With Interpol/National producer Peter Katis behind the boards, the second album from this Glasgow trio comes invested with its share of high drama. But singer Scott Hutchison, who founded the band with his brother, Grant, prefers directness to theatricality. Overwhelming as some of the album’s lyrics can be, he assured in a recent interview that they’re “not at all metaphorical,” including the one where he contemplates throwing himself off a bridge.

Like their Edinburgh countrymen Idlewild, Frightened Rabbit aren’t afraid to let a dynamic build slowly. “My Backwards Walk” simmers for nearly three minutes before the drums kick in, pitting an anxious strummed guitar against an undulating wash of one-finger piano and gently lapping accordion. Occasionally, as on the somber sea shanty “Who’d You Kill Now,” the band harks back to the more shambling and eclectic sounds of their 2006 debut, Sing the Greys, which was essentially a collection of spruced-up demos. But for the most part, Frightened Rabbit are confident in their insecurities, with Scott Hutchison’s quavering voice fighting through the haze, riding the waves and coming home safe.

A bleary Tijuana bar band blanched by the blistering sun, Arziona's Calexico manage to cut straight down to the darkness bubbling at the center of country music. Hot Rail contains all of their strengths in one arid, ominous package. Opener "El Picador" is a bit of bloodshot mariachi, horns blowing full-tilt; just a few minutes later, though, they're hushed and haunted, throwing shadows across the grim expanse of "Fade" and "Untitled III." That Calexico can veer so effortlessly between both extremes is a testament to their versatility. Their music — at this point — was guided by the same experimental undercurrent that powers, say, Rachel's or the Sea and Cake. But instead of finding an outlet for their imagination in jazz, they push against the borders of country, nortena and ranchera. They never come off as overworked or undercooked. They're not dilettantes — they're a gang of grim, drifting cowboys for whom no place feels like home.

Around the time Paul Simon heard his first cassette of South African mbaqanga, or township jive, Trevor Herman and Jumbo Vanrenen, a pair of S.A. ex-pats in England, began compiling this landmark. Their timing, as it turned out, was perfect. Opposition to South Africa's oppressive, racist apartheid system was beginning to get noticed in America and Europe, buoyed along in the pop world thanks first to the charity "Sun City" single and later by Simon's Graceland, controversially recorded in South Africa with local musicians, during the U.N.-sanctioned cultural boycott of the country. But for the lucky listeners who encountered it, the deepest impact came from Herman and Vanrenen's 12 exquisitely arrayed selections.

Like many of its sequels (there have been five additional, numbered volumes, as well as several spin-offs), The Indestructible Beat of Soweto features cuts from mbaqanga's grandmaster, the sublime, ram-throated bellower Mahlathini and a stirring album-closer from Zulu male chorale, Simon collaborators and eventual Coca-Cola pitchmen Ladysmith Black Mambazo. These are surely South Africa's most famous apartheid-era musicians, but their star power means less here than the sure-footed support of the Makgona Tshole Band (led by expert guitarist Marks Mankwane), who appear on much of the album. From Udokotela Shange Namajaha's keening violin instrumental "Sobabamba" and the towering album-opener "Awungilobolele," with its hypnotic twin-guitar leads that settle into a groove so powerful it's almost grave, to the dizzying gulps, gurgles and doots that dot Amaswazi Emvelo's "Indodo Yejazi Elimnyama," Herman and Vanrenen turned more people on to a great musical tradition than any album compiler this side of Harry Smith or the producers of The Harder They Come. There is no hyperbole in calling The Indestructible Beat of Soweto the most influential collection of South African pop ever assembled; if there's any in saying it may very well be the single best album on eMusic, we can live with it.

Hot pop stars wooing mercenary hit producers goes back to the dawn of the studio itself. LA’s Sparks, from their debut on through Indiscreet, settled for nothing less than top-tier producers — Todd Rundgren, Tony Visconti. That they were only pop stars in Europe rather than in their homeland (while a crime) is beside the point.

Like any good gambler at the dog tracks, the brothers Mael (Ron and Russell, the only two constants in Sparks four-decade career) always went with the hot hand. By 1979, the zeitgeist of pop music was wholly ensconced in the studios of Giorgio Moroder. The man-machine behind Donna Summer’s roborgasmic “I Feel Love,” Moroder was not the most natural choice for the always-game and ever-quirky Mael Brothers, but from the first analog bloops that announce “Tryouts for the Human Race,” it’s a match made in heaven. That the rapscallion Maels capsize that beatific yet salacious sound so as to sing about sperm remains their master…uh stroke. Never before have Moroder’s components and circuits been so hellbent on soaring up to Nirvana (check the divine vocodered exhalations wafting upwards on “My Other Voice”). The collaboration between the Maels and Moroder not only aims high, but hits higher. Who else could name a song “The No. 1 Song in Heaven” and have it be both cocky and absolutely correct?

Before splintering into the Mars Volta and Sparta, At the Drive-In recorded their final album, The Relationship of Command, a fiery finish to an eight-year career that elevated frontmen Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López to near demigod status in the post-hardcore world, their big hair and lanky bodies the flailing mascots of the band's deservedly heralded live shows. "One Armed Scissor" paced Command, earning modern-rock radio airplay with its shouts of, "Get away! Get away!," but it's "Invalid Litter Dept.," an epic indictment of globalism and imperialism ("dancing on the corpse's ashes"), that makes this album great and, from start to finish, their best (their Vaya EP is a close second). These are the guys that took the more traditional emo sound mainstream (My Chemical Romance owe them infinity beers), and with the Mars Volta, Cedric and Omar went on to destroy it. It's a helluva last gasp.

John Prine’s never been a guy for grand gestures or fancy flourishes. When a woman enchants him, it’s the little things that catch his attention. “She uses Eveready batteries to keep/ Her electrical appliances going steady,” he sings in “She Is My Everything,” setting a new standard for finding poetry in the mundane. Fair & Square, as its title implies, eschews emotional extremes in favor of a tone of acceptance and resignation; released in 2005, it was his first album of new material after his recovery from neck cancer.

In “Taking a Walk,” a protagonist brimming with anger avoids blowing his stack by casually exiting threatening situations. And in “Clay Pigeons” — written by the late Texan Blaze Foley — a character forces himself, slowly and tentatively, to re-engage with a world that’s left him feeling bitter and isolated. The production, by Prine with engineer Gary Paczosa, is suitably low-key: the band finds a groove, establishes a melody, then steps back to let the pickers do their thing. Fair & Square isn’t as revelatory as Prine’s 1991 classic, The Missing Years, but it finds glory in subdued moments, and offers insight into the avoidance of risk.

