Before we get started with today’s gawping at an artist stumbling out of mothballs, I’d like you to do me a favor. I want you to look back at your life and think about the times you’re most nostalgic for — those golden moments when, even if you didn’t fully appreciate it (and let’s face it, you probably didn’t), the world was a little simpler, a little kinder, and filled with possibilities that seemed a little brighter.

Feels a little bittersweet looking back now, doesn’t it?

Well, buck up, Tiger, and pat yourself on the back, because as much as you might wish you could recapture the glory days of your frittered youth, you can at least take comfort in knowing you’ve never recorded an album whose sole purpose is to sound exactly like the one you made 20 years ago. Unless you’re one of the Nelson brothers, in which case we’re here to talk about your new release, the hopefully titled Lightning Strikes Twice.

Cruel as that last sentence may sound, I’m really not here to bury Nelson. I turned 16 in May of 1990, right around the time the twins first bathed the pop charts in all their blond, well-muscled glory, and I will freely cop to playing the fuck out of my cassingle copy of their smash hit, “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection),” all summer long, as well as, to a somewhat lesser extent, their full-length debut, After the Rain. Like the Bee Gees, only better-looking and without that one brother in the hat who hardly ever sang (His name was Maurice and you know it. Stop being mean. –Ed.), Nelson offered huge hooks and eerily tight harmonies during a time when the youth of our nation badly needed them.

But what Nelson couldn’t have known — what none of us truly understood — was just how quickly the world would grow numb to their hawk-nosed, androgynous splendor. At the time, taking a pair of twins with womanly manes, dressing them in phony Native American garb, and sending them into the studio to record politely loud, supremely polished rock anthems about fallin’ in love and breakin’ up and stuff seemed like the failsafe breakthrough the music industry had been praying for. Alas.

I’ll share a brief personal story to demonstrate how quickly Nelson’s star faded. As I mentioned, when “(Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection” was released, my friends and I played it nonstop, and we listened to After the Rain throughout the summer. But when Nelson came to town in August — August! — and we somehow ended up with eight free tickets to the show, we all just kind of shrugged and decided to find something else to do.

Fickle fame, thy surname is Nelson.

Of course, radio being what it is, “Love and Affection” didn’t hit the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 until September, and After the Rain kept churning out singles until the following spring, when “More Than Ever” reached the Top 20. Nelson, meanwhile, headed back into the studio to record their follow-up, where they inadvertently discovered the surprisingly simple formula for a five-year gap between your first and second albums. Here it is:

1. Record a concept album.
2. Call it Imaginator.
3. Play it for your label.

Nelson was next heard from in 1995, when their sophomore release, Because They Can, reached stores with a pair of wig-bedecked William Wegman dogs on the front cover. The end.

Well, in America, anyway. But they still had plenty of fans in other parts of the world, so they hunkered down, started their own label, and released a flurry of albums between 1996 and 2000 (including Imaginator — take that, Geffen!), as well as starring (sort of, I guess) in the Nelson: Rock & Roll Detectives cartoon series. Over the years, the Nelson brothers have plugged along doggedly, performing on cruise ships, at Disney World, on tribute tours for their dad — pretty much anywhere they could get a gig — and that down-to-earth work ethic, coupled with the fact that they seem like genuinely nice guys (and the fact that “Love and Affection” is still 1,990% awesome), has ensured that while they may have been a flash in the pan, they’re remembered more fondly than, say, Color Me Badd.

But I guess that wasn’t good enough, because as the 20th anniversary of After the Rain‘s release rolled around, Nelson got busy writing and recording Lightning Strikes Twice, a 12-song time machine that apes the sound of the era as convincingly as anything I’ve ever heard. This album is stuffed with all the sonic gewgaws that made the AOR of the late ’80s and early ’90s so special: stacks of shiny guitars (chorused leads! Glistening acoustics! Crunchy rhythms!), whorls of hairsprayed harmonies, flanged drums, and well-timed cries of “whoo!” And as an added benefit, the lyrics are still all about fallin’ in love and breakin’ up and stuff. The brothers might look a little more tired than they did 20 years ago, but they sound exactly the same:

Like an asshole, I went back and listened to After the Rain again, so I could point out all the ways Lightning Strikes Twice emulates it while falling slightly short in the songwriting department, only to discover that Lightning is actually a better album. So what we have here, in a sort of brain-exploding twist of fate, are a couple of guys who waited until 2010 to make a better 1990 album than the one they originally recorded in 1990. The mastering is probably a little too bright, but in the exceedingly shrill context of everything else these days, that’s a relatively minor complaint; what matters is that the songs are punchier and more consistent — and there aren’t any instrumental interludes bogging things down between all the melodic rockin’.

How did this happen? Why did it happen? Who does it help? When you’re comparing albums on a scale that starts with Nelson’s After the Rain, does anyone win? I don’t have the answers to any of these questions. I’m just one befuddled man, caught between twins who won’t stop doing that ’80s rock guy dance while playing guitar and singing in flawless harmony. All I can do is sit here and wait for Color Me Badd to make a sequel to C.M.B.

I’m sure there are plenty of places that people would love to hear Phil Collins go back to. Sitting behind Peter Gabriel in a reunited Genesis, maybe. Or back to Brand X. Back to obscurity, even. But back to the studio to record dozens of Motown and ‘60s soul classics? That couldn’t have been high on the list.

And yet here we are with Going Back, Phil’s latest and laziest solo album. Shockingly, despite his omnipresence on the radio during the ‘80s, this is only the eighth Collins solo album — and it comes a whopping eight years after his last release, Testify. Like a number of unimaginably wealthy rock stars his age, Phil has lost his will to create; he knows he’s never going to be as popular as he was at his peak, and although he seems just fine with that, he isn’t willing to record new music just so the public can ignore it. (He’s also falling apart — a lifetime at the drum kit has left him with a surgically repaired back, and hands that can’t grip the drumsticks.)

