Classical Curves is the first full-length album by Jack Latham, a young English electronic producer who goes by the name Jam City. Some claimed influences for the album are marble, trenchcoats, and "oily black Jeep windows." These are opaque things, hard things, things that reflect and conceal. The music isn't much different. Latham's previous releases for the Night Slugs label-- two EPs and the one-off "Arpjam"-- were flat, glaring, and high-tech. Classical Curves isn't much different, only more distilled. Some electronic musicians strive to make their sound as humanistic as possible; Classical Curves is basically disinfectant set to a beat. It borrows its jazz chords from artists like Prince and the 1980s electro-soul group Zapp-- artists who found glamor in the cleanliness of machines. It's an album of bangers, though less in the vernacular sense than in the sense that it often sounds like stuff banging together.

About a minute into the album's intro, we hear the sound of breaking glass. Then more glass. Then a little more. Then, as it transitions into "Her", a drum machine that sounds like a jackhammer and a flurry of camera shutters. "The Courts"-- a single Latham released in advance of the album-- is built on a web of what sounds like new sneakers being streaked across freshly waxed wood. Later on, dogs bark over some more broken glass. In all likelihood you'll know whether this album will repulse you within about two minutes. There's a good chance it may. Latham's single-mindedness, though, is a rare and admirable quality-- a quality that makes Classical Curves sound more like one long, continuous idea than a series of discrete tracks.

As with all Night Slugs' best releases, Classical Curves creates a world that belongs to the music-- a visual world, a world of ideas. The album's cover is a slick little motorbike lying on its side in a marble atrium in front of a huge fern, with a silky yellow piece of fabric draped over a wall behind the bike. It's a seductive image, an image of perfect objects in an imperfect, disarrayed scene. During a recent email exchange, Latham didn't share with me exactly where the shot-- or some accompanying videos-- were taken, but he mentioned that a year ago he worked for a company "stealing and selling information about their rivals," a job that forced him to spend a lot of time hanging out in similar kinds of lobbies, spaces he calls "glamorous looking in a kind of... corporate, rich-people way, I suppose... but pretty lonely and alienating and not the safest career option." At another point in his career, he produced chrome prostheses for fashion shows. One track here is called "How We Relate to the Body." Latham's answer, I imagine, is "with ambivalence and heavy machinery."

Beauty, bodies, science fiction, ideas of cleanliness and perfection-- it's all suggested here in sound. In a lot of ways, this album is more conceptually in touch with prime-era Kraftwerk or, as...

Given that the rallying cry for progressive bass music in 2012 amounts to "Not another shitty house album," it's difficult to remember that as recently as 2010 there was a third avenue available to producers not inclined to four-on-the-floor kickdrum patterns or wubs'n'dubs moshing. Sometimes referred to as "bitstep," there was a handful of producers-- including early Zomby and Philadelphia's Starkey (an example), even James Blake's outré moments-- that were constructing bold, mechanistic dub-funk. Slugabed's Ultra Heat Treated EP was one of the ripest examples of this style, which, in drawing from dubstep, American hip-hop, grime, and hard techno, offered a more robust sound palette than most anything else being released. If Detroit techno was, as Derrick May famously said, George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator, this was Dr. Dre pumping out of Optimus Prime's speakers. To quote the title of a track from Slugabed's Time Team: "It's When the Future Falls Plop on Your Head". 

The shame is that neither that track-- which closes Time Team on a slight note-- nor the rest of Slugabed's debut long-player sounds much like the future at all. Since Ultra Heat Treated, Slugabed has released two EPs of increasingly glossy synth turbulence, refining his sound by sanding off the edges that made it-- and anything that came into contact with-- bleed. Slugabed can thank London's recent fascination with house music for the fact that he has rarely sounded further askew from his particular generation of bass producers. Time Team has as much in common with Scuba as it does Skrillex, which is to say very little (though Sluga's bold, manic productions are a purer interpretation of Aphex Twin's legacy than Skrillex's widely praised "I also like melody"-devotion). 

His default mode now is a slow, saccharine boogie-- dubstep filtered through a g-funk lean-- that still relies on his alien sound palette. He favors call-and-response synth figures, overseeing cat-and-mouse games between timorous whistles and black-rubber bass. Rhythms that used to forcefully contort his melodies are more cooperative now; the busy latter half of "Dragon Drums" is an afternoon shower compared to the gale-force storms he used to summon, but he's never so inattentive as to let his drums fall into gridlocked kicks or lazy boom-bap. 

