If you only go see either musicians about whose genius you've already developed an opinion, or ones about whom you know nothing at all, you may occasionally be dumbfounded (Billy Bragg, Living Color and the Leslie Spit Treeo were all totally unknown to me before I saw them open for Echo & the Bunnymen, the Bears and the Alarm, and precious to me immediately thereafter), but you'll rarely be surprised. By the Sheila Divine's second song, any attempt to converse with me would have elicited little but gibberish and arm-shaking. I've felt the electrifying conviction that I'm seeing incipient greatness before, but this was the first time it had ever been accompanied by the faint possibility that I was seeing it early enough for "discovery" to have a non-subjective sense. If I owned a record label I would have been down on my knees on the sticky floor of the club, as their third song began, writing out a contract on the back of a Boards of Canada flyer with pilfered lip gloss. I'm not necessarily saying it would be a smart decision. They have, frankly, no appreciable image. Drummer Shawn Sears looks like someone you'd find still working at Kinko's at an embarrassing age, bassist Jim Gilbert could be the goofy, genial neighbor you always see pushing his three-year-old around in her little plastic fire truck in the evenings, his briefcase sitting on the porch with his suit jacket draped over it because the light's dying fast and he can't bear to disappoint her by going inside first, and singer/guitarist Aaron Perrino looks a bit like a paler, red-haired version of the young Elvis Costello, only without the raw animal magnetism. They all wear thick glasses, and there isn't a dancer's chin between them. Maybe a good stylist could work a Devo-ish angle, but left to dress themselves they muster a collective visual presence less evocative of rock stardom than of getting beaten up for their lunch money. And the music they play, even worse, has no ingredient even remotely in demand. Put them on the stage at one of those MTV beach parties, and my only uncertainty is whether they'd be incapacitated by sunburn faster than the kids could phase out.

But standing there, listening, paralyzed, ecstatic, spring breaks and Kid Rock and stupid facial hair were nowhere near my thoughts. Inside the few square feet the band and I shared, a dream I've had before shimmered into being again, the dream in which U2 never met Lanois and Eno, and REM and Oasis are playing colleges but Cactus World News and the Armoury Show are superstars. Epic passion and anthemic sincerity were never supplanted by arch nihilism, smug irony or peppy superficiality. Singing is the act of forcing all the air and hope out of your body and into a microphone. Perrino opens his mouth, and it no longer matters what he looks like, or where he comes from, or where the walls of this club end, or whether we're going to be able to divert the asteroid in time. The last Boston band that tried this, Cliffs of Dooneen, derailed on their second album and never made a third, and maybe that will happen to the Sheila Divine, too, but for a few months, at least, I can sustain the illusion that it won't, and the fond fiction that intent commitment can be as charismatic and compelling as La Vida Loca. For a dozen songs a long list of hopeless and half-forgotten ideals seem viable almost to the point of tautology. In the opening lines of "Automatic Buffalo" Perrino sighs like Thom Yorke, but by the time he gets to the title refrain I think he's grasped that most people's plights mix nobility and futility in roughly comparable measures. The pounding "Like a Criminal" could be a defiantly simple answer to "Karma Police". "Awful Age" clatters, hums and surges, its plaintive "I'm at an awful age" applicable to any of them. "Hum" is a venomous self-critique that reverses the blade just as the chorus ends, howling "god don't make the laws", leaving you to deduce who does. "Spacemilk" is calmer, the vocal harmonies on the chorus uncannily reminiscent of the Armoury Show. "I'm a Believer", not a Monkees cover, churns like U2's "Gloria" in the hands of Catherine Wheel, and although I'm disappointed that the last couple choruses haven't actually morphed "I'm a believer" into "I'm a belaborer", like I initially thought they had, the song's sketchy narrative is arresting nonetheless, something about feigning desire and then realizing that it's possible to deceive yourself, too. "The Modern Log", clunky title notwithstanding, is like "Two Hearts Beat as One" with its romantic aspirations scaled down to an eighth of their original selves, a paean to soulmate unity rewritten as a desperate warning against the insidious lure of inaction. The betrayed catharsis of "Opportune Moment" is only a couple "Ah-ooh"s and whammy-bar swoops away from Cactus World News. "The Amendment" starts out airy and adrift, but rises into a soaring coda, Perrino's guitar finally catching up to Sears' steady, patient groove. "New Parade" takes a sort of bleak "Fake Plastic Trees" inertia and turns it into the converse of Millennial panic, the fear that we're actually counting on the calendar digits to transform us. The aching "Kitchen Song", another track that it seems to me could easily be transplanted onto Cactus World News' Urban Beaches or the Armoury Show's Waiting for the Floods, jumps from MBV-esque electric whir to pensive acoustic to rhythm crunch to rousing crescendos. The only song whose role I don't really understand is the last one, "Sweep the Leg", a minute that sounds like Radiohead picked up on a spy satellite followed by a minute that sounds like the spy satellite, bored with Earth music, just twittering distractedly to itself. I wanted this record to gather itself for one last atmosphere-shattering scream, on behalf of everybody who once sang this way, heart and lungs in sync, and doesn't any more. But maybe I'm rushing things, asking the Sheila Divine to redeem an entire aesthetic in one album. Maybe that's why the others failed, overextending themselves and being consumed from inside. If the truth lies that way, then this irresolution is the best possible omen, a horizon with bigger dreams than simply holding still long enough to conceal the sun.