So what’s a guy left to do with his recording career if he can’t be bothered to record new stuff? Well, if he’s Phil Collins, he rounds up a crowd of top-shelf studio musicians (including Funk Brothers Eddie Willis and Bob Babbitt) and rolls tape on one of the most slavishly faithful covers albums ever made. Collins has said it was his “intention to make an ‘old’ record, not a ‘new’ record,” and he’s succeeded on that front — though some of these recordings, particularly the ballads, sound AC radio-ready, much of Going Back sounds like Phil Collins singing along with a Motown greatest hits CD in his bedroom. “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Going to a Go-Go,” “Heat Wave,” “Take Me in Your Arms”…they’re all here. And more.

As a creative exercise, in other words, Going Back doesn’t even exist. It isn’t that Collins wasn’t trying to bring anything new to these songs — he was actively trying not to add his stamp. He just wanted to have a karaoke party, and if Atlantic Records was willing to cut him a check for the privilege of trying to sell it to his remaining fans, so much the better. On the surface, Going Back is exactly the kind of album I love to hate.

And yet.

I turned 36 this year, which means I’ve spent more than a quarter of a century as a devoted music fanatic. Somewhere around eight or nine years old, I caught the bug, and ever since, I’ve devoted countless hours (and dollars) to the pursuit of that magical neural rush that comes with musical discovery. There are plenty of albums I’ve returned to over the years, and I love them too, but there’s nothing like hearing something wonderful for the first time. That’s a big part of why I love writing about music — I spend 99 percent of my listening time absorbing new stuff, and it still excites me.

This year, though, for the first time, I noticed a huge jump in the level of comfort I take from going back to the records I loved as a kid. And I was a Top 40-loving child of the ‘80s, too, so these aren’t exactly classic albums we’re talking about — but at a certain point, I think every music lover gets locked in nostalgia’s orbit, and although I’m always sort of shocked to find myself setting my media player’s filter for the mid-to-late ‘80s and hitting “random”…I’m never really surprised.

All of which is to say that I understand why Phil Collins wanted to record Going Back, and if someone came along and offered to give me a pile of money to perform the songs I loved as a kid, I’d absolutely take them up on it. They wouldn’t be as closely Xeroxed as Phil’s, but again, I understand the motivation; I understand the nostalgic craving to wrap yourself in memories and tunnel back to simpler times. And I can appreciate the impeccable musicianship that went into these performances, as well as the level of insane dedication that led Collins to tape drumsticks to his hands just so he could play along with the band.

I’m conflicted about Going Back, honestly. Is it a hollow record? I think it is. Yet I don’t think it’s possible to play these tracks without hearing the bittersweet echo of the love of music that led the younger, more driven Collins to omnimegasuperstardom in the first place. It’s a weird record, one whose arrangements evoke the originals even as Collins’ vocals remind you of his “You Can’t Hurry Love” and “Groovy Kind of Love” pantomimes, and I can’t say I’d recommend buying it; if you’re really into these songs, you should stick with the originals, and I think Collins would agree. But all the same, if you do find it necessary to buy Going Back (or the Deluxe or Ultimate editions), I can’t imagine you’ll be disappointed. It’s an album that does precisely what it sets out to do, and every minute of it reverberates with Collins’ love for the material. There’s something to be said for that.

Coming up with a great band name is hard. I’ve tried it enough times, and been around enough people as they tried to do it, to know that it might be an even bigger pain in the ass than writing a great song. The temptation can be great to just give up and pick something goofy to get it over with.

You never know, though — that name could end up sticking with you for years. If John Rzeznik had known he’d be saying “thank you, good night, we are the Goo Goo Dolls” every night as a 44-year-old man, I have to think he would have done things differently. Another fine example of this principle in action is Nu Shooz, the Grammy-nominated pop duo whose name, and whose sound, made perfect sense in 1986 — and then instantly fell out of style.

Everything about Nu Shooz, from their name to their totally synth-dependent records, exuded a very ‘80s air of impermanence, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise when they lost their deal and disappeared in the early ‘90s. Like T’Pau, Haysi Fantayzee, or Robbie Nevil, they had a name that shouted “too silly to last.” Here’s the thing, though: they made fun, slightly goofy pop music, but Nu Shooz (a.k.a. the husband-and-wife team of John Smith and Valerie Day) wrote some solid songs underneath all that plastic noise, and even if the Top 40 didn’t want them anymore, that didn’t mean they were going to stop making music.

Success is hard to find, though, and after 20 years or so, the temptation to trade in on your past triumphs can be pretty difficult to resist. They’ve been fixtures in the Portland, Oregon music scene for decades, but Smith and Day have never done anything that approached the level of popularity Nu Shooz enjoyed. The insatiable ‘80s nostalgia market has given us reunion tours and new music from plenty of bands we’d long since left for dead. Why not these guys?

Enter the Nu Shooz Orchestra.

Despite the implications of the name, the NSO doesn’t perform symphonic reworkings of Nu Shooz’s ‘80s material, or synth-pop renditions of orchestral favorites — not that both of those ideas wouldn’t hold a certain daffy appeal. No, what Day and Smith are into now is good old-fashioned dinner theater music — smart, subtle, and jazzy, not unlike the kind of thing Nu Shooz’s fellow ‘80s refugees in Swing Out Sister have been doing for years.

It isn’t a bad idea, really. Before making new music under the Nu Shooz banner, Smith and Day had to decide whether to embrace their old sound or trying to bring it up to date somehow; by going the jazz combo route — and by taking their music further into the past, they’ve avoided the pitfalls of either option. And the Nu Shooz Orchestra isn’t some chintzy home studio affair, either; it’s a ten-piece combo, with room for woodwinds, horns, and a pair of cellos. Their new album, Pandora’s Box, sounds like a million bucks.