There's still a sense of discovery, now paired with playfulness. Sluga's vocal samples aren't ashen divas but wishful, chiming children, like he's borrowed Boards of Canada's pastoral naivety but transposed their nostalgia into sci-fi galavanting. On the mid-album "Mountains Come Out of the Sky" and "Grandma Paints Nice" he offers faraway vistas, the likes of which you might find on a fantasy novel's cover: the sky is purple, there are a half-dozen visible moons, endless possibilities presented in comfortable, familiar ways. 

But looking out at eight moons would be really beautiful, so I can lose myself in the tasteful aphorisms of "Unicorn Suplex" and "Climbing a Tree"'s Books-y niceties....

This singer (pronounced "tall waist") not only shares a hometown (Toronto) and producer (Illangelo) with the Weeknd's Abel Tesfaye, but the same subject matter, vibe, and eerily similar vocal melodies. But instead of an intriguing side project from an obviously talented producer (in addition to the Weeknd, Illangelo had a hand in Drake's "Crew Love"), the EP turns out to be a disappointing facsimile of his more famous projects. Alien Tentacle Sex basically feels like Illangelo twiddling his thumbs nervously while he waits for the Weeknd tour to finish.

The record starts strong with a lush production job in "I'd Die", musically as strong as anything on the Weeknd's Echoes of Silence. The slinking metallic beat is embellished with groaning synths, eerie chimes, and all manner of weird samples. But then the vocal comes in. There's something about TALWST's cadences that sound too close to a sandpaper-throated Tesfaye, and the heavy processing that replicates the headier moments of the Weeknd catalog doesn't help the case. The unwise similarity is further explored on "Mercy Me", a nonsense mope-glam number that sounds like it was based off a discarded Tesfaye guide vocal. These comparisons may be unfair, but there's just no escaping them here. 

TALWST doesn't have the most distinctive or powerful voice, but that shouldn't be enough to dismiss him wholesale-- plenty have done great with much less. Unfortunately, his lyrics are far, far worse: Gems like "passport inked like Lil Wayne's face" are outdone by the mid-album wading pool "Lonely Guy", an unbearably self-pitying track where his reedy warble actually manages to croon the phrase "Lonely guy/ He is I." TALWST's self-analyzation feels like empty narcissism, backed up by a completely unconvincing persona.

Alien Tentacle Sex isn't all Weeknd rip-offs. "Woman" chops up spoken-word and gasps of melody into an alien assemblage that sounds neat even if the lyrical content is embarrassing, while the brief "Peace Tonight" is easily the highlight. It's just too bad his gruff rap is interrupted by cries of "please no nuclear bombs." The only thing worse than the unnecessary politicization is his flagrant mispronunciation of "nuclear." The melodramatic closer "No Stones" seems to want to recreate the subtle magic of Usher's "Climax", from the honeyed tones to the gently elongated phrasing, but it lacks even a modicum of subtlety, its ham-shaped fist too salty for even the most naive of palettes.

R&B is largely personality-driven stuff, and outside of what he misguidedly tries to borrow from more established artists, TALWST has very little to sell. Having come so far so fast, Illangelo's name now carries some serious weight, but even that proven pedigree isn't enough to build a fortress out of toothpicks. Whatever the intent was with Alien Tentacle Sex (even the title hints at an intriguing dimension unexplored by the pedestrian music), it seems like they lost the plot at some point along the way.

Andy Falkous is something of a personal hero, and if he ever decides to give up on music, I just hope an institution of higher learning allows him an emeritus professorship based on the philosophical principles set forth by Mclusky's Do Dallas. Our children deserve it. I say all of this because the corporate-slick production on Future of the Left's third album makes me wonder if this is still the guy who made the music of "To Hell With Good Intentions" and "You Need Satan More Than He Needs You" as sharp as their wit. And what about the cover and the goddamn title of The Plot Against Common Sense? What in god's name is the author of "Fuck This Band" doing stealing ideas from unpublished John Stossel books?

