Not content with year-end lists, many music critics now offer their thoughts at the halfway point. Here are mine. For what it's worth, I think 2009 has been a fabulous musical year, with quality and innovation bursting forth in every genre. In typical fashion, my list is all over the place. That's because I like music, all kinds of music, and I see no reason to compartmentalize my listening habits.

My #1 album isn't out until August 18th. Sorry about that. It just happens to be the best album I've heard so far this year. When it comes out, you should buy it.

The albums come in never-ending waves. They blur together. Sometimes they stand out. And when they do, I try to tell you about them. Here are two that have stood out in the past couple weeks.



No Through Road -- Winner.

Yes, the period is part of the title. Thank you, TV on the Radio and latest album Dear Science,. Punctuation is your friend.......

No Through Road hail from Adelaide, Australia, where apparently the music world is stuck in a 2002 timewarp, and where all the cool kids are listening to Interpol and The Strokes. That's okay. I like Interpol and The Strokes, and this band recaptures the sound really, really well. "Party to Survive," the video shown above, sounds like a lost track from Is This It?, and a great one at that. "Berlin Wall" and "Your Fall" are just as good, and the album careens right along until it flames out on the final track, the 10-minute, feedback-bedraggled "(this isn't) Rock 'n Roll." It's technically true. It's mostly noise. But there's a lot of great rock 'n roll along the way.

Two Cow Garage -- Speaking In Cursive

In a more just universe, Columbus, Ohio's Two Cow Garage would be playing the big summer festivals. Instead, they detonate their killer live shows night after night in front of mostly indifferent fans in dive bars in the Midwest.

Sounding either like Steve Earle fronting The Replacements or Paul Westerberg fronting Drive-By Truckers, take your pick, these four lads rock and lope, but mostly they bash the hell out of their instruments and sing their rough and ragged but literate tales of the lost and the losers, kids who were raised on Jesus and Disney movies and meth labs, bored and lethargic and intermittently, furiously committed to busting out of their dead-end farm towns.

In Micah Schnabel the band has not only a thoroughly captivating, gravel-voiced singer, but a fine writer who piles up little cinematic details that somehow manage to capture a whole lifetime of beauty and waste: "She wore a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, a Virgin Mary tattoo/On her left shoulder like a badge of honor, but faded green to blue." That's the start of the disarmingly desperate "Sadie Mae." Damn, dude, you had me at the first line.

There are thirteen songs here and thirteen winners; raw, jagged slices of visceral rock 'n roll that redefine both the words "poetry" and "slam." Speaking in Cursive is Album #4 in an ongoing series of criminally ignored releases. It's one of my favorite albums of the year, and it needs to be heard.

It's all rather passe these days to praise the work of '50s rock 'n roll icons. The 50th anniversary of Buddy Holly's death merited some attention earlier this winter, and Elvis remains a perennial subject of derision and awe, but for the most part the first generation of rock 'n rollers is seen as a quaint reminder of a bygone era, as contemporary as a trip to the drug store soda fountain for a chocolate malt.

And so it was with some surprise that my recent re-exploration of the music of Chuck Berry revealed an artist who still sounds supremely relevant. Chuck, of course, has his share of '50s cultural reference points -- hamburger stands, jukeboxes, long-distance phone operators, American Bandstand shows and Coupe de Villes. In those ways he is perhaps the quintessential '50s rocker. But there is also a timeless and utterly American quality to many of his best songs that extends from his love affair with fast cars (The Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen obviously took some notes) to the universal celebration of the end of the school and work day, that magical moment when the drudgery is finished and it's time to cut loose and live.

I've never been to Alberta, and I've certainly never been to rural Alberta, which I suppose is pretty much the whole province outside of Calgary and Edmonton. I'm not sure why it would be advantageous to hail from there. More moose sightings, perhaps. But Hometowns, the debut album from The Rural Alberta Advantage, a trio of non-antlered bi-peds who have now migrated to Toronto, makes the case that the windswept prairies are a prime impetus behind their creativity.

Here's the good news and the bad news: Hometowns sounds remarkably like Neutral Milk Hotel. That means you get the kind of furious, barely contained folk punk that NMH perfected on albums such as In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and that means that at times it's very good indeed. You also, per the inevitable Jeff Mangum comparisons, get a lead singer in Nils Edenloff who sings in an off-key nasal yelp. Minus the Salvation-Army-band-on-acid influences that add much needed texture and variety to the NMH albums, Edenloff is left only with that yelp, a bevy of songs that reference western Canada, and the stalwart work of drummer Paul Banwatt, who bashes the hell out of his drum kit on every song. It's not quite enough, although it's impossible not to be impressed by the prodigious racket.

God knows Edenloff wants you to know where he's from. "The Ballad of the RAA," which kicks off the album, recounts the band's journey from Alberta to Toronto. "The Deathbridge in Lethbridge" namechecks a small Alberta city and its most famous landmark. "Frank, AB" references a mining disaster in the town of the same name. "Edmonton" leaves the rural prairies behind and explores the big city. At times the Neutral Milk Hotel influences are overpowering. "Drain the Blood" is an almost note-for-note recapitulation of NMH's "Holland 1945," complete with overamped guitars and my-skull-is-gonna-explode vocals. But Edenloff is at his best when he tones it down just a notch, as on the ramshackle folk rumble of "Rush Apart," a fine approximation of an early Dylan hootenanny. The album peters out toward the back end, but the first half dozen songs throw down the gauntlet, and constitute the best sustained folk punk attack I've heard since the last Ezra Furman album. The yelp will be offputting to some, but I'm impressed with the raw materials here, and I look forward to hearing what these transplanted Albertans will do in the future.