Nuclear War is actually a live-in-studio recording, but tighter, and the material is strong and representative of the time. The title cut is a rare Ra social-protest funk-chant, and it's a doozy: "They're talkin' about, nuclear war... it's a motherfucker, don't you know? When they push the button, your ass gotta go!" Also included: simmering soul-organ grooves where John Gilmore swings as hard and brilliantly as any tenor player on this or any other planet; muscular hard-bop riffs and tautly controlled slow-tempo dissonance; a note-perfect "Drop Me Off in Harlem," one of several forgotten Duke Ellington gems Ra loved to play; and ingenious, off-beat but oh-so-right arrangements of the standards "Sometimes I'm Happy" and "Smile," with a heart-stopping June Tyson vocal on the latter.

A bold about-face from the bright Beatle-esque jangle he'd plied just four years earlier with the Soft Boys, I Often Dream of Trains finds a wounded and subdued Roby Hitchcock attempting to make sense of himself. Because Hitchcock is a master surrealist, even his sense doesn't make much sense: "Sounds Great When You're Dead" is clearly a sneering insult — but to whom and over what remains just out of reach; "This Could Be the Day" ought to be a victory anthem, until halfway through we're confronted with Nubian slaves and hissing tongues of fire; and the title track is an aching, moving cipher, either a meditation on mortality or an observation of slow-moving public transit. What remains uniform throughout is Hitchcock's flair for cockeyed melody. Wistful acoustic phrases go suddenly pear-shaped, resolving from major seventh to minor catastrophe. It's Dadaism unplugged, a hushed, moody work of strange visions and wild inventions. It's quiet splendor has only grown more singular and more stubborn with age.

Mitch Hedberg lived the life of a rock star-comic, and died like one, too — he passed away in 2005, found in a Jersey hotel with drugs in his blood. He spoke in the quick, clipped voice of an old-time hipster, wore his hair Seattle long and sported a goatee resembling that of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Beneath this façade, however, lay a routine that was brainy and even a little bit nerdy. "I like refried beans," he says here. "That's why I want to try fried beans, 'cause maybe they're just as good — and we're wasting time."

This pulverizing (originally cassette-only) album proved what DC and NY denizens had already been marveling at for four years: not only were the all-black Bad Brains the greatest punk musicians ever (along with the Ruts), but these crazed Rastas also unleashed the most furious lightning/blitzkrieg assault imaginable. On positively jaw-dropping, astonishingly frenzied pulverizers such as "Sailing On," "Banned in D.C." and "Big Takeover," the group somehow married Motorhead's lethal, nasty chops to the Sex Pistols and Black Sabbath's power riffs and the Dickies and early Saints' speed-fueled attack. Then they added reggae, showing off singer H.R.'s uncanny pipes. It's a miracle disc.

Probably the most critically acclaimed new artist of the mid '00s, Maya Arulpragasam is also among its most controversial, in two different ways. Po-faced style purists chide her grab-bag embrace of numerous urban sounds (Brazilian baile funk on "Bucky Done Gun," London grime on "Galang," vigorous neo-electro on "10 Dollar") without having "done her time" in any particular scene (as if pop forms weren't rewired regularly by tinkerers rather than apprentices). The other reason is a lot more serious: Arulpragasam is the daughter of a Sri Lankan political rebel affiliated with the Tamil Tigers, an organization devoted to armed struggle since 1983; they are said to have essentially invented modern suicide bombing. Maya not only doesn't run from this legacy, she devotes a lot of her art (her award-nominated visual work as well as her music) to invoking it: "Like PLO, we don't surrender," she chants in "Sunshowers," for instance. It might not make her a terrorist, but it certainly makes people uneasy.

Despite all of this, or maybe because of it, Arular, Arulpragasam's debut as M.I.A., is one of the most consistently thrilling pop records anyone has made. What's especially impressive about this is that while the album is hardly devoid of melody (M.I.A.'s sing-songy chatter is highly hummable), it is remarkably short of instrumental detail: These tracks' aural character is almost entirely down to their beats and bass, and their differences come across on the tiniest and tinniest of speakers. Arular is endlessly playful, which means you can play it endlessly.

Originally from New York state, Old Crow Medicine Show began life as a quintet of street-corner buskers, before a you-wouldn’t-dare-make-it-up discovery by a passing Doc Watson outside a North Carolina pharmacy led to their relocation to Nashville — where, mercifully, Music Row signally failed to rub off OCMS’s rougher edges. Substantially recorded in Nashville’s legendary Studio B and Woodland Sound Studios, O.C.M.S., their full-length debut, sounds as far as possible like something Hank Williams might have made, had he survived into his 80s (the raffish, ragged works of Williams’ grandson, Hank Williams III, are actually a decentish reference point). As on few modern country albums, it’s possible to hear the fingers hitting the strings, and the horsehair scraping on the fiddle strings.

Producer David Rawlings had the admirable sense to recognise that the biggest favour he could do these road-worn, mutually attuned and instinctive musicians was to let them get on with it. The result is that O.C.M.S. sounds like OCMS’s songs were issuing in through the window from a pitch at the end of your road, rather than from your speakers. Either way, you’d be grateful — the songs are consistently fabulous. The lament “We’re All in This Together” has something of the sepulchral fatalism of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” the angry Vietnam fable “Big Time in the Jungle” a whiff of the simmering anger of Steve Earle. All are delivered in raw, throaty harmonies as furious yet finely honed as the arrangements behind them.

If The Glow Pt. 2 were six or seven tracks shorter, it might rank with Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as one of the best indie-rock albums ever made. As it is, Phil Elvrum's masterpiece gets a bit lost across its twenty tracks — but only just a bit. Despite its lack of focus (the one criticism you can pin on Elvrum), The Glow Pt. 2 is magnificent, a heartbreaking album that sprawls and burrows, wet with tears and rain.

If you are new to Phil Elvrum, a quick word on his aesthetic: lots of acoustic guitar layers that often sound like they are chasing their own shadows; he self-harmonizes a lot, but very loosely: syllables echo, words start and then start again as he finds his way to them; and his lyrics almost solely deal with longing and desire, pronounced gorgeously, and in a bucolic framework. Nature itself is often a character in his songs: Thoreau and Elvrum would have a lot to talk about.

So, the best songs, then: "I'll Not Contain You" (light and airy), "Map" (beautiful and foreboding), "I Want Wind to Blow" (precious), "I Felt My Size" (stunning and obtuse) and "I Felt Your Shape" (even more stunning and even more obtuse). And then there's "You'll Be in the Air," one of Elvrum's best songs, and one of the best songs written for long-distance love ever (the Kinks' "Strangers" and "This Time Tomorrow" being the best), except maybe it's about a plane crash. The song closes, "You'll be in the air/ You'll bear fruit, your bare feet/ Your bare arms in the heat/ You'll be able to feel your might." It's a perfect canvas for hope and pining. And along with "I Felt Your Shape" and much of The Glow Pt. 2, a perfect song for falling in love.

