“Constructive Summer”, The Hold Steady
God damn! Nobody’s doing rock and roll anthems this good anymore except the Hold Steady. They get better on each album, but they’re never as good on their new one as they are on “Constructive Summer”, the first track. Here the Springsteen-iness of their other work is still present- even in the lyrics, with lines like work in the mill until you die sounding like the exact sort of scenario that the Boss would drop on some girl he’d refer to by name before the come-on where he tries to get her to get into his car. But this isn’t about a girl, it’s about getting older and still keeping the best parts of punk rock or whatever it was that inspired you- the process I was calling the thirtying- and they make it sound like a fun thing to do. When he wraps it up with the closing few lines- raise a toast to saint joe strummer / i think he might have been our only decent teacher / getting older makes it harder to remember / we are our only saviors / we’re gonna build something this summer.- it’s hard to imagine how we couldn’t.

“Accidents Will Happen”, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Sometimes it’s the lyrics and sometimes it isn’t, when it comes to figuring out what hooks me into a song. I like lyrics a lot, like words, and I like getting away from them. I like songs that have really stupid lyrics a lot of the time, or none at all, because that’s not the whole point. But this time around, I think most of the songs I love, I love because of the words. One of those amazing throwaway lines that Nick Cave tosses off like he isn’t even paying attention opens this one up- all those dreams you’re having, you stole them all from / i was having dreams like that back in 1973. This is one of the only new Bad Seeds songs that isn’t a shout-along number that sounds like what you’d have gotten if the semen of the late-70’s Stones had been mixed up with that of the tender prey-era Bad Seeds and they’d impregnated someone like how Arnold Schwarzenegger came about in twins. Instead we just get backing harmonies and a kind of pretty acoustic guitar line. And handclaps. But it’s not really all that poppy. Mostly it’s just Nick Cave, being weird even when he’s not trying.

“Windows”, N.E.R.D.
Sort of a Cars-like vibe here, and there’s a totally badass spoken bit over the bridge where Pharrel talks about a real pretty girl. The main hook is amazing rock and roll gibberish, too, like a 2008 response to a whop bop a lu bop a wop bam boom. Every indie rocker should immediately declare this the pop hit of the summer.

“San Francisco B.C.”, The Silver Jews
This one’s got no chorus, and the Silver Jews are sometimes mostly a showpiece for David Berman’s weird poetry, so I’m not going to talk about the lyrics at all. This is a real jaunty tune, though, with Berman’s voice the low-end and a guitar sound that wouldn’t be out of place on a Phish album bringing up the highs. It reminds me a little of something Warren Ellis wrote about recently, about how mp3s, which don’t capture the middle spectrum of a recording very well because of the compression, is leading to people making music that ignores the middle section. I’m not smart enough about music to know if that’s what happens on “San Francisco B.C.”, but it’s got something that feels very new and now to it, even though people have been writing songs like this since forever.

“Street Karma (A Cautionary Tale)” (feat. Jean Grae), The Herbaliser
Apparently Jean Grae is retired, which is weird. I don’t claim to understand it- she had some problems with her label, they put out the record she’d been sitting on for years as a digital-only distribution without her approval, then released a video in which she looks kinda trashy that was taken away from her before she finished filming it… But then she updated her MySpace page with, er, sexy photos, so the original theory that she didn’t like the way she was being portrayed seems off-base. So I have no idea if this is the very last Jean Grae song you’ll ever hear. I doubt it, but if it is, you know- she could have done a lot worse. She always turned in her best work on her collaborations with the Herbaliser, and this one is a real low-key, laid-back song that shows you just how versatile she is. Last time she was on an Herbaliser record, she turned in one of the funkiest club tunes in recent memory, now she’s on a Jazzmatazz thing. If she’s gone, I’ll miss her.

“Blackpowder”, Jucifer
Every time I rediscover this band, I always regret the time I didn’t spend listening to them. “Blackpowder” is a kind of alt-rock song, sounds almost like L7 or something, real chunky guitars and, like, a face-melting solo. The album this comes from is really weird and it’d be pretentious if it weren’t full of 45 second hardcore bursts to balance out the, you know, whisper-sung tracks that are in French and about the fall of the Bastille. But right here, they’re just a reminder of everything that was promising about 90’s rock without spending more than two minutes looking backward.

“1000 Mph”, Witch
I have no idea who this band is, but they rule. Every single lyric is shouted and makes no sense, total rock and roll shit- a thousand miles an hour / she’s a speed demon… / living on volume and burning rubber. Hell, yeah. In 2008 rock and roll still sounds like this, and I think that is beautiful. It’s not pastiche, it just doesn’t really care that anything happened musically after 1983. All that other shit is fine, I’m sure, but come on. Sometimes you don’t want to have to argue that Thin Lizzy is the best band in the history of popular music. Sometimes you just want to listen to something made by people who know.

“Soul On Fire”, Spiritualized
J Spaceman has an unrivaled gift for the uplifting chorus. He’s bent Pachelbel to his will and personally pulled thousands from despair when he sang lord, let it rain on me / let it all come down in 2003.But “Soul On Fire” is probably the prettiest thing he’s ever recorded. It jangles and crescendos and it kind of reminds me of the Polyphonic Spree, the way it turns joy into something that crashes down on you as you listen. The difference here is that “Soul On Fire” achieves that effect by weaving its way from the sad-pretty of the verse, with sad-pretty lyrics to match (”freedom is just another word / for when you’ve no one left to hurt”) until the chorus comes around and the idea of setting your soul on fire doesn’t sound goofy or cliche at all, just the thing we all want and don’t know how to talk about.

“Leave a Map”, Real Live Tigers
This is kind of what it feels like to have finished a novel you can’t even get anyone to read before they reject it.