I only wish I could say the same thing about the songs. It’s easy to understand why Day and Smith might have felt like they needed to get away from the synth stutters of their earlier work, but Smith — a.k.a. the songwriting Shoo — seems to have lost interest in the pop hooks that powered those albums. Pandora’s Box is subtle to a fault — an hour and 15 minutes of unbearably mellow sonic wallpaper that takes Day’s still-supple voice, puts it in front of a great-sounding band, and then fails to do much of anything with either.

Then again, Pandora’s snoozy overall vibe might have been by design; it extends to the album’s covers ( “Charade” and “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most”) and infects updated versions of Shooz hits “I Can’t Wait” and “Point of No Return” (the latter cheekily titled [The Return of] Point of No Return”). And given that the whole thing starts off with the languid, six-minute “Welcome to My Daydream,” you can hardly accuse the band of hiding this album’s exceedingly laid-back aesthetic.

Times — and one-hit wonders — change, and it’s hard not to commend Smith and Day for branching out with the Nu Shooz Orchestra and Pandora’s Box. Unfortunately, it’s just as hard to stay awake listening to it. Here’s hoping they bring a few pop hooks the next time they convene the Orchestra — and maybe start a trend in the process. Who’s up for some Cutting Crew Quartet?

For the kids of my generation, Heart was just another source of power ballads — sort of a slightly more hairsprayed and corseted version of Starship or Chicago — and when their jig was up, right around the time 1994′s Desire Walks On came out, it was sort of sad (fewer corsets always are) but also something of a relief (who needs to hear “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” again? Ever?)

The truth of the matter, though, is that Heart was around long before “These Dreams” lit up the request lines; they were, in fact, one of the more entertaining (and groundbreaking) AOR acts of the ’70s. The Runaways received the biopic treatment this year, and they surely deserved it — but if the Runaways broke down the door for women with overdriven amps, Heart took that pungent, unstable fusion of rock & roll plus T&A and turned it into a reliable formula for minting platinum records. Between 1976 and 1980, the band sold more than seven million albums in the U.S. alone, and racked up eight Top 40 singles, including the FM classics “Crazy on You,” “Barracuda,” and “Magic Man.”

Heart’s commercial fortunes took a stumble in the early ’80s, but even during those years of high member turnover and low sales, the band never released anything as crappy as Chicago XIV or Starship’s Nuclear Furniture — and when Ann and Nancy Wilson decided to reinvent Heart as a pop radio hit factory for 1985′s Heart, they remembered to throw in a handful of old-school rockers (like “If Looks Could Kill”) alongside future adult contemporary standards like “What About Love,” “Never,” and “Nothin’ at All.” More importantly, even as they bought hits from outside songwriters like Diane Warren and Kelly & Steinberg, they never stopped writing solid material of their own — something many of their peers forgot.

Nothing lasts forever, though, and by the time Side Two of 1990′s Brigade rolled around, you could kind of tell Ann and Nancy were running out of steam as far as the Heart brand was concerned. They spent the early ’90s dabbling with a side group, the Lovemongers, and closed out the decade on extended hiatus. For a time, Ann even toured without Nancy.

The lure of the nostalgia circuit can be powerful, though, and in 2002, the Wilson sisters returned with a new version of Heart; two years later, they released their twelfth studio album, Jupiter’s Darling. No longer concerned with hits, they made a return of sorts to their old sound, offering a decent-sized chunk of acoustic-based rock & roll nostalgia for the older set. It wasn’t a patch on their older stuff, but it was pleasant, and Diane Warren was nowhere to be found.

Of course, like a lot of would-be comebacks from rock warhorses, Jupiter’s Darling didn’t have much of an audience waiting for it. Plenty of people might be willing to pay a few bucks to see Heart drag out their greatest hits on tour, but there aren’t many left who care about what the band is recording now — which Heart should understand, actually, because their latest album, Red Velvet Car, gives the impression that the band doesn’t care much either.

A collection of solid riffs in search of a few good songs, Red Velvet Car is a miserable 10-song paradox: It presents the Wilsons at their bluesiest and most appealingly stripped-down, but it also contains some of their least interesting material. For the most part, these are sketches instead of songs — the sort of stuff you’d expect from a band that had six months instead of six years to work on an album.

It starts promisingly, with the slinky groove and rattling acoustic guitars of opening track “There You Go,” but despite some fine, bluesy grit, the song doesn’t really go anywhere melodically, and that’s a theme that quickly repeats itself. The second track, “WTF,” boasts a thundering rhythm track, crunchy guitars, and a nice swerving riff in the breakdown, but the melody is a mess; there’s nothing here you’ll remember later. Ditto for “Wheels,” which has plenty of defiant attitude and an appropriately circular riff powering the melody, but never feels like it gets out of (ahem) first gear, and “Death Valley,” a grinding mess that reaffirms the fact that you should never trust a song that begins with the line “I looked outside my window.” (And they’re all better than “Safronia’s Mark,” whose notebook-margin mysticism begs for a flute solo and/or a vocal cameo from Stevie Nicks.)

If the record has a real bright spot, it’s “Hey You,” a pretty, if slight, acoustic stroller that features a warm lead vocal from Nancy and the only sing-along hook you’ll hear on the album. It’s the kind of song that Top 40-chasing rock bands used to tuck in at the end of an album to prove they could still hack it without all that ’80s production — but here, it’s the fifth track, and instead of ending the record with a nice palate cleanser, it serves as a too-brief interlude and a bittersweet reminder of what used to make Heart special. It’s built from quality parts, but — to end on a gag as uninspired as the album — this Red Velvet Car isn’t even worth stealing.

Here’s everything you need to know about the record business in 2010: It contains a not-inconsiderable number of people who thought you needed to hear a Meat Loaf concept album about the visions of a dying soldier who is seeing glimpses of his possible future lives.

Oh, and it’s called Hang Cool Teddy Bear.

And it’s 65 minutes long.

This is what happens when you’re a once-mighty star in a dying industry — people will write you checks just so they can put your name on a piece of product, no matter how asinine it is, in the hopes of refracting one of the last fading rays of your former glory. Of course, the labels have been pumping out shit for as long as there have been labels, but in the old days, they did it because they knew there was so much money in the marketplace that something like Having Fun with Elvis on Stage would turn a profit. These days, they do it because they’re desperate.

