Dark with lots of electronic layers, I initially had a difficult time getting to know Help Wanted, the initial offering from former Jane's Addiction bassist and founding member Eric Avery. After several attempts and an accidental shady parking garage, I found the right medium in which to truly enjoy this CD. Listening in the dark, all the nuances of the music and vocals become crystal clear.

The sound is a bit sci-fi and disassociated, and the lyrics are far away from the usual emotional subjects that one finds in mainstream radio fuzz. The vocals are enveloped by the music, almost like Avery is falling into the waves of an ocean, but they're not overpowered; his role of storyteller remains intact. Avery's monotone vocal style has good timbre and works very well with the subject material. Overall, the CD is hugely visual, and this is the reason it's best to get acquainted with it in the dark -- without the usual distractions.

Each song stands well on its own, yet works in harmony with the others. The lyrics are all Avery, with the exception of "Maybe," which is co-written and performed with Shirley Manson and is absolutely beautiful. Other artists adding their talent to Help Wanted include Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Flea plays trumpet on the delectably delusional "Song in the Silence (The Man Who Can Fly Pt. 7)".

Opening song "Belly Of An Insect" introduces the listener to the uniqueness of Avery's dark, cold lyrical style and paves the way for the rest of the CD. "All Remote And No Control" is one of my favorites and has an end-of-the-world imagery -- there is catastrophe in the sound; you'll know it when you hear it. "Walk Through Walls (The Man Who Can Fly Pt. 5)" is pure fun with a funky retro sound, and "Suns Gone" is the progressive-y final track that brings things to a quiet but oddly hopeful close.

Help Wanted is amazingly good, well-produced album and would be the perfect soundtrack to a futuristic science fiction movie. It is definitely worth picking up if you enjoy dark, depressive music -- oh, and don't forget to turn out the lights. (Jamie Teague // 09/26/08)

Mötley Crüe is a brand, like Apple or Harley Davidson. Like the biggest bands in the last fifty years, Mötley Crüe exists in our minds as part of a universal consciousness, a shared history. If you are between the ages of thirty and maybe forty-five, you were coming of age smack in the middle of the '80s hair metal explosion in LA. You can roughly map this explosion starting with Twisted Sister (New York, natch) and the earthquake that was Quiet Riot, watch Mötley Crüe lead the rise of the era through the mid- to late-'80s, mortally wound it with the ascension of Guns 'N Roses for that insane run between 1988 and 1993, and finally kill it off with a tiny album by an unknown of band from the southern backwaters of Seattle. Many of these bands still exist in workable form today; if you'd headed down to the four-day festival "Rock the Bayou" this past August, you would have seen the LA metal scene in all of its daft glory. All except the Crüe.

If pressed, I don't think I could name a better hair metal band from that era, all things considered. The Crüe sold upwards of 80 million albums worldwide, had a number one album, toured everywhere, and unleashed more insanity than there is room for in the Halls of the Hair Metal Hall Of Fame. I still remember seeing a Time (or was it Newsweek?) on the newsstands with them on the cover in 1985 or thereabouts, with the headline, "Is this band worth $40 million?" At the time, it was an outlandish amount of money to pay a rock band. Now, it just about covers the budget for Chinese Democracy.

Why? Why has Mötley Crüe survived intact, successful and, er, healthy? I can't definitively say. It seems to be equal parts music, mayhem, and media, and Mötley Crüe has leveraged each of these facets perfectly, either by releasing three bona-fide classics (Theater of Pain, Girls, Girls, Girls, and Dr. Feelgood) and drinking, drugging, and killing through nearly two decades, or by constantly appearing in solo projects or on reality TV. No other band has controlled their image nearly as well or worked so hard to make sure that there were no cracks in the outer wall of their created world, even when all hell was breaking loose inside.

Musically, the band is in pretty good form. Mick Mars stretches out more sonically than I've heard before. Believe it or not, Mars was a real-live guitar god in the '80s, scoring covers of Guitar Player with regularity, and it shows here -- interesting wah parts, a large palette of amp sounds (from thin and buzzy to full Mesa roar), and very inspired playing, especially considering it's coming from someone who can barely stand up by himself. Tommy Lee's drums sound great, especially his classic bass drum thump. Lee has always been much more solid musically than the rest of the band and is probably the main appeal for musicians.

Nikki Sixx is as solid as ever and pretty much wrote the entire album. Vice Neil's voice you either love or hate, though, and it hasn't stood up well through the years. He's always been pretty nasally, but he sounds pretty weak here, and I think I hear auto-tune. But Neil was always more of a showman than a singer; even Sixx has admitted that he never really liked Neil's voice, especially in the beginning. But so what? It's instantly recognizable. Sonically, the album is crushed in mastering, as usual. You can't really even EQ it, as tweaking the bass or lower mids immediately introduces distortion. Sign o' the times, I guess.

