I am young again. I am skinny and long-haired and tight-jeaned and cowboy-booted.

This is because in my head, and on my iPod, and in my car stereo, I have Choice of Weapon, the first Cult album since 1989’s Sonic Temple that didn’t make me say “Sure, they’re my favourite band, and it’s good to have a new record, but …”

There are two kinds of Cult albums: Billy music and Ian music. When Astbury has his way, the music is trippy, atmospheric, cinematic. When Duffy forces his hand, the tracks are bigger, louder and more ferocious, all about the riff, with everything else secondary.

Choice of Weapon is the first Cult record in decades that manages to capture both mens’ passions. Not since Love, in 1985, has Astbury’s esoteric snarl meshed so perfectly with Duffy’s Gretsch-grinding guitar work.

The songs on Choice of Weapon remind me most of Love, largely because of the way they insinuate themselves. There are few huge hooks here, but a lot of great little moments, whether vocal or guitar, hidden usually in the bridges of the album’s tracks.

Bombast? Yeah. Lots. The Wolf, Pale Horse, Honey from a Knife, Lucifer and first single For The Animals are raw, raunchy rock, and listening to them offers a glimpse of what 2007’s rushed Born Into This might have been able to achieve.

Turning away from the rough-from-the-floor sound of Born Into This (and, by extension, 1987’s Electric), The Cult has wrapped its tattooed arms around the studio tricks and effects layering that made Love and 1989’s Sonic Temple work so well. There are little reminders, too, like the jukey piano lick in For The Animals, a direct lift from Sonic Temple’s New York City, and little desert-rock tributes to Duffy’s skeleton spider guitar on Dreamtime, the 1984 album that launched the band while also managing to sound like it was made by a totally different crew of dudes.

The desert sound is honest this time around, as the band worked with Chris Goss, frontman of Masters of Reality, a band I like almost as much as The Cult. Goss, who produced Astbury’s slick solo CD (you really should seek it out) is the mastermind behind the Palm Desert scene (Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, etc.) and he brings that esthetic to Choice of Weapon in a big way.

This involves envoking big, wide skies, heat, crashing waters and passion, both through Astbury’s lyrics and Duffy’s playing. Astbury is better here than he’s been since the 80s; rougher, angrier, his trademark yelping toned down to something solemn and dark. There are no “Baby baby baby” chants here. “I came to you with love in my heart,” from For The Animals, carries a weary weight that Astbury has always seemed to be trying for. The man has been through a lot, and he finally sounds like the bluesman he’s always wanted to be.

And Duffy … this man can do no wrong on guitar, if you ask me. He sounds amazing even when playing on pure bona fide Cult garbage like Gone (from the band’s self-titled 1994 disc) or Sweet Salvation (from Ceremony, a song I listen to only because my cousin Donny Gerrard sings backup on it, and even then, it’s a challenge). Duffy knows that space can say more than noise, and he knows how to keep it simple, so we get big riffy songs like The Wolf and Pale Rider that have as much air as riffage, and they work.

Rhythm section: This is the first time the Astbury/Duffy team has produced two consecutive albums with the same bassist and drummer. Chris Wyse and John Tempesta know enough to hang back and do what has to be done without getting in the way, and they sound solid here.

Goss didn’t wrap production on Choice of Weapon; the band took the work they’d done with him and paid a visit to old crony Bob Rock, the Canadian pop star, super-producer and all-around cool cat. And it’s that combination, that rare mix of Goss, Rock, Astbury, Duffy, Wyse, Tempesta and, of course, my stuck-in-the-past musical tastes, that makes Choice of Weapon my album of the year. And it’s only May.

Of course, he’s taller now.

Here’s a new album from a talented Toronto singer-songwriter who was once hit in the face by a moving train, which has caused him to grow the greatest Magnum face foliage of all time. Give it a listen. Download the tunes. It’s good music for a grey, thoughtful day.

There’s Lightning

• 1. Everyone’s hair is strangely shaped and oddly sculpted, yet still looks a little wet, because the show was probably shot in Vancouver, where it rains 379 days a year, and there’s sleet on the other three.
• 2. Everyone’s jeans are baggy and seem to be belted around their bellies, and they’re wearing several suspicious layers of flannel while not appearing to be actual lumberjacks.
• 3. You recognize that actor from a commercial for coffee, or maybe margarine, or diapers.
• 4. You recognize that actress from a late-night Call Me, I Want To Chat With You commercial.
• 5. The special effects look like someone whipped them up on an Amiga in the back of a station wagon parked beside the set.
• 6. You saw that same set on a totally different show last week, and come to think of it, isn’t that your cousin Kevin’s apartment building in the background on that strange alien parallel world? Kevin calls those late-night Call Me numbers, by the way.
• 7. The “high-tech weapons” look like Motorola flip phones with calculators glued to them.
• 8. The opening titles look suspiciously like the ones your local weatherman uses when he tells you it’s going to rain like crazy before the sleet. And then snow.
• 9. Special Guest Star: Al Waxman.
• 10. One of the actors is also listed in the credits as key grip and “wig assistant to Mr. Waxman.”