Although, Mark E. Smith has habitually been romantically involved with female Fall-ites, he has always claimed that Craig Scanlon and Kay Hanley pushed him into bringing Brix Smith into the band for The Wonderful And Frightening World Of… Ballsy and talented, she quickly “took the band by the scruff of the neck” (Smith’s words) and, in only a year, the whole dynamic of the group changed, especially with the arrival of Simon Rogers, the Fall’s first classically trained musician, on keyboards. Cue a James Brown-style self-aggrandizing album title, for a record which is considered — rightly (probably) — to be the band’s finest. It has all its predecessor’s widescreen production (Leckie again), but a real sense of carrying over the old experimental edge in a pop framework ("Spoilt Victorian Child," "LA"). In a nod to his roots, Smith gave props to Can’s singer ("I Am Damo Suzuki"), while on "My New House," he squawked jovially about his move up the real-estate ladder — “According to the postman, it’s like the bleeding bank of England!”

Still recognized as the greatest composer/arranger in jazz history, Duke Ellington also led the finest big bands, but recognition came relatively slowly to him in the US. His band regularly performed in concert in Europe during the '30s, but hadn't played the most prestigious American stages until his 1943 appearance in Carnegie Hall. The fact that he was finally allowed to play that venue was quite significant in itself, but became even more auspicious when it became the place he debuted his most ambitious composition, "Black, Brown and Beige," a 45-minute suite subtitled "A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro." The rest of the program contained impressive, if more conventional, Ellington performances.

Duke's band at that time included such stars as trumpeters Rex Stewart, Ray Nance and Harold Baker, and trombonists Joe Nanton, Lawrence Brown and Juan Tizol, as well as saxophonists Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster and Harry Carney, who were an all-star unit unto themselves.

The first CD of this two-CD set contains a number of classics by Ellington and his songwriting partner Billy Strayhorn, from the early "Black and Tan Fantasy" to the more recent "Johnny Come Lately." Richly orchestrated, they include memorable solos by a variety of band members. Dig tenorman Webster on "Portrait of Bojangles" not only displaying his big tone, but a very modern rhythmic conception. Baker contributes lovely muted work to "Black Beauty." "Black," the first section of "Black, Brown and Beige," an uneven but often impressive work, ends CD one, its highlight a lush, gorgeous Hodges alto solo.

Enter the Mortal City and meet the bemused, the broken-hearted and the utterly bereft. Dar Williams brings the residents of her 1996 breakout album palpably, achingly to life with little more than the sweet simplicity of her voice and her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue. Blending sophisticated wit with raw, unabashed emotion, Williams creates characters who feel so real, so accessible, it’s no wonder Mortal City is the kind of record that can inspire dorm room singalongs and awaken the ambitions of acoustic guitar-toting wannabe folk singers.

The anthemic girl-power classic “As Cool as I Am” kicks off the album with a rousing tell off of a womanizing, soon-to-be ex-lover. Sarcasm abounds through the song: "And if it helps, I'd say I feel a little worse than I did when we met." Zing! But Williams is too fun (note the song's danceable beat, enhanced by harmonicas and drums) and too empowered (the refrain: "I'm not that petty/ As cool as I am I thought you'd know this already"), to come across as truly embittered. Later, Williams hones her sense of the absurd in songs such as "The Pointless, Yet Poignant Crisis of a Co-Ed." With crisp, staccato vocals that accentuate her subject's silliness, Williams tells the story of a young idealist who has an epiphany about her boyfriend, co-chair of a student group called the Hemp Liberation Army: "You stupid pothead."

The laughs that Williams scatters throughout Mortal City serve as stark contrast to the quiet devastation she summons in "February," an elegy for a frostbitten romance that won't survive winter's relentless snowstorms: "We were always out shoveling/ And we'd drop to sleep exhausted, and we'd wake up, and it's snowing." "February" belongs on the bleakest of breakup mixes, but "Iowa" is a stunner in which hope ultimately wins out over melancholy. Its lulling, repetitive refrain (just the word, "Iowa", over and over), belies the narrator's desire to break free from routine; to go “running through the screen doors of discretion" in pursuit of a new romance. Williams’s tentative optimism also pervades Mortal City’s title track. As its occupants know, to live in a Mortal City means to embrace life's fleeting pleasures, and to try to find humor and redemption in heartbreak.

After an inauspicious start, Judas Priest took heavy metal to a new level of precision and darkness with Sad Wings of Destiny, an epic album that balanced technical musicianship with take-no-prisoners brutality. The record opened with the textural nuances and complex guitar work of “Victim of Changes” which immediately shattered the stereotype of metal musician as unsophisticated rube. Tracks like “The Ripper” and “Tyrant” proved they could also destroy like unsophisticated rubes. Only Iron Maiden would have equal influence on the next decade of metal.

A big, bright, bratty clusterbomb of sound, Superchunk's sophomore effort is a hot white streak that never dissipates and never relents. To listen to it now is to hear indie rock inventing itself: the band brazenly borrows the speed-racing, sludge-laden riffs of the SST era, but uses them to power songs that are ruthlessly melodic, crowned with Mac McCaughan's proudly imperfect yawp. The group is consistently defiant — "You think you see everything with those glasses," taunts McCaughan in "Cast Iron" — and as the record evolves it becomes clear that No Pocky is serving two purposes. It's an appropriation of punk for the bored and overeducated, a shift from simply thinking nothing matters to the anger and helplessness that comes when you realize why. More than that, though, No Pocky is a testament to the power of youth, revved-up and rambunctious — proud of its imperfections, brash enough to exploit them once more, with feeling.

When 16 Lovers Lane came out in 1988, Australia's Go-Betweens thought they had a good chance of ending their years spent epitomizing the dreaded combination of critical success and commercial failure — this one would sell, dammit! On this album, their sixth, co-leaders Robert Forster and Grant McLennan combined their usual literate lyrics with their most accessible melodies ever, upgrading their earlier jingle-jangle indie sound for dramatic, superbly layered arrangements (Amanda Brown's oboe and violin were put to particularly good use). While the songs are credited to both Forster and McLennan, it's always been easy to tell who wrote what, and on this release the difference between their distinctive individual styles was particularly stark: Forster was at his most melancholic on "You Can't Say No Forever" and "I'm Alright," while McLennan unleashed classic-pop chops on "Love Goes On!" and "Streets of Your Town," a minor college-radio hit at the time. And yet the album feels of a piece, a romantic study of love in all its forms that stands the test of time. Despite the beauty of 16 Lovers Lane, sales remained elusive; the feuding, disillusioned Go-Betweens broke up in 1989, then reformed in 2000, much to the delight of their faithful fans.

