gentleman on our LP cover, in turn an artifact of a now equally vanished time and place.

If there is a dot to connect here from some dusty pile of 78s to now, it is Television's first two albums, Marquee Moon and Adventure. Indeed, "Fountain Stairs" could nearly pass for early Television, offering Verlainesque lyrics, apathetic collegiate vocals, earnest chiming, and those aural city lights, while "Sailing" sounds like a missing link between Adventure and the band's calm, beautiful 1992 comeback album: the minimalistic and focused intensity, the oceanic sound, the infinite restraint cast off by a subtle heaviness of thought. Television's followers insisted they were a punk rock band; leader Tom Verlaine insisted he was a poet. But the theoretically harsh, angular noises they made that fell so sweetly on neo-street corner songs like "Prove It" and "Careful," as though they had always been there, presented the idea of rock not as a continually evolving singular beast but as a vernacular in which to operate, a forever-renewable resource. It is for this reason that Deerhunter is not retreading, they are revisiting, and with a heavier heart and more beautiful baggage than ever before. "Don't Cry" could be a sequel to "Prove It," but in every heavily reverbed note is a gorgeously expressed sadness. The chamber-intricacy and John Lennon vocals of "Revival," with its persuasive but easy Brit-Invasion or Motown beat, could have existed at any point in the last fifty years and is thus provided with a feeling of an infinite life.

That Hot Chip song is an interesting comparison because of the odd emotional solidarity it suggests between doo wop and adult-contemporary soft pop. The way Deerhunter pushes Television's instincts is by conjuring up memories of a subgenre that didn't yet really exist at the time of Marquee Moon: dream pop. Electronics and ancient pop collide with the Smiths and the Jesus & Mary Chain on "Helicopter," in many ways the emotional climax of the record. The closing "He Would Have Laughed," a dedication to recently deceased friend Jay Reatard, is an wailing epic of sad elation that belongs in some classic Truffaut film, or rather in the Walkman of a film appreciation student circa 1987 who loves Truffaut. Deerhunter has historically carried elements of shoegaze, but this album uniquely casts two forms of long-past decades as a mutually reliant life soundtrack, a rationalizating, categorizing of the past -- a wistful and pressing desire to comprehend and cope with it. Perhaps the reason that Halcyon Digest feels so universally magic is that not one of us isn't familiar with that feeling. Moreover, the album begs to become an ingredient in that cataloging. I can't think of a higher compliment to pay than that when I hear this music, I flash back and re-score my life with it. It couldn't feel more right, and I bet an armload of 45s that the same is true for you.

Twin Shadow: Forget (2010)

(4AD)

RECOMMENDED

Call it chillwave if you like, but we appear to be in the middle of an '80s revival. Although this record remains obscure enough that it lacks even a Wikipedia entry, it shares with the more celebrated Before Today by Ariel Pink (reviewed below) a firm foothold in a sound that ten years ago seemed entirely passé but has now established itself as a mark of indie bands at all levels of popularity. The question of when this began is somewhat interesting and merits a brief tangent.

No pun intended. Most folks will probably remember a band of pseudo-goth poseurs called Orgy who made chart hay out of a ponderous cover of New Order's "Blue Monday." That was 1998. Three years before that, an independently released record called Get Lost by the Magnetic Fields self-consciously aimed for a fusion of the '80s ironicists Pet Shop Boys and ABC with classicist pretensions toward Cole Porter and the Brill Building. The Fields' preceding record, their first with wide distribution, was a brilliant synth-country experiment called The Charm of the Highway Strip which must have sounded at the time like a deliberately incongruous revival of out-of-date keyboard noise. In fact, Strip was recorded in 1988. It sounded like a tribute, but it was really the genuine article, in a similar universe to the seldom-acknowledged fact that the first version of the Beatles formed in 1956.

