♦Elvis Costello – Brutal Youth: Remember the BMG mail order CD club? The one where you got a little catalog and a postcard every month and if you didn’t return the postcard by a certain time (and sometimes even when you did), they’d send you (and charge you for) a CD you didn’t necessarily want? Back in 1994, this was one of those CDs, and for whatever reason, I never bothered returning it. Now, my 19 year old self certainly wouldn’t seek out an Elvis Costello record, though I probably held on to this one because on some level, my poor, sad, sheltered teenage self recognized that Mr. Costello was cooler than I was capable of handling at the time. As I listened to this disc this week, I found myself enjoying it a hell of a lot; certainly more than I could have back then. Seriously, pure Irish pop perfection; not one bad tune to be had, from “Pony St.” to “Favorite Hour,” with standouts like “13 Steps Lead Down” and “This Is Hell” in between.

♦Extreme – Waiting For The Punchline: I really loved this band, and not, surprisingly, because of “More Than Words,” even if it was pretty much the soundtrack of much of my Junior and Senior years of high school. They were a great, talented, funk-metal combo with some serious riffs, excellent quirky and intelligent lyrics, and high aspirations…they did a three-side rock opera record with full orchestration and damn it all, it worked…in the early 1990s. This record is the oft-forgotten, much maligned fourth record before the band broke up, Nuno tried to go solo, and Cherone ended up with Van Halen (and did a much better record than anybody gives him credit for). As opposed to the highly choreographed production of the first several records, this one’s stripped down and grungy, with hardly any overdubs to speak of (on purpose – Seattle was hitting big, and they borrowed a bit of the vibe), and when I first listened to it in ’95, I really didn’t like it; it was too different, and I wasn’t ready for that kind of experimentation. However, with a little distance, I had a blast with it this week – it’s got all the hallmarks of what I loved about the band: the surprising lyrical depth, the great rhythm sense, the tight vocal harmonies, and the totally insane (but not terribly wanky) guitar pyrotechnics; just distilled down to their essence; I imagine it’s what the band would have sounded like in a dank little club in Boston in ’90…which is perfectly okay with me.

♦Devonsquare – Bye Bye Route 66: Another notched spine special; I can’t remember what exactly posessed my to buy it; I know I was using a surprisingly powerful antenna on my dorm room radio about the time I bought this and was listening to a lot of the rock station out of Baltimore, which played a bunch of stuff I’d never heard before; I believe “If You Could See Me Now,” the big single off this record, was one of those. And really, it’s still a great little pop tune that’s aged well. Too bad the rest of the record sounds like warmed-over 70s California yacht rock or a really mediocre Fleetwood Mac tribute band, especially when Alana McDonald isn’t singing.

♦The White Stripes – Elephant: Another wonderful, stripped down affair, with just the kind of exuberant energy to snap me out of the “wanna kill every driver on the highway” mood I found myself in yesterday afternoon on the way back from DC. It’s hard to believe that there were only two people in this band; the wall of sound is surprisingly large, when most of of it’s just guitar, drums, and vocals. “Seven Nation Army” just sticks with you.