On the record 33 1/3 makes a rock canon BY MIKE MILIARD

Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series is the sort of great idea you can’t believe hasn’t been done before: enlist critics and musicians to write chapbook-length meditations on their favorite albums, setting the scene for the works’ conception, probing the particulars of their creation, delving into every track, and, especially, enlivening criticism with the writers’ own personal connections to the music.

The first six books in the series rolled out last October, among them titles by Boston-related folks like former Del Fuego Warren Zanes (Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis) and the Pernice Brothers’ Joe Pernice (the Smith’s Meat Is Murder). The five most recent titles (many more are due in the coming months) further attest to how great critical writing can be when it’s not just intellectual and emotional but experiential — re-creating the long, hard slog of an artist’s studio session or capturing the visceral punch of a song played good and loud.

JOY DIVISION’S DEBUT, Unknown Pleasures, appeared in 1979, black and cryptic and seemingly out of nowhere (a little like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Chris Ott writes about the record with a chilly elegance that evokes the austerity of the music itself. The book first took shape as an essay for Pitchforkmedia.com, where Ott is a staff writer. Here, he expands his purview considerably — in fact, the book reads almost like a truncated Joy Division biography, from their callow beginnings as the Stiff Kittens, singing "thuggish Motörhead/Sex Pistols hybrids," through their quick and improbable ascent and on to singer Ian Curtis’s suicide.

Of course, discussions of Factory Records and the band’s flirtations with Nazi imagery and Curtis’s debilitating epilepsy offer necessary context. But Ott’s real insights come when he sticks to the music, as when he says the chorus of the early single "Digital" "harks back to classic Stax tracks, like the slow, steady burn of a Sam & Dave chorus." And though Ott indulges in some armchair psychoanalysis as he probes Curtis’s fractured mind, in the end, the book suffers some because he seems to skirt his own connection to the music. As a postscript, he lists a discography of the records playing as he wrote. All the bands you might suspect a post-punk fan to love (Durutti Column, the Fall) are there — but not Joy Division.

As guitarist for the Only Ones, John Perry played in a post-punk band. That might seem to make him an odd choice to write about Jimi Hendrix — especially an expansive mind-melting gatefold like Electric Ladyland. But the author’s relationship with the erotic, acid-gobbling godhead dates back to Perry’s days as a 14-year-old "bedroom guitarist" whose friend asks whether he wants to go see "some American bloke play with his teeth." Perry pondered: "Was it worth risking a valuable Monday evening on some unknown American guitarist when I could be throwing stones, up at the disused airfield we disputed with hill-tribes from the council estates behind it?"

That type of winsome anecdote enlivens what otherwise would be an engaging but fairly straightforward account of the album’s painstaking recording, one woven from interviews with engineers, musicians, and sundry hangers-on who were there as Hendrix burned the midnight lamp in long, arduous sessions. Fortunately, Perry is an astute critic and someone who, as a musician, gives credibility to his commentary on the studio process. Best, he brings a fan’s fervor to his revivification of a significant moment in Hendrix’s three-plus year recording career — an apex of an album, where he "reached full artistic maturity . . . emerging as a musician/writer fully capable of directing every stage of the recording process from first demos to final mixes."

In contrast, Time Out New York music editor Elisabeth Vincentelli writes about a record that was a posthumous capstone to a band’s career, Abba’s Gold. She admits from the start that the buoyant blonds "incarnated a dated decade, a dated look and a dated type of pop." "Not only did they not ‘rock,’ " she admits, "but there was the issue of the band members’ utter Swedishness."

Then there’s the fact that Gold is (gulp) a compilation. Although Vincentelli understands the argument that "acknowledging that your favorite band’s most important album is a compilation somehow casts a pall on the band itself," she disagrees. Abba, after all, were the quintessence of a singles band. Moreover, she says, upon its release in 1992, Gold "single-handedly retooled the band’s image and symbolized the moment when it became acceptable to take Abba seriously."

Vincentelli is an intriguing sociologist (calling Abba one of the few bands to link "European drag queens and midwestern housewives, New York hipsters and Japanese students") and a funny critic ("Lay All Your Love on Me," she says, "may well be the gayest song ever recorded by two clean-cut heterosexual couples"). And she’s unabashed about her fandom: "When you write about Abba, you have to let your guard down. . . . And so I should admit that ‘SOS’ is not only my favorite Abba song, it is my favorite song of all time, encapsulating everything that makes pop glorious, everything that makes life worth living."

Seattle Weekly music editor Michaelangelo Matos brings a similar lust for listening as recounts his profound attachment to Prince’s Sign ‘O’ the Times. It all started in 1988 at a shopping mall in Edina, Minnesota, where Matos, a 13-year-old welfare kid, picks up a cassette that, he says, would "permanently alter the course of my life."