OK, I’ll fess up: I only discovered Mali’s Tinariwen after Robert Plant raved about them in an interview four years back. But the nomadic desert blues collective has in fact existed in some form or other since 1979, their impassioned, highly politicised sound an issue-raising catalyst for the Tuareg people of the southern Sahara long before someone pulled a Ry Cooder and helped record their wonderfully stirring music for consumption outside of Africa.

On Aman Iman — as on their "official" 2001 debut The Radio Tisdas Sessions — that person is producer Justin Adams, the multi-instrumentalist and erstwhile Wayward Sheiks member who is also a member of Robert Plant’s current band, the Strange Sensation. Adams does an excellent job, acting as facilitator, not meddlesome shaper.

This time out, Tinariwen has made a fabulously skewed blues album that restores a winning exoticism to that oft-heard genre. The return of near-mythic founding member Mohamed Ag Itlale after six years in the desert (and you can take that quite literally) proves memorable, his improvised poetry on “Ahimana” intoxicating even if, like me, you don’t understand a word of his native tongue.

Gritty and wholly involving, the album is a delicious tangle of snaking Malian guitars, Möbius strip-like rhythms, fat bass, clanking percussion and call-and-response chanting. The hypnotic pulse of “Cler Achel” is such that resistance is futile, while “Tamatant Tilay” further underlines Tinariwen’s status as lords of the feral dance. But there are also gentler moods, the meditative-sounding “Izarar Tenéré” so soothing that it’s easy to forget that the members of Tinariwen are in fact fearsome, Colonel Gaddafi-trained guerrillas-turned-troubadours.

Word is that the final mix of the album had to be submitted for the approval of the Tuareg tribal elders, and that band percussionist Said Ag Ayad ferried it to them by camel. Now, how cool is that?

Forget whatever prog-induced nightmares the 43-song tracklist brings to mind -- Double Nickels on the Dime cuts a swaggering path through an hour's worth of breakneck punk-funkery. The Minutemen are known for doing a lot with a little, and for having done it first. Double Nickels finds the guys taking the less-is-more m.o. and dancing all over the musical map. The spirit is undoubtedly "punk" (scratched-out guitars, dime-store production, singer D. Boon's throat-y shouts), but the sprawling set allows for some adventurousness here. Check the faux Flamenco acoustic track "Cohesion," the noodle-y blues shuffle of "Love Dance" and the made-famous-by-Jackass twang-stomp of "Corona" for evidence of some inspired stretching out.

This slaphappy genre hopping wouldn't come off, of course, if they didn't have chops. Luckily the trio, led by rotund firebrand D. Boon (guitar/vocals), play with bluster and charm. The interplay of Boon's wild, spidery (and occasionally cacophonous) guitar with the locked-in, rubbery rhythm section (bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley) set the blueprint for "funky" followers from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Fishbone to the Rapture. Of course, they couldn't replicate Boon's bristling strut.

Balancing a shouty, Reagan-era furor with a keen (and sometimes juvenile) sense of humor, Double Nickels is a definitive '80s political screed. Tracks with titles like "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing," "Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?" and (hardy har) "The Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts," show how offhandedly Boon and co. could skewer politics and pop culture, and how steadfastly they refused to sit on the sidelines.

All things dark and beautiful indeed: LA combo Isis are masters of sculpting the darkness, teasing out the weird shapes that lie just out of view. The music on Panoptician is blank and searching, stark chiaroscuro whorls of sound that pitch and roll over and over and over. "In Fiction" is marvelous monotony, a single series of riffs circling over and over and over until the bottom falls out and the whole song goes rushing suddenly, terrifyingly downward. "Wills Dissolve" is like June of 44 corrupted by evil, long strings of sound dripping icicle-like. It's these reveals — abrupt, noisy, volcanic — that make Panoptician so utterly terrifying. Like a ghost leaping from a closet door, Panoptician is full of sickening surprise.

The Afrobeat of Fela Kuti combines the charged socio-politics of Bob Marley, a blend of funk stylings (taut a la James Brown and elastic like George Clinton) and an instrumental helix employed by improvisational jam bands like Phish or the Grateful Dead. Because his tunes adhere to an informal template and the musicianship is of consistently high quality, there’s no better or worse place to submerge yourself in his gloriously huge discography. Mr. Follow Follow culls two vintage workouts from the mid '70s, each one rapidly adding layers to achieve a relentless groove in which soloists emerge and fade in succession, followed by Fela’s declamatory sermon-vocals (tagged by a village of backup singers numbering in the dozens), and then an equally stirring instrumental outro.

The title track — taken from arguably Fela’s most notorious record, Zombie — has more than the usual quotient of horn solos and slingshot sax riffs, chief among them the dank baritone horn Lekan Animashaun, a signature part of Fela’s sound. “Who No Know Go Know” is more string and keyboard oriented, establishing a smooth, almost acid-jazz groove. Put simply, there is something of substance going on for everyone here, be you mindless dancers, impassioned revolutionaries or all persuasions in-between.

You could say artist/musician/androgyne Antony has a certain flair for drama. Spirited by the tranny cabarets and gender-fucking performance artists that lured him to New York from California in the early '90s, Antony torches his piano with poignant songs of pain and power, alienation and acceptance, love and sorrow, all drawn from a palette of gender identity, the desire to be female never far from his thoughts. "One day I'll grow up/I'll be a beautiful woman," he promises on "For Today I Am a Boy" — and if that doesn't work, there's always surgery ("My Lady"). His melancholia is underscored by his swanlike, womanish tenor, which flutters, warbles and floats out in grand curlicues of vibrato, lifted high on a pedestal of piano and a small string section (which includes Joan As Policewoman violinist Joan Wasser). He also posses up the man-sopranos for guest spots, reminding us he's not the first pop singer flaunting his divaness; for "You are My Sister," he's joined by O.G. gender-queer pop star Boy George, while the loping "What Can I Do?" features Rufus Wainwright's clear croon; and neo-hippie hipster Devendra Banhart contributes on "Spiralling." I Am a Bird Now's real life longing is cradled in bouts of bittersweet fantasy and cushioned by hope; as such, Antony's theatricality never overpowers his humanity. "I am a bird-girl," he wails sadly on the closing track, "and bird-girls can fly!"

So many musical crimes have been committed in the name of "conscious hip-hop" in the years since Labor Days was released, it's become impossible to consider this gloomy forerunner with anything other than mounting skepticism. You've been in this situation before — returned to a book you loved in college only to find it hamfisted and overwritten, stared at your once-beloved Beat Generation box set with a mixture of dread and shame.

