In some recent reviews, I’ve read separate pieces of misinformation that add up to a portrait of Hart as a psych-rock musician not known for theatrical or melodramatic performances. What’s needed, clearly, is a catalog of his theatrical and melodramatic performances (numerous) and the many ways his small, wide-ranging body of solo work escapes simple definitions. What is psych-rock anyway, but a kind of shorthand for a niche artist who can’t write songs? So the reviews have been positive, but insulting in their evaluations, and also inappropriate to the major occasion of The Argument (a 20-song double LP from the guy who wrote half of Warehouse: Songs and Stories, after all). The album’s conceit is quite considerable, a musical rendering of Paradise Lost as told by Milton and retold by Burroughs, but what’s most remarkable is the way Hart shrinks down and gives weight to the whole affair with a flippant and very apt remark in the liner notes: “Adam and Eve are led out Paradise to the wilderness. Where they have to find their own food, pay their own rent, make their own bed and invent the phonograph.” It’s as if he’s only interested in the garden story as pretext for its eventual conclusion in the brief era of the LP, the era that contains his life and this retelling. On his own Book of Genesis, he tries on voices (Holly, Bowie) and styles in a characteristic way that should be opening him up to a critical reevaluation.

Slumberland has two swell ones coming this week. Neither is very startling, style-wise, but the new one from Terry Malts is especially remarkable for the way it returns real discontent to a type of noisy pop sound that’s been growing increasingly blank, the domain of tourists. Morality has come back to indie rock: The only possible vehicle for Terry Malts’ sense of disillusionment is the very sound they’ve chosen. The album’s abysmal, glorious feeling starts with the title (back then, at least everybody knew this was nowhere; now we don’t even have that) and runs all through the lyrics: “Sounds like a party, to be apart from the human race.” “Why’s everyone so well adjusted?” “You’re so serious,” Phil Benson complains toward the end of the album, but the secret about this band is that they’re serious too.

By comparison, this music is equally potent, the band a bit less certain of why we need it. Instead of revealing weakness, Joanna Gruesome play at coolness: “Wussy Void,” “Lemonade Grrrl,” “Anti Parent Cowboy Killers.” But it all comes out the same, since melodic smarts and tight playing are what bolster them, same as Terry Malts. This young and illusioned crew sounds like a rougher hewn Veronica Falls or Exlovers, but with enough surprising detours—like the final minute of “Sugarcrush” making a sudden return to the intro’s heavy attack, after an intervening sweet smear has erased all memory of it—to make them consistently engaging.

Would Steve Albini Like It? Unanswerable, of course, but your own answer might clarify this album’s power.

a.k.a. Sonic Reducer. Stripped down and yet a million times more remote than their ostensibly noise obscured previous work, An Object is the right kind of 30-minute LP, once again, the kind that requires constant rotation. Everything in Between: play it quiet. An Object: play it loud.

Maybe just because it starts with a 10-minute jam called “2013,” our year spoken with a kind of undeniable rhythm (“twenty thirteen!” Bobby Gillespie sings repeatedly), More Light could be the conclusion of a trilogy that also includes previous era-defining classics Screamadelica and Exterminator. The problems here being that: (1) I haven’t yet figured out if More Light is truly as good as those albums; (2) As Gillespie would be the first to admit, making a classic and having it recognized as such always happens by accident, and 60s counterculture quoting Screamadelica in particular was only the album he wanted to hear in the early 90s, not some cosmic mirror; and (3) More Light hasn’t really been embraced as much more than a good album, and indeed it’s hard to imagine an album with live drumming capturing the imagination of very many people in 2013, Daft Punk notwithstanding. But if defining reality is always just an accident, anyway, I might as well lie in bed and complete my trilogy.

A band that continues to continue for all the right reasons (the mayhem of the title is a real thing, and being in a band is their consolation), they’ve made another reliably strong, this time more consistently energetic album, with an appropriate number of VU-esque squalls, per their quota.

The band’s name doesn’t bode well, but Hooded Fang still don’t come close to the kind of dishonest indie rock band Terry Malts are set to rescue us from. Death looms here, as it should, and the music either recalls Black Lips or late 90s Blur, on those tangled songs of misleading lethargy.

Julia Holter’s current tourmate combs her own influences in a way that, while in fact quite assured, sometimes sounds a little frantic. The last song is called “The Perfect Timing,” but on the album’s first half especially, the tempo often seems to be at least a little too fast. Torrisi exists more squarely in the world of pop music than Holter does, so her attitude of engaging with the listener is necessarily more insistent, but that doesn’t distract from arrangements and productions nearly as detailed and vivid as the ones on Holter’s Loud City Song.

August 21: Cold Hard Cash Show – Impeccable Johnny Cash tribute act, with a frontman named Merle.

August 28: Red Elvises – More Funplex than B-52s, L.A.’s Elvises seem to have missed their punk era and gone straight to their dynamic touring party band era. They reliably show up in Helena every summer to play their polka and love-drug metaphor songs, and it’s a good time.

August 31: The Magpies – Sound-wise they’re always great, and song-wise “Charlie Hustle” remains their best achievement, the get close moment. And, from a closer position, you might notice their powerhouse drummer and all his improbable handicaps: flip flops, milk crate seat.

…All of these sets enjoyed in the company of a BT colleague, taking whatever good live music he can get in the land of the bad cover band.