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1. Ween, “Pork Roll Egg and Cheese.” If you please, on a kaiser bun. A few years later, it was Chocolate and Cheese, which may or may have not been about something entirely different.

2. David Ford, “State of the Union.”

3. The Brunettes, “Credit Card Mail Order.”

4. Brett Anderson, “Love is Dead.”

5. The Clash, “Police and Thieves.”

6. Pulp, “This is Hardcore.” You name the drama, I’ll play the part,” Jarvis Cocker sings in this Brit-Pop classic, and he does in a run through film noir, Busby Berkeley, Douglas Sirk and everything else under the Hollywood sun. Magnificent and musically ahead of its time.

7. The Rosebuds, “I Better Run.”

8. Dynastie Crisis, “Faust 72.”

9. Fountains of Wayne, “This Better Be Good.”

10. Black Moth Super Rainbow, “Sun Lips.” The best animal control music video ever.

The new single from A in H will once again have you pounding your head against the wall in frustration and asking, “Why the Hell can’t pop radio be more like this?”

This documentary on Fermilabs’ search for the subatomic particle known as the Higgs Boson follows a group of scientists dealing with Bush-era science cutbacks and competition from other countries, and as a bonus, it was co-directed by my cousin-in-law, Clayton Brown, who is known as Jeff to us. It was on last night, and is being rebroadcast at 9:30 p.m. and 2 p.m. on OETA’s digital channels, so program the DVRs, now!

They’re upgrading the blogs for the next few days,  so you might experience some irregularity. Or it could just be the stuffing.

Rating: 40 

“Four Christmases” plays like frenetic holiday episodes for four sit-coms, haphazardly stitched together by the hit-and-miss chemistry of its stars, Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon. To its credit, Seth Gordon’s narrative debut after his smashing documentary “The King of Kong” contains a few belly laughs, but this Yuletide dish’s bellyaches are just as plentiful.

Brad and Kate (Vaughn and Witherspoon) are two unmarried up-and-comers from divorced families, and given their bizarre relatives, their aversion to marriage is wholly justifiable. Every year, Kate and Brad make up a story about immunizing children in Myanmar or solving the glacial melting on Mt. Kilimanjaro to get out of spending Christmas with their insane families.

But the ruse falls flat when San Francisco’s airport gets fogged in and a local news station interviews Brad and Kate, clearly on their way to a tropical paradise. The four factions — a violent hick, a cradle-robbing earth mother, a serial monogamist and a semi-Norman Rockwell ideal — call them on their dishonesty, forcing the couple to pull a Christmas marathon in which they see each parent in his and her own odd natural habitat.

The comedy is frontloaded with Oscar gold, but such talent as Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Mary Steenburgen and Jon Voight are not needed to play these cardboard archetypes. But this multiplied “Meet the Parents” lacks the measured comic tension of that film, and while Witherspoon is a willing participant in this endless slapstick, this Oscar emeritus feels out of place in all the wackiness.

This is a second-in-a-row Christmas swing-and-a-miss for Vaughn: last year’s “Fred Claus” was notable for its lavish sets and threadbare laughs. Perhaps he can do less damage with Arbor Day.

2. Matthew Alvin Brown, “Take Me Home.”

3. Miles Davis, “Israel.”

4. Pavement, “The Killing Moon.”

6. TV on the Radio, “Lover’s Day.”

7.  Lupe Fiasco, “Just Might Be O.K.”

8. The Perishers, “Weekends.”

9. Ben Folds, “B—- Went Nuts.”

Rating: 79

It seemed the moon might smash into Earth and end all life before Axl Rose finished “Chinese Democracy,” yet here it is after 14 years, the most expensive and most labored-over rock album in history — granted, Brian Wilson took 38 years to release “SMiLE,” but he took a 35-year break. “Chinese Democracy” will make no one’s head explode in wild wonder, but Rose and his coterie of expert hired hands made a strong Guns N’ Roses record — not a great one, but a strong one.