This all occurred to me during a recent sleepless night when I fired up Netflix on the Wii and found old episodes of Sliders, which I remembered as a cool show, and soon learned my memory isn’t as great as it thought I was.

And then I remembered all those sleepless ’90s nights, when the news would end, and Canadian TV would offer us great stuff like Earth:Final Conflict and that show with Hercules in a starship, all shot in Canada on the cheap, like X-Files, only with effects that make The Starlost look high-tech.

I watched every episodes of Earth: Final Conflict, and I still couldn’t tell you what the hell was going on.

But Sliders? Sure, it was cheesy-looking and cheap. But the conceit of it all — exploring alternate histories with a boy genius, a computer geek girl, a pompous professor and, for some reason, a faded Motown star — made it work for the first couple of years, before it remembered it was Canadian and suddenly got complicated and ridiculous.

I was going to watch the whole first season, but then I saw Earth 2 is also available, and since I saw only the pilot of that and nothing else, I want to see how it all ends.

UPDATE: These guys talk about the iffy 80s and nutty 90s every week on this new cool podcast I like.

The Cult, building up to a grand return in May with new album Choice of Weapon, has strangely chosen YouTube video mixmaster Jim90290 to produce their latest video, a daring take on a demo for a song that eventually became a B-side in the ’80s. This video features band stalwarts Ian and Billy along with Pee-Wee Herman, Mr. Bean and Kid Rock in a fantastic sarcastic bombastic take on modern attitudes towards male sexuality.

I had it in my head that I had seen these houses down near Liberty Village, because that’s where I had wound up that day, but I forgot that I later worked my way back down King St. to Yonge, then up to Bloor, and then back down to Dundas, all over the course of several hours of blues-fuelled iPodery. Skip James, Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Muddy Waters … that’s what I heard when I walked past those weird houses.

In the years since, I have been asking Torontonians about them, and nobody knows what I’m talking about. Google Street View has been no help. So I started thinking that I had never actually seen them, that they were some kind of dream fragment or a bit from a long-forgotten short story from an Alfred Hitchcock digest found in a bus station in Saskatoon, which, if you know me, is entirely possible.

And then, a few days ago, through some random web research for something unrelated, I came across this:

The Cottages

They’re located northeast of Queen’s Park, and are worth looking at if you enjoy unusual row-home architecture, which I do.

Meanwhile, I am listening to a lot of interesting new non-American white-boy blues these days. I’ll tell you some more about them as I get back into the Weather Station groove. For now, here’s a guy whose music I enjoy:

Whole World

I suspect that if I had been listening to him on that day in 2005, I would not have wondered if the Rose Cottage was imaginary.

In related news, I bought a bag of PC “Ballpark Hot Dog” potato chips in the discount bin at the grocery store and do not recommend them, because the name sort of lets you know what to expect, and they did not at all taste like anything except old all-dressed chips left over from like five years ago.

In Mexico once, I bought lime and pepper Pringles, and that was almost as weird.

I now challenge Republican presidential candidates to come up with something even better to classify as a vegetable, like cows or gasoline.

• Plot: A model rents a new apartment in Brooklyn. Upstairs, there’s a blind priest who sits in the window all day and all night. The other neighbours are very, very strange, including the little old man with the cat, who is not what he seems at all. The priest is there for a reason: he’s guarding the gateway.

I love this movie, mostly because the book it’s based on is one of my favourite horror novels. Jeffrey Konvitz must have been more than pleased to see his story adapted so faithfully; I just wish The Guardian, his equally fantastic sequel novel (No, not the stupid Kevin Costner/Ashton Kutcher swimming movie), never made it to film. This stuff is as good as, or better than, The Exorcist and most other ’70s Satanica.

• Warning, though: The Sentinel uses people with actual physical deformities in one sequence, and this caused a stir of accusations of exploitation. If you’re sensitive that that kind of thing, you should probably watch some Twilight. Also, the poster is a spoiler.