In fact, everything about Hang Cool Teddy Bear reeks of desperation, from the album artwork to the frantically overstuffed arrangements of the songs, which scale ever-higher, ever-more-rickety heights of thunderous idiocy in their quest to distract you from the fact that they barely exist. Meat’s voice is shot, which is fitting, because he doesn’t have anything to say.

What he does have is a budget healthy enough to attract plenty of studio ringers, from producer Rob Cavallo (who should have declared a career moratorium on concept albums after American Idiot) to House star Hugh Laurie, who contributes piano to the Kara DioGuardi duet “If I Can’t Have You.” Teddy Bear doesn’t boast the booklet-bloating cast that Meat drafted for Bat Out of Hell III four years ago, but it still includes the talents of a bewildering array of people who should have known better, including bassist Kasim Sulton and ace guitarists Brian May, Steve Vai, and Tim Pierce. Justin Hawkins, the helium-lunged former frontman of the Darkness, added backing vocals and co-wrote some of the songs, but the sense of melody that grounded his flamboyance is gone. About the only name in the liner notes that makes sense is Jack Black, who duets with Loaf on the middle-aged metal shouter “Like a Rose.” He’s a talented singer, but anytime you see his name, you feel like you should laugh, and that’s an improvement over what I felt like doing for most of the rest of the time I listened to Hang Cool Teddy Bear.

Look, it’s a Meat Loaf record. You know what to expect: Loud songs with lots of layers, that go on for longer than they should, with titles that make excessive use of parentheses. But from the opening moments of the first track, “Peace on Earth,” you know something is wrong — it starts off with a series of thudding, slamming noises, like Meat stumbling to the fridge at 3:30 in the morning, before exploding with what sounds like the sound of every session musician in the L.A. metro area. Strings! Guitars! Piano! Pounding drums! Everything but a real melody! It tries hard to replicate old-fashioned Meat Loaf theatrics, with changeups galore, guitar solos that redefine wankery, and bloated gospel shouting, but there’s literally no song to hold all the noise together. Every time the tempo shifts, it feels like you’re listening to someone kick a tape player. And the second track, “Living on the Outside,” gains nothing by being more straightforward; piled high with phony drama, it sounds like Springsteen being done by someone who wants to kill Springsteen. By the time it’s over, you just wish Meat would stop yelling.

But then he does, on “Los Angeloser,” and you remember to be careful what you wish for, because oh God he’s rapping, and there’s scratching and drum machines and a spoken-word breakdown, and the only way the world seems fair is if you hope against hope that Meat wanted this song to be funny and simply ended up missing the mark somewhere along the way.

In contrast, the aforementioned “If I Can’t Have You” is actually enjoyable, in its own limited fashion; it at least has a decent melody, courtesy of DioGuardi and her co-writers, Paul Freeman and Raine Maida. Also, it isn’t over seven minutes long and it doesn’t require Meat’s voice to do any heavy lifting, unlike “Love Is Not Real,” which couldn’t expose the 62-year-old Loaf’s vocals any more cruelly if it pantsed them in church. It’s hard to decide which is worse — that or “Did You Ever Love Somebody,” in which Meat sounds like he’s dying, but not quickly enough.

And on and on it lumbers, a Frankenstein monster of bombast, so bloated beyond sensible length that it makes room for a song as punishingly dumb as “California Isn’t Big Enough for Me,” henceforth known as “the song where Meat Loaf screams ‘I can barely fit my dick in my pants.’” Of all the albums to be an hour and five minutes long, why Hang Cool Teddy Bear? Because Bat Out of Hell has sold more than 40 million copies, that’s why, and no matter how thoroughly Meat’s muse deserts him or how embarrassingly he flails around trying to catch your attention, there’s always going to be someone with money to burn and the knowledge that slapping the Meat Loaf logo on top of a painted album cover will move a few units. With that kind of name value and a steady touring draw, who needs to worry about whether or not the new material is any good? Sometimes, two out of three is pretty fucking awful.

There are only 26 letters in the Western alphabet, and thousands upon thousands of musical acts, so it’s only natural that every once in awhile, a band will end up choosing a name that’s already taken. It can be confusing for fans, but it’s unavoidable. And it’s the explanation I’m choosing for Still Here, a collection of mistakes perpetrated by a group of frauds calling themselves the Temptations.

Okay, so I’m in denial. But hey, you could build an argument against these Temptations, however flimsy — at this point, Otis Williams is the sole remaining member of the group, which has seen a dizzying number of lineup changes over the last 50 years — and although the fact that their current sound bears no resemblance to classic Temps isn’t surprising, it’s still deeply depressing. So I’m going to write about Still Here in this column, and then I’m going to go right back to pretending it was released by a pack of jackals trying to pass themselves off as one of the greatest groups in the history of American music.

Technically, I suppose Still Here doesn’t deserve to be the subject of a You Again? feature, because the Temptations have been recording pretty consistently throughout their five-decade career, and their last effort, the covers collection Back to Front, was only released three years ago. But on the other hand, the group is so far removed from the limelight that each new album is a surprise — I’ve told probably a dozen people about Still Here, and all of them have reacted with astonishment. The band didn’t pick that album title for nothin’.

I should point out that I don’t have any problem with the idea of a new Temptations album in 2010; in fact, I’d love to hear the group’s brilliantly soulful harmonies, hard-charging rhythms, and gorgeous ballads brought into the 21st century. The problem is that, for the most part, the Temptations themselves don’t seem particularly interested in hearing the Temptations. There’s no shortage of harmony, but like a lot of heritage acts, the Temps seem to have gone into Still Here thinking they had to fit into the current R&B scene, and as a result, the record is stuffed with senseless junk like trendy slang, synth bullshit, a rap interlude, and Auto-Tune. (Yes, fucking Auto-Tune! I know!)

