The Mountain Goats: Transcendental Youth (2012)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

It's not altogether surprising that some are finding this new Mountain Goats album to be John Darnielle's most connected, startling work in years while others are blasé and underwhelmed. What are the lessons of Darnielle's career, after all, if not that even a cult artist can reach his disciples for a myriad variety of reasons. At its best, for me Transcendental Youth is a flamboyantly emotive record, an ironic but felt celebration of the desperation it carefully documents by long-suffering outcasts and lost causes. Bugger the notion that his work relies wholly on his alternately literate, revealing, and wide-eyed lyrics -- if you didn't already get the message from All Eternals Deck that this has become a real and full-fledged band, you will now.

What does make the difference between a good and great Mountain Goats album is the strength of the vocals, which invariably say a good deal about Darnielle's engagement with the subject matter (spoiler: he's consistently very attached and compassionate toward the people and actions he sings about). Still, if you're not on board with a song about offscreen Scarface characters ("The Diaz Brothers"), distantly poetic though it may be, nothing's likely to wake you up to fully appreciate it, not even that high-octane piano playing.

It's all still music, first and foremost, to me, and musically I don't find this sunnier treatment of unsavory-as-ever matters to be more engaging than the variably brooding and impassioned Eternals, which I still believe was one of the best collections of songs Darnielle has put together, and without the safety net of a unified theme. If there's a theme here, granted, it's a vague one, but it takes very little searching to find the common chords between a tune inspired by the death of Amy Winehouse ("do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive") against insistently anthemic drums and guitar, and one about Frankie Lymon's pounding drive into permanent oblivion. The Winehouse song is destined to join the pantheon of shouted-with-gusto concert staples; the Lymon one boasts Darnielle's most durable hook possibly ever. And in no sense does lyric writing get much better in anyone's canon than "the loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you're never going to see again," though I doubt one can convey the impact of that line in writing.

The table was set for this LP's adventures in pop writing and unexpectedly intricate arrangements way back on 2009's The Life of the World to Come, which at the time was hailed as something new and elaborate musically and conceptually. Everything Darnielle has issued since then, including the two Goats albums and his collaboration with Franklin Bruno as the Extra Lens, has come across as a sort of loosening of that record's tight conceptual reins, in service of ever more agreeably sung and expressed missives from the same diverse characters and forbidden-thought pits as ever. It's for this reason that I feel my ideal Mountain Goats are those of 2011, a loosening but also a furious but never hard focus upon eclecticism. Darnielle's a new father now, and we now have new horns, new brightness, a new elasticity to match.

So a good number of the songs here whoosh by -- undeniably pleasurable and with a not infrequent effect of rendering one agape at the three-piece's virtuosity -- despite better melodies than ever, more affected, nightmarishly detailed production that occasionally puts the spotlight on Darnielle's metal fascination ("Until I Am Whole") as well as a long-untapped love of melodrama, but it's a short walk from spare, haunted chiming there to the self-consciously drab "Night Light." The songs in this problematic midsection will undoubtedly mean the world to some; I've little doubt that "Counterfeit Florida Plates" is the best song about schizophrenia and stealing sunscreen from CVS that's ever been written, or that the "perfect howl of emptiness" on "In Memory of Satan" will strike someone as being just for them. It's all quite intensely hunkered-down and hard-hitting, but not really up my alley. Nothing here, frankly, gets to me like "Age of Kings" or "High Hawk Season" or "Estate Sale Sign." What I'm getting at is: the playfulness in Darnielle's voice seems to be driven to a sense of obligation here rather than the exploratory or heart-wrenched rumblings on his best work. But I'm probably just deaf to things I want to hear but can't.

Don't take complaints about this undeniably slick, verbose mood music to be a referendum on the horns, Darnielle's big new discovery here courtesy arranger Matthew White, which liven up what could be a bleak affair. They enter first on the staggering "Cry for Judas" ("I am just a broken machine and I do things that I don't really mean"), tempering its hopelessness; and peak on the closing title track, one of the most ingratiating pop pieces this man's ever performed. It's big band splendor and could almost be a Lovin' Spoonful song -- a musical break from the often harrowing mental-health breakdowns chronicled elsewhere here. But mental health breakdowns are a big reason we're all here. There's none better than on the best cut on Youth, the one on which all of Darnielle's conflicted impulses hang together flawlessly -- "Lakeside View Apartments Suite" finds us in another screened-in, bleak drug hovel; the cloudy, volatile, intense atmosphere is notable for its keenly observed sense of place and the nearly unbearable heartbreak lurking behind it. If those troubling internal casualties and impulses are something that connect to you, you probably need to hear this album in full. If you're sort of tormented by it in a manner that you weren't even by "No Children," go ahead and listen, but keep the lights on and your loved ones near, for heaven's sake.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Life of the World to Come (2009)
All Eternals Deck (2011)
All Survivors Pack (2011)