While not mind-blowing, the songs are pretty solid. "Saints of Los Angeles (SOLA)" is classic anthemic Crüe, pinching the main riff from "Wild Side" off the mega-classic Girls, Girls, Girls. "SOLA" reads like a historical biography, a clear pronouncement that the Crüe stands tall over the remnants of the LA metal scene and the pretenders at their feet. "Welcome To The Machine" is the standard middle fingers to the industry that made them rich but extracted so much flesh. "Goin' Out Swingin'" and "White Trash Circus" paint the Crüe as the embodiment of their 25 years of mayhem, bruises and all. "Just Another Psycho" starts of vanilla, but (seriously) has a really cool funk section in the middle (well, "funk" by Mötley Crüe standards). "Chicks = Trouble," "This Ain't A Love Song," and "Down At The Whisky" are all typical tongue-in-cheek misogyny, but this is the most blatant they've been about it.

So, is Mötley Crüe really a band anymore? Each member has his own, separate Website listed on the liner notes. There were years they didn't speak to each other. Hell, they had John Corabi as a singer for an album and Randy Castillo on drums for a tour, and Lee and Mars hardly played on their last compilation, Red, White & Crüe. So I don't blame you for being cynical about this album. Overall, SOLA is thirteen pretty good new songs, but not one matches the high-water marks of the past. This album isn't about respect, though, or topping their past, or showing that they still have "it," or silencing critics. Oh, it sounds great, and the requisite sleaze is dripping from the lyrics ("Animal In Me" as a ballad? just listen to the first verse...), but while the "fuck you" attitude is still here, the "fuck it" attitude is gone. We get four anti-heroes telling us their early story in the only way the they know how. It isn't nostalgia, and it isn't apologetic, but the songs here carry a kernel of time that those of us who lived it secretly long for, even if we would never admit it. (Andrew Perkins // 09/26/08)

A friend of mine tried to convince me once that creating good pop music is practically science. Not that you have to do A, B, and C to make a perfect pop song, but more that there are things you just don't do if you want it to work right. There are rules to it, and while they can be bent or broken, they really shouldn't unless you know what you're doing. Is he right? I dunno; I'm more of a "feel" person when it comes to music, honestly -- if it makes me smile, makes my heart skip a beat, makes me so melancholy I want to jump off a roof, it's done its job. That said, I've found that I do have a handful of "rules" (okay, "guidelines") that I unconsciously use to evaluate all things musical, so I guess maybe he's got a point.

Bands like Redcast also make me re-evaluate my view of the whole "rules" thing, because whether they meant to or not, with their debut self-titled EP, they've made a small pile of picture-perfect, sunshiny-day pop, the soundtrack for a perfect world where the birds are singing (all in the same key, of course), you've got your girl by your side, there's not a cloud in the sky, and everybody you see around you is smiling. The music's jaunty and endearing from the start, with first track "Beside Myself" a sweet, keys-heavy, heart-on-sleeve declaration of love that brings to mind Moods for Moderns, Ultimate Fakebook, or Semisonic's Great Divide. Which is no mean company to be in, believe me.

Redcast cruises on from there, focusing on a more retro-'80s pop sound on "Hopeless?", where the guitars get more electrified but still remain relatively low-key, and "When You're Falling," a bit of melancholy, understated acoustic pop that reminds me oddly of Tom Waits' "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You" (and not in an "oh, God -- how dare they rip off Tom Waits?" way, which is a good thing). "Soap" veers very close to Barenaked Ladies territory, which isn't somewhere you really want to be with me, personally, but even then the band pulls it off. This track's a bit of an accomplishment, really; Redcast (band members are apparently brothers Seth, Jarrod, and Darren, but build a goofy metaphor for something ("rationality," I guess?), then never really talks about it, instead spending the length of the song basically apologizing for the goofiness of it. And against all odds, y'know, that works just fine.

The band finishes up the EP with an amalgam of all of the above -- "A Thought From You" draws in the aforementioned Ladies, Semisonic, and Ultimate Fakebook influences, melds 'em together with a heavy glob of youthful insecurity and doubt (which is definitely understandable; the three brothers look like they're barely of drinking age in all their photos), and hangs it all on a wide-open smile so unashamed and un-cynical you can't help but smile back. These kids may not realize it, but they've apparently taken that whole pop rulebook thing and grafted it onto their musical DNA. Given that, how could they not hit the mark? (Jeremy Hart // 09/26/08)

Roedelius/Story is a side project of Cluster's Hans-Joachim Roedelius, who's been collaborating with Tim Story, an American synthesizer experimentalist and composer. Their third album, Inlandish, combines classical-sounding keyboard parts with a variety of processed instruments, creating a pastoral minimalist soundscape.

The album focuses on diferent droning piano or keyboard melodies, accompanied by a host of real and alien-sounding instruments. Everything on the album is of a piece -- the sounds all complement one another. Unfortunately, too much of it is processed in the same way for it to sound very distinctive. Each track is pretty, and some of the melodies are strong, but over the course of an album, it starts sounding the same.

There are a few interesting moments here -- on "Trouve," one of the instruments continually shifts its quality, from something with a sitar-like sound to harmonium to vocals. The atmospheric sounds in the background in title piece "Inlandish" shift from biting to distorted to soothing. "Ripple and Fade" begins with a wash of ambient sound behind a skipping alien turntable.

Again, the album is pretty, and there are some interesting sounds on there, but overall, it seems slight. Considering that most of the overdubs and processing was done by Tim Story, it might have been different if Hans-Joachim Rodelius had more of a hand in the album. As it is, it's ultimately not that interesting. (Henry Mayer // 09/26/08)