Still Here does at least give a half-hearted nod to the band’s rich past as a band capable of moving between social commentary and standard boy/girl fare; the album kicks off with “Change Has Come,” a celebratory call of togetherness inspired by Obama’s election. Which would be awesome if the song didn’t suck so bad — “Big” Bruce Williamson’s lead vocal sounds like the dying struggles of a constipated emphysema patient, the rap cameo on the bridge is embarrassing, and whoever recorded the screeching guitar wanking that was shoved way down in the mix deserves to have his fingers broken.

And then there’s “One of a Kind Lady” and “First Kiss,” which urinate all over the band’s vocal legacy with senseless Auto-Tune (speaking of urinating, the third track, “Let Me Catch Your Diamonds,” begs for an R. Kelly joke). Or how about the awful synth steel drums on “Warm Summer Nights,” which includes the wretched line “Grab your girl/Give her a twirl/Make her feel she’s in another world”? Or, God help us all, what about the first single, “Shawtyismygirlooyeah”?

You read that right. SHAWTY IS MY GIRL OO YEAH. Otis Williams, 68 years old, is dangerously close to being reduced to the rapping grandma in The Wedding Singer.

But it isn’t all bad news. Horrendous title aside, “Shawtyismygirlooyeah” is actually one of the better songs on the album, which settles into a decent, relatively gimmick-free midtempo groove right the eighth track. (Of course, in a better world, Still Here would end at 10 tracks, but whatever.) It never really gets away from that plastic production — I hope I’m wrong, but I think that’s an EWI on “Still Here with Me” — but after the embarrassing fumbles toward relevancy that make up the first part of the album, even mind-numbing filler like “Woman” and “Going Back Home” sounds all right. And Still Here even manages to suggest, once or twice, what a decent Temptations album might sound like in 2010 — most notably with “Soul Music,” which, despite being your garden variety “music used to be so much better” lament, has more honest soul than anything else on the record. There’s also a nifty a cappella tag at the end of “Listen Up” that almost justifies its dreary six-minute-plus length.

A couple of moments do not an album make, however, and after listening to Still Here‘s shoestring production and gazing sadly at its unimaginative cover “art,” you’re left wondering if maybe the buffet circuit isn’t the best place for the Temptations after all. In 1966, they admitted they weren’t too proud to beg; in 2010, they’re still doing it, but with a lot less style. The good news is that those harmonies are still intact — someone get these guys a strong producer and some top-shelf material.

Let’s talk about commitment, hard rock style.

For a lot of the bands who enjoyed success during the genre’s glory years, pop metal wasn’t much more than a means to an end — a convenient way of completing the journey from shitty rehearsal spaces to the top of the charts. If polka had been popular, C.C. DeVille would have strapped on an accordion. If folk ruled the airwaves, Jani Lane would have been blowin’ in the wind. I think this is part of the reason so many of these bands have sounded so flat-footed in the years since Nirvana wrecked their party; though they’re all known for a specific type of music, what they really wanted was to be popular, so they’ve been eager to experiment with variations on that sound, from the power ballads of the late ’80s to the industrial-tinged clatter of nu metal.

Ratt was never the most popular, or the most talented, rock band, but their commitment to the sound and the lifestyle has never been in doubt. They slithered out of the SoCal petri dish as disciples of Van Halen and Aerosmith, with a dash of shred on top, and so they remain — except where VH was always a pop band with a hard rock shell, and Aerosmith cleaned up and threw in with Top 40 song doctors, Ratt has more or less always sounded like the third band on a weekend bill at a grimy Hollywood rock club. It’s sort of telling that the album that featured collaborations with Desmond Child and Diane Warren, 1990′s Detonator, arrived during the epic peak of the band’s substance abuse issues — where other bands took their sharpest shots at pop radio post-sobriety, it took massive amounts of drugs for Ratt to dial down the sleaze.

Except it didn’t work, because without sleaze, Ratt ceases to exist; where bands like Poison and Warrant consist of musicians looking to get rich, get laid, and be adored, Ratt always sounded more like a pack of ravenous hedonists who just happened to have amplifiers. Ratt — and, not coincidentally, hedonism — peaked in 1984, the last year before everyone knew drugs were bad for you and AIDS peeled back the nightmare underneath the sexual revolution. It isn’t hard to imagine, say, Night Ranger wishing they could go back in time to ’84, but that probably has just as much to do with wanting to recapture the zeitgeist as it does with wanting to get back to the music, man. In contrast, I think Ratt was always happy to earn platinum certifications, but they felt more incidental somehow. Put it this way: Bret Michaels wanted you to talk dirty to him. Ratt’s leather-lunged frontman Stephen Pearcy was happy to do all the talking, dirty or otherwise; you just had to shut up and like it.

That level of commitment doesn’t come without costs, and Ratt absorbed them all. They were one of the first pop metal bands to lose their record deal, expunged from the Atlantic roster in ’92. Founding member Robbin Crosby was exiled to rehab, then contracted AIDS, then finally died of a heroin overdose in 2002. They were one of the bands exhumed by John Kalodner (John Kalodner) for his ill-fated Portrait resuscitation in the late ’90s, but their reunion started badly — original bassist Juan Croucier wasn’t involved, much to his consternation — and ended with two versions of Ratt (one led by Pearcy, and one featuring, bizarrely, Jizzy Pearl and John Corabi, who briefly replaced Vince Neil in Motley Crue) duking it out in the clubs and the courtroom.

Ratt’s been a joke for awhile now, in other words, and if you were going to draw up a list of bands who could successfully come back from ugly legal drama and 20 years of near-total recording silence, they wouldn’t even merit a footnote. And yet here they are with Infestation, their seventh album, which tosses a whole bunch of unlikely events into a garbage can, shakes them around for 45 minutes or so, and comes up with a persuasive argument against every trend in popular music over the last 25 years. Infestation asks you: Why did we ever walk away from brown stacks of thin, crunchy guitars, vocalists who sound like they fell asleep with a lit cigarette in their mouth, frantic bass shoved way the hell down in the mix, and drums that sound like a coke fiend slapping a stripper’s ass?

