I actually made it out of the house to see a rock show on Friday night, and picked a good one. Secret Machines was playing at the Iowa Memorial Union, a show tailor made for me: No opener, an 8 p.m. start time, and an “in the round” stage set-up that meant I could actually get close enough to see without fighting through a gaggle of college kids for the opportunity. Yeah, I know I sound like an old man, so what?

The band was better than I expected, given the rather ragged radio shows I’d heard (and in the case of Morning Becomes Eclectic, seen) over the past several months. The light show was a bit overbearing given the rather small confines of the room, but the sound was decent and the band was clearly as tight as they’ll ever be. That made the more grooving songs in its set the best, propelled by the mighty drumming of Josh Garza. At times, the Curtis brothers would lay out, leaving Garza to carry the song. He did so ably, and while it was a nice cathartic rush each time they came storming back in on massively pedal-tweaked Fender Rhodes and guitar, the musical sameness between those drummer-only moments and what followed made certain songs feel sort of hollow. Variation is certainly not the band’s strength: I think the guitarist actually soloed once, and their best songs were all essentially to the same beat.

On the way out of the show, a couple of friends and I were talking, trying to place the band on the musical spectrum. They’re too prog-loving and jammy for the indie kids, too indie/loud/droney for the jam-band fans and not near wanky enough for the old psych heads. Where does that leave them? My guess is this: They obviously have a few powerful fans in the Warner Brothers family, because no band without decent tour support from a label could afford to cart around that stage set to play for 200 kids on a Friday night. No label would offer that kind of support this long after the release of a second record that didn’t generate much buzz unless the band was going to get a third. Assuming that doesn’t sell either, which indie label picks them up? Or rather, which smart band picks up Garza once the Secret Machines split?

I have many friends who like some jazz, but who can’t quite wrap their heads around some of the more out-there artists I have gravitated toward as my love and knowledge of the genre expands. I have tried to drop some of the more accessible things from David S. Ware, William Parker and Matthew Shipp (particularly his fantastic work as both artist for and curator of Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series) on them, with varying results.

The folks behind Destination Out have obviously faced a similar challenge. In contrast with my efforts, however, they have codified things a bit and offered a heap of supporting evidence. The post, “A Beginner’s Guide to Free Jazz,” is a great place for beginners to start, and a nice place for those of us who feel we’re at least at the intermediate stage to see a bit of taste fulfillment and catch a few unheard tracks.

The post is full of links to other pieces that flesh out this introduction to free jazz, but the meat of it is a genre-specific introduction. For example, it says if you like classical music, you should try Matthew Shipp, specifically the song “Orbit 2″ from his album New Orbit. There are even handy mp3s of all the sample tracks, making this a very valuable multi-media primer. Other categories include funk, electronica and freak folk.

I have been on a serious R.E.M. bender of late, sparked mainly by the release of the new best-of collection from the band’s IRS years, And I Feel Fine. Hearing all of these familiar tunes back to back really conjured memories of the band’s mid-80s heyday, and made me realize how much I miss the fun that an R.E.M. record once promised.

After tracking through both discs of the “collector’s edition” of the disc, hearing rarities like “Mystery to Me” and “All the Right Friends,” I’m struck by how consistently good the band’s output was over the first five years of its existence. From 1981, represented by the earliest bootlegs of the band’s club shows, to 1986 with the release of Lifes Rich Pageant, there is hardly a bum note to their name.

Looking closer, however, it is clear that a significant portion of the best music the band recorded during that time was written very early in the band’s career. Listening to bootlegs like That Beat in Time is like hearing a demo tape for three of the band’s first four albums. Most of the material showed up on Chronic Town and Murmur, while a handful didn’t appear until Pageant. Other early bootlegs feature songs found on the band’s second full-length, Reckoning.

The only among those early albums that seems to be composed of contemporaneous compositions is Fables of the Reconstruction. One can chalk up the significantly different sound of this disc to the fact that it was produced in the UK with Joe Boyd, but I’ll posit that it also stems from the fact that it was the first time the band didn’t rely on those earliest, Athens club-tested songs when they went into the studio. The experience of recording that album clearly had an impact on the band, which might explain why the subsequent Pageant is both R.E.M.’s most fun and most rocking album (not counting the forced attempt to recapture that feel on the later Monster).

