File under: Unnerving, serrated-edged, spacious art-punks who love dissonance and contrast

For fans of: Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Sonic Youth, Arab Strap, Xiu Xiu, The Birthday Party

From: Omaha, Nebraska

Personae: Jack Begley (guitar, vocals), Noah Sterba (guitar, vocals), Jeff Sedrel (bass), Kevin Donahue (drums)

Yuppies took a very long time to make their first album — the band formed in 2007 and has released a handful of singles and a split EP over the past few years, but their self-titled, full-length debut has just appeared on Parquet Courts’ label Dull Tools. It’s a terrifically unsettling record, flowing from quiet, spacious passages (with main vocalist Jack Begley muttering or chanting lyrics that sound like every phrase is in a separate set of quotation marks) to out-of-control punk slaloms like “Hitchin a Ride,” which Noah Sterba screams so hard his voice cracks. And the band’s years of playing together are evident in the way they run every song into the next, without a pause.

There’s a lot of history audible on Yuppies — the atonal hammer-and-release textures and shambling rhythms of some of these songs echo the late ’70s no wave scene, and Begley and Sterba’s voices recall the Midwestern punk rock of the ’80s. But it’s also an assured, startling take on the psychogeography of the Dust Belt landscape that spawned the band. “All right, all right, we’re going for a ride, whether you like it or not,” Begley snaps at the beginning of “A Ride,” and that’s Yuppies’ attitude, right there.

eMusic’s Douglas Wolk talked with Sterba as the band geared up for a month-long tour.

On the band’s origins in high school corridors:

Me, Kevin and Jack all grew up together. In high school, I was writing songs, and Jack was writing songs, and we knew Kevin played drums, so we started playing together. Our earliest stuff was very primitive and…”young.” We were learning to play our instruments as we were playing songs. As we’ve gone on, we’ve kind of gotten more competent. We graduated from high school in 2007, and then in probably 2010, Jeff joined — we’d just been guitars and drums, and we thought, “Oh man — we gotta have some low end!”

On geographical separation and making their first album after six years:

Jeff lives in Virginia now, and Jack lived in St. Louis for a year or two. We’ve only had two or three years of being in the same city as a band. But once we got Jeff, we couldn’t play with anyone else. Even if after this tour we can’t play for another year, we won’t stop being a band — we’ll just kind of try to work with what we have and where we are.

The album’s definitely been a long time coming. One or two of the songs on the album we’ve had for four or five years; there are a few that we’ve thrown out, then reclaimed and put on the record. Most of the songs flow together, but I’d almost say that’s not something we consciously did — we’ve had a lot of space between times when we could practice, so the songs form their relationship with each other. Which is pretty cool.

On their nonstop live sets and how that translated to the recording:

Our shows are high-energy and anxiety-ridden. There are a lot of moments of chaos. We don’t take any breaks between songs, although we’ve got a bunch of different sets. We don’t have very long attention spans; we try to push ourselves to do new things at every show. The first side of the album we did in one long take. We recorded it live except for the vocals, and we thought, “This could take all day if we keep fucking it up 15 minutes in,” but we got the whole thing in one take. The second side we did in two parts — the first few songs run together, and then the last two.

On “What’s That?”:

That was one of the coolest songs to be a part of. We never talked about the writing of that song, we just started playing, said, “That’s kinda cool!,” practiced it again and started playing it at shows. When it started out, it was so different from how it turned out on the record. We never once talked about the structure of the song until the day before we recorded it. It was a bizarre process to be part of, watching this thing form itself.

On what they do when they’re not being Yuppies:

Kevin and I play with Simon Joyner — I’ve been playing with him for three or four years, Kevin just joined the group this year. We just made a new record and it’s awesome — more of an experimental record than Simon’s ever done. Simon lent me a space with an 8-track, and I recorded a solo album where I play all the instruments — that was released on Unread Records. Jack had a solo tape close to a year ago. And Kevin and I work at a diner that our friend owns in Omaha. Jack also works in a restaurant, and Jeff works in a restaurant in Richmond.

On the band’s favorite reactions to their music:

I’ve had a lot of people come up to me after a show and say, “It was good, but it made me feel really weird.” To be able to conjure up an emotion in someone, just from the sounds we’re making — to be able to create a feeling and have them really feel it too — that’s so flattering to me.

Spilling over with crisp, witty rock songs, punctuated by bonus noise doodles

Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss have now been recording as Quasi for 20 years and nine albums, outlasting nearly all of their contemporaries, which is astonishing for a band whose main lyrical themes are indignation and self-laceration. They’re still enormously creatively fertile as a duo (a format they’ve returned to after a few years with bassist Joanna Bolme) — Mole City is spilling over with crisp, witty rock songs, punctuated by bonus noise doodles. Weiss is a pile-driving drummer most of the time (she tones it down when the songs call for it, but it’s really fun when she cuts loose), and Coomes favors super-fuzzed-out instrumental sounds and massive riffs to set off his weedy smart-alec voice. And they’re as locked into each other’s sense of rhythm as any two musicians can be: Either “Blasted” deliberately includes an incredibly weird metrical shift or both of them impulsively threw in an extra half-beat at the same moment.