Did I enjoy Ratt’s music when they were popular? I did not. And yet I don’t have a good answer to any of the questions Infestation poses. To listen to it repeatedly is to risk coming away feeling like 1984 represents the incontrivertible peak of Western civilization.

Of course, if you want to really get technical about it, this isn’t a complete Ratt reunion. Crosby is dead, and Croucier remains on the outs, for whatever reason, so original members Pearcy, guitarist Warren DeMartini, and drummer Bobby Blotzer are joined here by ex-Quiet Riot guitarist Carlos Cavazo and former Vince Neil bassist Robbie Crane. (Crane, it should be pointed out, joined Ratt in 1996, which leaves him with more tenure then Croucier, and bass in general has always been fairly incidental to this style of music; still, time served isn’t always as important as simple nostalgia. Just ask Jason Scheff.) Membership shuffles aside, Infestation certainly sounds like Ratt, and not just because Pearcy and DeMartini’s distinctive styles are present and accounted for. What I’m talking about here is more crucial, and so much harder to capture. It’s vibe.

A number of the other bands I’ve mentioned here have tried going back to their “classic” sound, often with “classic” lineups intact, but it almost always sounds like a calculated effort. It’s an approximation of an outdated style, with an ugly meta layer on top — old guys, acknowledging that their best days are behind them, giving up on creativity and making a nod-and-a-wink deal with the remnants of their once-mighty fanbases in which everyone pretends nothing ever changed. Plenty of things have changed for Ratt; plenty of important things. But what hasn’t changed — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — is their commitment. It’s a commitment to the retarded and the obscene, but that’s rock ‘n’ roll, and no matter how much it might boggle the mind to think that Ratt understands this better than their peers, there’s no getting around the fetid blast of ridiculous, sleazy fun that is Infestation. The only thing that’s missing is a half-naked model on the cover. Maybe, after the next round of breakups and lawsuits, they can revive that tradition, too.

Shit.

At first blush, the idea of a new Neil Sedaka album in 2010 might seem like some kind of joke. I mean, this is a guy who would have been eligible for the You Again? treatment in 1975, when Elton John, for no apparent reason other than to prove he was the biggest star in the universe and could do anything he wanted, brought Sedaka out of mothballs and helped him score his first hits since the early ’60s. The mid ’70s were huge for Sedaka — he was all over the radio, both as a performer (“Laughter in the Rain,” “Bad Blood”) and a songwriter (“Love Will Keep Us Together”) — but his comeback was blessedly brief, and he’s been pretty quiet since then. Until he popped up on American Idol a few years ago, his highest-profile project of the 21st century was Brighton Beach Memories: Neil Sedaka Sings Yiddish.

If you think about it for a minute, though, it makes perfect sense for Sedaka to resurface now. Barry Manilow’s Greatest Hits of the Fifties reached Number One on the Billboard album charts in 2006 (followed by #2, #4, and #14 bows for its ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s sequels). Neil Diamond topped the charts with Home Before Dark in 2008. And Barbra Streisand hit Number One last year with her most recent album, Love Is the Answer. Clearly, old people be buyin’ records, so why shouldn’t 70-year-old Neil get in on the action?

Here, my friends, is the reason why. It’s called The Music of My Life, and it makes clear that as far as AARP-certified pop stars go, Neil Sedaka isn’t even in shouting distance of Barry, Barbra, and Diamond. Those artists are all priorities at their labels, for one thing, and enjoy the superstar-sized recording budgets that go with the territory — and Diamond has the added benefit of being able to use Rick Rubin’s magical beard hairs to fly, Dumbo-style, up the charts. Sedaka, meanwhile, has licensed The Music of My Life to Razor & Tie, the label that gave us Monster Ballads and the Kidz Bop series, and it sounds like it was recorded with half of whatever Streisand spent on croissants while recording Love Is the Answer. (The keyboards, in particular, seem to have been borrowed from Daryl Dragon.)

I’ll say this much for Neil Sedaka: For a singer you probably thought died 25 years ago, he’s in remarkably fine voice, which is to say he still sounds like the same penny-loafered gelding he did in 1962. On the other hand, he apparently believes this is his strongest set of songs, which is a clear indication that someone should have wrested power of attorney from him years ago.

Sedaka at least has the courtesy to let you know what you’re in for right away — he kicks things off with “Do You Remember,” a Latin-flavored horror show that finds Sedaka leading his Casio army south of the border for the greatest bilingual tragedy since Mellow Man Ace’s The Brother with Two Tongues. From there, he dabbles in a little pale funk (“A Fool in Love”), pays a visit to the over-60 hookah lounge for some Cairo-by-way-of-Dubuque balladry (“Living in a Fantasy”) and clones himself for a few minutes of inoffensive doo-wop (“Right or Wrong”). You get the idea — it’s all vintage Sedaka, which is to say it’s immaculately pressed, very well-mannered, and ultimately a little creepy. Even when he’s singing about drinking himself into a post-breakup stupor in “Bringing Me Back to Life,” Sedaka sounds like he’s smiling on a dinner theater stage. Actually, he sounds a lot like Bob McGrath from Sesame Street, except Bob has the good sense to sing about topics that are appropriate for old men with perfect diction and a healthy vibrato, such as the letters of the alphabet and being proud of remembering how to count.

Of course, Sedaka’s squareness has always been a big part of his appeal, and there might be millions of rock-shy senior citizens just waiting to shuffle on over to Best Buy and buy a copy of The Music of My Life — stranger things have happened, particularly in Britain, where Tony Christie’s cover of Sedaka’s “Is This the Way to Amarillo” is apparently the top-selling single of the 21st century. (And stranger yet: He’s already debuted his next project, a classical symphony, and a Broadway musical based on his songs has been in development for years.) I have to believe, though, that the type of listener who seeks out Sedaka’s brand of corny escapism is probably looking for something that sounds like it was created with good old-fashioned production values — a la Barry and Barbra — rather than a chintzy album whose cover seems to depict a desperately jaunty man who knows his next car ride will be a surprise trip to an assisted living facility. This might be the music of Neil’s life, but I sincerely doubt it’s yours.

