Intelligent POP

The Intelligent Pop top 20!

Here they are! These are the top 20 Intelligent Pop albums we've found in the last year.

Intelligent Pop fully endorses every album in our top 20 for purchase by intelligent pop fans. From #1 through #20, we believe all these albums are of high artistic merit (the top 2% of the thousands we encounter) and warrant your support.

PLEASE NOTE: Unlike many raving online reviews, we offer significant criticism of many of the albums we endorse. Why? Because our mission is to promote excellence—indeed, amazingness—in intelligent pop music.

And because you trust us to be straight with you. Our credibility matters.

Whatever criticism we offer, we love these CDs. They’ re worth every penny!

1. Inara George, All Rise
2005 (Everloving Records) (Listen )

Los Angeles’s Inara George is a total original with an amazing voice. While the melodies on this record—while certainly very well crafted—are not as catchy or as easily singable as some others in this top 20, and while at least one reviewer thought the lyrics were at time indecipherable, the startling originality, relentless innovation, stunning performance, and sheer beauty of this record triumphed with all of us to place it atop a list of albums that includes formidable competition.

The first thing you notice is this artist knows who she is. While that’s not all we care about—unlike major labels, we find it immensely pleasurable to listen to a serious talent that’s still finding out who he or she is—Inara George knows how she wants to sound, and this record’s soft but playful tones are stylistically as focused as any record we’ve ever heard. Credit accomplished L.A. producer Michael Andrews for much of that.

I lied in the last paragraph. The first thing you notice about Inara George is that voice. Some of us thought “Bjork!” Others thought, “The Cranberries!” All of us thought, “She’s in total command.” This singer, who ultimately does not sound like anybody else, can do anything she wants with her instrument, and rather than just show off her voice, she uses it to speak casually and confidently to the listener, to play in her musical sandbox, and to spew an adorable but childishly defiant attitude all over the place.

Subscribers who receive this record will immediately know why we say it’s the best independent Intelligent Pop album we’ve found in the last year—anywhere on earth!

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2. Busbee, Busbee, 2005 (Listen )

This ear-friendly album is possibly the most easily singable album in America right now. Too bad only a few people on the West Coast know about this artist, who, though not famous, has achieved a producer or writer credit with a couple of better-known artists.

Busbee is apparently a fairly uncomplicated guy. His music is straightforward friendly, honest rock. It doesn’t try to be brilliant. Sound unexciting? Well, the thing is that every single damned moment of every song is so good. Every aspect of the writing, the performance, every flourish, every lyric, just kind of relaxes you, coats you with good feeling, and never, ever insults your intelligence.

In fact, this album, while trailing the top two in sheer unexpectedness and innovation, is probably the closest thing in America to a perfect definition of pop music for discerning grown-ups—that is, intelligent pop. The songs hit soaring emotional highs without ever emoting artificially like an American Idol singer. You are compelled to sing along, and when you realize what the lyrics you’re singing are saying, you realize that you have to agree with them. Busbee is saying exactly what you would say.

Simplicity and catchiness without triteness or bubblegum—that’s a tough combination to achieve, but Busbee accomplishes by way of a mature, adult approach to the material. Busbee is a grown-up singing reflectively about grown-up things. This doesn’t sound like a teenage boy singing about cute girls he hangs out with—a quality which ever so slightly bedevils Nicolas Johansen’s otherwise equally catchy album also on our charts.

A rare baritone singing pop music, Michael Busbee is so at ease with his voice, and so vocally understated, that you might not notice that this is one of the greatest male singers in all of pop music today. He frequently draws comparisons to Boz Scaggs or James Taylor, and credits Harry Connick, Jr. as an influence (one we didn’t hear in him). But we suspect his years as a jazz trombonist may have yielded a stealthy influence on his beautiful, warm pipes.

Also, this is probably the warmest, most beautifully recorded album on the chart. It was expertly recorded—albeit in just a couple of days—by accomplished L.A. engineer Brian Cook, and mixed by Busbee himself at his home studio. He obviously knows what he’s doing: one of our reviewers gave the sonic quality of this album a rating of 100!

We hope Busbee will take a few more risks on his next album, and in fact we’ve heard at least one track on what appears to be an acoustic/folk departure for Busbee’s next project, and it sounds absolutely gorgeous. We think he can “go deeper.”

But we are being picky here. There is not a better pop craftsman alive than Michael Busbee, and probably not a better intelligent pop band playing than Busbee’s band. You will enjoy this one on the first listen, and it does not get old after repeated plays.

Busbee is December 2005's featured artist. Click here to read the feature!

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3. Nicholas Alan, A World Like Ours, 2005 (Listen )

What a beautiful little record. If #1 was the most confidently executed record in our top 20, Nick Alan’s homemade masterpiece (he literally mixed it in his bedroom on a not-quite-professional computer system) is possibly the most touching.

 Nick Alan is only 24, and yet he approaches this material—it’s just about life and love, really, nothing political, didactic, or out of the ordinary—with the insight, honesty and wisdom of an old soul. When he sings “There’s an ocean outside of my window, and a taxicab out on the street. And if you should choose, I’d send it for you. Taxicab, bring her to me.” You not only remember what it was like to be 24, lonely, and longing for a girl you’ve been afraid to call and ask for a date…you are transported, so that you are literally there again. Over and over, Nick Alan takes you right up to the times in your life when you were at your most vulnerable, your tenderest, your most emotionally intense. He takes you there, draws back a curtain and says, “look, there you are. You saw these things, you felt these things.”