Quasi’s performance aesthetic is punk rock all the way, but one weird and wonderful thing about them is that their songwriting is totally grounded in the pre-punk era (the ending of “See You on Mars” is boater-and-cane music-hall, and the singalong tune of “Bedbug Town” could have appeared on an old Kinks record). Mole City reaches back to the early glam and metal era for some of its sounds — there’s a lot of T. Rex and Ziggy Stardust, and a little bit of Black Sabbath, in its grooves. As usual, though, Coomes and Weiss’s harshest critiques are reserved for their own impulses. One of the album’s centerpieces is an unhinged Big Star pastiche called “Nostalgia Kills,” and the climactic “New Western Way” skewers the culture of a generation raised on “Nestlé Quik mother’s milk/ Mickey Mouse plastic spoon.”

The new Costello/Roots collaboration Wise Up Ghost — mostly recorded in the Roots’ dressing room for their regular gig on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon — sounds like the product of a couple of intense music nerds cheerfully impressing each other, and it’s drenched in musical history. Costello’s always been a habitual quoter of and alluder to other people’s songs: From his very earliest recordings onward, his discography is strewn with small and large echoes of his favorite records. (How many of the punks of 1977 who listened to his first album, My Aim Is True, noticed that “Blame It on Cain” borrowed the groove of Sam Cooke’s “That’s It – I Quit – I’m Movin’ On”?) The most extensive homage in his discography, 1980′s Get Happy!!, is pretty much a tribute to the sound of ’60s-era Stax Records — compare “Temptation” to Booker T. and the M.G.’s’ “Time is Tight.”

The curious thing about Wise Up Ghost is that the catalog Costello spends most of his time revisiting is his own. Several songs set nearly entire lyrics from old Costello compositions to new music: “Wake Me Up” is “Bedlam” from 2004′s The Delivery Man, and “(She Might Be a) Grenade” is the same record’s bonus track “She’s Pulling Out the Pin”; “Stick Out Your Tongue” is “Pills and Soap” from 1983′s Punch the Clock, with a verse from “Hurry Down Doomsday” stuck into the middle; “Refuse to be Saved” is “Invasion Hit Parade” from 1991′s Mighty Like a Rose (Ross MacManus, in fact, played trumpet on the original version). And the “Invasion Hit Parade” lyric was pretty allusive to begin with: “no pool, no pets, no cigarettes,” a half-quote from Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” gets rhymed with “just non-stop Disco Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes,” a reference to the early disco act who recorded “Get Dancin’.” (Has Costello’s dismissive attitude toward the latter softened in the past 22 years? Who knows?)

Even in his new lyrics, Costello can’t stop alluding to the rattle bag of songs in his head. Wise Up Ghost‘s opening track “Walk Us Uptown” drops offhanded references to Jimmy Reed’s “Take Out Some Insurance On Me Baby” and the Mojos’ “Everything’s Alright,” and finally detours into a couple of lines from the 19th-century socialist anthem “The Red Flag”: “As cowards flee and traitors sneer/ Keep a red flag flying.” Of course, Costello can’t sing the word “coward” without bringing to mind the Coward Brothers, his collaboration with T-Bone Burnett — and when he mentions a white flag a few seconds later, it can’t help but recall his much-bootlegged early song “Wave a White Flag.” If you record as much as he has, everything’s an allusion to something.

In an interview with Electronic Musician, Costello noted that one unusual thing about Wise Up Ghost was that he didn’t play any tremolo guitar — the low-end leads that have been a hallmark of his performances since “Watching the Detectives.” But what’s that guitar sound that holds together “Sugar Won’t Work”? It might be Costello playing it, and it might be the Roots’ Captain Kirk Douglas — but the riff is very, very close to the one from “Watching the Detectives”… backwards. Likewise, the central musical motif of the album’s loveliest song, “Tripwire,” is another small Questlove nod to the Costello fanatics in the room: It’s lifted from the introduction to Elvis’s 1989 song “Satellite.”

At times, Wise Up Ghost matches Robert Christgau’s description of an early Magnetic Fields album — “more songs about songs and songs” — to the point where it’s sometimes not clear how much it has to do with the world beyond the record shelf. (The title of “Sugar Won’t Work” is surprising in that it’s a quote not from a song, but from the film version of “The Big Sleep.”)

The open question, though, is how many of its meta-songs will stay in Costello’s repertoire. It’s been Elvis’s pattern for a few decades now that he treats his albums with his main rock band — the Attractions, originally, and more recently the Confederates — as his “real” repertoire, the source of most of the material he plays live. His work with other artists is more often collaborator-specific; it’ll be surprising if many of the songs from Wise Up Ghost appear in his stage show when he’s not playing with the Roots (although “Tripwire” turned up at a solo gig he played the week before its release). Still, it’s a remarkable record, the most surprising and challenging album Costello has made in many years. If he has to set up his throne in a hall of mirrors, this one would be a fine choice.

