Fastball

PJ Harvey Uh Huh Her (Island)

"I can't believe that life's so complex/When I just want to sit here and watch you undress," Polly Jean Harvey sang a few years back on "This Is Love," the best song on the best album of her career, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. After spending most of the Nineties as a mysterious, cult-building heroine, she found something like happiness on Stories. Now, after four years and a queen-size dose of bad love (or so it seems, despite Harvey's claims that her songs aren't strictly autobiographical), we find the English farm girl in blues-poet mode once again. On Uh Huh Her, she evokes disturbed, historically significant females such as Clytemnestra, Emily Dickinson and Polly Jean Harvey.

Harvey doesn't brandish many new moves here. Raw, riff-heavy numbers such as "Who the Fuck?" and "The Letter" revisit her more punkish early days, and "It's You" and the delicately atmospheric "You Come Through" recall the slow-burning metaphysical turn she took with 1995's To Bring You My Love. But having reaffirmed her DIY instincts (Harvey produced the album and played everything except drums), she packed Uh Huh Her with moments of austere beauty, straight-ahead melancholia and more tenderness than ever. She compares a lover's words to poison ("The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth"), imagines good times ("You Come Through") and brandishes a knife to thwart off marriage (the magnificently creepy "The Pocket Knife"). On the murky, resigned closer "The Darker Days of Me and Him," Harvey dreams of a land with "no neurosis/No psychosis/No psychoanalysis/And no sadness." But darkness is still Harvey's metier, and she can dive into personal dramas that would make lesser talents sound silly. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)

Fastball Keep Your Wig On (Rykodisc)

Fastball's first studio album in four years doesn't flash the instant infectiousness of tunes like "The Way" (from the band's 1998 breakthrough All the Pain Money Can Buy). But Wig is the kind of album that slowly grows on you, a solid album driven by the lead vocals interplay of songwriters Tony Scalzo and Miles Zuniga, which lends a steady mishmash of eclectic roots. Both singer/songwriters seem to have benefited from the time off. "I Get High" is the standout here, coupling soulful melody with a speeding piano interlude. "Perfect World" and "Our Misunderstanding" are equally as potent, fashioning a tight collection that quietly competes with Fastball's earlier work. (DOUGLAS WATERMAN)

Velvet Revolver Contraband (BMG)

Before you start cracking wise about out-of-work refugees from multiplatinum bands or rock stars with drug problems and arrest records -- as if we haven't seen a few of them in the last half-century -- consider this: Singer Scott Weiland, late of Stone Temple Pilots, and the ex-Guns n' Roses trio of guitarist Slash, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum have, with second guitarist Dave Kushner, gotten more done in one year as Velvet Revolver than Axl Rose has achieved with his version of G n' R in the past decade. If nothing else, banging your head to Contraband's snarling update of Eighties Sunset Strip rock classicism is a lot better than laying around waiting for the mythical Chinese Democracy.

Contraband is, in fact, tighter and hotter in construction and attack than we had any right to expect from a band that started out auditioning vocalists while being filmed for a VH1 reality show. Weiland and the emeritus Gunners are not shy about flashing pedigree: "Sucker Train Blues" opens the album with zooming-underwater bass, pneumatic gallop and flying chunks of superfuzz guitar -- Appetite for Destruction in miniature -- while Weiland pulls out his police-bullhorn-style bark from STP's "Sex Type Thing." But the chorus harmonies are closer to dirty Def Leppard, and Weiland's searing, monotonic chant -- more evil monk than howling wolf -- takes you right to the center of his very public hell: "Brain and body melting while there's roaches multiplying/It's the alien infection, it's the coming of Christ." For a guy routinely lampooned as a walking rehab failure, Weiland nails the sweet selfish oblivion and dumb-ass self-destruction of addiction with explosive clarity and no jive excuses.

The deja vu keeps on comin' throughout the next twelve tracks: Slash's high, strangled fills in "Do It for the Kids" and his reprise of the soprano-hiccup lick from "Sweet Child o' Mine" in "Fall to Pieces"; the tumbling growl of McKagan's bass and Sorum's hammering pulse in "Big Machine"; the full-on Stone Temple Roses of "Slither." But whereas Axl Rose now runs a Gn'R that plays the old numbers like a repertory orchestra -- and not enough of Democracy to prove that the album even exists -- Velvet Revolver energize their combined histories with original snort (the skewed skittering riff in "Set Me Free") and punchy vocal choruses. Weiland, in particular, shows that he is far more than the sum of his court appearances and star-crossed years with STP. His grainy yowl -- which, at the height of Seattle rock, earned Weiland a lot of lazy, cruel comparisons to Eddie Vedder -- is actually a precision instrument that cuts through Slash and Kushner's dense crossfire with a steely melodic purpose that, when Weiland piles up the harmonies in the choruses, sounds like sour, seething Queen.