Each track on “Chinese Democracy” is carefully thought out to the point of being science, and while early sketches of great tracks such as “Better” and “There Was a Time” leaked years ago, the final versions rock with more tension and precision than their precursors. The title song lacks any real distinction or direction, but Rose is in top vocal and lyrical form elsewhere. “Street of Dreams” and “Madagascar” — which quotes both Martin Luther King and “Cool Hand Luke,” of all things — are classically overwrought GN’R ballads, and the rapid and rabid “Scraped” reaches nearly “Appetite” levels of destruction.

Given the revolving-door nature of “Chinese Democracy,” some tracks have bits of five different guitarists on them, and Rose and former Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson are the only constants. But this is Rose’s idealized Guns N’ Roses, an entity he completely controls, and the title is a winking allusion to his rock autocracy. He should not have spent a third of his life recording it whether it was a labor of love or obsession, but at least “Chinese Democracy” exists in practice now, and no longer in theory.

1. Passion Pit, “Sleepyhead.” Too many hooks to count in this debut single, and video, which would have been given the designation “Break Through Video” by MTV back when such things mattered, was done without any computer assistance. 

2.  Weezer, “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived.”

3. Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama, “Pictures of Jesus.”

4. Roxy Music, “Same Old Scene.”

5. Kanye West, “Heartless.” The new disc, 808s and Heartbreak, comes out tomorrow. I’m having a hard time loving either of the back-to-back singles, mainly because they’re both built around the AutoTune vocals that made T-Pain America’s Favorite Guest Vocalist. To which I say, meh. Nice Peter Max-inspired video, though.

6. The Budos Band, “Deep In the Sand.”

7.  CSS, “Alala.”

8. Duffy, “Serious.”

9. Albert Hammond Jr., “The  Boss Americana.”

10. The Jam, “In the City.” This was the first single by the great Mod revivalist group, a part of the Staticblog canon. Of particular note: the descending bass line that opens “In the City” is nearly — aw hell, it’s not even nearly — identical to the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun,” which came out three months later. Then again, when has John Lydon ever been held up as a paragon of virtue?

All hail the power of full-tilt riff-o-rama boogietastic sleaze ‘n’ roll. And Dave Grohl in a wig.

“Bolt”

Rating: 64 

Disney’s “Bolt” is the studio’s best non-Pixar computer-generated cartoon to date, a shaggy-dog tale that owes as much to “The Truman Show” as it does to “Lassie Come Home.” Young kids might not get the film’s meta layers, but characters are funny and cuddly enough that they just might not care.

As it opens, Bolt (voiced by John Travolta) is a puppy getting picked out of a pet shop by Penny (Miley Cyrus), and then it skips forward five years. At this point, Bolt is a superhero dog with heat vision, a nuclear bark and the strength to drop cars from high bridges, saving Penny from peril at every turn.

But none of it is real: Bolt and Penny are the stars of a slam-bang TV action series, but Bolt is blissfully unaware that life is a stage. A few clever accidents later, Bolt learns that the real world is less easy to conquer as he travels cross-country with smart-mouthed alley cat Mittens (Susie Essman of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” who fans of that great show will swear is going to break into rancid profanity at any time, but keeps it clean nevertheless) and a star-struck hamster in a Wayne Coyne-style plastic ball.

While Disney’s previous CG outings without the Pixar crew could never hold their own with the company’s prestige line, “Bolt” comes close — the animation is sharp and the film is packed with expressive characters. The Hollywood in-jokes about agents and screenwriter pitches and the first 15-minutes of explosive action get tiresome, but once “Bolt” gets into the “real” world and the banter between Travolta, Essman and Mark Walton as the hamster hits its stride, there is good fun to be had.

For added excitement, see “Bolt” at a theater equipped with 3D capability — the effect is great, with Bolt and Mittens jumping off the screen, and the hamster rolling around in the next aisle. The technology has caught up with filmmakers’ ambitions, and the glasses are headache-free.