Nas: Life Is Good (2012)

(Def Jam)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Purely musically, there's no doubt this is Nas' best album in well over a decade. With varied, capable production handled in bulk by No I.D. and Salaam Remi (on separate tracks), it employs a robust R&B sound that seems deliberately backward, yet fresh in its playful applications. It's in his lyrical themes, however, that Life Is Good comes across as the most consistent (and least self-conscious) LP the great rapper has put together since It Was Written in 1996. That's not to say that Nas has reined in his more unsavory mannerisms; there's sexism, bitterness, and bare anger that's all unbecoming years after the fadeout of Illmatic's goodwill. What's striking is the messiness; Nas keeps comparing this to Marvin Gaye's Here, My Dear, and he's right in many respects. The rants and raves that occupy Life Is Good -- an ironic title, of course -- are meant to piss you off, to make you shake your head and try to psychoanalyze the dude. But there's just enough of an abstraction here to make this a successful examination of a broken human both living in and trying to escape the past.

Like Gaye, Nas has recently (at the beginning of this decade) gone through a divorce, his from high-profile recording artist Kelis, hence the "I hate you so much right now" jab. But Gaye's divorce album was uncomfortable and difficult by design, and its devastating emotional effect will never come easily to a lesser artist, and putting yourself in the shadow of an artist like Gaye, even if you were once potentially one of your generation's greatest MCs, doesn't make for a great starting position. Thus, it's handy that this isn't strictly a lovelorn song cycle. It's more of a snapshot of an inner world at a specific moment in time. What's clearest of all is how much Nas cares about this music; there are some artists, like Alex Chilton, whose boredom produces immaculate beauty. Nas has never been such a figure; his material lives or dies by his engagement with it, and while he's never released an embarrassing album, his work has been reliably hit and miss for, now, most of his career.

There are shades of that apathetic version of Nas here. An obnoxious singalong like "Summer on Smash" just doesn't really belong on the same slab of wax as most of this material. And the clumsy half-heartedness of the family-man shit "Daughters" creepily recalls his most faux-inspirational material from the early 2000s, all diluted and radio-safe. Commercial aspirations are, of course, the pleasure and undoing of Life Is Good at its extremes, but unlike Here, My Dear, it achieves populism without sacrificing the anguish at its core. The intelligence and craft within the grandiose "A Queens Story," high drama with a hint of Gene Kelly sentimentality, is hard to fault artistically or commercially. The furious rhyming over these perfect melodramatic hooks with all their towering, revolving strings and piano are as rousing as the resignation of already-legendary closing breakup manifesto "Bye Baby" is wounding. Meanwhile, he's fun again; listen to the tricky Rufus Thomas analogue-thorny beat on "Loco-Motive" -- there's liveliness here.

Such a rediscovery of energy may not warrant the overjoyed reception that this has been afforded, but how many other rappers have even tried to cope with middle age so head-on and nakedly? The memories of Biggie and arena-rock mannerisms of "No Introduction" might paint Nas as a figure from another era, but you can't say he sounds out of touch. Indeed, the new adaptability he shows is impressive -- Heavy D's weird, over-the-top Kanye-styled club production on "The Don" is approached with delicious nonchalance on Nas' part, as though he walks in, looks around approvingly, says a few words, drops the mic and leaves.

In the past, many of us have come away disappointed at such moments. After all, Nas is at his best when exploiting the percussive potential in his tonguetwisting verbal assaults; at the peak of each of his major albums, and during the bulk of Illmatic there are these moments wherein he goes off in rapid-fire mode and you simply must throw your head back and get thoroughly swayed back and forth, as though there were something cosmic or religious about it. It's been a while since that happened, so when it does, on "You Wouldn't Understand" -- an astoundingly smooth late-'80s R&B groove that fades much too quickly -- and "World's an Addiction," it justifies the leaner, subtler moments. The latter cut is particularly interesting as it initially seems to stop the record in its tracks with its plodding urban-sprawl soul and Anthony Hamilton's initial stark, wheezy shouting. But get to the verse that begins with the attention-grabbing character study "Doctor busy operating on a lady who's sedated / He can barely concentrate cause he’s newly separated" and witness the most passion Nas has spewed out since Illmatic on his brief but well-told tale of a man coming apart.