The good news I bring you is this: Labor Days is as good as you remember, possibly better. Aesop's million-syllable-a-second surrealism is still arresting: he lets loose a barrage of sound then yawns out the final word, a weird, disorienting cadence that remains stupefying no matter how many times you hear it. "Fantastic planet urchin putting work in/ Searching for pertinent verse, minus the murderous diversions/ Apologies won't lure me to the communal sob story," he yammers in "Labor," and that's as close to a statement of purpose as he comes.

This would just be a mere parlor trick if it wasn't for the production, which is uniformly breathtaking. A string of icy arpeggios scramble up the center of "Save Yourself," Aes presciently advising: "The next time you want to be a hero, try saving something other than hip-hop." "Flashflood" is mercilessly grim, an inside-out samurai song where pan flutes crash up against swift, stabbing bass lines. And then, of course, there's "Daylight," the monolithic genre-defining song that none of Aes' disciples have come anywhere close to besting. "While the triple sixers lassos keep angels roped in the basement/ I walk the block with a halo and a stick, poking your patience," he announces over that fantastically blunted organ loop. All this time later, that prodding remains just as insistent, just as fantastically unsettling.

Between the moody English goth of 1984's Dreamtime and the pyrotechnic riff-rock of 1987's Electric, the Cult released Love, an album packed with textural rhythms, pounding beats and anthemic choruses. It was their Rosetta Stone, a revolutionary offering that helped frontman Ian Astbury make the transition from gloomy, gothy moaning to full-throated rock star howls. The album was even more pivotal for guitarist Billy Duffy, who combined his layered, ringing tones and ominous arpeggios with brazen power chords and galvanic leads. Songs like the ecstatic, driving "Rain" and the mystical metal of "She Sells Sanctuary" provided plenty of punch, while the smoky, swaying ballads "Brother Wolf Sister Moon" and "Black Angel" proved the Cult could still play softly without sounding sappy. On future offerings, the band would flex additional metal muscle with crunching AC/DC-style riffs, self-indulgent solos and flailing drums. But it was Love's restraint and balance that made it the band's brightest hour.

Not for nothing is the first track on this almost unpronounceable album called "Dark & Long." Almost all the tracks by this UK techno trio were both dark and long. The group's very name spoke of the urban subterrania that was their provenance and their subject.

With roots in late-'80s whiteboy funk-rock, Karl Hyde and Rick Smith found the missing piece of their sonic jigsaw in Romford DJ Darren Emerson, the reborn Underworld giving techno a rock makeover (or vice versa?) by mixing cerebral synth loops and four-to-the-floor pulses with flat, passionless vocals and the occasional searing guitar riff. The ghosts of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder collide here with blissed-out Orb arpeggios and skittering squirgles, creating a cold beauty and mechanized monorhythmic intensity.

If Underworld's sound hit its peak with the Trainspotting classic "Born Slippy" and 1996's superior Second Toughest in the Infants album, Dubnobasswithmyheadman stands tall as a soundtrack — at once euphoric and claustrophobic — to hip life in the London suburbs of the early '90s. While there's a certain humorless pomposity to Hyde's sub-Alabama-3 delivery and his cut-up lyrics — "Mmm Skyscraper I Love You" is both facile and dated — a dark power is still discernible on trancey epics like "Tongue" and "Spoonman."

Although the likes of Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs loved their early albums, the Mekons' most widely admired work eight years after they convened in punk-era Leeds was still the 1978 single "Where Were You?" It wasn't until 1985's Fear and Whiskey, self-released on their U.K.-only Sin label back when imports were hard to find, that their legend launched worldwide. Susie Honeyman's fiddle was enough to slot the album as what was then called roots-rock, and put it at the forefront of what was later called alt-country. But in retrospect, Fear and Whiskey just sounds like a Mekons record — one driven by Tom Greenhalgh's desperate cry rather than Jon Langford's sarcastic shout or Steve Goulding's motorvating drums. What Greenhalgh is desperate about is a literally revolutionary scenario in which the government has routed rebels who swear they'll regroup but find themselves bogged down in alcoholic angst on a highway that's lost the way a beachhead is lost. Facing up to the failure of a punk idealism crippled, like the rest of public life, by the reactionary cruelty of the Thatcher and Reagan regimes, the Mekons had begun their lifelong project of keeping rock & roll leftism alive.

Boston's leading light of the '80s post-punk explosion, Mission of Burma gained a staunch reputation for infusing art (and artifice) into their dark n' noisy guitar anthems. The prevailing attitude then (and even largely now) is that in order to feel the true brunt of the awesome Burma sound, you had to see 'em live. In part, of course, it was just a matter of sheer volume — the guys were known for sending out sheets of sound the likes of which a hi-fi could never capture. Another MoB live staple, though, was sound collagist/tape head Martin Swope's on-the-fly sound sampling. Often planted in the booth with the soundman, Swope would sample the live performance from the stage through the mixing board, run a series of delays, loops and effects and send a cascading, eerily whitewashed signal out, usually without the crowd having a clue the source of the mountainous, layered noise. This uniquely abrasive and heady sound was (understandably) never fully captured on record. Luckily, even with Swope's contributions rather buried on Vs., Burma makes a mean, inspired racket.



Largely lacking the fistpumping gusto of the preceding, insta-classic Signals, Calls and Marches EP, Vs. relies heavily on squalling and cacophonous stomps. Early highlights like "New Nails" and "Dead Pools" tell the tale nicely: scratchy, minor chord guitar rips, shout-sung sloganeering ("Don't make an idol of me!") and heavy doses of floor tom bashing. You have to sift through quite a few dark dirges before encountering anything resembling a riffy chorus, but when they hit, it's worth the wait. The rollicking "Ballad of Johnny Burma" almost entirely strips the "post" from the punk — it's a blistering three-chord anthem barely nosing over two minutes. It's the canonized (for good reason) "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" that's the true centerpiece of Vs., though, as singer/guitarist Roger Miller bashes through the downright bouncy tune with a clear sense of vigor. It's a moment of thrilling immediacy and sounds as much like a clarion call as anything Burma recorded. Coming at the end of this tough and ragged record, it plays like a melodic salve. If there's anything you can say about Mission of Burma — they sure make you work for it.

All you kids today pretending to be robots have nothing on former Tubeway Army leader Numan, whose friends were electric way before you downloaded your first MP3. The Pleasure Principle is his masterwork — every song sticks, and several are classics, including "Films" (a hip-hop breakbeat staple, included on a volume of the beat-digger bible Ultimate Breaks & Beats series), "Metal" and "Cars," a song so funky Prince used to rehearse the Revolution with it.