But enough about “honesty.” Honest is a word that’s lost its meaning in the music business for its relentless application as a label for nearly every record that comes out. It almost sounds like a consolation prize for an album that doesn’t have the greatest songs, but Nicholas Alan is, from the standpoint of pure melody and lyric, a legit candidate for the best undiscovered songwriter alive. His songs grow and grow on you until you are compelled to listen.

That’s a testament to Alan’s command of melody at a sophisticated level, and probably his upbringing as the son of an accomplished jazz bassist. His melodies wind, unfold slowly, turn back on themselves, and come to rest at unexpected but entirely sensible ends. You like them at first—but then, at first, you don’t fully understand where he’s going. You have to live with this album for a while, and then you realize every song is beautiful. And his lyrics are as imaginatively imagistic as any artist we’ve found.

His father’s jazz band plays on the album and it was entirely recorded unexpertly by the musicians who played on it. Some of the mix choices—awful reverbs, strange panning choices—are joyfully inexplicable! This meant we were not able to give it high marks for sonic quality, but on the other hand, its sound is positively endearing. And don’t get us wrong: it doesn’t sound entirely amateurish, just a cut below the big-budget-sounding stuff that mostly surrounds it on this chart. These days it seems every unsigned artist has a big-time-sounding demo. Nicholas Alan doesn’t. His is just better than theirs in almost every other way.

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4. Paul Otten, Bad Parade, 2004 (Listen )

All the reviewers here at I-Pop keep saying is, “How did this rich album fall to #4?” Because we love this record! Described by one of us as “A country version of Phil Collins in his early, exploratory period,” this is an artist who’s not sure what he wants to sound like. As a result, we get a conglomeration of unexpected sounds: synths, loops, country-fried guitar, bluesy soul, and straight pop takes on what’s one of the deepest and most interesting displays of songwriting in the top 20. The musical exploration stays within the bounds of pop, but an exploration is exactly what it is.

Wrong-headed critics will call it stylistically unfocused, even un-hip. We call it intriguing and ceaselessly fascinating.

The album doesn’t sound great—it’s a little thin-sounding, somewhat lifeless, and we detect the evil over-use of auto-tune. (What is auto-tune? Click here.) It would be nice if Otten had spent more time honing his vocals. They are occasionally stellar, but just as often flat, overcorrected and overprocessed. Could he have been pushed to achieve more by the producer, Brian Lovely? Or is he merely an adequate singer performing amazing material? We don’t know.

Exactly because of its sonic limitations, this is the kind of album that Intelligent Pop exists for. Major label A&R people are unlikely to get past the dated drum-machine sound on the opening track (there are plenty of real drums on the album, but the opening track starts out with a cheesy-sounding drum machine), so it’s possible they’ll miss out entirely on the brilliance contained in the songwriting. Intelligent pop subscribers won’t miss out on it, though.

The writing is just that good—and so is the instrumental arrangementm (kudos to the always tasteful, quietly amazing guitar work of Mr. Lovely), which is possibly the most innovative in the top 20. The wonderful, emotionally hard-hitting melodies, lyrics and instrumental flourishes overcome the flatness of the sound quality and the uneven vocal delivery.

We think Paul Otten should be famous as an artist in his own right, but if he can’t be, then his songs ought to be. Speaking of Phil Collins, his material of late has been quite weak. He really ought to seek out Paul Otten as a writer and re-capture the pop magic of his early 1980s efforts.

If this CD had been treated, during the recording stage, with a little more TLC, then it would be gunning for #1.

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5. Peter Murray, Ants and Angels

When Peter Murray’s terrific, driving, bright-distorted-guitar, pop-rock song “Generation X DJ on E” cranks up, you immediately have two thoughts: (1) this is kind of 5 years ago, kind of Blink-182; and (2) but this is way better than Blink-182. Great lyrics, amazing, and yes, sophisticated pop melody. Hell, you’d have liked Blink-182 if they’d made music this good. Maybe if pop radio doesn’t notice how smart the whole thing is, they’ll play it, the same way they played Ben Folds’s almost-as-good “Rockin’ the Suburbs” a few years ago before they realized the joke was on them.

Then, when the also-catchy and slightly weird “Skydiver Friends” comes on, you think Murray isn’t so much a smart Blink-182 but maybe a new Cake. Wry and ironic, a little too-obviously intelligent. Extremely talented, but it’s starting to become obvious that Murray is so intent on not taking himself too seriously, that like the very good but always unsatisfying Cake, he’s just not willing to say anything too pithy, lest ultra-hip 24-year-old pseudointellectuals and the second-rate critics they grow up to become accuse him of too much sentimentality.