Of course, it's a short trip from that story's punchline about premeditated murder to a conclusion that we're hearing the musical meltdown of a certifiable asshole, and many of Nas' public behaviors, those having to do with Kelis and otherwise, may bear this out. But at least the album's honest and blatant in its raw self-examination, malicious as it may sometimes be (check album cover for guest appearance by Kelis' wedding dress). That again harks back to the moral conflicts of Here, My Dear, as befitting the classicist soul influences throughout this album. The high-energy disco moves on "Reach Out" are more Midnight Love or "Got to Give It Up" than anything, though, and handily illustrate a damaged soul's willingness to change. Such unhesitant dance music -- pop, even -- is a stretch for Nas. That's undoubtedly the point.

That vitality is the needed context for the revelations Nas offers when he's back in a world he understands. "Accident Murderers" makes so much more sense in said context than it did as a single earlier in the year because it's a reasonable, well-paced outlier; even its Rick Ross guest spot is engaging. The compressed lite-jazz sound of "Stay" and surprisingly killer Amy Winehouse sample on "Cherry Wine" are suggestive of heavy, deep dreams of something transformative. In this respect, Life Is Good fails -- but it's a remarkable, artistically exuberant failure of rare dimension. Nas will never be as tight as he once was, none of us will be, but there's a new appeal to his looseness and untidiness here. It works just like that strange Motown / cued-up old-school fusion on "Back When": it's a reflection, a pause to ponder in the wake of a change and in the grip of an uncertain future. Don't they call that the blues?

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Mature Themes (2012)

(4AD)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

Ariel Pink was just another bedroom-pop cult figure knocking out lo-fi projects consistent in their sleepy-eyed disaffection until 2010's dazzling Before Today, a tour of alternative rock history that tapped into the joy of discovery, of vinyl plundering and expressionistic elaboration on the results, peaking with the shimmering melodic opus "Round and Round."

Such pleasures are only fleetingly recalled on the disappointing Mature Themes, in the skeletal but catchy Byrds-alike "Only in My Dreams" and the almost convincingly soulful "Baby." Otherwise, this is a frustrating regression into Pink's deadpan whining of yore; at worst ("Driftwood," "Schnitzel Boogie"), he resembles Arthur Lee on an end-of-the-road drug bender. Gone is the spark and restlessness, replaced by the Haunted Graffiti's new fixation on softcore-porn Muzak. There was a time, of course, when not giving a fuck was renowned as some sort of punk virtue, but if you're looking to surround yourself with apathy for an hour, better Stephin Merritt's actual popcraft than the fanatical flatness of this joyless New Wave; it comes across as a joke, and we're not in on it.

[Submitted to MT but unpublished.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Worn Copy (2005)
Before Today (2010)

Cat Power: Sun (2012)

(Matador)

RECOMMENDED

There's always been a strain of the catholic and the populist running through Chan Marshall's work, something that periodically made it easy for outsiders to brand her as the sort of quintessential singer-songwriter for the latte circuit during the decade we recently wrapped. Those with faith in her remain as dogged as Leonard Cohen and John Darnielle's acolytes because theirs was the privileged knowledge that the music on Marshall's albums as Cat Power was, however bold and interesting, incidental to her treatment of it. If her work is sparse and cold or if it's strange Tahitian rollerdisco, the spotlight remains on the drama inherent to her own writing and singing, much as Cohen can record nightclub music or Darnielle can work with metalheads and no one worries for a tenth of a second about the appeal of either being subverted.

Nevertheless, there's a disconcerting eagerness at the center of the first Cat Power album in a whopping six years, since the brilliant The Greatest. No question about it, Marshall makes a few eyebrow-raising decisions here and occasionally gives evidence that she felt little interest in decisions at all, resulting in an awkward kitchen-sink atmosphere and what sounds like, well, radio -- filtered through the sensibilities of a post-radio world. Sun might or might not be a deeply personal record for Marshall but its musical ambitions and quirks are front and center, and it's a Frankenstein creation that feels very much of its time. To a degree, this translates to a kind of breezy nostalgia: try divorcing yourself from listening for FM static when you hear the opening riff of "Peace and Love," a virtual replica of the meaty sonics in mid-1990s "modern rock"; try ignoring the corporate rock-ready artificial blues that persist through "Silent Machine"; and try ignoring how "3, 6, 9" lays its foundation upon the architecture of Hits, Hits from any era. Its stark rock-soul formula, complete with an Annie Lennox vibrancy in the singing, is note-perfect.