Fans often draw a dividing line in the band’s career between its time with IRS and its longer tenure with Warner Brothers. That is convenient, and certainly not without merit. But I’d group Document in with that latter batch as being part of the band’s “new” sound. It’s a nice bridge, and when one considers it, with Fables, as a sign that the band was chafing at the constraints of its college-rock yoke, it is a fitting close to one chapter and beginning to the next.

I have enjoyed, to varying degrees, every R.E.M. album save for 2004′s Around the Sun. One thing missing from the band’s last few records — at least since the on-the-fly tour-spawned disc New Adventures in Hi-Fi – is a sense that the band is having fun. Much as Monster seemed like a forced attempt to recapture the gritty feel of Pageant, Reveal felt like a misguided attempt to inject some fun into the band’s work. Perhaps revisiting all of these old tunes will do the same thing for the band that it did for me: spark a few memories of the past and a bit of hope about the future.

Sunday was an exciting day for fans of Michael Connelly‘s Harry Bosch. Connelly is the latest mystery writer to be featured in the New York Times’ “Funny Pages” section. The Times will serialize a new Bosch novella, “The Overlook,” for the next 16 weeks.

Interested as I am in reading any new Connelly work, I’m hesitant to dig in and commit 16 weeks to this. Why? Because Connelly plans to rework and flesh out the material for a book version to come in 2007. According to a Q&A about the project on his web site, “I plan to rewrite it, adding to the length of some chapters and adding a few additional chapters involving an off shoot of the investigation that I didn’t have room for in the New York Times version.”

Personally, I’d rather read it the way he wants it to be than to read it in drips and drabs over the next four months. The temptation may be too great, however; we’ll see. Another reason to wait, at least for a while: Connelly says there are references, albeit minor, to things that take place in his forthcoming Bosch novel, Echo Park. The story in that book, due in October, predates “The Overlook,” in Bosch’s world, anyway. It seems to make sense to read that first, and then tackle this story. Consider it dessert.

The New York Times has an interesting article about that fact that Bob Dylan apparently lifted some lines from Civil War-era poet Henry Timrod’s work for the lyrics to songs on his new disc, Modern Times. Dylan was accused of this last time out, with lines from a novel by Japanese author Junichi Saga popping up in songs on Love and Theft. Reaction to both has been mixed; some see it as fairly straight-foward plagiarism, while others cite it as part of the folk music tradition. I fall in the latter camp, because Dylan is clearly using these bits to augment his own work, collage-like, rather than simply trying to pass it off as his own.

One funny bit — The Times cites this lyric as one that seems to contain elements of Timrod’s verse: “In the dark I hear the night birds call/ I can hear a lover’s breath/ I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall/ Sleep is like a temporary death.” The verse from Timrod is “Which, ere they feel a lover’s breath,/Lie in a temporary death.” Stolen? Perhaps. But the song in which this is found is “Workingman’s Blues #2,” itself an homage to Merle Haggard’s classic “Workingman’s Blues,” right down to the way Dylan phrases the chorus.

Bob, it seems, is like a blogger, taking the best bits from various sources, polishing them up, providing his own context and sending it all back out into the world under his own name. If only he’d hyperlink to his source material, he wouldn’t be in this mess.

UPDATE: NPR had a short piece about this as well, talking with the fan who uncovered the lyrical liftings.

There may have been a better week for new CD releases, but if so, I don’t remember it. The dozen discs pictured at right are just some of the many released today that have already or will soon grace my collection. It seems positively ridiculous to backload the year like this, but it happens annually. Something about the pending holiday season coupled with the start of the school year makes labels feel fall is the right time to drop a new release. Thing is, it’s already hard enough for folks like Ron Sexsmith, Eric Matthews and Kasey Chambers to get lost in the shuffle — heard much about any of these three releases yet? — and releasing their latest discs on what must be one of the top three busiest release dates of the year isn’t doing them any favors.