The American music industry has never been particularly interested in — or good at — pursuing slow, sustainable growth models. Americans in general are obsessed with speed, and that’s reflected in our rock folklore — from Elvis striking God’s perfect chord during his first Sun Studios take to Taylor Swift writing hit songs while she was still in high school, we love a fast, out-of-nowhere success story on the pop charts. There’s a whole world outside the spotlight, however, and even though it doesn’t seem to happen as often as it used to, the major labels have occasionally functioned as impatient and/or semi-unwilling incubators for artists who, for one reason or another, take a little extra time to achieve mainstream success.

Like, say, Kansas.

Needlepoint violin solos aside, pretty much everything about Kansas is slow. The first of the band’s many lineups formed in 1970, but it was 1974 before they got around to recording an album, which flopped, as did the two that followed. It wasn’t until their fourth album, 1976′s Leftoverture, that Kansas was able to claw a toehold in the marketplace — and by 1982, when original singer Steve Walsh took a hike and the band briefly morphed into a terrifying CCM/prog hybrid, they had already slid back into commercial irrelevancy. Kansas’ last major label release, In the Spirit of Things, came out in 1988, and their last overall studio effort, Somewhere to Elsewhere, was released almost ten years ago.

While contemporaries like Boston, Styx, and REO Speedwagon managed to retain various degrees of dignity during their commercial dotage, Kansas has given off a sad, flat-footed vibe for the last 25 years or so — Walsh’s departure kicked off an era of multiple breakups, grimy club tours, and long silences punctuated by bargain-priced archival live albums. During the mid ’90s, Kansas attempted a comeback with Freaks of Nature, an album recorded for Intersound, a label widely believed to be a Mafia tax shelter; three years later, they were recording live symphonic covers of their greatest hits for another shady indie outfit, River North. During an interview to promote 2002′s live CD/DVD project Device – Voice – Drum, drummer Phil Ehart admitted that the band had been dumped by not only its last label (prog champions Magna Carta), but its booking agent — a horribly galling admission for a band with evergreen AOR hits in a touring marketplace that always has room for everyone from Air Supply to whatever jiveass live package Alan Parsons happens to be peddling.

But still, Kansas perseveres; according to their website, they were on the road more or less continuously throughout 2009, they’ve recently spun off a Walsh-less satellite group called Native Window, and they’ve teamed up with a hokey-sounding outfit called StarCity Productions to celebrate their 35th anniversary as a recording group with their recently released seventh live album, There’s Know Place Like Home.

I’ve had a long and contentious relationship with Kansas’ music, starting with a series of disappointing encounters with their hit records during my early adolescence. As much as Kansas fans might beg to differ, I’m not sure there’s a classic rock band whose album covers and song titles did a poorer job of delivering what they promised. I mean, Leftoverture? When you’re 14, that title is just about as clever as clever gets, and when you toss in an intricate painting of a beleagured Medieval priest on the cover — and awesome song titles like “Father Padilla Meets the Perfect Gnat” — you’ve got the makings of a kickass rock record with a sense of humor and plenty of quirk. It was all just a ruse, though — a cunning attempt to trick ’70s youth into buying one more album full of bloated showoff musical arrangements and desperately earnest, soul-searching lyrics. Still, there was a certain fire in the belly of those early albums, and the band did a better job than most of blending its hairy prog roots with radio-ready pop songcraft: the “Carry On Wayward Son” single edit is the proggiest 3:30 that’s ever brushed the Billboard Top 10. They may not have been as much fun as Boston (those motherfuckers put a spaceship on the cover of their first album, and they made you feel like you were on one), but they didn’t seem like they’d ever tumble below Night Ranger on the list of marketable touring acts.

Needless to say, I approached There’s Know Place Like Home with no small amount of trepidation, even after reading that the band was joined by original guitarist Kerry Livgren (who left in 1984 after finding Jesus) and Livgren’s original replacement, Steve Morse (whose second-tier classic rock trifecta is rounded out with memberships in the Dixie Dregs and Deep Purple), plus an orchestra. To begin with, despite the tie-in with the band’s name, I can think of few things more depressing than celebrating any kind of anniversary in Topeka, where Know Place was recorded; for another thing, it’s hard to imagine the point of yet another Kansas live release, regardless of the marketing hook. At bottom, this is just product.

I have to say, though — as far as product goes, this really isn’t that bad. It’s true that Steve Walsh’s vocals aren’t what they used to be, but the man is 58; aside from Sammy Hagar, who drinks unicorn blood before every show, I can’t think of any singer physically capable of handling such demanding material over such a prolonged period — and anyway, he sounds a fair sight better than he did on 1992′s Live at the Whisky, and the band’s sound is every bit as tight as you’d expect from a pack of grizzled old road dogs.

The set list should also be commended. Dock a few points for the inclusion of the umpteenth live versions of “Carry On Wayward Son” and “Dust in the Wind,” but both of those were pretty much a given, and Kansas deserves credit for packing its history into a 14-song set that draws from albums both old (set opener “Belexes” comes from 1974′s Kansas) and not as old (Somewhere to Elsewhere gets a nod with “Icarus II”). Even the band’s soggy ’80s output gets a nod — “Hold On,” “Fight Fire with Fire,” “Musicatto,” and “Ghosts/Rainmaker” are all tracks that most bands of Kansas’ vintage would probably rather just leave in mothballs. It all looks and sounds depressingly small for the 35th anniversary party of a band that has sold as many albums as Kansas, but even that’s kind of fitting; this is a band that, for all its prog pomp and spectacle, has always had a blue-collar heart.

