Long after I've forgotten what the Lion and the Witch had to do with anything, or whether the Dawn Treader was a person or a ship, the image of the Wardrobe remains vivid in my mind, C.S. Lewis' archetypal symbol for the discovery of unimagined worlds lurking just out of sight of the ordinary. I'm sure this is another of those two-kinds-of-people dividing lines, cordoning off those of you who seek adventure over horizons from those of us who hope (and, stubbornly, expect) to find revelation hidden behind out-of-favor trenchcoats and the boxes that our stereo gear came in. In the great quest for answers, as in typographic affectation, I side with cummings, who summarized the credo of introspection thus: "seeker of truth / follow no path / all paths lead where / truth is here". And so, too, in music, where, though I do spend some time wandering afield to reassure myself that I'm not missing my true love in some other sector of the store entirely, most of my time is spent on the endless vigil that watches for the sudden subtle shift of light that reveals new shapes in the most familiar terraces and squares. Statistically speaking, far too much music is made for any one human to keep up with, even me, but between the amount of Sisyphusian energy I put into the effort and the helpful fact that obscurity and mediocrity go a long way towards canceling each other out, in the end I'm drawn towards the admittedly complacent conclusion that while plenty of music escapes my notice, word of most things I would really like will eventually reach me. Between the times when I buy CDs essentially at random (whether intentionally or not) and the occasional disc that arrives in my mailbox because the band's bass player read my review of somebody else, I have regular occasion to test this theory, and usually it holds up pretty well, most of the control-group samples falling firmly into the wide expanse between accomplished and promising. "Good band", I think to myself. "Earnest, hard-working, every bit as worthy as the Gin Blossoms. Good enough to listen to a second time." So I do. And then I cross it off my list of things worth reviewing, put the disc into the vault, and do not think about it again until the vocalist somehow ends up in a band with Butch Vig. But I keep at this routine for a very simple reason: the records that defy it, that refuse to sink meekly into any of my worn and crowded pigeonholes, the ones that cause sharp involuntary intakes of breath, distracted neglect of the book in my hands, the rush back to the CD player to pick up the jewel case and hold it in my hands, so that they too can be involved in the experience -- these records and moments are large parts of why being alive seems so vastly preferable to me to being dead.

If, for some reason, your mood requires a little more violence, albeit still carefully controlled, with your acrobatic soprano, then the arrival of Rose Chronicles' second album, Happily Ever After, is singularly provident. Rose Chronicles are on Nettwerk, home of Skinny Puppy and Sarah McLachlan, and they represent something of an inspired, if slightly uneasy, compromise between the two. Singer Kristy Thirsk's voice is a little more ethereal than operatic, like a slightly harder-edged Elizabeth Fraser not singing in tongues, and her breathy, beepy delivery has more than a little in common with Sarah's, but where Pierre Marchand moves Sarah up so close to the microphones that you can hear whether her eyes are open or not, Kevin Hamilton pulls Thirsk back from them, so that her voice always seems to be drifting in from a distance, rather than emanating from the back of your own skull. The band, a solid guitar/bass/drums trio behind her, plays something like an airy, unprocessed, keyboardless version of Killing Joke or Curve, surging guitar textures wrapping around pounding drums and pulsing bass, but without chattering samples, blasts of white noise, macabre gongs or constant noises like a small dirtbike being single-mindedly revved to shreds. The naturalistic production, particularly of the drums, can make the record sound at times a little like a Chainsuck unplugged session, but if I turn it up loud enough, the lack of cartoon jack-hammer snare-processing quickly stops seeming to me like an omission. Happily Ever After is actually significantly sparer than the band's own 1993 debut, Shiver, on which the atmospheric fog was thick enough that at times it threatened to obscure the songs, and while I kind of enjoyed Shiver's bizarre aural tempest for its own sake, I think the band's skills are done rather more justice here. None of these songs will be mistaken for club grooves, but the music is propulsive, not zephyrious, and even when the songs decline to accelerate, their delicate roar easily fills the room.