Booka Shade's "Mandarine Girl" was 2005's premier crossover club record, an electro-house charmer whose buzzing, zapping bass line is echoed and emboldened by higher-pitched synth noises, all moving in tandem at the song's mid-length climax like Claymation robots. The single's warm sound (a mix of house's humane undertow and electro's gleeful cyber-futurism) and nonchalant air helped it get onto the year-end lists of more than just DJ aficionados. Now it anchors a full album, many of whose songs work in a pleasantly similar manner. On Movements, Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier, the Berlin producers who record as Booka Shade, grows on you in a similarly subliminal way. Sometimes they tighten their basic formula, as on "Pong Pang," whose assertive core sounds like a rapid, bouncy thumb-piano riff that's mirrored by hi-hats and buggy computer effects; it also segues seamlessly into "Mandarine Girl." When Merziger and Kammermeier loosen up, they go all the way, as on the slap-happily electro-poppy "The Birds And The Beats/At The Window." But mostly they prefer to creep up on you, each new noise emerging unobtrusively from the corners of the sound-field, not pouncing but sidling.

Ornette Coleman’s first new album in a decade, Sound Grammar, documents the iconic alto-sax maverick’s stunning current band, an all-acoustic group with two bassists, at a German concert on October 14, 2005. This particular album is less about pushing in new directions and more about acknowledging and extending the strengths that have shaped Coleman's style from the very beginning: melodic generosity, a healthy disregard for rules and, always, a deep blues feel at the core of his conception. The strongest attraction here, really, is the powerful performances that this particular band produces.

Bowing his instrument in classical style, Tony Falanga provides keening accompaniment and vigorous counterpoint to the leader’s bluesy ebullience; Greg Cohen (Tom Waits, John Zorn), anchors the band with his rock-steady pulse. Denardo Coleman, the saxophonist’s son, remains an idiosyncratic drummer, but he’s at his best here. The set includes familiar numbers such as “Sleep Talking,” “Song X” and the classic “Turnaround,” but close watchers will also recognize a few more recent tunes presented here under new names. A miraculously clear recording by Chris Agovino lays clear every strand in the quartet’s intricate weave. With this release, Coleman assumes control of his artistic destiny with the establishment of his own label. With any luck, we'll see Coleman albums more frequently than we have in recent decades.

Person Pitch may not sound like a singles album, but that’s exactly what it is. Culled from 12-inches and compilation appearances, the songs on the album don’t reflect the product of an intense period of recording; instead, the album is a general expression of what Noah Lennox has been up to in the years since his second album, 2004's Young Prayer (i.e., getting married, having a child, moving to Portugal). In other words, Lennox has been busy getting happy.

You can tell simply from the song titles — “Comfy in Nautica,” “Bros,” “Search for Delicious” — but the songs themselves confirm it: “Comfy” opens the shutters on the album by slowly revealing a storefront of chanting and hand-clapping backup singers behind Lennox’s slow-motion singalong. “Take Pills” ups the tempo, gradually building its way from a waltzing lullaby into a looped verse from a forgotten Avalon/Funicello beach movie.

But the two sunny movements of "Take Pills" are trumped by “Good Girl/Carrots,” which finds time for organic trance, a nursery rhyme-esque middle and a narcotic dub coda. The undisputed highlight, though, is the twelve-minute “Bros,” which sounds built expressly for Julee Cruise, until Lennox rubs his eyes and the song goes widescreen. Judging by these results, we could stand to hear Lennox happy more often.

In retrospect, it's actually surprising that this album wasn't bigger. In 2000, an Icelandic trio called Sigur Rós cooed new age into the indie rock mainstream with Ágætis Byrjun, a contemplative collection that steers between gorgeous whale music ("Svefn-g-englar") and post-Enigma Europop ("Starálfur" and "Ný batterí"). Certainly the glacial pace and nonsense lyrics (sung in a made-up language) place some limits on its reach, but by and large Sigur Rós' music is intensely accessible, with emotionally naked cinematic flourishes pacing the compositions. There are tentative dabbles into jazz and Radiohead-style art-rock, but by and large this is a smart and progressive new age album that even the kids can dig.

There’s only one bad thing you can say about Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire: it doesn’t contain career highlight “Elevator Love Letter.” Otherwise, this album is pretty much the perfect indie-pop record, replete with girl/boy harmonizing, epic choruses and the type of catchy tunes that could’ve only been created (these days, anyway) in Canada.

But it’s not just perfect pop constructions. Check the extended coda on the title track, which cuts off the propulsive tune and takes it to outer space. Or “The Big Fight,” where the group seemingly hires a different producer mid-song and turns a plodding lament into an upbeat instrumental. Or the flat-out electro-jazz-punk maelstrom of “He Lied About Death.”

At heart, though, Stars is a pop band, and pop music is about moments that make your heart swell a little bit larger than you thought it could. Fire has plenty of those, too: when drummer Pat McGee starts syncopating on “One More Night,” when the group “woo”’s are indistinguishable from the oscillating synth on “Ageless Beauty,” that one moment of silence before each chorus in “Soft Revolution”… I could go on, but what’s the point? Words are useless when you run up against this type of album. Dig in.

Too often sacrificed in the rush to create Billy Bragg, post-Guthrie socialist folkie is Billy Bragg, hopeless romantic. It's odd and unbelievable that politics somehow became sexier than, well, sex, but so goes the strange and crazy world. So let this collection stand as a testament to the other Billy Bragg, the one who pours out his heart in secret to the woman who will never know his name. The character is perfectly suited to Bragg — he's a funny-looking bloke who can't really sing and has a harsh and intrusive accent, and those imperfections only make his tales of unrequited love sting longer and harder.

"The Milkman of Human Kindness" offers tokens of his devotion, but then slips out unnoticed. The title track is a repeated plea, a little more heartbreaking each time through. "The Price I Pay" is pure straight sorrow, Bragg sighing "That's the price I pay for loving you the way that I do" over pirouetting piano. Is this the voice of a firebrand activist, or the soft plea of a shrinking violet? Bragg approaches both topics with the same directness, preferring to state outright rather than hint or imply. Case in point, the speedy, spectacular "A New England," where Bragg lays out his m.o.: "I don't want to change the world/ I'm not looking for a new England/ I'm just looking for another girl."