As it turns out, those fears aren't fully realized on The Plot Against Common Sense, though they are definitely warranted. Little has changed musically for the always-contradictory Future of the Left. The constituent parts are primitively composed but played with vice-tight musicianship, while the blindingly bright, major-key synth riffs still come off as abrasive as anything produced by an atonal noise band. In terms of tempo and texture, The Plot hangs a little bit more loosely than the trim Travels With Myself and Another, with "Goals in Slow Motion" inching toward a legit alt-rock chorus and the jaw harp-like sample of "Anchor" raising the possibility that they're secretly fans of "A Milli". But even if the mockup of punk commodification on "Sheena Is a T-Shirt Salesman" is more entry-level ("dumb is the new black," ugh) than the aforementioned "pop" maneuvers, the music itself rips hard. And it's still so rare to hear a band this caustic and aggressive that manages to be so intelligible. 

But the sound is still there to support Falkous' hectoring. This is usually a good thing-- no one else is coming up with lines like "I have seen into the future/ Everyone is slightly older" and "Civilized people don't fuck bears/ Civilized people don't play fair" that function as good jokes and good hooks. It can make Future of the Left seem damn near necessary at times. After all, humor is often seen as coming from a less authentic place than anger, heartbreak, or joy, and most bands who try to be funny often make it a point to counterbalance it with an equal and oppositely sensitive show of humanity. Not these guys; an emotionally complex song on The Plot Against Common Sense happens to be both cynical and sarcastic. When it works, it opens up an almost unlimited world of songwriting possibilities.

But while Falkous has long been adept at connecting with an audience via snark, man, do things take a wicked, face-shielding turn about halfway through Common Sense. For the most part, you just wish Falkous would pick on someone his own size. Shit like plastic surgery ("Polymers Are Forever", held over from 2011's EP), Trustafarians ("Sorry Dad, I Was Late For...

"I was the Duke of Earl, but it couldn't last/ I was the pony express, but I ran out of gas." This is the first thing Hamilton Leithauser sighs on the Walkmen's new album, Heaven. It is a distinctly un-rock'n'roll sentiment. In fact, it sounds like the sort of thing your grandpa might say. Ten years ago, the Walkmen were a magnetic, messy young rock band, and they did all the things we expect young rock bands to do: swung in unexpectedly on friends, drunk-dialed exes, pleaded pathetically that things would get better with zero evidence that they would. But over the course of their last two albums, they began receding gracefully into sepia tone: Both You & Me and Lisbon felt like more breezy postcards from abroad than seething dispatches from here. Heaven, their gloriously pretty sixth studio record, marks the moment they shuffle off into that 4x6-sized sunset forever. The title they've chosen says it all: Look where they ended up! We all know that's not where rock bands go.

Heaven, as Talking Heads famously defined it, "is a place where nothing ever happens." For most sentient people, that sounds like the definition of hell, which Byrne's lyrics admitted: "It's hard to imagine how nothing at all/ Could be so exciting/ Could be so much fun." Similarly, it might not thrill longtime Walkmen fans to picture the band as a bunch of rumpled, beaming dads slotting recording time in between play dates. But on Heaven, they've made a bewildered, giddy paean to their own happiness. Heaven feels infectiously drunk on its own good fortune and kicks out a barstool for you to drink alongside it.

It helps that Hamilton Leithauser, with his oddly aristocratic presence, remains a magnetic frontman even when he's basically taking a song to make goo-goo noises at his one-year-old daughter (the lovely if borderline-saccharine "Song for Leigh"). There was always something airily entitled in Leithauser's on-record persona; he was the rich kid who didn't have to do his homework, because he knew you'd do it if he asked. That this kid had feelings too was a fundamental dramatic premise of the Walkmen. To hear this former kid now ruminating on big-picture stuff, like the statistical improbability of lasting love ("Love Is Luck") or the emptiness of perfection ("We Can't Be Beat") is to hear the band's purview expand quietly. On "Southern Heart", he even plays a pleasantly tired cuckold, like the Leonard Cohen of "Famous Blue Raincoat": "Tell me again how you loved all the men you were after," he mutters.

Some longtime fans might not like their Walkmen like this. They were great, after all, at being sexily unstable. But this retro-yearning tendency has been there since the beginning if you looked for it. So to hear them ease out of sturm-und-drang and into something resembling durable adulthood is to witness a great rock band evolve along a logical path. In what may be a tacit acknowledgement of this shift, Heaven glows with nostalgic pre-rock'n'roll sounds: "Jerry...