Personally, I don't have a lot of patience for power ballads -- they are invariably more sap than nectar -- and Contraband stumbles when the tempo slows and Weiland switches from buggin' out to soft beggin'. And, yes, if I had my way, we'd be getting a real Gn'R follow-up to the Use Your Illusion twins, and STP would now be making good on the interrupted promise of their recent best-of, Thank You. But we have Contraband instead, and it is a rare, fine thing: the sound of the perfect A&R sales pitch turning into a real band. Now we find out if these guys can stay together, and go somewhere new. (DAVID FRICKE)

Sonic Youth Sonic Nurse (Geffen/Interscope)

By Sonic Youth's own ear-shredding standards, Sonic Nurse is mellow gold. The guitar feedback that has defined these noise-worshipping New York bohemians for more than twenty years hasn't vanished, yet this is Sonic Youth's most accessible album since 1992's Dirty. The skewed, groovy guitar riffing on Nurse cops the prettiness and chops of classic Seventies rock, with multi-instrumentalist/producer Jim O'Rourke shaping the sprawl into smooth patterns of light and shade. As usual, bassist Kim Gordon delivers the best lyrics: On "Mariah Carey and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream," she observes of the wacky diva, "You are seemingly unconscious of what your body's doing." Sonic Youth, on the other hand, have never shown more self-control. (BARRY WALTERS)

Jay Farrar Stone Steel and Bright Lights (Transmit Sound/Artemis)

As a founding member of Uncle Tupelo in the late-Eighties, Jay Farrar helped define a new genre of American roots music that borrowed as much from rock & roll as traditional country. But in the time since dissolving the group, Farrar has become a folk troubadour whose songs are meant for the road -- full of post-modern poetry that reveal truths about the shape our lives have taken in an increasingly complex world -- and best suited for boozy late-night sessions on small stages off the beaten path. His first live disc, recorded at small venues across the south and midwest, is made up almost exclusively of songs from his solo releases and sounds as clean and warm as the original studio recordings. Among the nineteen tracks on the disc (which also features a live set on DVD from San Francisco), "No Rolling Back" and "California" get lush enhancement from Brandon Butler's melodic guitar licks. The poignant political insurrection of opener "Doesn't Have to Be This Way" dovetails nicely with the album-closing cover of "Like a Hurricane." And throughout, Farrar's recognizable, adenoidal alto burns brightly. (ANDREW STRICKMAN)

Of Montreal Satanic Panic in the Attic (Polyvinyl)

Like a pre-punk, art-rock opera held together by a Moog and a chorus of kazoos, Of Montreal's Satanic Panic is similarly connected by wild ideas. Once associated with the Elephant Six collective (indie-poppers like Apples in Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel), since the Elephant's extinction, the Athens, Georgia, six-piece became its own commune, living together and making nostalgic concept pop in kudzu country. Their sixth album is whimsical, English prog-folk (complete with flutist) fused with tight, androgynous harmonies and big-beat glam-rock attitude (they even name check Glammaster Gary Glitter in the herky-jerky "My British Tour Diary"). The openers, "Disconnect the Dots" and "Lysergic Bliss," are psychedelic-lite dreams, while two later, consecutive tracks, "Rapture Rapes the Muses" and "Eros' Entropic Tundra," will please the Oxbridge crowd. Too clever? Maybe. But for appreciators of Odessey and Oracle and the double wordplay of the final track's title, "Vegan in Furs," Satanic Panic is a contemporary bohemian's rhapsody. (DENISE SULLIVAN)

Rachael Yamagata Happenstance (RCA)

Although she's hyped as a piano-playing newcomer fit to follow in Norah Jones' footsteps, Rachael Yamagata sang for years with Chicago funk band Bumpus, and it's this experience that sets her apart from other keyboard-pumping upstarts. Overseen by John Mayer collaborator John Alagia, Happenstance evokes the singer-songwriter atmospherics of Carole King and Elton John. It doesn't sustain their lofty standards -- Yamagata's singsong, sighing vocals are limited, and her melodies are often similarly slight -- but she makes a little stretch a long way. The album saves its finest pleasures for the quiet, emotionally rich second half. On the untitled bonus track, Yamagata bids adieu to a failed love affair with an exquisitely hushed ache. (BARRY WALTERS)

Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter Oh, My Girl (Barsuk)

It takes a group called the Sweet Hereafter to conjure the sort of ethereal, noir-Americana that Jesse Sykes and her band create. Teaming with ex-Whiskeytown guitarist Phil Wandscher, viola player Anne Marie Ruljancich (Walkabouts), bassist Bill Herzog (Neko Case) and drummer Kevin Warner, the Seattle-based Sykes makes melancholy songs that are equal parts gloomy Pacific Northwest skies and high plains drifting. Sykes' nicotine-stained, Marianne Faithful-meets-Emmylou Harris voice is at times so magnificently broken that it loses its gender identification, but always retains its ability to convey the feeling of a busted heart. Wandscher's guitar playing is just as expressive; his rambling riffs oscillate between Spaghetti Western and Neil Young at his most introspective. The rest of the band provides even more atmosphere, especially the dreamy, distant steel guitar cry of "Your Eyes Told," joined by a choir of "ahhhs" that hover like desert ghosts whispering campfire tales. (MEREDITH OCHS)

Bad Religion The Empire Strikes First (Epitaph)

Hell bent on getting Bush out of office, Bad Religion sound more relevant than ever on their incendiary, political manifesto The Empire Strikes First. Now in its twenty-fourth year, the group that shaped California punk shakes some serious action on the explosive "Let Them Eat War." Here frontman Greg Graffin ponders, "Can this we what they voted for?" as his cohorts play with a force few bands can rival. Nicking its riff from L7's "Pretend We're Dead," the title cut shares the same mindset, but if anti-war sentiments hit a fever pitch of opinion and irresistibility on Empire, Bad Religion is just as effective when it sidesteps Dubya's administration to attack other issues. Graffin's Ph.D. in biology pits religion against science on anthems like "Atheist Peace," while "Los Angeles Is Burning" takes a scrutinizing look at environmental abuses. Fusing probing questions and blistering riffs, Bad Religion has created the punk album of the year. Here's hoping America is listening. (JOHN D. LUERSSEN )