He’d long been a Prince devotee, feeling a special kinship with his fellow Minnesotan. But now, suddenly, there was a vast, genre-bending double album that had the young fan flummoxed. "Sign doesn’t show off its wares the way earlier albums do," Matos writes. "It meanders, ducks in and out of corners, substitutes feints and jabs for the clean one-two punch of yore." But after numerous listens, he decides it’s "the greatest fucking thing I have ever heard in my life" — a realization that forces him to revise his "wholly arbitrary rules of conduct for how to like and dislike things, what’s allowed and what isn’t." Soon, his little mind is blown, "overwhelmed by the future, by as-yet-unrealized possibilities, by what could be accomplished — by Prince . . . and, by proxy, myself."

In the book’s second half, Matos engages in a lengthy, sometimes discursive, exploration of Sign’s conception, creation, and cultural import. But though his criticism and reportage are excellent (even if he once accidentally calls "Raspberry Beret" "Raspberry Parade"), that section is nowhere near as gripping as his own connection to the record.

Personal history is also the lifeblood of Joe Harvard’s approach to The Velvet Underground and Nico. The Velvets are one of the quintessential New York bands, but the Fort Apache Studio founder’s book is amusingly Boston-centric — from off-subject anecdotes (Alpo from the Real Kids caught crabs after stealing New York Dolls drummer Arthur "Killer" Kane’s pants!) to excerpts from Harvard’s interviews with Jonathan Richman (confirmed: there would be no Modern Lovers if there had been no Velvet Underground) to Harvard’s remembrances of listening to Lou Reed singles on the juke at Jean’s Coffee Shoppe, "our local hamburger-cum-bookie joint" in Eastie.

It’s long been a cliché that VU were criminally under-appreciated in their lifetime but that everyone who saw them play went out and formed a band. Harvard does spend some time bolstering those truisms, but he also offers unusual vignettes, as when he depicts John Cale ("One Badass Classical Dude") arriving at NYC’s Pickwick Studios to meet Lou Reed and discovering that Reed’s teen-trash anthem "The Ostrich" used an open-tuned drone similar to what Cale had been working on with Iannis Xenakis and LaMonte Young — "a shock akin to finding a monkey tuning his viola." The book also sparkles when Harvard lets his imagination explode on the page. He likens "Heroin" to the mystical poetry of Jalal ad-Din Rumi. In "European Son," he hears "someone flushing glass down a metal toilet" and "rockabilly rhythms from the foothills of Mars" and "a football chant for warrior droids of the future."

Referring to Sterling Morrison’s recollection of the band’s first-ever gig, Harvard writes that "I’d pay good money to see any band these days that could provoke ‘a mighty howl of outrage and bewilderment’ just by playing their two best songs." Then he reminds us that the VU’s debut actually got radio airplay in the Hub. "As a native East Bostonian, it makes me proud that Boston was one place that recognized how great the Velvets were — in their own time."

In Warren Zanes’s paean to Dusty Springfield’s landmark Dusty in Memphis, he wends his way among through the windmills of his mind, conjuring an impressionistic narrative that dwells as much on the mythical American Southland as it does on the self-created English pop star who recorded an album there. Because for Zanes — as for Dusty — the South represented something magical, musical, mysterious. He delves into the psyche of the woman born Mary O’Brien, divining what he can about her self-made persona as he recounts his own adventures through the fertile swamps of that old, weird America.

Sure, there are the informative interviews with producer Jerry Wexler, and of course Zanes parses songs like "Son of a Preacher Man" and "Breakfast in Bed." But it’s the twists and turns, the oddly illuminating vagaries in between, that make the book such a compulsive read. Zanes’s approach is apropos for a record that was something of a masquerade — but was no less authentic or affecting for it.

Joe Pernice’s take on the Smiths’ Meat Is Murder might be the best in the series thus far. Instead of an extended essay, he’s penned a novella, a roman à clef that takes us back to the spring of 1985, where our teenage zero molders in Catholic high school "in the diseased heart of suburban Boston." Part Dazed and Confused and part Virgin Suicides, the book is a funny, elegiac rumination on the pains and perils of adolescence — and the anodyne that certain albums can be to an outsider being smothered by dullness and angst. And it’s a rare book indeed that can cite the Smiths’ "Rusholme Ruffians," James Joyce’s "Araby," and the Brockton Carnival in the same sentence.

By fashioning his criticism as fiction, Pernice comes closest to evoking the transporting and restorative effect a song can have. "I popped side one into the cassette player, rolled the window down and cranked the chrome and bakelite volume knob. The car’s interior nearly cracked on the downbeat of one, and it overflowed with guitar melodies and piercing, glorious treble. We wanted everyone to hear. Morrissey’s vocals — at ear-numbing volume — enraged both mother and meathead alike, and we absolutely loved it. If I hadn’t been so anxious to see Allison in second period, I would have suggested to Ray that we ditch school, grab a six-pack of Narragansett tallboys and spend the day cruising around Nantasket Beach."