Then the beautiful, haunting, and entirely serious yet not at all trite meditation on being alive, “Lucky to Breathe,” comes on…and you realize you’re absolutely wrong about Murray. It’s too late to accuse him of being too serious, for you laughed your way through “Gen X DJ,” and admired his wry smarts on “Skydiver Friends.” By the end of the album, when Murray has morphed almost completely into Roland Orzabal, channeling the introspective spirit of the Tears for Fears singer, especially from his brilliant and ridiculously underrated master opus Raoul and the Kings of Spain, all you can do is sit back slack-jawed and hope against all hope that the world is ready for this kind of pop music again. If there is room in this world for another Roland, another Sting, another Peter Gabriel, another Simon and Garfunkel—in other words another artist entirely definitive of the Intelligent Pop genre, then world, meet Peter Murray.

If I may dwell a moment on TFF’s Orzabal: TFF fans know that many of their albums contain a single very down-tempo song in which there is not much of a “pop groove” and possibly no drums at all, full of pregnant pauses, introspective themes, and yet still great melody. These songs might be thought of as experimental, except that Orzabal made them a staple of his style. Think “I Believe,”  from Songs from the Big Chair, “Famous Last Words” from The Seeds of Love, and, most relevant here, “I Choose You,” from Raoul.

That’s what Murray’s “The Ark” is, and it’s possibly as great as Orzabal’s best work. The experimentation with an ultra-sophisticated Cello part, arranged and played by Kevin Fox, works brilliantly, and leaves you gasping for air. Wow.

But I’ve jumped to song 10. Along the way, you are entertained, moved, made to laugh, cry, and always sing along. “Murray vs. the Ants” is an ultra-catchy mid-tempo song that’s hilarious for its amusing depiction of a paranoid Peter Murray losing his mind, waging a war against ants, but still tragic for its subject matter. The seriousness is all in the music, but sanity is precious, and Murray intends to say so in the most nuanced way. You will be singing the chorus to yourself for days.

That is, if you can get the beautiful melody of the verse of “Where do you go” out of your head. This sophisticated melody represents the kind of innovative pop composition that we’re constantly urging songwriters to push themselves to achieve. It’s sophisticated, entirely unexpected, and yet thematic: it’s no less memorable for its winding path. Murray understands the meaning of a “melody’s narrative arc.” Mostly, his have strong, satisfying arcs. Like great stories, they have a beginning, a development, a conflict, a twist, and a resolution that’s both less expected and makes more sense than the melody you  thought you were going to hear. It’s all accomplished in a 10- or 15-second passage. The list of songwriters who do this on a regular basis is very, very short.

Finally, Murray’s lyrics are deeply thoughtful. Maybe too much so. They’re fantastic, but not as effortless as they’ll be in 10 years. Is this a criticism? Maybe, but it’s like criticizing an artist for not having gotten where he’s going yet. You have to enjoy genius as it grows. But if you’re wondering whether the guy can use concrete images to say something about experience, read this: “Ears make wax, eyes make tears, drinking makes me older/Eyes make tears and I don’t know why/Why do they have to make me cry?” In “Ears Make Wax” Murray seems to have found the perfect way to illustrate the realization that he is not in control of his emotions—the most basic realization of the human experience, perhaps, and one which most people fail to discover before they die.

Obviously from these comments, Ants and Angels is primed for a run at our top 3, and is the first record we’ve heard in a while that has a realistic chance to break the stranglehold on the top 3 that Inara George, Nick Alan, and Busbee have held.

But like those magical works, Murray’s record is not flawless. Murray does not reach his standard of melodic inventiveness on every song, and on his way to becoming Roland Orzabal, he glances back at Blink-182 more times than you’d like. It’s when channeling X-rock that he becomes his least interesting.

Murray, a perfectly good singer, is still not as amazing and dynamic vocalist as Orzabal, or say, Sting, is. Can he become one? Possibly. For now, his voice can verge on sounding a little ordinary, sometimes a little reminiscent of Todd Rundgren, his delivery style a little bland, as though he’s not yet settled on how he likes to phrase things. As he releases future works, he’ll have some discovery to do in this area.

Finally, given the utterly grandiose ambition of this album and its absolutely pristine recording quality, it’s disappointing that Murray confines himself entirely to the most basic sounds of a small rock ensemble from songs 1 to 11. It’s all guitar, drums, bass, and Fender Rhodes electric piano, and not much else. The couple of times he throws you a morsel of cello, you scarf it up and crave more symphonia (and more use of large acoustic spaces), but it’s just not forthcoming, either in acoustic or electronic form. Damn. A number of the less pop-rocky songs could have been beautifully embellished with some kind of progressive orchestral drama, to great effect. If Murray felt a compulsion to “stay small,” “stay intimate,” or “stay raw” in deference to some kind of purist indie-rock aesthetic, then we’d say that is the wrong impulse for these heavyweight, downright important songs. “Gen X DJ” is a blast, but overall, Peter, you are no post-modernist. Let the strings play; just write something interesting for them to play, not something corny. (But you know that!)

Oh yeah, if you guessed Peter Murray was from Canada, you’d be correct. Once again, from north of the border comes a sophisticated gem. Totally inspiring.