Still, there is an obvious rush for any music fan faced with hearing so much new music from favorite artists all at once. Thanks to the miracles of pre-release order fulfillment and downloading, I’ve heard three of these and have my mitts on a fourth. A trip to the record shop will net another three or four, while I’ll wait on the rest. I can vouch for the Black Keys, which is a grower, and the TV on the Radio, which is a refinement of the already pretty wonderful sound found on Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes. The Eric Matthews is a bit bland, though the liner notes — in which he writes of capturing “the Eric Matthews sound” — are unintentionally amusing.

The discs out this week are (in order above): Black Keys’ Magic Potion, Richard Buckner’s The Meadow, Eric Matthews’ Foundation Sounds, Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau’s Metheny Mehldau, Kasey Chambers’ Carnival, Los Lobos’ The Town and the City, R.E.M.’s I Feel Fine, Ron Sexsmith’s Time Being, Jason Moran’s Artist in Residence, the Rapture’s Pieces of the People We Love and Yo La Tengo’s I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.

I blazed through the latest Ken Bruen novel this weekend, downing Calibre in a couple of hours. Bruen’s hard-boiled mystery-thrillers are as fast-paced as they come, and this was no exception. I started reading Bruen in the winter of 2005, and have pretty well digested it all save for Priest, which doesn’t see a U.S. release until next February, and the contents of A Fifth of Bruen, the recently released collection that gathers his earliest four novels and other work. Thankfully, he is startlingly prolific, able to keep up with my demand for new work. As his U.S. publishers catch up with his catalog, however, I hope he’ll continue to crank it out to compensate.

As for Calibre, it’s the latest in his Brant series, following a cop referred to more than once as an animal. Anyone looking for a good Bruen entry point should pick up The White Trilogy, which gathers the fist three Brant novels in one seamless whole. Bruen’s a huge fan of pulp crime fiction, often leading into the chapters of his books with an applicable quote from a seemingly inexhaustible repository of hard-boiled dialogue. Here, he uses that love of pulp to create an interesting twist.

His Jack Taylor novels (The Guards, et al), which really broke Bruen in the U.S., are as good, though less viscerally driving and more dark and introspective. Beyond those are a handful of stand-lone novels that also have much to recommend them.

He has yet another novel ready to unleash on the world, the long-gestating American Skin, which, one hopes will continue to raise his profile here. After that and the 2007 release of (the latest Jack Taylor title), the only word of new Bruen has been the announcement that he and Jason Starr will write another book for Hard Case Crime to follow this year’s Bust. Keep ‘em coming, Ken.

I have been meaning to write about Daytrotter for quite some time, but the presence of new Bonnie “Prince” Billy recordings there has pushed me to finally do so. The site’s offerings are fairly straightforward: They host four new recordings from a different band each week. These “Daytrotter Sessions” are recorded at Futureappletree Studios in Rock Island, Ill., and later posted on the site.

Two fairly amazing things come to mind: 1) That no one thought of this previously. You could argue that “Morning Becomes Eclectic” and “World Cafe” do the same thing, though I’d argue back that these are radio programs with actual resources and thus really not the same thing at all. 2) That Daytrotter has landed such an impressive lineup given the fact that they are beholden to touring schedules that increasingly see bands steer clear of our neck of the woods.

The Daytrotter folks obviously caught BPB’s Will Oldham last month when he trekked to Iowa City for a record store appearance (which I, sadly, missed) and other performers who head across the plains to and from Chicago while on tour. That has led Jennifer O’Connor, the French Kicks, Catfish Haven and others. These artists have unleashed some surprises during the sessions. Oldham offered up a solo version of a song from the forthcoming The Letting Go, an old standard, a track from Arise Therefore and one of my personal favorites, “New Partner” from Viva Last Blues.

Daytrotter Sessions:
Bonnie “Prince” Billy – The Seedling
Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Goodbye Dear Old Stepstone
Bonnie “Prince” Billy – The Sun Highlights the Lack in Each
Bonnie “Prince” Billy – New Partner

The site also offers CD and show reviews, comics and other music-related music ephemera and trivia. Original artwork (such as the Oldham sketch above that I lifted from the site) is also a frequent feature. It’s a welcome addition to the web, and a new weekly destination to see who they’ve landed next.