Parlophone - the label home to everyone from the Beatles to Colplay in the UK - found the Swedish quintet Love Is All a touch hard to work with.

The label released the band's 2006 debut, Nine Times That Same Song, but dropped it after receiving rough mixes for the follow-up and getting resistance from the group about employing some outside producers to shape the recordings.

It was a union destined for failure, but Parlophone simply discovered what the members of Love Is All knew already: They are difficult.

"Everybody has so much say about everything," said lead singer Josephine Olausson in a phone interview last week. "It can get really frustrating."

Santa and your friendly postal carrier might be wishing that everyone gave digital gifts this year, as gift cards and iTunes credits surely lighten the load of their sacks. I'm sorry, St. Nick, but the perfect gift to thrill the music fan might be one of four new coffee-table books.

There is no disputing that Sean Ryan is inexperienced. He's a senior at Augustana College, and he nearly boasts that the songs on his debut album, Lonesome Driver Music, were dashed off and barely touched again.

"I don't think I've ever spent more than 10 minutes writing a song before," he said in an interview - his first, he said - in September. He added that he only changed a handful of lines from initial composition to final recording.

As we all expected, Bolt ran away with this week's Box Office Power Rankings ... .

Hmmm.

Let's step back a second. That Disney's computer-animated dog won isn't an upset, but its five-point margin is surprising. Even after I began plugging in the numbers, I was anticipating something close to a three-way tie between Bolt, Twilight, and Quantum of Solace. What I didn't process was the effect of the bunching of critical scores ? and the bunching of critical scores higher than we've seen for a few months.