It's also one of many songs here that no one seems to have known how to conclude. Sun isn't all that long, but it is long-winded, and Marshall buries herself enough that one can speculate freely on motives. Did a lack of confidence create this? Or just guardedness? There's still challenging, torn-apart emotional fire here, but we must search it out. "Always on My Own" might well have been a Moon Pix chestnut if not for the sense that we're hearing it from a considerable distance, like something blared from the megaphone at a closed service station. Marshall wraps around its heavy drama, but it doesn't go much of anywhere -- you're really there to hear what she's doing, and there are roadblocks. Conversely, "Real Life" contains her most energetic, revealing, and broken vocals on the album, yet its production comes across as some freakish sort of riot grrl revision of Mr. Mister. In sum total, Sun means to be a forward-looking and modern record with a revealing new direction, but as much as it succeeds as a collection of fine and fine enough songs, stacked together it's more like a bare grasp at things to find something that works. That creates a sense of general sleepiness, and it's hard for strong material like "Human Being" -- spooky guitar, building drums, sultry lead and a trickily elevating, shifting backdrop -- to shine in the pile.

Marshall doesn't know where to hang her hat, and Sun is best when it cops to this problem. The first three songs are grab-bag pop that summarize everything to follow without becoming too overloaded. The piano that rolls crazily in from the left channel on opener "Cherokee" gives an edge to an oceanic intensity shaped and recast by Marshall, whose vocal is all cold focus and assurance -- she's back, as an instrument and accompaniment to herself. It's new and great, and it's weird, but not as weird as the title cut, a bizarre but endearing match of video-game jock jam with plodding funeral march -- it's here that the hard rock texture of Marshall's vocals, explored to good effect on past records, comes in handiest, and it's here that her exoticism is best applied to a quick and painlessly intriguing coda. The revolution? Well, something akin to joy on "Ruin," a pulse-pounder offset by Marshall's sly "bitchin' and "complainin'," delivered with pomp and tossed-off brilliance like she's just giving you directions.

Then she hits upon what could make a good record a great one: she strips away all the stylized business, and leaves us with sadness that towers on "Manhattan," which is one of the best songs she's ever written. Its unadorned loneliness, a pure sense of loss, is beautifully expressed ("All the friends that we used to know ain't coming back") and complemented by an arrangement that wheezes with a worn-down prettiness while keeping the clipped, quickened pace of the rest of Sun -- thus accidentally pointing up the major problems with the other songs. Marshall's directness here makes all the difference; as on past records, there's the feeling that we're sharing secrets here, an understanding of sorts, as though it's just her and the listener.

One more cut like that could have made the big difference and made this another major album in an illustrious career. What we get instead is the ten-minute "Nothin' But Time," a glamorously gloomy Iggy Pop joke the world didn't particularly need. It's an inexplicable lapse into a kind of self-parody that brings to mind nothing so much as the way the Rolling Stones used to close out their albums with singalong atrocities about "the hard-working people" and getting "what you need." Those were fine songs, in fact, but they were born of a different time whose separation from us is severely underlined by the unconvincing nature of this seemingly endless dirge, which Marshall is equipped neither to present nor to rescue.

But what of it? Is there any point in fanboy carping about a great singer-songwriter who continues to deserve our support? No, I doubt it; it's been so long since The Greatest that I feel fortunate that Cat Power is back and still bringing us new music, especially music as strong as "Manhattan" and "Ruin." If I confess that I could recommend this unreservedly without "Nothin' But Time," I hope it doesn't seem that I'm being a spoilsport. But in their two extremes, "Manhattan" and oh, sweet "Nothin'" illustrate the same basic problem with Sun: its musical venturing outward is oddly affected and insincere, something that wouldn't matter if there were evidence that Marshall was using it as a springboard rather than a filter. But the strange fixation with conventional rock histrionics that "Nothin'" toys with seems like proof that we caught Cat Power in a strange mood. Really, you know, maybe that's a privilege for us we should embrace.

