"I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain," mumbles Matt Berninger, and he spends the rest of this NYC band's third album rummaging among churning grooves and shambling New Wave rips, turning up depressed guitar poetry that's both elegantly wasted and kinda murky.

“Helen Wheels”

A rollicking good-time hard rocker, "Helen Wheels" was not about a woman but about Paul McCartney's Land Rover, the anthemic chorus voicing the vehicle's reckless joy as "she" took to the road. The song was added to the U.S. version of Band on the Run but was issued only as a single in McCartney's native U.K. "I like that because it's a British road song and there's not many of those around," said McCartney. "It's always Route 66. But Carlisle? How many songs have got Carlisle in them?"