Album of the Moment - 3:39 a.m., Monday

The Verve's Forth is expansive and drowning in the same grandiose beauty that made "Bittersweet Symphony" such a powerful song. It's perfect for the middle of the night. Listen to it with headphones to get the full effect.
Lead singer Richard Ashcroft's vocals float on clouds of echo, panning from ear to ear and making full use of the freedom of stereo. Records like this make me wish quadraphonic sound (four channels of sound instead of stereo's two) hadn't faded into obscurity. I want to immerse myself in the music, close my eyes, relax, and drift down stream. Of course, quadraphonic headphones would require two more ears than I possess.

Take some time to ponder the possibility of people with four ears while you wade through the eight minute "Noise Epic," a song with the most bluntly true title I have ever encountered. By the end, the band actually starts to put up a racket, punctuating the last few blissful seconds with Ashcroft's repeated "Wake up, wake up, wake up!" floating back and forth between the left and right channels. Not yet, Richard. Not yet.
To be honest, in that same vein, I may never have seen more well-chosen album art. This record actually sounds like it looks. The music fits the peaceful, sedate above-the-clouds picture impeccably. There's even a song called "Valium Skies," featuring Ashcroft's voice booming across the expansive cloudbanks. It all becomes clear.

Anyone who expected this album to rock hard like the Verve's Britpop contemporaries Oasis will be disappointed. This is ponderous, symphonic music. "Mover," a bonus track, is the only song on the album that dips below the four-minute mark. These are serious songs, taking their time to unfold the aural tapestry the Verve has created. They lap on the edges of your consciousness like waves on the shores of a lake bathed in summer twilight. On "Columbo," the vocals almost resemble monks chanting from somewhere deep inside a vast, cavernous Gothic cathedral.

This isn't a classic album like the Verve's last release, Urban Hymns, and critics won't rate it nearly as well. But if you're looking for something that sounds a little like four in the morning on a weekday, Forth hits the spot.

- Andrew

New Orleans has endured a lot.

The city that birthed the United States' first completely original musical style (jazz) and contributed immensely to another (rock 'n' roll) is still struggling to recover from multiple natural disasters within the space of just a few years.

The city's massive musical legacy seemed to have decayed a little with the hurricanes' destruction of some of the city's historic musical neighborhoods. Jazz music may have been born in New Orleans, but it looked like it might die there as well.

But Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews might have something to say about that.

Shorty toured with Lenny Kravitz in 2005. He was a featured member of the singer's horn section on the tour. He shared a stage with U2 and Green Day at the Superdome's reopening in 2006.

It should be obvious at this point that Trombone Shorty is no old-fashioned jazz cat. He plays the trombone and learned his trade in New Orleans, so he's certainly familiar with his city's musical traditions. But one must only listen to his rendition of AC/DC's "Back in Black" to realize he's doing things a little differently.

Shorty is an up-and-coming artist who takes tried and true musical styles and makes them current. He takes New Orleans jazz and melds it with James Brown funk and contemporary hip-hop. He's also a multi-instrumentalist, despite his nickname.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Trombone Shorty is that he was born in 1986. This is just the beginning of Shorty's career. Jazz hasn't been a young man's music for quite some time now, but the youthful exuberance of Shorty's work could easily appeal to a wider audience.

Shorty's coming to the State Theatre on Sunday. If you want to see the revitalization of American music, this show might be a good place to start. This kid might very well signal that his city's luck is changing. With a new generation of musicians with an appreciation for New Orleans' rich history, the delta region has no reason to worry.

Vinyl records are better than CDs.

Perhaps it's unreasonable to make such a bold claim about a comparison that's been debated for years and is technically unprovable. But hey, music is all about emotion, right? I'm going to let my heart make this decision.

And so, if you think CDs are better than records, you're wrong.

I admit that CDs obviously have a lot of things going for them. I personally own hundreds of CDs, and there's a reason why CDs quickly dethroned vinyl records as the most popular medium for recorded music. You can't pop a record into the car stereo and you don't have to carefully brush the dust off a CD every time you play it. Many people will even claim CDs have superior sound quality: the clarity of digital versus the distortion of low-tech analog.

These are people who have never experienced the magic of vinyl.

When Elvis Presley walked into Sun Records on that fateful day in 1953, he didn't burn a CD for his mother. He cut an acetate. Ditto for Johnny Cash. The history of great recorded music is carved into grooves on platters of vinyl. If that isn't reason enough to pick record albums over the usurpers, I don't know what is.