Dirty Projectors: Swing Lo Magellan (2012)

(Domino)

Read my Metro Times review.

Twin Shadow: Confess (2012)

(4AD)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Two years ago, I wrote this about Twin Shadow's debut album Forget:

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.

I wasn't quite right. It's true that George Lewis, Jr. has now recorded one of the few great albums of 2012. But he does this not by stripping away his pop aspirations to find the wispy core underneath, but by amping up his mastery of hooks and taking on the swagger and confidence of a true star. It helps that he's shed the indie-rock pretensions and handled production himself, thus delivering on the vague promise of "Shooting Holes at the Moon" by bolting forth with something of universal and nearly automatic appeal. On the cover, which looks like something Belmondo would have stared longingly at in Breathless, he sneers at us from black leather and a garish blue backdrop; that photo somehow tells the same story as the record itself. Inspired by a new awareness of mortality, he's made a series of ten or eleven songs -- all of them brilliant and single-worthy, if we still lived in that time -- that provoke the heart, gut and loins with complex layers of accusation, the romantic pain of stale relations, the pining for redemption. And underneath it all is what? Is it soul music? Pop? Synth wankery? All of the above, conjuring up a time when there was little point to such stylistic separations and doing so with immediacy and irreverence. What can you say about its charged and emotional road-movie relationship chronicle semi-narratives set to popcraft of the highest order? Except: they're genuinely breathtaking.

Lewis puts on a cocky dreamcoat that's frequently resisted nowadays, like some highly introspective version of not Morris Day but Morris Day's licentious character in Purple Rain. "I don't give a damn about your dreams," he announces on "You Call Me On," and his dismissive eyerolls cast toward the women in his life are only a few steps removed from George Harrison's abusive-husband rant "You Like Me Too Much." Yet Lewis' brash ways mask an obvious, abstract artfulness, and the lyricism of these bad feelings is somehow enchanting in its complexity and lack of specifics -- a conversation joined midstream -- giving his lyrics an open-ended and mysterious edge that comes indisputably from a murky place, documenting forbidden thoughts with the relentless force of a documentarian. It helps, of course, that the music is uncommonly sexy, full of desire and bitingly delivered illicit intent.

"Golden Light" opens with a lonely echo, the sound of an empty tall-ceilinged mall or church, but that's the only point except the gaps between songs in which one isn't meant to be throttled back. That first cut is an dead ringer for Arcade Fire until you notice how much more Lewis' voice stretches and bends than Win Butler's. Tightly controlled and confident throughout, the singing voice that was already haunting on Forget achieves transcendence now. It's also impressively elastic without ever losing its specific character -- his croon can evoke Morrissey on "The One," Roland Gift on "Five Seconds," a pained and expressive Marvin Gaye on "When the Movie's Over." His self-production makes a world of difference; after sounding almost disembodied and completely separate from the music on the previous record, only on the hidden track "Mirror in the Dark" here does he emphasize such sonic messiness, and here to emphasize the alienation that sits like a specter at the end of the LP ("I've tried pleasure, I've tried pain"). Otherwise, he's the swooning balladeer and the steely-eyed dream operator.

Free of ironic trappings, Lewis marries his songs to an affected urgency familiar to anyone who listened to FM radio in the 1980s or has heard many soundtracks from the period -- but unlike so many of his peers, he appropriates only what he needs from this. This is no straight-ahead nostalgia trip, it's a recasting of old sounds in a refreshed and original context. It's backward-looking, in other words, without wallowing -- the abstract guitar bliss early on "You Call Me On" is just the bedrock of a gradually transformative track, and the night driving L.A. shit on "Five Seconds" doesn't strive for any touchstone in its tricky stop-start format and chilly "I'm not trying to make you cry" sentiment. But try not to feel like you're clubbing in some distant, freeflowing moment when that thing pares it down starkly to drums and vocals then builds back up. It's not just a throwback, it riddles something in us.

And okay, influences do abound. I even hear a little Midnight Oil on the nocturnal-to-sunrise "Run My Heart," and it would take a less fervent fanboy than me not to reach for the Depeche Mode comparisons on the gigantic tower of pounding snare programs in "Patient," which lays down its cards in a killer-powerful horn-filled chorus. And those Human League and/or Eurythmics synth trills straight from 1984 on the scarily hook-filled "When the Movie's Over" are confidently spun into now by vocals, sludge and melody, a good microcosm for the way the record works so instinctively and brilliantly.

