Here's one for the parents! Drenched in nostalgia for British bands of yore like The Kinks and The Jam, this track from The Bees' second full-length, Free the Bees, may shy away from outright theft, but intent aside, the boys still dress up like their heroes and come damn close to a first-class copyright misdemeanor. The Bees' own website boasts that this song "positively glows with the influence of Paul and Aaron's classic-vinyl collection." Unfortunately, The Bees don't compensate for their lack of ingenuity with anything even approaching wit or skill: "Horsemen" is dull, like that last request for "In the Mood" that breaks up wedding bands. The neatly harmonic chorus, "I've told you life's a worry and it's true," would better suit poor old Brian Wilson (it just wasn't made for these times), while the conventionally timed guitar solo sparkles like canned tuna. Deep within "Horsemen"'s bowels, singer Aaron Fletcher intones, "It's a good song for someone, but who's that gonna be?" Anyone seen The Big Chill?

To many listeners, the bubbly and sometimes goofy demeanor of psychedelic-pop masks the genre's savvy production and masterful compositions. Because 17-piece drum kits and wanking on Ibanezes and are unfortunately still considered appropriate medians of showcasing talent, the musicianship of Elephant 6 artists often goes unnoticed. While E6 survivors Of Montreal's "Spike the Senses" (from Satanic Panic in the Attic) requires only a set ears to be enjoyed, careful listening and a set of headphones are necessary to capture the essence of the multifaceted track's ingenuity.

Every instrument featured in "Spike the Senses"' vibrant musical collage was performed, recorded, mixed and produced by frontman Kevin Barnes, displaying his knack of arranging dozens of overdubs without creating a sense of clutter. Within the first verse, a slew of instruments-- including sleigh bells, phasing guitar, double-tracked piano, and synthesizer-- capture both serenity and create a solid foundation for its two-part chorus. A minor-keyed fuzz bass strains to bring the chorus to a new key as Kevin Barnes sings, "Trying to find a way to spike the senses/ Till everything goes white." Eventually, the bass and reversed cymbals achieve the desired major key, erasing the tension and creating a glorious resolution. Blanketing the lyrics with brighter instrumentation, the second part of the chorus urges the listener to let loose and share the joy in Barnes' pure, Athenian vocals. "Spike the Senses" ends with an unexpected airy denouement, a fitting finale for a track that manages to achieve beauty without an epic solo or sixteenth note drumming.

Here comes another slow jam from the Flaming Lips built around a maudlin piano melody, featuring lyrics about, as the title may give away, the assassination of the sun. Unfortunately, as a teaser between albums, this track from the recent Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell EP, is something of a drag, again employing the Lips' tried-and-true pastoral-pop-over-electronic-beats gimmick-- a technique that had already worn thin by Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots' second half. Here, Wayne Coyne seems barely able to find the energy to reach the upper registers, and rather than reach for that white-hot fireball in the sky, he sounds more like he's singing from his bed.

What's made the Flaming Lips of recent years great has been their keen balance of whining and whimsy, thier ability to toe the line between sincerity and overwrought ridiculousness. While songs like "Do You Realize" or "Are You a Hypnotist?" are undoubtedly moving, one gets the sense on occasion that Coyne could easily be giving the band a wink and a nod in the studio without our realizing it. That could be my cynicism showing, but either way, I wish I could find that same kind of appealing ambiguity here. Even compared to the slowest Yoshimi tracks, this song is just plain somber, more funereal than wistful or emotive, and quite a few yards from the musical quirkiness that suits them so well. Excuse me while I paint my white suit black.

The Beta Band have never been pleased with their producers. In a Chicago hotel room in 1999, they bitched to me about Chris Allison's work on their 3 EPs and self-titled debut, claiming they'd aimed for a more direct 60s feel than the beautifully sloppy, electronics-infused results. Colin "C-Swing" Emmanuel's work on Hot Shots II was better, but its folky Scottish hip-hop arguably set them in too-conventional surroundings. So, contrary to rumors that Nigel Godrich would be producing (he is, in fact, mixing), they've gone it alone on the forthcoming Heroes to Zeroes.