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6. Suzy Callahan, Pulling all the Rind Off, 2006

This homemade, organic (even slightly sloppy at times), and at first unassuming-sounding CD sneaks up on you with its power. The competent and immediately interesting melodic composition is obvious enough at first, but it was not evident to us how startlingly original Callahan’s CD was until the third or fourth listen. Everybody does ethereal folky rock on an acoustic guitar these days. One listen and you’re likely to conclude that Callahan’s doing the same, only maybe better than average. After you live with it for a while, you realize that, very subtly, Callahan is innovating the acoustic rock genre more powerfully than anyone you’ve heard in a long, long time.

Callahan is playful, imagistic and often brilliant with her lyrics and relentlessly innovating—but always in the subtlest ways—in melody and production. Here’s another artist that proves you can write powerful hooks that are all at once infectiously singable, completely original, and intellectually rewarding. Great and memorable composition does not require the absence of originality or heavy borrowing of overplayed themes. The presumed forced choice between The Velvet Underground and “Hollaback Girl” is entirely mythical.

On song after song, Suzy Callahan is always doing something musically and lyrically interesting, and she garnishes it off with her entirely different voice. Like co-top-20-occupier (and aesthetic cousin) Kathy Ziegler, and unlike so many female rock singers, Callahan manages to do this style of music without sounding like Alanis, Jewel, or like an inferior Dolly Parton. At times she seems to struggle against a vocal instrument that, like a perfectly beat up antique, just won’t sound quite pure, and at other times she seems in command of a respectable full tone. Her voice is always changing, always interesting, and always that of a veteran, reliable storyteller who is entirely at peace with her delivery.

The album launches with two mysterious and ethereal sounding opening tracks (don’t think Sarah McLachlan exactly, though; you haven’t quite heard anything like this before). It’s just enough time for you to think you’ve figured our Callahan, and then the most immediately infectious tune on the album, “I’m the Teacher,” appears. It begins like the others—quiet, dark, with fingerpicked acoustic guitar backing whispery voice delivering quirky lyrics—and then suddenly and entirely unexpectedly begins to rock (I know you hate that word, but I don’t mean rock like Weezer; I mean more like Simon and Garfunkel in, say, “Sounds of Silence”). The song bursts into one of the coolest choruses you’ve heard in years. I promise, you will be singing this one to yourself for weeks.

“Teacher,” by the way, is illustrative of what this whole album is about. Quirky subject matter (often the song seems addressed to a child, such as “Little Duck”) is dealt with in possibly the most authentically personal point of view of any artist in our entire top 20. As far as I can tell, this song is an entirely un-ironic paean to the nobility of the profession of teaching very young children. “It won’t help to look down, or fidget with your pencil…I know all the tricks…’cause I’m the teacher, giving you my everything, giving you my all; don’t blame the teacher, ’cause you might need her…giving you her everything, catch you when you fall,” sings Callahan. It’s strongly endearing, even inspiring, but somehow without being overly cute—because of Callahan’s entirely straight-faced approach. Far from making the songs harder to identify with, her authenticity magically transforms the personal into the universal. That’s what great storytellers do. The tell only their story—and magically, it’s yours, too. (Did I mention how strong the hook is? For all my praise of the song’s authenticity, in better musical times this would be #1 hit material.)

“Karen” is yet another example of breathtakingly original quirkiness rendered entirely un-cute by authenticity. As in “Teacher,” Callahan develops the theme of ethereal verse followed by “rocking” (but again, in her own way) chorus. (Here I do wish they had turned up those drums, but apparently the home studio in which the album was recorded burned to the ground with the master tapes before any remixing was possible.) The lyrics are a straightforward story about a hot-shit woman who’s come to Callahan’s small town and stolen her husband. “I’ve got to introduce myself to Karen,” Callahan sings. “Then, I can explain why I’ve been starin’. Just let me introduce myself to Karen. ’Cause that’s my husband’s sweater she is wearin’.” The lyrics are so straightforward they don’t read as powerfully as they sing. You have to hear it: this originality of Callahan upon which I’m harping is something you have to take in all at once, melody, performance, everything—and investment in multiple listens pays off handsomely. It’s entirely captivating.

There are a couple of complaints with the album, although possibly if the studio still stood, Callahan and her production partner might have corrected these. In general, but not always, the vocals are a little soft, forcing the listener to work extra hard to extract the rewarding storylines. Second, Callahan’s sometimes experimental-sounding approach sometimes jerks the listener needlessly back and forth between soft acoustic sections and more rhythmic or “rocking” sections. This can be frustrating when you wish she’d just let the band get down to grooving. On no song is this more disappointing than “College Girl.” She teases you in the first verse with the momentary (less than one measure) appearance of what sounds like a fantastically funky rock groove. But she doesn’t let the drummer really do his thing until three and a half minutes into the song. When the band finally starts to crank, it’s about the most satisfying badass rock groove you’ve ever heard—where did you get that drummer Suzy?—and Suzy sounds great singing over it…for the last half minute of the song, and then it’s over. Give us more of that drug!

Third, although Callahan’s melodies are relentlessly innovative and always fascinatingly interesting, sometimes they are not as “complete” or as honed as they could be, robbing them of impact. A brilliant chorus will be matched with a more “tossed-off” –sounding verse which doesn’t measure up to the chorus’s great compositional quality, or vice-versa. Alternately, during the course of a particular single phrase, Callahan will set you up for a melodic knockout punch that never quite comes. Such is the case in “College Girl” where the lyrical hook, “When I need the money…bring back my new honey” (she’s talking about returning from Europe to the safety of her parents’ support) is lyrically a knockout, but melodically a little flaccid, a little unimaginative. Why not give us both at once, if you’ve got the ability, as Callahan clearly does?

