"I cheated on my metaphysics exam," goes an old Woody Allen joke. "I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me." Human Conditions, the second album from the soul-baring solo career of the Verve's former leader, offers assistance in taking life's tests -- providing you don't find metaphysically minded rock stars a bit funny to begin with. The album contains only one real rocker, the tabla-dappled "Bright Lights" (close kin to the Black Crowes' "Sting Me"), but Ashcroft's mastery of balladry makes "Buy It in Bottles" his best since the Verve's "Lucky Man." And on the gospel-tinged "Man on a Mission," he croons a cutting couplet: "A fortune has been made on all the illness they made/And then we've got to pay for the drugs to take it away." Which is no joke. (PETER RELIC)

The Music The Music (Capitol)

At last, a review that's only about the Music. As the portentous name suggests, this quartet from Leeds, England, dotes on big signals: the stentorian cries of Led Zep and U2 driven by the block-rockin' beats of heavy electronica. The songwriting needs a personality infusion and more gray cells, but numbers such as "The Dance" have the enthusiasm of a puppy powered by a nuclear reactor. Including the band's 2001 single "You Might As Well Try to Fuck Me" would have added a barb to this debut, though singer Robert Harvey knows that big signals don't need subtlety: At the peak of their peak song, "Take the Long Road and Walk It," he just lets fly with "Bip-bop-bip-bop dop-a-dop bop-bop bip-bo." (MILO MILES)

Throwing Muses Throwing Muses (4AD/Beggars Group) Kristen Hersh The Grotto (4AD/Beggars Group)

Throwing Muses split up in 1997, as the market for thoughtful alternative rock was seemingly disappearing. But now bands such as the White Stripes are on the charts, and the Rhode Island trio has recorded its rawest record yet. Throwing Muses should make sense to fans of the new punk. Like the Stripes' output, the album's sonic simplicity and emotional complications are inspired by blues and folk as well as the Ramones. Former Muse (and ex-Belly leader) Tanya Donelly contributes background vocals to tracks such as "Solar Dip" that throttle and swirl with the band's trademark shifts between 6/8 and 4/4 time. At the same time, Muses leader Kristin Hersh has revisited the barren strength of her early solo work with The Grotto. The album showcases her inward poetics with acoustic guitar adorned by only violin and piano. The finely focused results are hushed and uneasy. As she sings in "Milk Street," "It's still a tragedy" -- but it's also a triumph. (BARRY WALTERS)

Fischerspooner #1 (Capitol)

Like Britney Spears, New York performance act Fischerspooner generates theater, video, fashion and hype that's as much of a creation as the music itself. And like Spears' music, the debut album from Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner only sometimes stands on its own. Long stretches of #1 sound like the synth-pop soundtrack to a vintage video game: thin and static. But its woozy high points can make you forget the self-described "hypermediocrity" elsewhere. "The 15th" transforms Wire's lonely punk ballad into a pulsating keyboard lullaby. "Emerge" mutates 1980s aerobics-class beats and a self-motivation mantra to reach a perversely catchy, pogo-dancing climax. It's an alternative-galaxy hit in the glorious New Wave tradition -- and all Fischerspooner's ridiculous wigs, Cats-worthy outfits and desperately artful pleas for attention are just icing on the spandex. (BARRY WALTERS)

The Minus 5 Down With Wilco (Yep Roc)

You don't hear much about Wilco these days -- what have they been up to? These one-time recluses seem to unveil another big statement every few months, and in the wake of their career album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, their career-album documentary and their Loose Fur side project, here's Down With Wilco, the band's collaboration with indie-pop vet Scott McCaughey and his collective, the Minus 5. Other hands on deck include R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, the Spinanes' Rebecca Gates and the Posies' Ken Stringfellow, with everyone collaborating on thirteen new songs. It's a Saturday-night version of Foxtrot: laid-back, poignant and comic. The opening ballad, with McCaughey solemnly intoning the chorus "I never wanna lose/The days of wine and booze," is worth a standing ovation all by itself -- the funniest drinking song since "Passenger Side," on the first Wilco album. (ROB SHEFFIELD)