There's more, if you remain unconvinced. Records also sound better than CDs, and it goes beyond quality. CDs might have better sound quality or clarity, but there's something to be said for warmth. Played through a proper stereo, a CD sounds cold and clinical when compared to the living, vibrant tone of a record.

It's a lot harder to take care of records, so the slightest scratch on the surface of an album can result in a permanent "pop" sound. However, these imperfections only help to endear the record to its owner in a way CDs can never understand. And there's nothing in the world like the sound of the needle dropping down on the edge of a record.

Records are bigger than CDs, which decreases their portability but greatly increases their potential to be individual works of art. Often, a large amount of work goes into crafting a cover for an album, so why shrink it down so much you need a magnifying glass to see it? With records, album art is large and powerful. See Jackson Browne's Late for the Sky, my personal favorite album cover, for an example.

I've been in houses with framed album covers on the walls. I've never, on the other hand, seen a framed CD cover. The effect simply isn't the same.

The music on albums needed to be divided into sides due to the length restrictions of the vinyl record. Old albums were arranged with that in mind, so the last track on side 1 is often intended as a kind of first-half finale. Track arrangement was an art unto itself. Now, with CDs, all of that artistry is lost. CDs just plow ahead, forcing you to listen to the whole album at once, without the pleasing intermission of flipping the record.

This probably isn't the last time I'll be singing the praises of real record albums. New bands still releases record albums, and the number is on the rise. Traditionalists like the White Stripes are all about releasing albums on vinyl. There's a recent trend of bands offering a free digital download of the entire album with the purchase of their record, which is a win-win situation. You get the record, and you can still put the album on your iPod. Perfect.

Old albums are being reissued on vinyl as well. With any luck, records will rise up and save the crumbling music industry that CDs have so successfully crippled. Also, I know from experience: CDs make great drink coasters.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back my turntable.

There's been a recent trend in the music business that needs to be addressed.

Long-idle bands have been coming back and releasing albums, and it seems like it's all happening at the same time. Is there something about 2008 that made bands think, "It's time to dust off the leather pants?" Despite how appealing that sounds, the results were a mixed bag. Some bands that needed new albums finally delivered, while others made unwelcome reappearances reminiscent of villains in horror movie sequels.

For fans of some groups, the reunion trend is good news. The Verve, the Britpop band that released the smash "Bittersweet Symphony" and then promptly crumpled under the weight of the lawsuits that accompanied it, left plenty of unfinished business behind. It's taken 11 years for the group to try to deliver on the promise of Urban Hymns, but it needed to be done. The jury's still out on whether the album is worthy of its predecessor. If anything, at least the new album provided me with some assurance that the guys in the band weren't bankrupted and left homeless by their many legal battles, which is what I'd assumed when they dropped off the map.

It would have been better for a few other groups to leave music to the youngsters. New Kids on the Block comes to mind. This was a group that was in the right place at the right time. That is to say, the musical climate of the early '90s was what gave the Kids a chance to be relevant. So this year, when Donnie Wahlberg and company decided to give it another go with The Block, they ended up just sounding exactly like what they are: a mediocre boy band 20 years past its prime. The album was putrid. This is exhibit A in the argument for preventing one-shot throwaway groups from attempting to grab another 30 seconds in the spotlight.

Meanwhile, fans have been waiting for bands like Pink Floyd to reappear for as long as those bands have been gone. Why is New Kids on the Block allowed to release another album while Roger Waters and David Gilmour still feud? Some dream reunions did come to pass, though. The Police cashed in magnificently on years of anticipation this summer with a mega-successful tour, but Sting and company skimped on the new music. AC/DC and Metallica both have new albums coming out this fall, but neither band was technically broken up.

In closing, if Axl Rose was waiting for a sign from above, something that would let him know the time was right to release Chinese Democracy, maybe this is it. The album would fit in nicely with 2008's wave of new releases by old groups. The mythical album's release date has become something of a joke, akin to "when pigs fly": "Will Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Elvis Presley form the supergroup I've always wished for? Yeah, on the same day Chinese Democracy comes out." Even the album's title seems like a nod to its own unlikely release. But Axl, this might be your last chance. Who knows how soon this trend will end?

After all, no matter how bad it is, Chinese Democracy still has to be better than The Block.

-- Andrew