Finally, the album’s homemade sounds serves it well, but it would be nice to hear Callahan’s next record sound a little more pristine. Going for a slick studio sound will be dangerous, however: Callahan must retain her casual delivery, and the impromptu nature of the instrumental performances should not be sacrificed. It’s just that there’s so much great stuff going on in the music, however simple it is, that you want to hear it all as well as you can.

These criticisms are quite nitpicky. Callahan’s album is shocking in its originality, and mainly accomplishes this departure without making any sacrifice of good, solid principles of musical composition, with memorable verses and choruses that make you want to sing along. This is a difficult and rare feat, but a few artists achieve it—our top 4, Callahan, and #16 (with a big bullet) Peter Murray come to mind immediately. This is intelligent pop music at its absolute finest, and Callahan deserves to be a gigantic success. Whether a shallow, well-trained public is ready for this kind of terrific art on the radio is debatable, but a world where Suzy Callahan was a huge star would sure be one we’d like to live in.

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7. Rob Fetters, Musician, 2005 (Listen )

This is not an indie-rock record. Although there are light doses of the irony that way too easily impresses self-important rock critics, a little irony cannot ruin this colorful exploration of quirky pop, an explosion of inventive and ultra-intelligent songwriting, instrumental experimentation and technical virtuosity, dripping alternatively with sarcasm, honesty, anger, love and even unflinching sentimentality. Just when you’re about to get mad at Fetters for refusing to be serious, he shows he’s not afraid to do just that and hits an emotional nerve.

Oh, and yeah, you can sing along…like crazy. Unlike indie-pop critical favorites like, say, The Strokes, the vocals are audible. Thank you, Rob, really!

It’s often weird, kind of art-rock-y. In fact, when, in one of the most inventive and emotionally stirring tracks, “Tell the Truth,” Fetters takes a winding, 16th-note-heavy, acoustic guitar solo, it’s really too much. “Where did that come from?” you find yourself asking. He’s masturbating on the guitar, really—almost an aesthetic mistake. But know what? If you are going to make a great record, you have to take chances. This “mistake” is interesting. It makes Fetters a more fascinating person to listen to.

Fetters is another one of the many artists in our top 10 who are stylistically “unfocused.” That’s market-speak for “their songs don’t all sound the same.” Many, including most marketing experts, would probably tell you this is a problem. We sure are happy these “marketing experts” are idiots! That way we can make money turning you on to people like Rob Fetters—musical explorers who prove that experimentation can be energetically pursued while preserving easy accessibility and singability. Impossible, some jaded musicians might say! You have to abandon fundamentally sound melody and forget about comprehensible lyrics to say anything intellectually interesting. No, not impossible, just way more difficult. That’s why Rob Fetters is #5 and they’re not. (And it’s why many of his buddies from Cincinnati are hogging the other positions in our top 20.)

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8. Gary Henson, The Coast is Clear, 2005

This is our favorite Beatlesy artist. Top 20. Beatlesy, that is, with a taste of Crowded House and Oasis. Sings in a British accent. Big backup vocals. How else to say it? Good sounding, almost-pro production, but some amateur elements. “Coast is Clear” is a catchy song.

But does it all add up to anything that moves you? Actually, yes. On “The sun always shines,” a song about how the past always seems halcyon, he achieves something rare in pop music: real beauty, as a lovely lyrical phrase marries to a terrific pop melody. If the production were a little fuller, a little more carefully crafted, the song would soar to the epic proportions it deserves. It’s almost there.

“Crystal clear” is a lovely, near-perfect pop song. The haunting “Holiday” is perfect—except for the boring guitar solo, and the fact that it doesn’t lift off enough when it vamps at the end.

Only problem: if you know this idiom, there still aren’t enough surprises, melodically or production, and the production is just not giving quite enough support. The instruments sound decent, but not great, and they’re not doing anything wonderful. And the vocals should have been produced to achieve a more solemn effect.

Henson needs a producer to take this from “fantastic demo” to “classic record” status. Vocals still undermixed, intelligently done but not inspired in its production.

A great songwriter, though, the best of the unsigned Beatles imitators.

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9. Chris Arduser, The Celebrity Motorcade, 2004 (Listen )

Here’s one of five Cincinnati offerings to hog a space in our top 10. Drummer Arduser has created a theme album: every song is about the moviemaking business of old Hollywood. It sounds great. Arduser’s melodies are straightforward—sometimes a tiny bit too symmetrical, in fact. And while occasionally, the melodic content is inspired, there are other times when the melodies seem not fully thought-out, not so much composed as improvised around the prose-like historical lyrics. Indeed, Arduser’s lyrics often eschew editorializing in favor of simply objectively recounting stories of Hollywood legends’ lives. Because of this, Arduser might miss a few opportunities to hit emotional high notes. But the sense of importance, of epic proportion, is not entirely lost—it’s just subtle.

