Having learned these new, danceable AIH songs at concerts, I find the album cramped and kind of unrewarding, except for “Like It Or Not” and “Heart It Races” and oh, “Lazy (Lazy)” is pretty good, as is “Hold Music”. “Same Old Innocence” is actually better here than live. That’s half the record. But trust me when I tell you that you really, really need to see them in person. You also might want to get the “Heart It Races” single, with a fantastic DJ/rupture reggae remix that actually gets better the farther it goes from the original– “actually” because that’s unusual for indie-rock remixes, not for DJ/rupture. [Out August 21.]

I seem to like Billy Corgan’s music more the less credibility he has. This is getting some decent reviews, but usually with an undertone of, “Well, I enjoyed it, but you have to feel bad for Billy Corgan that he made this album.” Maybe that’s the thing about coming to him in my 30s, enjoying the records just for bombast and melody: I don’t care about Corgan’s feelings at all. (And on the other hand, I really am baffled that 2004’s “Mina Loy” doesn’t bulletproof anyone else’s moods the way it does mine. I just can’t be sad while it’s playing.)

This folk band don’t live up to the self-applied tag “gender pop”, but who could? Still: the wistful, eager title track and “St. Peter’s Bones”, nestled together in the middle of the record, have sold me on the fundamental Girlyman concept, and about half of the rest stubbornly resist leaving my playlist even when I think I’m not in the mood.

I assumed this would be a cash-in on the heels of Word Freak and that movie about crosswords and the one about spelling bees and you get the idea… It is very much of a piece with those stylistically; Harris alternates between bits of personal memoir and detailed recountings of Jeopardy games. (VERY detailed– in some cases based on frame-by-frame study of his videotapes.) But it’s also sweet, funny, and, unusually, well-written. Harris, formerly a stand-up comic, cracks jokes constantly but does it with such a straight face that it quickly comes to feel like he’s just reporting the contents of his head, at which point it’s charming.

His little narrative hops into the future knit it all together, making it satisfying in the way that reading your own journal from a period you’ve forgotten is. They also make Prisoner Of Trebekistan slide in right next to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on my mental shelf, a pretty good place for a book to be. Non-linearity is a somewhat adventurous technique for a writer, and I appreciate it just for that, but it’s also the real texture of memory for me. Harris hops from one notional place to another along lines you’d choose yourself and along lines you wouldn’t, reinforcing a Jeopardy-backed moral: The world is a web of facts, and even the things “everybody knows” change their meaning depending on what order you learn them in.

And here’s the thing: I finished Word Freak wanting to play more Scrabble; I finished Prisoner wanting to live a bolder, more charitable, more spirited life. Harris’ life lessons don’t feel like a stretch, they feel like his motivation for writing the book in the first place.

I mean, you should take my praise with a grain of salt because I’m in a pretty sunny mood right now. But I think that the book put me there.

John Vanderslice’s “Exodus Damage” struck a chord with me that few other artistic reactions to September 11 have, largely because of the lines “Tell me now / I must confess I’m not / I’m not sick enough to guess”. While I like Emerald City a lot in small doses, I do think that in the terms of that one lyric he’s gotten sicker, and it makes me uncomfortable.

Admittedly, he and his narrators seem self-aware about their fixation on 9/11/2001, carrying around steel dust from the wreckage in a little vial, or staying in to stare at a particular Tarot card: the tower struck by lightning (known in some older decks as “the house of God”). But while you mull over the image yourself, consider that in album opener “Kookaburra”, lightning is the symbolic source of all life. As he says in a later song, he can see both sides.

The reason I get uneasy here is that Vanderslice savors bad things happening to people a little too much. The aversion to macho staring-into-the-void that I heard in “Exodus Damage” turns out not to be there, or at least not to have kept him from writing TWO songs about people being kidnapped and murdered; “White Dove” (about a child, no explicit connection to September 11) and Japanese bonus track “Mother Of All Dead Time Factories” (written, chillingly, from the perspective of a Daniel Pearl-like captive at the moment that he’s about to be killed).

I think I get it, though. Vanderslice’s overarching concern here is to understand, to look through other people’s eyes. A few years ago, just capturing the mindset of someone struck dumb on the day of the attacks was enough of an accomplishment, but now he wants it all: the killer, the victim, the grieving father who turns to drugs and conspiracy theories. I dig the concept, but in practice, Vanderslice is too successful at it for me to keep my mental walls up, and I just don’t have the stomach for much exposure to the results.

Scott Solter’s production work for JV does keep getting better, I’ll give him that. The bubbly clicking on “Numbered Lithograph” and the door-knocking noise on “The Minaret” appealed to me greatly in their alien-ness. A little more ice and distance in the music, and maybe I wouldn’t even mind that the bits of us Vanderslice wants to carve out and put under glass are hard to look at, and harder still to lend out to artists before we were really done with them ourselves.