Paper Lions The Symptom and the Sick (Kindercore)

Atlanta's Paper Lions are exciting, even intriguing, because of the combo's ability to reconfigure what's come before and present it in a fresh way. Drawing upon three decades of rock, Paper Lions combine elements of Seventies pioneers Gang of Four and the Clash with the iconoclastic guts of Fugazi and a contemporary emo edge to fashion an impressively taut eleven-song debut. The group's guitarists, Jesse Smith and Justin Snyder, share an intuitive, powerful interplay (they've played in a previous band together) that threads through The Symptom and the Sick. "Money Blanket," "He Commands Commandments" and "Graduation Prize Prize" are perhaps the CD's standout tracks, but there's not a bad cut on this nifty calling card from the South. (MARK WOODLIEF)

Virgil Shaw Still Falling (Future Farmer)

Part-time carpenter and art school grad Virgil Shaw's music reflects his vocation the way Don Van Vliet's manic paintings are echoed on Captain Beefheart records. Still Falling, Shaw's second solo album (he is also a guitarist/vocalist in the band Dieselhed), is both well-constructed and full of beautiful abstractions. Weird like Roky Erickson and soulful like Van Morrison, Shaw's lyrics paint fanciful scenes that are loosely encased by clever, mid-tempo arrangements. Subtle use of Dixieland horns, church organ and vibes underscore his cryptic drama on songs like "Golden Sun" ("All that went wrong is out on her lawn . . . I just didn't want to see it all end so miserably") and his aesthetic on "The Drawing" ("Crudely drawn but done with taste"), in which a character walks out of a picture and disappears in 3/4 time. It's the perfect palette for Shaw's singing; his drawl lisps gently, cracks pleasingly and occasionally floats up to falsetto, as it does on the album's closer, a pared-down cover of Merle Haggard's "Sing Me Back Home." (MEREDITH OCHS)

Count the Stars Never Be Taken Alive (Victory)

The first line of Never Be Taken Alive is enough to make one wince: "This brand new skin/Is wearing thin." Will it be a song, or worse, an album, filled with rhyming couplets and cliches? Thankfully, no, as "Brand New Skin" immediately turns into a catchy hard-edged pop song with ragged edges and clever lyrical jabs ("You can take your whole life/But you'll never get the best of mine"). The four-piece is more Jimmy Eat World than Sum 41, rougher punk not embarrassed to bust out with poppy choruses. Never Be Taken Alive is filled with aggressive, melodic anthems that surely blow the roof off live joints and could easily fit on radio. But should the album rot next to the heap of other punk-pop contenders, Count the Stars, who sold 5000 copies of an indie CD and booked a six-month tour on their own, will just continue as they have for the past eight years: D.I.Y. F.U. (KAREN BLISS)

Phaser Sway (Emperor Norton)

Sweeping washes of lush guitar psychedelia, airily twinkling pianos and somber, majestic cellos swell and swirl beautifully on Sway. Oddly, Phaser's roots are in Washington, D.C., but the band's sound owes more to the Verve, Suede, Slowdive and Jesus and Mary Chain than to the Dischord Records aesthetic that's so prevalent in their hometown. Brothers Siayko and Boris Skalsky's epic and elegant gutteral approach to dream rock isn't likely a reaction to their musical surroundings; mere rejection can't spawn such passionate, almost meditative compositions. Whether Sway is climbing to weighty wall-of-sound rock crescendos on "Life and Illusion", or is curling up in spooky, languorous folds of sonic silk on "Northern Light," its depth and beauty is hard to ignore. Phaser only fail when certain progressions are explored to an extreme, snapping the listener out of Sway's ethereal spell. Fortunately, that's rare. (JOAN HILLER)

(February 24, 2003)