As of Ruby Red, their last album, the Dambuilders were the third of these types to me, an intent and often abrasive band whose style intersected Alternative, obliquely and more coincidentally than anything else, I thought, in the single "Teenage Loser Anthem" (which is what nine other singles that month ought to have been called, if they'd been honest or self-aware), but not in many more places. I filed them, in my mind, beside such bands as Long Fin Killie, the Geraldine Fibbers, Mecca Normal and Fugazi, less because they sounded especially like any of them (the Dambuilders, Long Fin Killie and the Geraldine Fibbers do all have violinists) than because listening to them required a similar willingness to stop whatever else I was doing and concentrate. These are harder bands to love, because you don't (and can't) decide to play their records as casually. If a record comes to pieces in your hands, as shiny pop records are designed to, you can carry little bits of it around with you, reminders of the experience, encouraging you to have it again. When the key to an album's appeal isn't in isolated hooks and choruses, though, but in the way the band seems to hear itself play, or how the record can refract your gaze, or the talismans someone found to face their pain with, it doesn't leave you with mementos, it changes you, and you don't play an album that changed you again the same way you put on an album that made you dance again. I don't actually remember the last time I played Ruby Red, or Scott Walker's Tilt, or Fugazi's Repeater, or Laurie Anderson's Bright Red/Tightrope, but their value in my life is not measured by calculating how long it's been.

There may be something I'll learn from Against the Stars, too, that will earn it a similar position, but I'm not going to figure it out until I get through this period of just playing it over and over again for the sheer joy of it. Where Ruby Red made only a few reluctant concessions to pop, Against the Stars is immersed in its charm, and of these thirteen songs, six are pop anthems I would hold up against anything else you care to nominate. After a brief, Sonic Youth-like introduction, the achingly earnest "Break Up With Your Boyfriend" eases from spare, galloping verses to surging, fuzzy choruses, guitars pealing and ringing everywhere, like Velvet Crush and Catherine Wheel trying to impersonate each other. The sighing harmonies and cheery guitar and plucked-violin hooks give the song a curiously sunny demeanor, as if dumping a boyfriend is no more emotionally onerous than buying an adorable sweater, something easy you can do to make your life better, but Kevin March's dry drumming supplies an undercurrent of menace that keeps the song from ever turning into Weezer. "Burn This Bridge" is built similarly, with light, snappy verses exploding into roaring, nearly Smashing Pumpkins-like chorus turbulence, but singer Dave Derby has none of Billy Corgan's whine, and the song switches in and out of overdrive too readily to grate on my nerves the way Corgan's songs often seem to want to. The little processed-vocal transitions into and out of the noisy parts ("Sit back and watch me--") keep them from unbalancing the song, tying them to the falsetto bridge, the opening verse's Bruce Cockburn-ish spoken intro and loose guitar jangle, the insidious little vocal "cha"s and the echoing patter of the drums. "Herstory", with jittery stick rattles and keening guitar interjections skittering through the opening, sets out more mechanically, but by the chorus, where the rest of the drums kick in, violinist Joan Wasser sets up a cycling hook, and Derby leans into a heartfelt "You can't reduce the past to a memory", the song has acquired enough timeless rock warmth to remind me of the Michael Stanley Band's "My Town". The strained "You Might Want Me Around", with thin, trebly guitar, slithering hi-hat and a breathless duet between Derby and Wasser, is frail and eager in its conviction that the subject will eventually come around, but the insistent chorus suggests that this belief is as important for the sense of self-worth that asserting it produces as it is for any likelihood it has of coming true. The slow, wistful "You'll Never Know" acts as a first-half finale for me, Wasser's tentative violin just skirting the edges of Derby's melancholy lament for all the things he'll never say, and all the things the woman he's singing to will never hear.

Then, just to remind you that the Dambuilders are not Fountains of Wayne, the album launches into a very strange three-song stretch. The angular, off-kilter "Itch It", sung by Joan in a voice that can't quite decide whether it wants to be lilting or bracing, could at some points be Jale trying to do a double-speed Berlin cover, and at others a misguided cross between the Tom Tom Club and the Clash. "Discopolis", with its slinky bass groove, rattling percussion, abstract guitar wailing and persistent beepy keyboard cycles, sounds like a Talking Heads song remixed by the Gang of Four. And "Luster", with an imperturbable dub beat and ethereal Wasser vocals that remind me of Kate Bush as they round a few of the song's corners, sounds like Jah Wobble reworking something from an early Lush album. Pop poise returns for the impassioned apology "I Was Wrong", which manages a rare bit of in-song rethinking, as Derby lets "How could you have misunderstood?" slide into the chorus admission "In other words, I was wrong", but the choppy "On the Slide" is back to harsh angles, unison guitar harassing the vocal lines and the drums sputtering fitfully around the rhythm, refusing to settle into it. "Seek and Destroy" strikes a truce of sorts between the two sides, letting the verses careen and burble freely, but soaring into an unapologetically cathartic and streamlined chorus, guitar and vocal lines twining sensuously. And the album ends back on a slow note, with the muted "Wished on the Wrong Star", halfway between Robbie Robertson and Radiohead, weighing Robertson's warm-hearted embrace of life against Thom Yorke's desperate yearning to escape it. I haven't decided how (or whether) I think the Dambuilders reconcile these urges, but as mainstream guitar rock is overtaken by Wallflowers/Dishwalla listlessness, this is an album that for me gathers up all the good things still left in Alternative and assembles them into perhaps one last great album before the genre grinds to a halt completely, and that's easily good enough to keep me listening to it long enough to find out.

I'm not sure they've figured it out even now, but perhaps they don't need to. About 80% or so of Butch, the new album, is country, and the other 20% is blaring punk disharmony, which produces a composite effect something like eating a large cucumber with a small jalapeno pepper embedded in the middle of it. The punk parts are only slightly better distributed than the pepper, so while "California Tuffy"'s choruses are cacophonic, "Toybox" is withering throughout, and "I Killed the Cuckoo" bears almost no western traces at all, "Trashman in Furs" is mostly languid and mournful, "Swim Back to Me" becalmed and reverent. "Seven or in 10" could be the Feelies crossed with Sleater-Kinney, but "Folks Like Me" is a goofy lope, "Pet Angel" a slow sawdust waltz. "Butch" is drifting and elegant, and the violin in "Arrow to My Drunken Eye", despite the Brian Dewan-like title, sounds very Nymanesque to me. The cover of Can's "You Doo Right", covered previously by Thin White Rope in precisely this same strangled-country style, is either an intentional (if weirdly roundabout) tribute to TWR, or an astounding coincidence. After that the album sort of trails off for me. "The Dwarf Song" has the title and lyrics to be a Thin White Rope song, but isn't nearly scary enough, musically, and the long, wandering album-ending instrumental, "Heliotrope", I can't make sense of at all.

Some days, none of this appeals to me at all. On others, though, there's a spark of genius in Bozulich's madness that I catch and nourish. Sad country songs are so often performed in a caricature of misery that renders their own predicaments laughable; the Geraldine Fibbers' insight, to me, is that punk's disgust, turned in on itself, can cut through this protective casing and get at the pain underneath. And I believe, although I wish I was a little surer, that this is part of the healing process.