ALBUMS (descending points)
1. Charlotte Gainsbourg - 5:55
2. Kinski - Down Below It's Chaos
3. Low - Drums And Guns
4. Patty Griffin - Children Running Through
5. Fountains Of Wayne - Traffic And Weather
6. Abra Moore - On The Way
7. The Stooges - The Weirdness
8. PJ Harvey - White Chalk
9. Busdriver - RoadKillOvercoat
10. Warren Zevon - Preludes

COMMENTS
Charlotte Gainsbourg: Smooth aurally, yes, but listen closely and find lyrics about insomnia, plane crashes, love-as-surgery, dangerous submission through ecstasy, and more. No wonder the record ironically (at first) worked better when I move around than when I lie down to relax. I'm not even a huge fan of Jarvis Cocker or AIR (I'd probably dig Neil Hannon more if I had more of his records). Recommended to all. Fun factoid: Charlotte overcame mic fright by singing underneath a blanket. Just like Lionel Fanthorpe used to write.

Low: The eighth studio album, and second Sub Pop release, finds longtime bassist Zak Sally out. With him went the slow-fused and brilliantly bursting long jams; the new songs arrive short, adroitly arranged in electronica, and mortality-obsessed. "Pretty People" and "Your Poison," with bold condemning rhetoric, suggest the aural broadsides of Roberta Flack or Nina Simone circa 1969. But Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk mostly, admirably, eschew preaching aside for some first-person culpability ("*My* hand just kills and kills/There's got to be an end to that.") They question personal responsibility for violence,
addictive transcendence and its flipside cynicism ("Dragonfly") the conundrum of where to apply force ("Sandinista") and other easily-encapsulated but thorny moral debates. "Murderer" painfully, resignedly offers bloodletting for hire to the Lord. And finds the Lord one more middle manager with an overflowing "In" box.

Patty Griffin: I'm confident successive playings shall attune me more acutely to its ambiance of mystery. Even if one song swipes most of its guts from "You Send Me." "...And we'll grow kindness in our hearts for all the strangers among us/'til there are no strangers anymore"—that deserves a place on a gravestone, doesn't it? Or at least under a senior picture.

The Stooges: Yea they Stooges finally tunneled out from under ten tons of Raw Power-era bootlegs. Lousy how they won't let Mike Watt pose in the portraits or share in the songwriting, but Mike's a grown man and can read the fine print with his glasses. James Williamson allegedly took off for Silicon Valley, and I miss his wildness at times—memo to Ron Asheton: don't skimp on the wah-wah radioactive death ray, okay? Iggy rhymes "I see your hair has energy" with "My dick is turnin' into a tree" and chides rock critics, all within the first :45 . All is right with his world. Oodles of the rifftastic obscene joy you'd expect from convicts freed recently of their own past. No sign of the abject, sweet sorrow of "Fun House"'s "Dirt." Maybe that comes after they settle (down?).

PJ Harvey: YouTube bits didn't grab me, and one wag wrote in to point out how the title track resembles Smashing Pumpkins' "Blank Page," and after YouTubing that, I agreed. The studio tracks sound far more confident and multifaceted than the live YouTube stuff, though, and given how I didn't have much invested in "Blank Page" to begin with, that part ceased to bother me. If you stuck "Dreaming"-era Kate Bush in a flat with a four-track and feed her on true crime books, you might end up with something like what's here. No pick of mine hurts worse to listen to than this, and maybe I'll regret bumping Peter Bjorn and John. But "The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu" hurt, and I decided we need that.

Busdriver: "Abstract hip hop," says Wikipedia. I say, so nutty he's bound to throw out some kernels.

Warren Zevon: I certainly can't help comparing these versions to the ones that eventually appeared in his lifetime. But the six (out of sixteen) previously unreleased cuts make me wonder why (aside from general chaos) he passed them over, especially "Steady Rain," and "Studebaker," which breaks down just like the cranky car it describes. "Accidentally Like A Martyr" misses its 5/4 breakdown from "Excitable Boy," but startlingly enough works just as well with its old verses as with the newer ones I already knew.And who knew "Werewolves Of London" started out as genteel reggae (inspiring David Lindley's later skaification?) with far more carnal shout-outs?