If the lingering presence of "delicate" in my description continues to worry you, another step along the continuum toward more familiar territory brings us to the reverb-drunk Boston trio The Curtain Society, who exist perched precariously on the border between Boston's fanatically cohesive neo-gothic underground (definitively represented on the Castle Von Bulow AIDS-benefit compilations Soon and Anon) and its loud-guitars rock-club "alternative" mainstream. Life Is Long, Still, the follow-up to their 1995 debut Inertia, falls somewhere between Curious Ritual's God Hilliard and the album the Chameleons might have made after Strange Times, if only they hadn't self-destructed before they got around to it. The Curtain Society haven't quite the wall of guitar noise that characterized the Chameleons circa Script of the Bridge, but if you imagine a Chameleons extrapolation through the increasingly moody acousticity of Strange Times, Mark Burgess' roaring vocals replaced with some vaguely Luna-esque singing that is more earnest and dreamlike than overpowering and possessed, then ending here wouldn't be at all out of the question. Mind you, I don't necessarily think that the Chameleons next album wouldn't have been their least exciting, but given the current dearth of people making Chameleons-like music, Burgess himself included, I'll take what I can get.

Then again, if you'd rather dispense with rock completely, and concentrate on haunting atmosphere in an undiluted form, I recommend to you my laughably uninformed contemporary-classical self-education strategy, which consists of walking into the classical department and buying anything with an appealing cover design whose composer is still alive. After a few weeks on this regimen I've realized that this amounts to a more methodical approach than you'd guess, because my minimalist graphic design aesthetic happens to closely coincide with that of the labels Nonesuch and ECM New Series. ECM, actually, is almost wholly responsible for my renewed interest in classical music. I took a Bach-to-Glass music-history survey in college, but somewhere in the process of converting the bulk of my music collection to CD my small accumulation of those tan CBS/Bernstein LPs of Mussorgsky, Sibelius, Copland, the Ninth, Mass in B-Minor and the like got stuck in a closet and, I presume, sits there to this day. After about five years without sparing classical music a non-Nyman-soundtrack thought, though, I was forced to mount a sortie into the department to get a copy of Officium, the ECM collaboration between the early-music choir the Hilliard Ensemble and improvisational saxophonist Jan Garbarek, which my boss at my last job had put on for mood-setting at a team-building off-site. Actually I ridiculed him for it at the time, dismissing it as "Nature-Company New-Age" (thus offending both my boss and my sister, who works for the Nature Company), but it haunted me afterwards, and I really liked the cover art, so I broke down and bought it. And once it had drawn me into HMV's well-appointed classical room, some base completist urges kicked in, and the idea that there was a whole room of music into which I had extended no tendrils at all became quickly insupportable.

I wouldn't normally subject you to a transition this jarring, but I've run out of weeks before Christmas, and reviewing a Christmas album after Christmas would get me disbarred. There's a reason for that: all Christmas music is so inherently odious that even people who profess to love it can only stand to hear it for about a month of the year. Personally, I hate Christmas music like I hate little else in this life. Vince Guaraldi is my own private Antichrist. As a result, I try to keep a small supply of purely nominal Christmas records on hand (Loreena McKennitt's To Drive the Cold Winter Away is the only one I'd listen to in June), so that deranged seasonal intruders can be placated without my ever having to hear Merle Haggard throttling "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir caterwauling through a terminally over-rondoed "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen". Too Many Santas is the Bobs' nominal Christmas album. The Bobs are the world's greatest a cappella pop band, and this album has twelve thematic, but original, a cappella pop songs, such as "Fifty Kilowatt Tree", "The Night Before the Night Before Christmas", "Mrs. Claus Want Some Lovin'" and "Rasta Reindeer". The first two times you listen to this, you will think to yourself, "This is the worst album the Bobs have ever done, but at least these aren't the usual hateful, nauseating, soul-defiling Christmas novelty songs." Then, about the third time through, the horrible realization hits you: these are the new hateful, nauseating, soul-defiling Christmas novelty songs.