By the 2000s, the Magnetic Fields were celebrated as a national treasure and signed to a major label. Near-mainstream bands like We Are Scientists were scoring hits with backward-looking singles aping the mid-'80s production style of music that was in its heyday considered too "pop" for the underground scene. Dance and club music, never far from the '80s spiritually (Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys have remained peerless hitmakers in that genre long after the peak of their mainstream popularity), began to consciously, unguility revisit the feeling and spark of two-decade-old synthpop hits. Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem's hip revision of PSB and OMD was followed by the still-massive Madonna's direct acknowledgement with singles like "Hung Up." The four biggest bands in indiedom owe debts obvious (Arcade Fire reincarnates Depeche Mode and U2; Death Cab for Cutie's biggest hit is arguably a rewrite of DM's "Enjoy the Silence") and subtle (Vampire Weekend stakes its career on their audience's memories of Paul Simon's Graceland, whether they will admit it or not; the Shins emerged from three-year shadows this year with an able cover of Squeeze's "Goodbye Girl").

The point being: the music of the 1980s, particularly synthpop and alternative, is well-mined territory. But it is unusual for it to be approached with the sort of lyricism and vocal capabilitiy of someone like Brooklyn's Twin Shadow, real name George Lewis Jr., a Dominican Republic-born singer-songwriter with a tentative, sweetly lilting voice and a major burgeoning talent of the new, non-lo-fi lo-fi -- think of it as minimalistically created music with aims for high-level pop impact, the idea put across by Stephin Merritt on Highway Strip all those years ago. Twin Shadow's debut album, produced by Chris Taylor from Grizzly Bear, is essentially a sophisticated variant on New Romantic synthpop, with extra production shades of New Order, Suicide, Tears for Fears, the Go-Betweens, Josef K, the Cure, and of course PSB and DM. His sweetly sad dabblings in the field are quite appealing, but the reason to hear this record is its more warm-blooded qualities: the singing and the lyrics are what to watch for here.

On the very indie opening track, "Tyrant Destroyed," equipped with a slow ominous build, the words reveal an unexpected fragility: "As if it wasn't enough just to hear you speak / They had to give you lips like that / Like all of your sadness reduced to a color / Then painted upon... / How could I forget you / And who was I to think that on a Saturday night / That you would really bike home alone / And the way that I left you / Just hanging on Sundays / Let fair skin boy take you home." On the soft rock drone "When We're Dancing": "I am trying to remember all the things that I've known / They all shine soft and stand alone / Like I picture you waiting at the end of a bridge / But it's hard for me to render all the things that we did." The outwardly confident, cyclical "Yellow Balloon" reveals a gorgeous aching: "In the pines we learn to speak / Bend your knees, forget to breathe / If you hear your mama calling, get away from me... / Secret handshakes, the swimming hole / Keep awake, and we will not grow old."

None of these have music to match the depth of emotions in the words, even though Lewis sings them beautifully. They are buried under nostalgia that may or may not be part of the story but doesn't feel nearly so necessary as he probably thinks. He could get away with far less embellishment, and his songs would benefit for it. The sepia tone that the throwback sound adds only really clicks on two songs. "Shooting Holes at the Moon" is a masterful big-beat evocation of choppy 1986 production, vocally and melodically suggesting Echo & the Bunnymen or the Smiths. The persuasive melody of "Castles in the Snow" is enhanced by perfect self harmonies; its period-piece echo cacophony is entirely in service of emotion. The same can't really be said of something like the new wave retread "I Can't Wait"; the Talking Heads/Information Society pseudopop of "At My Heels," driven by what sounds like a toy drum machine; the shimmering 1980s wall of sound of "For Now." These come off like retro trips burying ideas that are far more interesting.

Part of the reason I can't fully buy the final product, as enamored as I am of some of its elements, is that I think this sort of pop production was built for hook-filled pop singles; Lewis reveals himself, sure, to be a master of the pop sound... but not so much of the pop hook. "Tether Band" has the sound of a buried Depeche Mode album track but feels at times like a semi-shapeless meander through synth noise; yet again, the intimate vocals feel completely out of place, hovering above and beyond what surrounds them. "Slow" convincingly suggests Hot Chip, "Forget" is a singsong Prince slo-jam with requisite college rock lite-droning in the manner of Beach House, but neither song matches its window dressing particularly well. This is fun to a point as a sort of exercise, but it's also distracting.