This is an intelligent and highly listenable album, with several real gems on it. Listening to the stories about Hollywood giants is at times gripping, and despite our mild criticism of the melodies, there are some hooks that are powerfully compelling. The idea for such a theme album was a great one, and Arduser does not disappoint in the execution.

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10. AM, AM, 2005 (Listen )

AM doesn’t seem to have a name—he’s a person, but he just goes by AM, and we don’t know whether it’s pronounced ay-emm, or am.

At any rate, AM, beginning with an acoustic-rock skeleton and then borrowing, but not too heavily, the additional panoramic textures of Coldplay and U2, has a sonically beautiful and melodically explorative record executed with technical aplomb and confidence.

The songs are terrifically singable, but there is a problem: AM’s lyrics, though almost never cheesy or dishonest, are too full of nonspecific language (Writers, we’ve got to use colorful verbs, and watch the overreliance on variations of lifeless verbs like to be—“am,” “are,” “is”), and not enough concrete images or clear examples of storytelling. Combine this with a slightly undermixed lead vocal (it’s very slight, and not a huge problem here, and anyway this is such a common mistake, even for big-budget records, that many listeners won’t notice) and it’s occasionally more work than a listener should have to invest to gauge what AM’s songs are about, to place yourself in his world and fully identify with what he’s feeling.

With more commitment to concreteness in his lyrics, AM has the talent to make a #1 record for this chart. They guy is a formidable talent. This record has potential to move up on the strength of the melody-writing, the inventiveness of the instrumental arrangements, and the terrific production—hence the bullet.

We think this talented veteran still has his best albums ahead of him. Get this one now, because it’s thoroughly enjoyable, and watch this artist grow.

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11. Kathy Ziegler, Don't Worry, The Danger..., 2005 (Listen )

It’s lovely to hear a modern female pop or rock singer who doesn’t sound anything at all like Alanis or Sarah or any of the other confessional female singer-songwriters of the moment, er, last 15 years.

Ziegler sounds rough, hoarse, almost drunk, Janis Joplinesque. This is the “sound of authenticity” critics love, and while we sometimes clash with conventional critical currents in this case we love it too.

This is not the most melodic album in our chart, but the production is relentlessly inventive. Just when you think, after the album starts off with “We Can’t Find It,” that Ziegler is pure acoustic-and-slide-electric-guitar Americana, she and co-producers Matthew Horn and Don Piper introduce a soft synthesizer flourish here, a loop there, Daniel Lanois-inspired dirty guitar on one song and then on another, a mellow cornet. It’s all extremely musical—and, importantly, the flourishes are intertwined with each other and with the Ziegler’s songwriting, symphonic, rather than random as is so often the case in alternative pop of this style. The sound of the album is sometimes smallish and narrow, sometimes wide and lush, always varied, always an understated complement to Ziegler’s writing, the production choices tell their own story and give the album miles of depth.

While Ziegler’s melodies are not by themselves haunting, her lyrics are, and it is on the strength of her powerfully imagistic lyric writing that this album could rise in this chart over the next few months to single-digit heights. She can be maddeningly indecipherable at times—but while this is usually a criticism, in this case we’re not sure it’s a problem. Ziegler’s lyrics seem mainly to tap themes that dance around a kind of pseudo-Eastern-philosophical-spiritual way of seeing the world. Now, since so much of lyric writing today attempts this very thing, you might want to roll your eyes. But don’t, because Ziegler does it better than anybody.

Somehow, when you’re reading her lyrics, you can’t say exactly what she’s talking about, but you just sort of know. And she does it all with some of the strongest and most original imagery of any writer we’ve heard. “Like a summertime kid’s mind, cool in a night air way,” she writes, “Sleep when you’re tired, then try again—these habits slip away. Hattered by something, sheltered by nothing, the race, the dream, the small of your back. Caught in the fine space between the things you love and the things you lack. Stunned by the shape of it, staring at the beautiful moon. We can’t find it.”

And how’s this for a personal, relevant, multi-sensual image? It actually made my (Everett’s writing this review) heart skip a beat when I first read it, because it feels so real, so tragic: “Ceremonious school closing, two beds in the room. How we revel in secret languages the way survivors do. I listen to your stories, memorize your facts. We are only children once.” Oh my god.

Obviously, we think melody is the one area where Ziegler could explore some new territory. We like her melodies just fine. We especially like her improvisational delivery, and we certainly don’t want her to write bubblegum “hooks,” but there’s potential for her to discover more hauntingly memorable lines to go with her heartstopping lyrics. Being melodic need not mean being hackneyed or hokey—and anyway, hokum is something of which we’re sure Kathy Ziegler is incapable.

This album is more than worth the price for those lyrics, along with that terrific voice and innovative production. It might sound trite to say it, but Ziegler seems to know something important, and as a listener, you trust her to be your guide to just about everything. Her lyrics are just barely specific enough for you to begin to get it, and then challenging enough for you to spend countless hours figuring out what she means. And really, what greater pleasure can a masterpiece of intelligent pop music deliver than that?

