My ears frequently turn a bright, glowing red and sizzle like a short-circuiting toaster tossed into a bathtub by an angry woman because a cheating husband is in there sleeping off a drunk in the dirty, tepid water.

My ears are not red because I’m embarrassed over something, but because I listen to a lot of music and my ears are searing from overuse. A lot of music. And not just stuff I already like. The job description requires more than that.

And so, at least two days a week, I sit at my desk here in the expensively carpeted newsroom at the Mighty Day newspaper, and I listen. O yes, I listen. I'm constantly shifting through various musical sources — CDs, downloads, Myspace, artist and/or label streaming, radio, online radio-y things like Last FM, the occasional cruise around the block in a friend’s El Camino to hear obscure 8-tracks like the band Forever More because they did a song many centuries ago called "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine" that contains just one of the great guitar riffs I've heard. (Except that I don't actually know anyone with Forever More on 8-track. If you do, call me.)

Anyhoo: I do all this listening just to find the tenderest musical morsels — so that you don’t have to wade through crap.

Here are four recent CDs well worth your investigation:

The Golden Archipelago by Shearwater (Matador) — Probably the most non-Austin band in the history of Lone Star Beer, lead by melancholy and oddly-falsetto’d genius Jonathan Meiburg. Icy, ghostly, yearning and spectacularly lovely stuff.

Anno Domini High Definition by Riverside (InsideOut) — Seductively fuses spooky ambient with brainy nuthouse metal and the sort of wonderful vocal hooks Paul McCartney was trying to think of when he was secretly dreaming of murdering the wife that came along after Linda.

It Was Easy by Title Tracks (Ernest Jenning) — old school power pop — only it’s sorta new school power pop because sole Tracker John Davis, formerly of Q and Not U, surveys everything modern and new going on in pop music and curses it and throws it — all together now! — like a short-circuiting toaster into a bathtub because Paul McCartney’s wife-after-Linda is soaking in there, counting divorce settlement money. Anyhoo, instead of trying to be new, Davis distills Badfinger/Grassroots style greatness and shoots it through a prism of his own melodic intuition.

And, yes, one more time, The Courage of Others by Midlake (Bella Union) — This is the last time I’ll bother you about how stellar this album is. Next time you hear about it from me, it will be December. when I’m compiling my year-end Best Of lists.