My diagnosis is this is too goddamned polite. Twin Shadow has the potential to be a giant if he just lets himself go a little bit. He has a powerful, sensual voice with ample emotional capability. I firmly believe he has some brilliant music in him and that we'll be hearing a lot about him in the next few years. And I'm willing to bet that'll be because he lets go of some of his attachment to the admittedly wonderful music he and I both listened to and loved growing up and strips this material down to its core. It is more than worth the effort. Take away the gimmicry and you have eleven outstanding songs here. Ariel Pink may have worked up genuine magic from a regeneration of the past, but that's his gift. Twin Shadow's gift is writing subtle, sorrowful songs about loss, memory, and regret. Forget seems inexplicably determined to divert us from noticing that. Fear of embarrassment might be the one thing holding this possible future master back from transcendence; I can't wait to find out.

The-Dream: Love King (2010)

(Def Jam)

RECOMMENDED

There is a moment on this record that almost made me spit my cereal all over the poor drywall: It's a song called "Yamaha" on which the young R&B master writer/producer The-Dream embodies the Purple Rain era so perfectly, emulating not just the sound and vocal inflections (note fucking perfect) but the songwriting -- if not the lyrics -- of a classic Prince album cut to such an extent that I was sure I'd pressed the wrong button. You can chalk this up as cheap or crass, but anyone who wishes Prince's '80s output was a bottomless well -- in other words, most anyone with any damn sense -- will find it hard to deny that their pulse starts to rush for a minute there. Holy shit, it's 1984 and there's new motherfucking Prince. If I had nothing else to thank The-Dream for (and I do), I thank him for that feeling.

The-Dream is on his way to being a Quincy Jones figure, having cowritten and coproduced some of the most earthshaking crossover hits of the last half-decade, chief among them Rihanna's propulsive "Umbrella" and Beyoncé Knowles' universal "Single Ladies." Either of those is enough to place him firmly in world consciousness, but The-Dream is also a solo artist who sings silky-smooth, frankly sexual slo-jams with an unusual depth and a mild avant garde bent that places him in underground sympathies. The-Dream probably doesn't take himself as seriously as peak-period Prince did; he's more likable and guarded. But he's also less honest, and is more fond of calculated risks than the unfiltered kind. The human cracks of this enjoyable, occasionally brilliant LP are hidden under a haze of trickery and at times even routine.

Which isn't to say you won't dig Love King; its weaknesses are nearly invisible if you take it a bit at a time (it runs 54 minutes). Listen to tracks one through four, or five to nine, or ten to twelve, and you'll have hearts floating above your head. If you're alienated by modern R&B, I'm unaware of any writer and performer who can make an easier time of converting you, convincing you that soul expression has never lost its sophistication and delicacy. Let's pretend Love King is three extended-play records and see how it goes:

EP #1 is the most dubious, opening with a song that spells out its title in the chorus and namedrops "T-mobile" while introducing an insanely annoying gimmick of a throaty, slowed-down Dream vocal reiterating or rambling along across both channels. T.I. provides the record's major cameo on the extremely silly, musically generic "Make Up Bag," a not-at-all-sexist lecture of sorts explaining that the best way to win a lady back after you've fucked her over is to simply buy her very expensive foundation. It reminds me vaguely of the Contours' "First I Look at the Purse" and does employ the classic image of a woman swearing at The-Dream while wearing only panties. The highlight of these four cuts is easily "F.I.L.A.," a remarkable layering of menacing synth wall and syrupy R&B with a "pursue her / do her" rhyme and the hook-filled elated feeling missing from lots of romantic jams. "Sex Intelligent" comes harder; its choppy, robotic grind and light Parliament suggestion are agreeable but feel too studied.