Given all this, it seems a tad ironic that the centerpiece of Confess should be the song that sounds most like it could've come out of earlier Twin Shadow sessions. "I Don't Care" controls its demonic aural urges just long enough demonstrate how his songwriting has advanced since 2010 -- it's a brutal ballad about sexual pasts and mutual destruction, swirling around an alarming bridge with "Lookin' to get it 'cause your daddy's not home, so I came to you in the night" belted out like Lewis is losing his grip but gracefully, but reliant equally upon the burn-through-the-bullshit refrain about being danced "around the room while you lie to me." It's a long courtroom exchange of, yeah, confessions and finger-pointing but rendered as though it's the last of the romantic battles to be conquered. It feels like such a climactic and weighty revelation that the nearly perfect "Be Mine Tonight" can only serve here as its coda: a murky intonation from deep within that suddenly lurches into action halfway through. But its emotions are far less ambiguous, a mildly menacing lover's ballad and come-on about where to go if you can't go home, and the fact we notice that on first pass is a credit to how much of a master Lewis already is at communicating both musically and lyrically, and the extent to which we're completely his guests in this domain. Already.

For me, this assured cycle of addiction, loss, and decadence (pure horrorshow sleaze on "Beg for the Night," by the way) cuts to shreds something like M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming because it shows no human detachment from its pure showmanship. Every ounce of Lewis is in every second of this record; you can periodically hear the desperation thus warranted in his sultry voice... but only when he wants you to. It's really the kind of pop music you dream about; for all its archaic fixations on Vince Clarke synths and Minneapolis R&B gurgling, it lives so much in our moment and delivers such a sense of strength and fearlessness that, yeah, if you love music, any kind of pop music, you should probably hear it. Slide into these biting odes to dishonesty and regret, every one of which sounds more than a little like a future classic, and find out what all those disparate noises really amount to: "a sanctuary for your troubles and doubts."

[SEE ALSO:]
Forget (2010)

Words and Music by Saint Etienne (2012)

(Heavenly)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED [re-graded A+ in 2019]

Words and Music bites off a lot more than most latter-day albums by major pop groups -- it intends to be a catch-all "this is your story" for obsessive music people, especially Anglophiles, the world over, all rendered with a spirit of personal and direct communication. To put it bluntly, it's about life; looking backward, looking forward, celebrating hedonism, looking for more, remembering dancing and making out and distant hazy things, and wondering how the years got away, how to regain the urgency. Its sentimentality for its own form, for the utility of dance music and rock & roll, is unabashed, but it knows its audience. There's a broad contingent of people who won't know quite what Sarah Cracknell's on about when she broods about holing up in her bedroom reading Smash Hits and memorizing the charts, biding her time and waiting for a freedom that she may or may not know what to do with. For those who do know, who know this obsession and passion exactly, hers may be the all-time definitive statement about it. Hence, this record is like the sonic Best Years of Our Lives; once you've spent time with it, so much as thinking about it can make you misty-eyed.

The sweet-natured, deeply moving spoken-word piece about budding as both an adult and a genuine fervent advocate of scenes, labels, bands, songs is "Over the Border," which opens this unspeakably beautiful album. It hits close to home because of its simultaneous attachment to the local and to the universal, something literal here (though there is, of course, a street map of imaginary pop-related place names on the cover) that translates to an embodiment of the band and Cracknell's own experience to incorporate the bare fact of coming of age as as certain sort of person. With its references to Factory Records, to Genesis, to lying in and listening to the radio like there's nothing else in the world, it immediately gives the rest of the material a lot to live up to, and the defining moment of Words and Music is likely what happens when this remarkable piece bleeds into the triumphant, explosive "I've Got Your Music," an open-hearted confection whose pound is of the heartbeat.

Listening to a backward-looking synth and beat-heavy creation like this, you can find yourself getting caught up in the past loves it evokes; Pet Shop Boys are everywhere (the florid string-heavy arrangements keep threatening to segue into "It's Alright") and the streets of early-'80s postpunk London seem to pulsate from the speakers. But if Saint Etienne have a message here, even if this is a sort of psychological regrouping and retrospective, it's to appreciate the moment, the everchanging now. Few albums can so easily make you feel as if you haven't done enough with your life, your youth... inflicting an appreciation and/or lament of the progression of years, the daytime relations and nighttime escapes as they accumulate -- seconds and minutes passing by faster than you can grab and savor them. And maybe you can't. Perversely, something like "Last Days of Disco" finds an affection for hardbound pop history in complement to its demand for a nostalgia-free, totally loose and free oblivion, the pure joy of new adulthood tinged with intimacy and propulsion: "Let's dance," goes the towering chorus, "got our act together." It's as suggestive as a novel -- you can see the flashing lights, smell the alcohol, feel the coldness and give of the floor as you shuffle and skip your way across the room.

