Quick comments on a handful of the CD's I've been listening to while undoing the poor aesthetic choices of our new house's previous owners:

• Bowling for Soup, Drunk Enough to Dance. There's probably a specific term for the sort of loud and slightly juvenile songs about relationships that these guys do, but I'm not up on power-pop subcultures at the moment. I picked this up because the single "The Girl All the Bad Guys Want" is the sort of great high-school loser song that I really enjoy. I particularly like the lyric "She broke my heart, I wanna be sedated/ All I wanted was to see her naked," for its implication that this was a perfectly reasonable hope cruelly denied... Happily, the rest of the album is good, too.

• OK Go, OK Go. More obnoxious power pop, with more synthesizers than have been cool since 1986 or so. More sneering than plaintive, but still a fun record.

• Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Last DJ. Tom Petty is pissed off at how much the music business, and specifically commercial radio sucks these days. So am I, and there's plenty to be pissed about. Unfortunately, it doesn't make for a great concept album. "Have Love, Will Travel" is a very good song, and there are a couple of other good points, but on the whole, it's too strident to be a great record.

• The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battle the Pink Robots. These guys are just weird enough to make the concept album thing work. Insofar as this is a concept album, anyway. Actually, I'm not sure what the hell it's about, but it's great, in a slightly trippy, ear-wormy sort of way. Also, "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell" is a great song title. Another disc that Kate doesn't like, because just speaking any of the lyrics to "Do You Realize??" is enough to get the song stuck in her head.

• The Blind Boys of Alabama, Higher Ground. What religious inclinations I have are Roman Catholic in direction, which is sort of a pity, because the Protestants got all the good music. A few traditional songs, a few new spirituals, a few odd covers, all in the same basic style as the three old guys in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. It's good stuff-- not everyday listening, maybe, but sort of soothing when you're discovering the umpteenth gaping hole in the wall that needs patching.

• Steely Dan, A Decade of Steely Dan. While they're unquestionably the best band ever named after a sex toy in a William Burroughs novel, I never got into these guys, back in the day. Probably because it was the Eighties, and they somehow came across as being inherently of the Seventies, and we hated the Seventies. There are some damn fine songs here, though.

• The Beatles, Revolver. I finally got around to buying this one, after years of hearing it praised in music magazines, general pop-culture venues, and weblog comment threads (my previous exposure to the early Beatles having been limited to my parents' copy of the "Red Album" best-of). It's amazing how many great songs there are on this-- these guys were astoundingly talented. I'm not sure it makes the "perfect album" cut, but it's certainly a great record.