That's one of the problems with Love-King -- its many good ideas are spread too thin. A song like "F.I.L.A." or "Abyss" or "Yamaha" or "Turnt Out" is overflowing with tricks and mad tinkering, while other songs and moments fade into nothingness. One thing undeniable: The-Dream's way with a hook is staggering. Even the weakest songs here will break the will of the most resistant sooner or later. One only wishes he was always working at the level of which he's capable and was less easily seduced by superficial gimmicry. I also have to object to the widespread declaration of The-Dream's music as raunchy or somehow notably explicit. The guy revolves a whole song around not wanting to say "fuck"; this is tame as shit mostly, and I think it would be stronger if it weren't. The-Dream often doesn't seem to be going quite as far as he wants to. He says he'll never be a pop star, he's too raw, but nothing here feels raw enough to start or end a career to me. His lyrics are clever, sure, often ingeniously minimal ("I'll never be the face of a magazine"), self-effacingly funny ("I know this may sound stalkerish..."), and, okay, sexy ("Are you one of those girls that mean 'go' when they say 'stop?'") but he's generally singing politely about vanilla sex, which doesn't strike me as the subversive act that's been depicted.

EP #2, as we're calling it, opens with the baffling retread "Sex Intelligent Remix," best ignored. After we fire into overdrive with "Yamaha," "Nikki, Pt 2" is one of those "ideas" songs; it lives up to Eno's old notion of vague music with its lilting string/synth backdrop and a sort of shapeless vocal with its share of absurdities ("You fuckin' with you fuckin' with you fuckin' with my house"). "Abyss" does a better job of carrying the momentum with a trance or house layer over some fuck music, a kissoff venting session with a powerful chorus. And "Panties to the Side"... well, let's wait a second to talk about this one.

Why do I think The-Dream sounds like a faker even though he explicitly states otherwise? ("If you get tired of fakin' it, call me.") Because he sounds defensive, for one thing; there's less love and romancing here than conquering, and conquering indeed based on an outdated girl-in-every-port romanticism. He's all about the pursuit, like Leisure Suit Larry. The-Dream's love life has also been plastered on tabloid covers enough that we know he's not exactly the "love king," not that it would matter except his estranged wife is Christina Milian. Can I admit here I had kind of a crush on her? He shouldn't do her wrong, man, and if he's so smart about love and shit -- which is all this fucking record is about -- well, what the fuck, dude? Why am I talking about this here? Where are my notes? Oh, here we go...

The final EP catapults us onto 1997 urban radio as envisioned by David Lynch. "Turnt Out" brings us The-Dream's killer falsetto and offers a near-guarantee of involuntary movement. The bangerness of it all is aided by the crazy production which features dense detail and much ticklish, subtle and unsubtle aural tooling. "February Love" we'll address in a moment. Closing track "Florida University" is more than dumb -- it's dumm. Cee-Lo does this kind of thing better and he doesn't have the shirtless golden boy voice that makes the whole enterprise inexplicably disturbing.

Regarding "Panties to the Side" and "Febraury Love" and disregarding the feeling of joy transmitted on contact by "Yamaha," what we have here are two brilliant songs, brilliant so far beyond everything else on the album that the rest of the party gets overshadowed. "Panties" opens with a sample of the MGM logo and bursts into a unique fat-synth dance with whispering fucktalk and apocalyptic autotune; a million ideas from almost as many eras of pop music fire at the bystander, and for once, Dream taps it all with lyrics worth the explicit tag. But "February Love," with its jazzy movements, its perfect integration and dismantling of current trad R&B production, its opening city wastescape by piano, its otherworldly haze, its adorable degenerate harmonies, its sheer unmistaken liquidity... this is the stuff The-Dream is made of, and I want more of this unbridled invention. Possessed with the ability to work within a chosen idiom while shoving the outside-imposed limits aside without so much as a shrug is the mark of some serious fucking artistry. I bet there's more to back it up; can't wait to hear it.