Villa Victoria is a converted church, and parochial uneasiness lingers in its posture as it greets its new life as a South End community center and occasional music venue. The stained-glass windows and quiet lobby carpet seem ill-prepared to cope with sweaty mosh-pit refugees and foundation-stressing volume levels. The bar in the corner lurks rootlessly, like a temporary structure hastily erected to host a bake sale to raise funds for stabilizing the bell tower or buying the parish softball team new uniforms. Inside the hall itself the normal accessories of a rock show can't quite adjust to the expanse of the space, much less its solemnity. Strobe lights flicker gamely, but in a room that people can't fill, the freeze-frame flashes capture mostly walls and ceiling arches, which appear able to resist, like people cannot, the temptation to gyrate stiffly, meeting the strobe halfway. Off to one side, near a fire exit, I notice a small plaster cross leaning against a wall, as if the new occupants had come across it in a spare bedroom. ("Oh look, here's something those religion people that were here before us must have forgotten." "Well, just put it somewhere out of the way, and we'll call them tomorrow and see if they want to come pick it up or we should just throw it out.") I keep expecting the speakers to cut off, the lights to come on, and an anxious priest to burst onto the stage shrieking, indignantly, that we kids had promised him this was a late-night Scrabble tournament for charity.

Back when 1994's AIDS-benefit compilation Soon introduced me to both of them, sirensong and Mistle Thrush sounded like the dual leaders of an underground Boston atmospheric-goth revival that was about to finally spread past its insider scene boundaries into recorded media, where people like me who never believe anything they can't listen to at home could follow along, as well. sirensong broke up after a couple EPs, though, and while I liked Mistle Thrush's five-song debut EP Agus Amarach quite a bit, on their subsequent full-length album, Silt, they seemed to me to suddenly turn self-conscious about their gothic atavisms, opting at the last minute to try to be 10,000 Maniacs instead of themselves. This is an understandable impulse, commercially, but to me too much of the album got sidetracked in a style that was neither Mistle Thrush's forte, nor anything I really needed another album of. To be fair, when I go back and listen to Silt again, I find that there are really only a few songs that sound like 10,000 Maniacs in any meaningful way. Neither arguing away this condemnation nor two years of distance, however, make me like the album any better. Maybe if I worked harder at it I'd learn to see something special there, but the piles of albums I could say this about that litter my life could spell Atlas, and life's too short already to spend valuable hours prospecting through your own trash. I suppose one could counter, smugly, that the only qualitative difference between pawing through your own garbage and my practice of buying new albums by bands whose last albums I didn't like is that you don't have to pay for your garbage again. But I keep doing it because I keep discovering wonderful things that way, easily often enough to justify the expense. Super Refraction sounded like the title of a Mistle Thrush album I'd like much better, and several of the song titles ("Moth-Like", "51 Pegasi: Rocketship v.2", "Do You Know This Bird?", "All Mirror Thing", "Escapades in Glass" (reprised from Agus Amarach) and "Making Salt With Sunshine") were far too cryptic to be listless half-folk, so I decided to give them another chance.

I didn't initially have a lot to say about Ed Ackerson's first album as Polara, 108 weeks ago, either, but by the end of 1995 it had wormed its way deep enough into my affections to squeak onto my year-end top-ten list by the grace of a tenth-place tie. Since then I've filled in his pre-Polara catalog as The 27 Various, and followed his production credits to Hovercraft/Shatterproof, and in this expanded context, Ed's noisy conception of how pop works has come to make a lot more sense. It's tempting, since he uses banks of synthesizers, to lump him in with the Pulsars and the Rentals in the nascent synth-pop revival, but even a cursory side-by-side examination of C'Est La Vie and Pulsars is sufficient to reveal fundamental differences. Pulsars' synth-pop derives straightforwardly from New Order and the Cars, retro-futurism little different, culturally, from the periodic resurgence of popularity in shiny silver jackets and freeze-dried astronaut ice cream. Ackerson's lineage is more knotted, tendrils reaching out to Allen Ravenstine's synthesizer dissonance in Pere Ubu, the Jesus and Mary Chain's waves of channeled noise, the Loud Family's bristling pop abstrusity, techno's blocky add-and-subtract compositional structures, metal's bluster, the Pixies' guitar churn, Athens jangle-pop's sighing Anglophilia and late-Big-Star disintegration. His songs invariably keep one foot in melodic pop accessibility, but each album he seems to stretch out further with the other one. The closest things here to unqualified pop songs, I think, are "Quebecois" and "Incoming", but "Quebecois"'s "La La La" choruses coexist uneasily with keening guitar barbs, shiny brass stabs, edgy "Rayon Drive"-esque verse cadences, and a series of random sounding rhymes that finds its way to "Parliament for partial paradise" and suddenly assumes a political pattern, and "Incoming"'s kinetic drum clatter, airy Jennifer Jurgens harmonies and sunny bridge fight with squealing guitar noise throughout, and collapse into a pounding drum break towards the end. Elsewhere, "Transformation" is blues cacophony for nervous killer robots, "Sort It Out"'s verses remind me strongly of Jah Wobble, "Light the Fuse and Run" twists a lounge-jazz vibe line into a careening organ hook, "So Sue Me" mixes a synthetic Nick Drake-like string section with slurred organ-grinder twinkle and a messy guitar solo, "Make It Easy" can't decide whether to break into Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull or the Jacksons, "Elasticity" is like "You Can't Have Me" performed in an electrical storm, "Idle Hands" spins and swoops like the Grays, "Other Side" is halfway between Scott Miller and Matthew Sweet, "Pantomime" is jagged and single-minded, like the bed tracks for a Jellyfish song, and the slow, tender acoustic-guitar/synth-cello lullaby "Shanghai Bell" sounds to me like a Replacements song in which earnestness is allowed to supplant disillusionment and exhaustion for once. Half of the time sparkling pop hooks are cloaked in noisy camouflage, and the other half of the time squalls of white noise are overrun by melodic momentum. Ackerson's genius, to me, is his ability to alternate these two confusing tactics at will, so that I'm never quite sure whether I like his music because it's so difficult to grasp, or because it's so easy. And while I doubt many people buy albums hoping for more confusion in their lives, for me confusion is the beacon that identifies where there's something new to be learned.