That being said, there probably isn’t a person on the planet who needs to own There’s Know Place Like Home. I found it oddly interesting chiefly because I hadn’t listened to a Kansas album since Freaks of Nature, but anyone who’s following the band at this point has probably seen them live multiple times, and probably owns multiple live albums, and this doesn’t add anything truly essential to the catalog. It does offer you the chance to see the ’09 version of Kansas in hi-def, via a separately sold Blu-ray, but that actually sounds sort of scary; this is a band so allergic to the camera that its label hired Richard Belzer to star in one of its videos — and that was 20 years ago. And why would Kansas want to muck around with Blu-ray, anyway? If Know Place drives anything home, it’s that the biggest part of this band’s charm (limited as it might be, in my opinion) is the way it’s managed to ground prog’s silly flights of fancy to iconography and subject matter that feels time-tested and solidly real. You know, the slow stuff, like rusty threshers, wheat fields, and quill-wielding priests. In a plastic-driven industry obsessed with whatever comes next, and a genre largely preoccupied with crap like faeries and armadillo tanks, that’s pretty admirable, isn’t it?

If Kip Winger hadn’t been around to make music in the ’80s, someone would have had to invent him.

Prettier than Lita Ford, with teeth whiter than Utah, the most perfect hard rock name not ending in “Dokken,” and a gift for the kind of leering lasciviousness that sounds about as dangerous as milk (and sounds great on the radio besides), Winger entered the charts in 1988 like Wilt Chamberlain joining the NBA in 1959 — in other words, with so many unfair natural advantages that they should have created an entirely new league. Seriously, “Seventeen”? Winger was like a meticulously stubbled, hair metal version of Chuck Berry, reducing rock & roll to its key thematic components (specifically, young girls and the gross older dudes who love them) while still allowing room for a little flash. His music bore the strong scent of Velveeta, but people have been buying that shit since 1918. Other bands might have made double entendres more successfully (see: “Cherry Pie”), but none of them had the same combination of pop-grounded metal and cheerleader good looks (see: any picture of Jani Lane). If he had played his cards right, Winger could have been one of the all-time legends.

But noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Like a lot of people who are really great at one thing, Kip Winger always seemed to be focused on doing something else. When listening to his band’s first two albums, 1988′s Winger and 1990′s Winger II: In the Heart of the Young, I was always reminded of Bill Murray in The Razor’s Edge, because they all delivered the same kind of senseless dissatisfaction derived from watching an entertainer struggle to do something besides entertain. Winger could come up with awesome hornball anthems like “Can’t Get Enough” in his sleep, and he had a way with the power ballad, as evidenced by “Miles Away” and “Headed for a Heartbreak,” but he was more interested in vaguely proggish crap like “Rainbow in the Rose.” And when grunge came to town, Winger was one of the first to abandon his strengths, loading up 1993′s Pull with songs that suggested his idea of rocking really hard was stringing together unrelated words (“Blind Revolution Mad,” “Down Incognito,” “Junkyard Dog [Tears on Stone]“). It was, to cop a phrase from my dear friend Jack Feerick, a bit sad, really.

The ’90s were terribly unkind to Winger. Not only was his band reduced to the butt of a Mike Judge gag, but his wife was killed in a 1996 car crash, and he spent the latter part of the decade releasing understandably morose-sounding records on various tiny labels while making a few extra bucks by popping up on the seemingly endless series of Cleopatra “tribute” records that helps guys like George Lynch and Steven Pearcy cover the rent during lean months. During the late ’90s, when everyone from Night Ranger to Great White was scoring deals with CMC, Portrait, and Castle, Winger stayed un-reunited, and I always thought that was for the best; the only way hair metal isn’t embarrassing for the artist and the listener is if it’s being performed with a heavy dose of irony (a la Poison after 1993) or by people who are too young to have seen Ratt on its first tour (a la Hinder). Winger took his music too seriously for the former and he was too old for the latter, and you just knew if the band got back together, he’d pen something that sounded nothing like “Seventeen” — like, say, a song cycle about American troops, which is what he did when he finally got the band back together for 2006′s Winger IV.

Well, give Winger credit, because he had the good sense to head back to his wheelhouse for the band’s new album, Karma. Much as I’ve joked about “Seventeen” being the ultimate Winger song, there’s no getting around the fact that a 48-year-old man has no business singing about sex with underage girls (not that anyone does, really, but you get the idea). To avoid unintentional comedy — or the tedium of Winger IV — the band had to take Kip’s most successful themes (wild women, hard living, hard-living wild women) and bring them into early middle age, which is kind of like building a time machine — it’s damn near impossible, and even if you can do it, the risks far outweigh the benefits.

And yet here with are with Karma, which is — and I realize I’m damning with faint praise here — the most consistent set of songs Winger has recorded. Though it lacks the delirious sugar highs of a “Seventeen” or “Can’t Get Enough,” it’s devoid of any numbing lows, and also, it doesn’t contain any dreadful Hendrix covers, with is always a bonus. At a lean ten songs and 45 minutes, it incorporates the goofy, punch-brained rock & roll you want to hear in a Winger record (opening track “Deal with the Devil” is 2:59), while also making room for a couple of the grandiose epics he wedges into every album (“Supernova” and “Witness” both top six minutes). Setting aside the inherent foolishness of a man who’s pushing 50 screaming about a girl who’s a “stone cold killer,” Karma packages most of the band’s strengths and manages to avoid its weaknesses. In all seriousness, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard an ’80s hair metal band update its sound this successfully. Of course, I’m not sure that’s something I needed to hear; even if it’s Winger’s most consistent set of songs, it can’t help but be a little less fun than their first two albums. You might appreciate the, ahem, compositional depth of these tracks, but I don’t think any of them will prompt reflexive devil horns and wagging tongues; it’s more likely that they’ll just make you want to listen to Winger or In the Heart of the Young. Which is a pretty incredible trick, when you think about it.