Having blown way more money at 4o Watt, Nowhere Bar, and Schoolkids Records than I care to mention, I can say from personal experience that everything you've heard about Athens, Ga., being a wonderland of fluid indie rock collectives, Southern hospitality, and dirt cheap rent is true. But want to know what band's been most consistently holding the Classic City down for the past decade? Not R.E.M., they were coasting on cred even before they went defunct. of Montreal? Please, you're thinking too hard. Drive-By Truckers? Definitely a contender. But the answer here would be jam-band warhorses Widespread Panic.

I use this exercise as a reminder that Athens is an artistic utopia but also essentially a suburb of Atlanta, and like any major college town, many of the 30-40,000 kids who call it home seriously like nothing more than to throw the fuck down. This explains why Athens is every bit as likely to spawn a band like Reptar as it is Pylon, and it's not just because their press photos look like surveillance footage from an AEPi hazing ritual. With all the indiscriminate enthusiasm and unearned confidence of young adults on the precipice of self-discovery, Reptar uses their debut Body Faucet as a vat in which to hastily dump the past five years of top shelf indie into some kind of frat party-stoking jungle juice.

But if Body Faucet indeed replaces the likes of "That Was a Crazy Game of Poker" during at least one keg bust, it's done a tremendous service, right? Seems kinda churlish to harsh the vibes since Reptar are clearly friendly guys not trying to put one over on us: This isn't fronting like a replacement for the likes of Vampire Weekend or Passion Pit or Yeasayer or Animal Collective and Reptar are likely just as excited for those bands' new albums as you are. Besides, even if everything about the band screams that it wasn't a matter of if they were going to name themselves after a kitschy 90s reference, but which one, the fact a remarkably similar but exponentially more awful band named Coolrunnings exists means we could do a lot worse. 

Still, Body Faucet proudly manifests its influence on about as basic of a level as possible, right down to the hiring of Ben H. Allen. We're still obligated to mention he produced Merriweather Post Pavilion, but his C.V.'s getting awful crammed with the likes of Fanfarlo and Bombay Bicycle Club, starched-shirt indie-pop bands looking for an extreme "Summertime Clothes" makeover. Reptar was always pretty tie-dye to begin with, but they fit in that lineage, since Body Faucet operates on fairly standard melodic progressions that could be strummed out by any acoustic-toting dorm rover. But under Allen's guidance, they're doubled by plinky electric guitar runs, tripled by keyboards, and if that's not enough, hey, we got these kids here, let’s have them sing the hook. This extends what otherwise might've been punchy songs past five minutes, but...

Owen Ashworth is familiar with nostalgia. His work as Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, an often lo-fi, not-always-Casiotone-based indie pop project that officially came to an end in 2010, encompassed a range of emotions that often tasted more "bitter" than "sweet." Regret, longing, desire, scorn, and jealousy frequently featured on the menu, but what made those feelings resonate was the presence of memory in his songwriting, the idea that even the most painful experiences are worth remembering. That's why his earliest material was so diaristic, as well as why he once chose to write a song reminiscing on when bridge tolls amounted to no more than "one single crisp clean dollar bill." 2009's final Casiotone album, the anti-procreation treatise Vs. Children, is perhaps his most cynical work to date, but the concluding song "White Jetta" punctuated ruminations on sick mothers and unstable bloodlines with a mantra about staying young forever: "To stay the same/ To never change."

Three years removed, and Owen Ashworth's shell has cracked. A Shut-In's Prayer is the proper debut from his new project, Advance Base, and it's easily the most wistful work he's committed to tape. Couched in the most immediate and affecting melodies of his career, many of the stories told on A Shut-In's Prayer look back at the past mainly to remember its contents. Ashworth's flair for narrative detail is in top form, achieving a level so microscopic that, at one point, he zooms in while ruminating on familial ennui to describe a scene in a horror movie that several characters are watching together. Sometimes, as on the album highlight "Riot Grrrls", these trips down memory lane end with resolution-- or, at least, as much resolution that you could get from two college-age outcasts "Wondering if we ran/ Who'd miss us." Elsewhere, memories take on the form of child runaways and faded filial relationships, as Ashworth is left with disconnected threads between the past and present and not much more.