In the fall of 1985, though, I went off to college, where a very large number of things that had previously been mysterious were elucidated (though relatively few of them, in my case, through personal experience), and an even larger number of things I hadn't previously contemplated were promoted to mysterious. By the time Echo & the Bunnymen came out, in 1987, the idea of the band had lost much of its potency, for me, and presumably as a result, the songs no longer seemed to have the same aura as "The Killing Moon" or "Ocean Rain". To this day I haven't gone back and filled that hole, and half the time I forget that Reverberation, the 1990 album without Ian McCulloch, even exists. But when McCulloch, Will Sergeant and Les Pattinson reunited in 1997, for Evergreen, I bought it, glossing over our falling out and hoping the band and I could pick up where Ocean Rain left off. Either the record was drab, though, or I simply couldn't re-inhabit the proper emotional context, or both, and the harder I tried, the more my resistance infected my overall feelings about the band, until I started wondering whether I really liked the early records that much, either.

And although obviously McCulloch and Sergeant have to make records in their own contexts, not mine, once they let What Are You Going to Do With Your Life? out of their hands they can no longer control what I do with it, and so as I play it, here in my solipsist's aerie, it becomes an apology and a truce. The apology is for however many directions they strayed. Ocean Rain was the core, and this album obediently returns to it, McCulloch's rich, gentle voice gliding languidly over swirling strings, rustling drums and sparkling, textural guitars. None of these songs has quite "Ocean Rain"'s haunting reserve, but instead there are impish hints of other bands, like Echo themselves have forgotten exactly where their role in New Wave started and ended, the bouncy "Lost on You" charged like Flesh for Lulu's "I Go Crazy", the opening figures of "Morning Sun" ripped off almost verbatim from "The Blue Hour", by Raise the Dragon, the verses of "Get in the Car" pastel and jazzy like Everything but the Girl. The glittering title track sways from glassy acoustic guitar to somber, elegant cello. "Rust" reminds me in places of U2's "One". The simple, beautiful "Baby Rain" plays like a patient lesson for Oasis on the proper roles of discretion in composition, and of the lungs in singing. I'm pretty sure if I heard Mike Peters doing the unadorned piano-and-voice lullaby "History Chimes" I'd have to check the credits to be sure it isn't an extra set of verses for the Alarm's "Walk Forever By My Side". McCulloch and Sergeant have succeeded in re-learning the art of writing songs that sound like Ocean Rain, and I'm much happier thinking that that was their goal than I was, after Evergreen, thinking that they only ever aspired to be loud. The truce, then, and however odd or underwhelming it sounds, it is important to me, is that in return for this apology, I agree not to listen to this album any more. It has given me back a band and a record I once loved, and thus recovered a lost piece of my life, which by now I might be properly prepared to understand. I want to be grateful, but I can tell, as soon as I recognize what it's done for me, that from here on I'm going to like What Are You Going to Do With Your Life? itself less each time I hear it, so the best thing to do is stop. I have now stopped. There's a weird and comforting sense of accomplishment from consciously deciding to be done with something. We assume that if a record is important to you, you'll keep listening to it, that a handful of your most familiar disks could transform a desert-island prison colony into paradise. But there are many crucial experiences in my life that I don't need or want to repeat. Some of my favorite books I'll never re-read, some of the most memorable movies I'll never see twice. And so we should attach no disgrace to an important album that you never plan to play again. That may be one of the greatest challenges of listening, in fact: knowing when the last gift a record has for you is a record-sized opening in your life, a clean, silent interval ready to be filled by new songs.