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12. Mark Lane, Golden State of Mind, 2003 (Listen )

Lane’s interesting and extremely intelligent record is deliberately retro-sounding. It’s immediately recognizable as Beatles-esque (especially the George Harrison and John Lennon tunes), with some of the post-Beatles influences of Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra. But as the title implies, it’s also coated with the distinct sounds of 1960s- and ‘70s-era West Coast rock: a little Beach Boys, a little Tom Petty.

Lane clearly knows what he wants this record to sound like, and its production is one of the most focused in our top 20 in terms of “going for a sound and getting it.” There’s lots of great-sounding harmonic distortion (not just in the guitars).

The lyrics are terrific almost the entire time. Lane is extremely clever—maybe too self-consciously so. But if you pay close attention to the slightly undermixed vocal, you’re constantly impressed with the fertility of Lane’s imagination and his ability to turn an unexpected phrase.

Probably a good way to describe Golden State, ultimately, is that it’s a party album for smart people. It’s mainly upbeat. It’s full of deliberate, well composed melody; chord progressions are sophisticated, and with its festive spirit, you could proudly play it loud at a well-lubricated gathering of your most intellectual friends, and they’d ask you with great interest who was on. But it’s not entirely clear whether this description is all compliment and no criticism.

This is because, accompanying the festive atmosphere is a detached quality that left at least one of our reviewers wanting more emotional commitment from Lane. It sometimes sounds a little like Lane is play-acting: he’s having fun pretending to care about the subject matter of his songs. For example, in the album’s closest thing to a stab at sentimentality, the pleasant, quiet, acoustic-guitar-and-violin-adorned “Loralei,” Lane doesn’t sound like he’s personally swept away by the girl; rather, he sounds like he’s singing an old favorite about a guy who’s swept away by a girl. It’s almost hauntingly gorgeous...but Lane himself does not sound haunted.

Several writing and production choices contribute to this “detached” quality. For example, perhaps a majority of the lead vocals are “doubled” (sung twice), a neat effect but one which can distance the listener from the singer’s raw sentiment by hiding vocal nuance.

One of our reviewers pointed out that Lane’s songs were, like ELO’s, full of dominant-seventh and half-diminished chords, which had always struck him as “cold-sounding.” Lane features these colors more than almost any writer we’ve ever heard. Maybe this caused our reviewer to perceive detachment. But importantly, it is also an indicator of Lane’s powerful sense of style, and that’s to be praised liberally.

We shouldn’t make too much of perceived detachment. The writing on the album is relentlessly clever, as are the terrific production choices. Song #1, “The girl with the clouds in her eyes” is 50% Beatles, 50% Beach Boys, and is good enough to have been on an album by either of those bands. (Sacrilege? Too bad! It’s that good!) It’s one of the most memorable songs we’ve encountered in our searches. The poor man’s romp “Taste for Champagne,” in which Lane finds just about every way in the world to rhyme with the phrase “You know I’ve got a budget for beer, I’ve got a taste for champagne” is an absolute hoot! “Champagne” has classic written all over it, and could become a beloved “Margaritaville” for people who can’t bring themselves to like Jimmy Buffet (such as this author).

Mark Lane seems like a brilliant guy, and, playing most of the inventive parts here, clearly a great musician. If you like your albums just a little bit dry of overt sentimentality; if you like thick, layered, retro-sounding production; if you like ELO and George Harrison; then you’re going to love this album right out of the box. If, on the other hand, you want artists to connect more sentimentally with their material—if mountains move for you when Sting sings “Fragile” or when Bono sings “One,” then you’ll be left with immeasurable respect for Lane, but wanting more.

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13. Chris Belden, Songs About Anything, 2004

The vast majority of what’s submitted to us at Intelligent Pop is competent, professionally made, indicative of considerable talent, and yet ultimately fails to separate itself from the pack. Why? Usually, it just doesn’t make us feel or think anything.

But ah, here’s a find! Belden, a 40-something-year-old writer by profession, has no aspirations to become a rock star, but his gorgeous and unassuming collection of melancholy, romantic songs is sure to make intelligent pop fans feel, visualize and reflect all afternoon long. This vaguely progressive-1980s-inspired jangle-pop album is perhaps most reminiscent of our #2 chart dweller by Nicholas Alan in its ability to conjure powerful, and powerfully nostalgic (especially for older pop fans), images that remind you what it felt like to be a young, philosophical liberal with a yearning heart and Morrissey in your CD collection.

Only Belden is not cynical like Morrissey; he’s rather the optimistic existentialist, more like Lloyd Cole in his wide-eyed fascination with the inner lives the various characters he observes, of his own uncontrollable whims, and especially of those tortured-but-beautiful girls he’ll never see again. Like Cole, Belden is open to it all, helpless but resigned, and of course always willing to have his heart broken just one more time. Belden’s writing is every bit as effective as Lloyd Cole’s is at its best, and that’s why he’s likely to rise to single digits on our chart.

Belden’s lyrics are almost never “brilliant” in the sense of being clever. They’re just superbly effective in putting you there, in the middle of every melancholy situation. Exactly as you’d expect from a professional writer, Belden’s words themselves go unnoticed, leaving you only with stories, innumerable concrete images, and lots of visceral affect.