"Assessment", the album's debut single, is our first taste of the band's first fully self-realized production, which they've proclaimed will return them to the sound of their early EPs. Judging from this track, that's not entirely true, but it's close: The song ushers back the spirited enthusiasm of The Beta Band's earlier work, but it also lends the focus they gained with Hot Shots II. In other words, where Hot Shots II frequently sounded stilted and too carefully considered, "Assessment" lets go with the unbridled exhilaration The Beta Band built their good name on: Opening with Steve Mason's silvery tenor shining through a shimmering mass of highly reverbed guitars and a walking percussion line, the song eventually winds into a brief drum-and-chimes breakdown before snapping back in line with an adamant, celebratory conclusion, driven by a pummeled rhythm section and a mass of triumphant guitars and horns. The question now is whether they can keep this up for the duration of an entire album without boring themselves to tears or wandering off into whimsical experimentation. Either way, I can't wait.

When people fault the Olivia Tremor Control's Dusk at Cubist Castle, sometimes it's for the record's tendency to overwhelm-- the possibility that, at 27 tracks, it may have too many good songs. Most often, though, it's for the 23-minute centerpiece, the semi-ambient drug lullaby of the "Green Typewriters" suite. Indeed, the abrupt change in attitude from the bright pop perfection of the first eleven tracks to this lazy psychedelic soundscape soaked in green paint is jarring, but crucial nevertheless: just as the record's first half begins to exhaust itself, "Green Typewriters" serves as a sort of intermission during which you can let your mind wander if you need to, or just take the music in as a temporary change of pace. In this sense, the suite allows Dusk the chance to catch its breath.

During its first eight tracks, "Green Typewriters" fades from slow but upbeat melodies to a state of total aporia. "Perception is an ocean, the day is like an eternity." The songs begin as hazy lo-fi kin-- pop reciprocals, even-- to Dusk's opening sequence. "What I need is space, and lots of it," we hear, and soon, the suite rewards itself with nearly ten standstill minutes of water drops, moving cars, and other scraps of found sound. "How much longer can I wait?" However, just as "Green Typewriters (8)" seems ready to retire the album completely, the band breaks into a screaming electric guitar anthemic denouement, reawakening the album's former conscious state. From here, Dusk works itself back up to speed gradually, with the suite's therapeutic tenth movement and repeated chorus: "When you're ready to come back down, I'll be waiting here." Which is when the Olivia Tremor Control return with their previous instincts for song.

Nominally it's a B-side to "Hendrix with Ko" from the feted Up in Flames, but the sound of "Silver Splinters" falls pretty squarely between the pastoral-IDM approach of Manitoba's 2002 full-length Start Breaking My Heart and last year's stuffed-sound psychedelic behemoth. Wasting no time, the song busts out of 7L with a spacious, polydistorted big beat which provides the composition's entire framework. The song grows grandiose not from simple cosmetic additions and subtractions, but because Snaith forcefeeds it from within, stuffing a smorgasboard of verdant soft-bells-and-string textures, turntable vocal scratch-ups, and a painfully lonesome trumpet flipping its octave and all the notes between. All of this, however, is a distraction for Snaith's larger motives with this song: as "Silver Splinters" progresses, it becomes increasingly darker, and by its end, it shares a strain of melancholy with Clint Mansell. It's this profound darkness that more than likely excluded the track from the otherwise upbeat Up in Flames, rather than a lack of careful composition or Humanus.

Of all of the tracks on the new Dolby 5.1 version of The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, "It's Summertime" easily features the most aggressive use of the technology. The stuttering, synthed-out bassline that opens the track bounces in a star-shaped pattern from speaker to speaker, followed and mimicked by a clipped organ. Electronic bird chirps start left, then bounce right while Wayne Coyne's wide-eyed croon finds new life by subtly floating from front to back to front again, until the haunting, choirish ooh's and aah's fill in the emptiness. Just before the chorus, the entire field of sound swirls around you like the sound of the ocean through a seashell, disorientingly shifting from speaker-to-speaker.

After the first chorus, a newly added guitar solo surprises you in the front-left speaker, then it's repeat-swirl-chorus. Finally, as the track begins to disintegrate into reverb-drenched madness, the glitchy snare drum's double attack bounces from front and center to back left with every other hit. Although the additions, manipulations and extensions (the track is about a minute-and-a-half longer) may seem minor on paper, the effect is breathtaking. In addition to further developing the sorrowful mood of the song, this version manages to bridge the gap between what was The Flaming Lips' most ambitious project, Zaireeka, with the older, wiser band we see before us today.