It is a holy and glorious day, for we have a new Sinead O'Connor album, Theology. It's a two CD set, though it has mostly the same songs on both discs. The "Dublin Sessions" are more minimal, acoustic and intimate. The "London Sessions" on the other hand are fuller orchestrations, with harps and horns and strings and such. Note that there's a special edition for Best Buy with five bonus live recordings.

Listening to both discs, the more fully orchestrated London recordings are mostly way superior, making the Dublin recordings sound like mere demos. The orchestrations are not heavy handed, and Sinead can command an orchestra with that mighty and majestic voice better than almost anyone else going. Going from Dublin to London here, she loses nothing in intimacy but gains quite a bit in groove and dynamics. Heck, she even sells "I Don't Know How to Love Him."

I particularly like "Watcher of Men," one of her more anguished compositions. starting with "Why did I not die at birth?" It also has the virtue of brevity, at just over two and a half minutes in the Dublin (disc 1) version, which is maybe the one song where the Irish version is better than the English recording. Probably the best song here though is "If You Had a Vineyard," a beautiful dramatic Gods-eye lament for the Israelis and Palestinians. The live Best Buy version is particularly nice.

Elder statesman and godfather of punk and new wave Nick Lowe has a new album called At My Age, which would be 58. Generally speaking, Lowe's work has become more emotionally affecting with age. He keeps the wit of his youth, as evidenced by new song titles like "I Trained Her To Love Me." But his work has gradually gained more depth of experience, particularly a world weariness that he could have used when writing stuff like "So It Goes." This gets his music now frequently described as "blue eyed soul," which would not have been an obvious description of Jesus of Cool.

The Beastie Boys are back with their first original all-instrumental album, The Mix Up, which is all Beastie organic jamming - no samples. A dozen years ago, I'd have told you that the Beasties rule. But the bottom totally dropped out with their last album, the 2004 To The 5 Boroughs was absolutely worthless, one of the worst artistic meltdowns from a major artist ever. Thus, I wouldn't expect much from them now. Still, these are the guys who wrote "Sabotage" and "Egg Man," so perhaps pleasant surprises await. Plus, this Zappa looking montage may be their coolest album cover, so they get at least a point or two for that.