The influence of Radiohead is incalculable, and every week I encounter at least one new release that is deeply indebted to Thom Yorke and company. So let's get it out of the way up front. Columbus, Ohio duo The Receiver -- brothers Casey and Jesse Cooper -- have clearly been influenced by Radiohead. Casey's breathy vocals are a dead ringer for Yorke's, and the layered keyboards/synths and skittery rhythms bear the unmistakable imprint of a couple guys who have spent a lot of time listening to Kid A.

The ghost of Ronnie Van Zant must be smiling.

Blackberry Smoke are four righteous southern rockers who wear the uniform with panache; hair down to the middle of their backs, beards down to the middle of their chests, bandannas firmly in place. They've been genetically programmed to carry on the proud good ol' boy tradition and fast-frozen since 1976. Recently thawed, they've unleashed their second album Little Piece of Dixie upon an unsuspecting public that has forgotten the dubious appeal of pickup trucks, coon dogs, rednecks and longnecks, and the sweet charms of the little missus.

This is admittedly not my favorite genre of music, and I hope you'll excuse me if I fail to hearken back to the glory days of the Confederate flag. That said, these guys do it up just the way Ronnie and the Skynyrd boys used to do it, with sturdy southern rock riffs buttressing Charlie Starr's (is that a southern rock god name, or what?) soulful, deep-fried vocals. "Shake your magnolia," one songs proclaims, and the flower of southern womanhood quivers in anticipation. My favorite is the song where the work-weary narrator begs his woman to hold off on the tales of unpaid bills, the woes of the kids, and the news of politics, religion, and war until he can finish his beer. "I'll get to the bottom of that right after I get to the bottom of this," he tells her. Priorities are priorities. If bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd, .38 Special, and Molly Hatchet bring a nostalgic tear to the eye, then Blackberry Smoke will delight you. Just watch what you put on the back of the pickup truck.

Before there was Susan Boyle, there was Paul Potts, astounding the world as a chubby little cell phone salesman who could sing opera. Imagine. Fat people could sing. Even on TV.

So there's Paul, on the cover of his second album Passione, which I'm going to take a wild guess is Italian for "passion," looking broodingly out over Venice's Grand Canal. If you had translated Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" into Italian, and actually had the audacity to call it "La Prima Volta," you might brood, too. Here's the deal: Italian is cool, and makes people feel sensitive and sophisticated and brooding. You will be able to listen to this album and instantly feel urbane and cosmopolitan. Even with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Paul doesn't do much to vary the formula that made his debut album such an international hit: mix in a couple operatic arias, a couple pop staples, and a soupcon of Broadway (okay, sorry, wrong language), slather on the bombastic string arrangements, and belt the hell out of all of them. In Italian. And so we have the aforementioned "La Prima Volta," Nino Rota's "Un Giorno Per Noi" (Italian for "A Time For Us"), Procol Harum's immortal recitatif "Senza Luce" (Italian for "A Whiter Shade of Pale"), and something called "Mamma" (Italian for "mamma"). It will probably sell a zillion copies, and all the PBS listeners will bask in their sophistication and in their support for the underdog. And cornpone is still la cornpone, even when you translate it.

For the past seven hundred years, poets have been rhyming love with dove, moon with June, girl with curl, and boy with joy. Certain rhymes are so convenient and appropriate that their use had already become stale by the mid 1700s.
-- Stephen Fry, from The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

That big fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon
We’re gonna let it
-- Bob Dylan, Poet of a Generation, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”

Five new worthy efforts for your listening pleasure.

Boston Spaceships -- Planets Are Blasted

Damn you, Bob Pollard. Pollard seemingly releases a new Robert Pollard/Cosmos/Boston Spaceships album every two weeks or so, and if I have to grudgingly admit that he's put out about three great albums since the demise of Guided By Voices, I'll still maintain that those three great albums are spread out over twenty official releases. So just when I'm ready to write him off, he releases another jaw-droppingly wondrous mashup of British Invasion jangle and lyrical non-sequiturs. Last year's Brown Submarine served notice that Pollard had finally formed another band that might be worthy of his superb Guided By Voices legacy. Planets Are Blasted is an improvement in every way, and although there's still a bit of filler, the big surprise is how solid this one is, front to back.

There was something magical going on long before Peter Jackson transformed the rugged wilderness of New Zealand into Middle Earth. In the early 1980s, Dunedin music impresario Roger Shepherd founded Flying Nun Records. The rest is history, although it's history that is surprisingly little known in the U.S. Perhaps it's time to change that. Because from the mid '80s through the early '90s, Flying Nun Records put out the best music on the planet. And yes, I'm looking at you, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder.

As with any "sound" associated with a city (Seattle, Athens, Austin), there is far more variety in the Flying Nun roster than can be reasonably captured by reductionist labels. Still, there was and is a distinctive Dunedin sound, and it is characterized by the lo-fi aesthetic and minimalist drone of The Velvet Underground and the jangly guitar work of Roger McGuinn and The Byrds. The resulting hybrid is one that has proven to be remarkably resilient, in part because straightforward garage rock and an emphasis on melody never goes out of style. The Flying Nun bands embodied those values as well as anyone. Above all, these Kiwi musicians know how to write superb melodies. If you don't believe me, check out the music of Crowded House and the solo albums of Neil Finn, which remain the most visible exponents of the sound (albeit not on Flying Nun). There are many other Flying Nun bands who did it just as well. Here are a half dozen of the great ones.