The electric guitar was a really good idea. Without it you would have to work really hard to produce modern rock music's defining stylistic trope, at least since "Smells Like Teen Spirit", which is when a series of tense muttering sounds suddenly explodes into a huge roar as a visceral metaphor for sudden emotional transcendence. Kurt didn't invent this, of course, and for all the good it did him may not even have understood it. You can make the same point with pizzicato strings, some timpani, one very big cymbal and a lot of frantic baton gesticulating, without even a single distortion pedal, but what that saves in technology it spends in manpower and planning. With an overdriven electric guitar, one person can produce this catharsis after about a minute and a half of rudimentary instruction. Definitionally speaking, the guitar is not a platonic machine on the order of the lever or the wheel, but as an art-making tool in social context it is both elemental and transformative. If you have never personally played a power-chord, and felt it slam back at you out of an amplifier, your relationship with rock music is only a shadow of what it could be. All generalizable intellectual forms cycle through traditionalism and experimentalism, of course, and here in 2003 you could fill a plausible life with music without necessarily including anything centered on guitars. And you could eat fascinating food every night without ever consuming anything grilled, and you could make friends without ever falling in love.

As of the two bands' last albums, two years ago, Thursday seemed to me like a simplistic exaggeration of Hey Mercedes' aesthetic. They still do, but this time exaggeration is exactly what I think Hey Mercedes' aesthetic most plaintively needs. Thursday scream whenever they can't think of the right next note, and spasm any time they lose their balance, which is no real substitute for discipline or grace, but half the point of rock, and three-quarters of the point of electric guitars and drums, is that enthusiasm can temporarily trump craftsmanship, and Thursday sound like kids who still vividly remember what that first power-chord felt like. Of course, they also still remember way too much about the absurd pretensions that seemed brilliant when they were fifteen, which tends to curse their lyrics with a less-well-read-Rush gangliness and lull them into the occasional counter-productive "thoughtful" aside (trust me, you'll be happier if you uncheck "This Song Brought to You by a Falling Bomb" before ripping this album), but most of the time they have the sense to keep flailing around with an inspiring abandon, and by the end of the record most of the room is in cheerful splinters. Braid and Hey Mercedes are fundamentally seminal, and Thursday are profoundly derivative, but taxonomy is not the same as listening. Sometimes, maybe even often, greatness lies in what your intentions corrupt, and what you inspire others to steal.

One of the strangest things about the centrality of the electric guitar in rock music is how seldom anybody makes records with just an electric guitar. There are millions of acoustic-guitar-and-voice records, at least hundreds of which qualify in one sense or another as rock, but the canon of ragged-electric-guitar-and-voice records, or at least my own personal subset of it, is basically a couple Billy Bragg albums before he succumbed to band temptations, a few Mecca Normal records before Peter Jefferies showed up and refused to go home, and a handful of thoroughly magical Paul Weller demos on one of those Jam rarities albums.

I wondered whether Aaron Perrino could sustain the pensive truces of the War Chords EP over the length of a full album. Here is the album. Perrino helps his own cause by keeping it to an old-fashioned ten songs in forty minutes, and recruits a little more help by getting Jack Drag's John Dragonetti to produce and help play, and bringing Blake Hazard back to sing a few more pretty harmony lines. If Perrino's other band, the Sheila Divine, tried to extrapolate what U2 might have sounded like if they'd never discovered Eno, Lanois or media self-consciousness, Dear Leader imagine another alternate U2 that deduced Eno and Lanois' restraint on their own, and so came to studio machinery via restless introspection rather than ironic extroversion or thinly disguised god-complexes. The Good Times Are Killing Me is thus a quiet, ticking, haunted record of overnight vigils and balanced disappointments, of drum-machine mood poems and restricted-palette landscapes of rain-swept streets, of stubborn candle-flame hope and anthems too aware of how much they ask. At its most menacing, like in the pulsing "Our Motto" or the stomping "If the House Spoke", it still can't hide the way compassion blurs the straightest lines. At its bounciest, like in the quick, twittering "Vigorous Cravings" or the patient "Culture Vultures", it still can't pretend that the silences in the rewinds don't reawaken doubts. Minutes drift into languid elegance or atmospheric calm. In my favorite isolated moments, "Ice Age" almost apologetically reconciles the Alarm and Curve, and "My Heart Is a Ghetto" admits sheepishly to aspirations to symphonic timelessness, but if the Sheila Divine were rousing, and the shorter Dear Leader EP was half grounded and half aloft, then The Good Times Are Killing Me defers to physics and takes on gravity. There are songs for dreaming that we can fly, and songs for knowing that it's no defeat to stand on the Earth.

But we make small noises with our real bodies, the ones stuck to the planet, and part of the point of guitars is that they can slip some of these implacable bonds. I know Dear Leader is the sound of accepting the night's loneliness, but recognizing maturity is not quite the same as inhabiting it. Loveless's Gift to the World was produced by Mike Denneen, who did some early Sheila Divine songs. Paul Kolderie loaned them some gear, and Loses Control and Gift to the World share both a studio and a drum tech, and I end the night where I tried to begin, after all, caught up in what guitars can evoke. The guitarists, this time, are Boston veterans Dave Wanamaker (from Expanding Man) and Jen Trynin. Trynin's presence is why I bought this, which meant I had to get over the disappointment that Loveless are no more Trynin's band than Helicopter Helicopter are Julie Chadwick's, but that took four songs, at most. Trynin sings a little, but this is an ensemble band, not a showcase with a pseudonym.