Joe Strummer is not dead. Just one listen of Gypsy Punks and it's clear that Joltin’ Joe’s departed spirit has slipped into singer Eugene Hutz. Gogol's banging Balkan diaspora dovetails with Strummer's world music explorations — it's arguably the summation of the former Clash frontman's global-politique-a-go-go. But Gogol don't fancy themselves rock revolutionaries in the classic sense. On "Go Revolutions," Hutz tears into karaoke culture by proclaiming that he could make a "better revolution with his dick." Humor and 4/4 rhythms aside, the soul of Gogol is still firmly rooted in the gnarled, rocking Eastern European wedding music popularized byYuri Yukanov and Ivo Papasov. It's frantic and fun, a manifesto wrapped in irony and fired with a sly urgency, especially when Hutz breaks out into the mother-tongue of all revolutionaries, singing praises to Cuba in Spanish. Somewhere, Strummer is harmonizing with Hutz on a phantom radio from the other side.

The repeated mantra at the end of the opening track from Grandaddy's The Sophtware Slump goes like this: "You're giving in, 2000 Man." It goes on for what seems like an eternity — 30 whole seconds! — until lead singer Jason Lytle finally breaks out of his reverie and urges "2000 Man" not to give up. This struggle between man and progress is the major theme that runs throughout Slump, as Lytle makes his way through broken household appliance national forests, drunk robots and a host of confusing chartsengrafs.

But as depressing as the subject matter gets, hope peeks out of Slump every now and again. "The Crystal Lake" may be the group's finest moment, gluing together heavy rhythm guitars, Lytle's ever-present whine and a ramshackle oscillating synthesizer that seems to have been turned on and forgotten about. The same goes for "Hewlett's Daughter." Sure, the drums plod along like a drunken robot, but the opening hook is an undeniable one: "Hewlett's daughter/ Loved her father/ And I think she/ Loved me too…for a little while."

Let's face it, though, Grandaddy is a pretty depressing band. Technology is always winning in this battle, whether it's in the sad tale of Jed, the forgotten robot, or the tinkling piano ballad "Underneath the Weeping Willow." On Slump, Lytle sounds like the American Thom Yorke — a whiny prophet that you want to hug as much as you want to punch. Luckily, with his excellent and ambitious backing band in tow, this is more Kid A than Pablo Honey.

Did he leave a "d" off the end of the title? Because the fifth release by Oregon's best neo-old-timey guitarist is decidedly post-Ward: a full-band progression from his sidewalk-busker sound. But not to fear, the indie troubadour has abandoned none of his soul-piercing profundity — on "Chinese Translation," a pretty folk jangler that drifts along to the distant, train-whistle oohs of guest vocalist Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Ward asks the Big Questions: "How can a man like me remain in the light?/And if life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?" Then he goes all fatalistic when Neko Case, guests on a cover of Daniel Johnston’s "To Go Home," singing (twice, for emphasis), "God it's great to be alive/ Takes the skin right off my hide/ To think I'll have to give it all up/ Some day."

A record that casts a warily existential eye on the future, Post-War forges links to the past: surf-guitar instrumentals ("Neptunes Net"), bare-essentials blues ("Rollercoaster") and '60s-inspired slow-dance numbers ("Afterward/Rag"). The lyrics often touch on soldiers returning from the front, and those anachronistic accents serve to underscore the idea that Johnny-comes-marching-home romanticism is, like the genres Ward explores, a vestige of a very different time. Some may call it vintage, but there's another word for it: classic.

Featuring two ex-members of influential noise-metal band Today is the Day, Mastodon creates fringe music for the mainstream — proggy, rhythmically complex torrents of melodic noise that incorporate elements of death metal, grindcore, hardcore, thrash and math rock, and somehow still groove like Skynyrd on crank. With Leviathan, the band funneled its multifaceted attack into a concept album based on Herman Melville’s literary classic Moby Dick. Nothing could seem less metal; little sounds more metal.

Seattle wasn't the only pea patch watered by kids of the ‘80s seeking to escape MTV and make punk their own. Lou Barlow and J. Mascis, two seemingly lackadaisical nerds from collegiate Northampton, Mass., turned their hardcore band into Dinosaur Jr. after realizing that the precision of thrash-and-mosh left little room for the sonic rambling that suited their hazy attitude. The resulting sound embodied one of indie rock's key emotional realities: the hormonal flux of misfit boys bent on claiming their cock rock inheritance, but scared of it as well. (Is there a sadder attempt at a romantic gesture than "In a Jar"?) Running wild with his effects pedal while mumbling insecurities into the mike, Mascis was rock's ultimate loser-hero, while bassist Barlow (who'd later found the equally influential Sebadoh) provided mind-expanding atmosphere. And don't forget the drums by Murph — the band's one unambivalent rocker, who held up its shaky treehouse with basic brute force.

Animal Collective — four couch-surfing, scraggly dudes from the Northeast — write rounds disguised as songs, time-delayed melodies that swallow themselves whole before completion and search for a finite end that never arrives. Sometimes the effect is like Columbus addressing the Flat Earth Society, but on Feels, the band's new album, it's like waking up to zero gravity, the whole world weightless and untethered — and what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than chilling on the ceiling?

Feels is easily the most accessible Animal Collective record yet, and also one of the best 2005 releases, period. "Did You See the Words" and "The Purple Bottle" tug from the same bottle of delirium as the Arcade Fire — it's as if everyone's in a race to see who can finish the song first. "Purple Bottle" in particular really impresses, the drumming primal but dampened, the vocals yelping and pygmy-like and an incredible "chorus" of soft yawps and falsetto sighs. "Bees" takes off on Panda Bear's excellent Young Prayer record, all harpsichord and enchanting forests. Bjork fans in particular might be surprised by how much they dig this one.

But far and beyond all of these excellent moments is "Banshee Beat." It's an absolute epiphany: chanted vocals, the strongest melody on the record, a pensive guitar drone, four chords, bombastic drums, percussion that sounds like spoon-thwacking, a too-brief crescendo rain-delayed for six minutes that still satisfies, a song that begs for the loudest stereo system ever. If this doesn't send you for the "download all" button, then nothing will.

Few 30-year-old albums sound as fresh and as ripe for rediscovery as Jesus of Cool. Unavailable or out of print throughout much of the CD era, the debut LP by Nick Lowe (renamed Pure Pop for Now People for the American market with a reconfigured track listing) was unique in its day for both embracing pop readymades and satirizing the exploitative and fickle culture that creates and consumes them. Nowadays, every indie rocker and blogger skewers the record biz while celebrating its guilty pleasures, but in 1978 such ambivalence was both radical (it was the first New Wave album to encapsulate the budding movement’s love/hate relationship with everything that preceded it) and misunderstood (Rolling Stone dismissed it as “a catalog of socko production effects held together with one-shot jokes.”)