Saint Etienne's timing for this couldn't really be better; as records by the likes of Pink and Ellie Goulding and even Usher ("Scream") suggest, the sound of Eurodisco and New Romantic is now a modern-day fixation that has lost many of its throwback associations. "Popular" sounds uncannily like something thoroughly modern and energetic that could be on your top 40 station now, and quite effortlessly so, but of course this veteran trio who've rendered dance music a romantic goldmine for more than two decades bring wisdom and the coloration of hard-won artistic progression to their music -- which it makes it more interesting still, and more moving, that they firmly place themselves in solidarity with a defiantly youthful and unfussily populist sound. The music is meant to be everyone's.

Another layer of this, of course, is a wistful glance backward at youth -- and much of this music aches with nostalgia and regret. The build of melody, sweetness, and beat on the remarkably detailed "Heading for the Fair" is steady and consistent enough to hide some of its melancholy, but the acknowledgement of mortality on "Twenty Five Years" is something altogether more sobering, and the relationship funeral "I Threw It All Away" is a stark reminder of the impossibility of going back. On these songs, Cracknell strongly evokes her peer Tracey Thorn in her witty and urbane treatment of depression and regret, infused with the most delicate kind of personal detail. "I Threw It All Away" in particular is almost a difficult listen, for it so straightforwardly confronts the fears that are kept at bay for most of the album, the carefree youth slipping away forever. You will never be the comfortable kid in the back seat again, the sulking teenager in the bedroom; it's on you now. That will never not be terrifying.

It would be easy for an aging band to look down upon their descendants and the revolving, some would say elastic, nature of bigtime pop careerdom, but they don't. Cracknell, Peter Wiggs and Bob Stanley are themselves half a generation removed from the idols they memorialize so sincerely on "Over the Border," and their loving missive doesn't mean to limit or exclude anything. There's an awareness, however, that the complete devotion to music as an entire world will only make sense to a certain breed of people. That in itself is a hard lesson of adulthood -- the difficulty of finding "your own," so to speak. When you step out of this little world you make for yourself, it's like, who else will understand?

That's why the scene described in "Tonight," the masterful centerpiece of the album's first half, is so touching -- it describes a late-night gig, the music taking off, and being surrounded by the like-minded. The excitement generates an absolute giddiness that will be familiar to most of us: "This could be my life / This could save my life." And most importantly, there is this key revelation: "There's a part of me only they can see." That could, in some context, be an annoyingly trite line, and some would never let it pass their lips (Thorn, for one, a master lyricist, would probably scratch it out)... but the thing is that when you hear it in this song, you get it. It's a risk, a huge risk, because it's always a risk being as emotionally naked as not only Cracknell but the entire group is on these cuts, and the fearlessness and, again, openness of the result is startling. "Tonight" is matched by two other emotional peaks, back to back on side two: "DJ" and "When I Was Seventeen," the latter as much a heartfelt magnum opus as its title coyly suggests. If all three of these songs were together, heads might explode -- the tradeoff from "DJ" to "Seventeen" is that intense and rousing after the second or third time through.

With its undercurrent of rueful sadness unflinching, "When I Was Seventeen" generates the most complex feelings a dance song possibly can, its relentless beat underscoring its gorgeous melody and conceit, which means to capture everything about the importance of "those times" and does just that, while quietly beckoning to an uncertain future without ever filtering it through condescension. Really, this and "DJ" are dual celebrations, both vibrantly infectious and provocatively yearning -- for the band to have put them together in this masterfully paced program makes for bliss of the highest order. If the album as a whole didn't already have this effect, it's here that you'll feel compelled to turn the lights out and deal with the involuntary flashbacks or maybe just dreams. If they are merely dreams, they seem like more, like a burst of real life in a suffocating tide of nothing. That's exactly the way music feels to you when you're a teenager -- which is, no shit, the point. It can't be overstated, though, that this music is alive, it's beautiful, and its openness and warmth could make you cry. Close your eyes, fade away, etc.