As a songwriter and, by proxy, as a human being, Ashworth's certainly grown since he started plinking out tape-hiss anti-anthems back in 1998. You can hear his musical progression in the pretty, at-times lush instrumentation on display here, a logical progression from the baroque figures of Vs. Children with added intimacy. He's made leaps and bounds as a singer, too: For all its warm mid-fi glow and quaint arrangements, A Shut-In's Prayer retains its affecting strength thanks to Ashworth's vocal performances. It still feels like a stretch to call him a "singer" by most mainstream standards, but the occasional sullen sneer of his earlier work has been smoothed out.

He's found a nice pocket of resonance in his low-pitched voice, and his higher register is pleasant and sing-songy. Ashworth uses the latter disarmingly on "More Trouble", the album's most easygoing and upbeat tune that, upon closer inspection, is about the grim inevitability of waiting for bad news from a doctor. There are a few songs on...

Much of the press Brooklyn duo Exitmusic garnered for its 2011 EP, From Silence, depended as much on the pair's backstory as their tension-dependent sound. The tale of Aleksa Palladino and Devon Church, after all, is more than a good narrative hook; it's a real-life manifestation of the kind of woozy, romantic arch you've either seen in your daydreams, on the silver screen, or in paperbacks filed in the young-adult or classic literature sections. The daughter of a New York opera singer, Palladino met the relatively agrarian Church in the smoking car of a train while backpacking across Canada. They were teenagers. The new friends tried to watch a meteor shower from the train's observation car, failed, and soon bid adieu; Church wrote her letters, bid for her affection, and eventually just moved to New York and in with her. They got married on Mulholland Drive, she found success as an actress, and they since started an interesting indie rock band together. "As they share a cigarette on the walk to their apartment, they think about their coming week," read a 2011 profile for The Stool Pigeon. "The Emmys, New York Fashion Week, the season premiere of 'Boardwalk Empire'." Yes, then, sometimes love can be like the movies.

But Palladino and Church's shared past is more than simple star-laced bait; it's essential to the drama and radiance of their music. If their story sounds like one to be written into a movie, the 10 songs on their Secretly Canadian full-length debut, Passage, feel like scores for pictures not yet made. Insurgent, cinematic, and sometimes brilliant, Passage is an emotionally evocative record bearing sharp hooks, driven deep by heavy textures and broad dynamics. Suggesting Berlin and Bowie, Bedhead and Portishead, Exitmusic's third release continues and catalyzes the pair's stepwise progression, which began with their muted, self-released start in 2007 and last year's refined if stylistically cramped four-track re-introduction. Produced at home by Church but mixed and mastered by the phenomenal Nicolas Vernhes, these songs sound incredible, with their tessellated instrumental layers and intricately woven effects. All at once, it's a sudden move from short films and home movies to a proper, feature-length production. For Palladino and Church, this next level works wonders.

True to her classical pedigree, Palladino is an incredibly versatile singer, able to hurtle gracefully from a Victoria Legrand whisper at the start of "The Modern Age" to a strident command by the time she strangles the tune's final refrain. She sends up smoke during weird waltz "The Night" and plumes of grey during the appropriately named "Storms". Above the outwardly building patter of "White Noise", she shadows the unwavering cool of Zola Jesus; "The Modern Age", the album's lone From Silence holdover, sports the steely glint of the National, just remixed for the fading hours between the dance club's and the bed's rest. During the opening title track, they split her sound open, using her wail as an ornate thread...

When I interviewed the Brooklyn black metal group Mutilation Rites, vocalist/guitarist George Paul said he was "a guitar player first," and that he doesn't think of himself as a lyricist: "I'm not a poet. What I write about is very personal, and it's almost entirely about depression, vices, suicide, substance abuse." He goes as far as to "slur" his words "to make it more monotone sounding," and therefore indecipherable. In the same discussion, drummer Justin Ennis, who used to play in the New York City trio Tombs, explains that the band's music is their "catharsis," and shouldn't be looked at as positive or negative: "To us, it's all feelings at once, good and bad." Live, Mutilation Rites don't talk to the crowd between songs; instead, they play loudly, and burrow into themselves: "The volume is part of how we and the listener become immersed in the moment. It's so loud that if you're not feeling us, you will leave the room. Either you want to be there with us or you don't."