Having struggled for years as the bassist of failed pub-rock band Brinsley Schwarz, Lowe created Jesus during his ascent as Stiff Records’ in-house producer of the Damned and Elvis Costello, and his sense of glee upon finally commanding his own destiny is palpable: No matter how cynical his lyrics get (check his still-shocking ode to fallen film star Marie Prevost, here dubbed “Marie Provost”), the music remains joyous. Nicknamed Basher for his technique of bashing out quick takes, Lowe gets remarkably kinetic performances from various members of Rockpile, the Rumour, and Elvis Costello’s Attractions that play tug of war with his spoofing side, rendering Lowe simultaneously offhand and heartfelt in proto-mashup mode: “Nutted By Reality” starts off by nicking the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” before abruptly shifting into a remarkably accurate Wings tribute, while “Tonight” recreates the teenage balladry of the Everly Brothers and climaxes on a melody cribbed from the Beatles’ “It’s Only Love.” Now including 10 extra non-LP singles, EP sides and compilation cuts that lead up to Jesus, this pop-about-pop landmark may ostensibly protest “Music for Money,” but Lowe’s clearly doing it for love.

This classic soul workout is as audacious as its title, thanks to Hayes' languid cover of the Jackson 5's "Never Can Say Goodbye" and the moody, oft-sampled "Ike's Rap."

The bleak rosetta stone for complex, technical metal, Opeth's Blackwater Park proves that heavy music can absorb far-flung influences without sacrificing any of its inherent unholiness. The songs on Blackwater Park are endlessly restless. Over the course of its staggering 10-minutes, "Leper Affinity" moves from for-the-throat grind to solemn acoustic folk back to hardcore battering. "Bleak" is different altogether, becoming subdued and jazzy in its center section, mournful acoustic plucking spiraling like a crow overhead. Adding to the sense of breadth is the dual vocal approach of Mikael Akerfeldt. He's coarse and growling one minute, scraping his charred vocals across the bottom of the songs. Seconds later, though, he's crooning softly, the voice sounding like it's coming from a completely different source. The songs get richer and more dazzling each time through, and eventually Blackwater Park becomes a record not just of mere technical accomplishment, but one of power, intensity and madness.

The split personality that is Ray Davies' genius is never more apparent than on this 1972 classic. Though the Kinks' initial breakthrough was built on ruffled-shirt decadence and guitar distortion, Davies early on revealed a nostalgic yearning for a simpler England, the Village Green and the local pub. But the price paid is steep: none of the many characters in Muswell Hill seem able to escape the modern world. Beset by alcoholism, starvation, jail and "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues," they take refuge in their dreams, and even those turn out badly. In "Holiday," the narrator lies on a beach only to be burnt by the sun, with the sea "an open sewer." In "Oklahoma U.S.A.," the punchline is "If life's for livin' then what's livin' for."

Unrelieved gloom? Hardly. Davies' affection for his characters and the Kinks' skill with a hook shines through. Despite the hard times amidst the omnipresent "People In Grey," his songs allow that a sense of community will grant a shoulder to lean upon, a friend to share a cuppa tea, a tune to hum. More than that, his "Muswell Hillbilly" can imagine the West Virginia he'll never see, the there of not-there, and the most powerful nostalgia of all.

Every rapper needs a creation myth — Illmatic opened with Nas and A.Z. counting money over snippets from Wild Style, the devil’s sons redeemed by hip-hop. Biggie opened Ready to Die with a gripping audio collage of his first twenty-odd years, as though his rag-to-riches tale was one you needed to learn. Jay opened Reasonable Doubt with a heartbeat, but its quickening pace suggested it was the sound of fear — of moving your first package; of holding your first gun; of seeing a man die; of the moment when you realize you have grown up too fast. This wasn’t an album deeply concerned with where Jay had been, since he had already built his name as a rather successful drug dealer. This album was about one man’s rebirth, and as soon as that ticking heart gave way to the gloss and floss of “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” it was clear that Jay, too, had arrived.

“My pops knew exactly what he did when he made me/ Tried to get a nut and he got a nut,” he bragged on that opening cut, as Mary J. Blige bellowed an achingly hopeful chorus borrowed from Mel’isa Morgan’s “Fool’s Paradise.” But was Jay really a “nut,” our “worst fear confirmed”? There is something cool and composed about Reasonable Doubt, as he plays straight man to Biggie’s true nut on “Brooklyn’s Finest” or earns his stripes on the icy “Dead Presidents II” — two of the finest songs of Jay’s career. “We used to fight for building blocks/ Now we fight for blocks with buildings that make a killin’,” he raps on the truly disturbing “D’evils.” But even there he sounds chillingly assured against DJ Premier’s spooked Allen Toussaint sample.

History recognizes Reasonable Doubt as evidence of Jay’s genius, but it all could have ended up very differently. Reasonable Doubt arrived during a tumultuous turn in the history of hip-hop. Nas’ disappointing It Was Written would come out a week later, and hip-hop’s obsession with the Mafioso lifestyle would soon bloat to cartoonish extremes. The Wu-Tang Clan would spool out of control, and within the next year, Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. would ascend to martyrdom. Yet the culture’s growth was still exceeding all expectations, and hip-hop would need new, larger, flashier heroes. And in Jay-Z, it found its pinnacle.

By 2003, Mark Kozelek was at a crossroads. The thick-band atmospherics he'd plied with Red House Painters had eventually curdled into classic rock, the group's oft-delayed Old Ramon trading mood and feel for direct licks and distressingly clean songwriting. So consider Sun Kil Moon a creative rebirth, a halfway stop between Kozelek's twin tendencies. Its opening is deliciously deceptive. Over a plaintive acoustic strum, Kozelek wryly compares the virtues of Glenn Tipton and K. K. Downing, finally kicking his feet up on the coffee table to watch Clark Gable movies. And then suddenly, the song shifts, softly and tenderly a reflection on loss and departure: the ghost of his father haunts the doorframe of his house, an old woman he'd befriended dies suddenly, leaving an aching vacancy in the diner where she worked. He pulls the switch so quickly and masterfully you don't see it coming — which, in a way, is as good a commentary on death as a person could possibly ask for. That Kozelek follows this auspicious opening gambit with nine songs that are just as good is almost a bonus. Everything here is beautiful: the lonesome, folky "Floating," the bright grand arc of "Gentle Moon," the steady twinkle of "Si Paloma." It's mystery music, and that Kozelek can spin such fabulous ciphers in a setting so spare is a wonder in itself.

Following the disappointing Girls Can Tell, Kill the Moonlight was a tremendous comeback for Spoon, a return to the taut, rhythmic feel of A Series of Sneaks (still their best album). "The Way We Get By" was Spoon's first real anthem, Britt Daniel flirtatiously barking, "You sweet talk like a cop, and you know it/ You bought a new bag of pot/ So let's make a new start," and then offering a raison d'etre straight outta Dazed and Confused: "We get high in backseats of cars."

The weed singalongs stop there