The same is true of his melodies. Though not overly clever, they are refreshing, memorable and, most importantly, they say something. This willingness to say something is particularly refreshing because some of the Morrissey fans who grew up to be art critics—both professional and armchair—often follow a postmodern aesthetic that’s suspicious of earnest attempts to say something important. This has produced a rash of 40-something songwriters and bands who, so intent on avoiding any whiff of cheesiness, just make boring music with entirely safe, if superficially clever, content instead. Belden’s romanticism is occasionally, ever so slightly, cheesy, but this is an inevitable price he must pay for saying something worth listening to. The result: a mostly not-cheesy, fully satisfying record.

The opening song, however, bodes ill. With the too-perfect title, “Helpless,” it certainly establishes the melancholy mood. But it does so in a less musically competent manner than the rest of the record, and in its writing is more predictable than many of Belden’s other songs. Belden sounds a little amateur in his singing, too. After 30 seconds of listening, you’re thinking, “this guy likes all the same bands I do, but he isn’t very good.”

But if you’re willing to give the album one more chance, song 2, “Need to Know,” just knocks you out with its enveloping beauty and its haunting, McCartneyesque melody (think “The Long and Winding Road”). Belden’s voice, though never extraordinary, gains a storyteller’s command of his subject matter, and holds it for the rest of the album, coming to sound, at least to my ears (Everett writing here), reminiscent of Art Garfunkel’s innocent tenor whisper (perhaps without the angelic soar). I’m listening to song 2 for maybe the 5th time right now, and I can actually feel my eyes welling with tears, just before I notice the wonderfully orchestrated countermelodic piano part that Belden and producer John Hegner delicately left there, waiting to be discovered. Apparently, song 1 was an aberration in its ordinariness.

Then comes song 3, “Quacks like Love,” a song whose melody is almost too simple, almost too obvious a hook, but Belden sells it with such perfect, unassuming candor that instead its easy memorability makes the song a should-be ageless classic. Like most intelligent pop-loving men, Belden obviously was (obviously still is?) hopelessly in love with that mysterious, artsy, tortured, childlike and too-perfect free-spirited girl in the sun dress from college days. You know, the one you were in love with and who was nice enough to you to make you think you had a chance with her, but who seemed to keep everyone—especially you—at arm’s length. I’m trying to describe her here, but Belden does it better here—and you’re right back there again: not just Belden, but you are still in love with her. That’s effective musicmaking.

By now, you’ve forgotten the mediocre opening and you know you’re in the hands of a seasoned artist who just needed a mulligan off the first tee. The rest of the record is terrific, especially “The Few Things I Know About Her,” a simple description of some of Belden’s observations of a woman. He never mentions her age—for me, she’s older, in her 60s. In fact, she’s my first wife’s mother, pretty much to a T. He never tells you once her life is sad—indeed never makes any evaluative judgments of her at all—and none of her behaviors are directly indicative of anything particularly disturbing other than that she’s a little odd (she works in her garden late at night). And yet, she’s the loneliest person I’ve ever known, and I long to save her. Of course, this is almost the textbook demonstration of what great art is and does. It does not try to make you feel. It just tells the story. If the story is real, you will find connections to it in your own life. And the art will draw to the surface all the feelings you have about those life themes the artist never even had to name. Name them, and of course the feeling vanishes in a puff of smoke (as, for example, Billy Joel does when, after creating the wonderful and poignant cast of characters in “Piano Man,” he sings, “Yes, they’re sharing a drink they call loneliness!” Ugh.).

Finally…sonically, the album is very professional sounding, and well played (with song 1 a slight problem, as noted). But more importantly, Hegner gives it an important sound—especially Belden’s voice, emphasizing its whispery midrange and allowing it to stand out from the music. This puts the lyrics—the story—front and center, where they should be. Hegner is to be commended for this too-rare achievement.

The sum-up: likely to rise high. If you’re very cynical, you might be put off by the sentiment of this album, but for most intelligent pop fans, a highly recommended purchase.

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14. The Allens, The Allens, 2007

First-rate slightly ethereal folk-Americana with a slightly thicker-voiced Sarah McLachlan-esque singer. Husband and wife team that crafts gorgeously textured songs with catchy and easy-going melodies, beautiful, honest, straightforward and thoughtful lyrics, and competent musicianship throughout the band.

We don’t like the production, though, because it robs the music of the importance it deserves. The vocals are undermixed at times, and there’s no space around the instruments. The overall sound is cramped, without enough dynamics. A new mix is needed. These songs ought to sound important, panoramic, and epic, but they don’t. Singer Catherine Allen is a wonderful talent, and the producer and mix engineer seem to have forgotten that along the way. She should sound like the voice of a goddess, like McLachlan does. She clearly has the pipes and the spirit to accomplish this, but her vocals are somehow drained of life by the production. In some cases, she could have been pushed to achieve more emotional takes, in other instances, the mix engineer simply failed to shine the proper light on her talents. The guitars all have lovely tone, but you don’t have to drown out the singer to make me realize that! So, points off for some poor production choices.

Still, the terrific musicianship throughout—terrific piano, guitar, drums and vocals, and songcraft—overcome the poor production to make this a top 20 record. Recommended purchase.

If they re-mix it and re-cut some vocals, it’s a top 10 candidate and recommended even more strongly.