Black metal bands often come with any number of agendas; the above statements help establish this group as one who doesn't. And unlike other black metal groups in their borough, the quartet's approach sticks to the old-school black metal template: They stuff crust, d-beat, and a love of Dissection into their sound, but in a way that doesn't ask to be called "post" or "avant." They're just very adept at reviving a structure and making it breathe again.

This year, Mutilation Rites released a couple of EPs of earlier material, but Empyrean is their first proper studio album. On it, they forgo ambient intros, ponderous samples, and endless riffing in favor of a tight 35 minutes that manages to feel expansive courtesy of layers of dual guitars, multiple in-song shifts, and an ongoing push and pull. It's a mix of raw black metal, dark doom, and punk that rocks, but that also offers plenty of prettier surprises. Think of late-period Darkthrone vomiting the youthful version of themselves onto the crowd at a filthy DIY space. (Since recording Empyrean, they fittingly added bassist Ryan Jones of noise-rock icons Today Is the Day.) It's stately and epic, but booze-soaked, filthy, and feral. 

They're smart songwriters with ears for catchy, compelling guitar parts. The gorgeous opener "A Season of Grey Rain" offers angular, spiraling riffs that locate dark beauty amid buzzing tremolo-picks. The galloping start of "Realms of Dementia"  has a loping rhythm before the song grows angrier, complete with George Paul hocking spit. (He may not consider himself a vocalist, but his maniacal ranting and raving is as essential to what Mutilation Rites do as is their snails-pace mosh parts, dense atmosphere, and d-beat gallop.) They offer plenty of variety without resorting to "fusion." The almost 8-minute "Ancient Bloodoath" introduces a snails-pace doom vibe. Following the storm of "Dead Years", a song that mixes furious blast beats with a stately crawl, the...

Flipping through the booklet to Paul McCartney's Ram reissue, you'll find no scholarly liner-notes essay. This is odd. Usually the reissue-packaging gods demand the positioning of an eager critic between you and the product, dispensing wisdom on how you might experience the music they're standing in front of. What you find instead is a McCartney family-photo scrapbook: Paul draping himself playfully around monkey bars with his infant Stella. Mary, about three years old, hoisting fat headphones above her tiny head; on the opposite page, Linda nuzzling Paul, those same headphones ringed around his neck. In the photos, Paul looks dazed, as if he were smacked in the face with a pillow seconds before the shutter clicked. It drives the point home: Ram is a domestic-bliss album, one of the weirdest, earthiest, and most honest ever made. No wonder critics loathed it so passionately.

Or at least, some critics did. Sometimes an album gets a review so resoundingly negative that it lurks forever like a mournful spirit in its rear view mirror: Jon Landau, writing for Rolling Stone, claimed to hear in Ram "the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far." Which is intense. But people wanted impossible things from Beatles solo albums-- closure, healing, apologies, explanations for what to do with their dashed expectations. John Lennon tried telling everyone outright "The dream is over" on Plastic Ono Band's "God", but that still wasn't a cold-water jet hard enough to prepare people, apparently, for the whimsical pastoral oddity that was Ram.

Landau was right, however, that it did spell the end of something, which might be a clue to the vitriol: If "60s rock" was defined, in large part, by the existence of the Beatles, then Ram made it clear in a new, and newly painful, way that there would be no Beatles ever again. To use a messy-divorce metaphor: When your parents are still screaming red-faced at each other, it's a nightmare, but you can still be assured they care. When one of them picks up and continues on living, it smarts in an entirely different way.

Ram, simply put, is the first Paul McCartney release completely devoid of John's musical influence. Of course, John wiggled his way into some of the album's lyrics-- in those fresh, post-breakup years, the two couldn't quite keep each other out of their music. But musically, Ram proposes an alternate universe where young Paul skipped church the morning of July 6, 1957, and the two never crossed paths. It's breezy, abstracted, completely hallucinogen-free, and utterly lacking grandiose ambitions. Its an album whistled to itself. It's purely Paul.

Or actually, "Paul and Linda." This was another one of Paul's chief Ram-related offenses: He not only invited his new photographer bride into the recording studio, he included her name on the record's spine. Ram is the only album in recorded history credited to the artist duo "Paul and Linda McCartney," and in the sense that Linda's enthusiastically warbling vocals appear on almost...