The most surprising and challenging Costello has made in years

Elvis Costello and the Roots’ drummer/majordomo ?uestlove have a couple of big things in common: For one, they’re both the children of professional musicians. (?uest’s parents were in the Philly soul group Congress Alley; Costello’s father, Ross MacManus, sang with the Joe Loss Orchestra.) They’re also both gigantic record nerds, the kind of omnivorous music collectors who can go off on the minutiae of alternate pressings and mixes. ?uest has a legendarily mammoth record collection, from which he’s absorbed seemingly every groove anyone’s ever recorded. And Costello’s right up there with him in terms of obsessive music fandom: When he catalogued his 500 favorite albums for Vanity Fair in 2000, the list seemed like it could easily have gone on 10 times as long.

The new Costello/Roots collaboration Wise Up Ghost — mostly recorded in the Roots’ dressing room for their regular gig on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon — sounds like the product of a couple of intense music nerds cheerfully impressing each other, and it’s drenched in musical history. Costello’s always been a habitual quoter of and alluder to other people’s songs: From his very earliest recordings onward, his discography is strewn with small and large echoes of his favorite records. (How many of the punks of 1977 who listened to his first album, My Aim Is True, noticed that “Blame It on Cain” borrowed the groove of Sam Cooke’s “That’s It – I Quit – I’m Movin’ On”?) The most extensive homage in his discography, 1980′s Get Happy!!, is pretty much a tribute to the sound of ’60s-era Stax Records — compare “Temptation” to Booker T. and the M.G.’s’ “Time is Tight.”

The curious thing about Wise Up Ghost is that the catalog Costello spends most of his time revisiting is his own. Several songs set nearly entire lyrics from old Costello compositions to new music: “Wake Me Up” is “Bedlam” from 2004′s The Delivery Man, and “(She Might Be a) Grenade” is the same record’s bonus track “She’s Pulling Out the Pin”; “Stick Out Your Tongue” is “Pills and Soap” from 1983′s Punch the Clock, with a verse from “Hurry Down Doomsday” stuck into the middle; “Refuse to be Saved” is “Invasion Hit Parade” from 1991′s Mighty Like a Rose (Ross MacManus, in fact, played trumpet on the original version).

The open question, though, is how many of the album’s meta-songs will stay in Costello’s repertoire. It’s been Elvis’s pattern for a few decades now that he treats his albums with his main rock band — the Attractions, originally, and more recently the Confederates — as his “real” repertoire, the source of most of the material he plays live. His work with other artists is more often collaborator-specific; it’ll be surprising if many of the songs from Wise Up Ghost appear in his stage show when he’s not playing with the Roots (although “Tripwire” turned up at a solo gig he played the week before its release). Still, it’s a remarkable record, the most surprising and challenging album Costello has made in many years. If he has to set up his throne in a hall of mirrors, this one would be a fine choice.

A handful of the most impressive labels in the history of American independent rock have focused very closely on a single local scene: Dischord in Washington, D.C., Dangerhouse in Los Angeles, Sub Pop (for a while, at least) in Seattle. That list has a new contender: Don Giovanni Records, which, for the past decade, has been the voice of the underground rock scene of deeply unglamorous New Brunswick, New Jersey. Founded in 2003 by Joseph Steinhardt and Zach Gajewski to release a single by their own band Talk Hard, Don Giovanni has built itself up, slowly and steadily, into an indie-rock powerhouse, releasing records by bands like Screaming Females, The Ergs! and Waxahatchee, and building a national following for the scene Steinhardt and Gajewski grew up in.

“We never planned on being a label,” Steinhardt laughs. “But as soon as we put out our own 7-inch, some other friends of ours in a local band wanted to put one out, and we said, ‘If we sell ours and get our money back, we’ll put out yours.’ And it still kind of works that way, even though we’re bigger in scale. When we put out the Ergs!’ record” — their 2005 album dorkrockcorkrod — “we thought it was the end of the label. It was our first full-length album, and we figured if our money goes down to zero, we’ll just stop. We did it on vinyl. At first it didn’t really sell. And slowly, after a while, it blew up.”

The label’s founders both have day jobs that have nothing to do with music — Gajewski works in publishing, Steinhardt is a graduate student — which allows them to put the label’s profits back into releasing more projects. “I think, honestly, Zach and I believe in the New Brunswick scene more than anything,” Steinhardt says. “A lot of the Don Giovanni bands might have been bad financial decisions at first, but in the long run, that focus has paid off. We don’t think of what’s going to make us money, we think of what’s going on right now in our scene, and how we can document that.”

Don Giovanni’s roster is very much a community — the bands have mostly known one another for many years, and wave the flag for one another. (“Everyone on the label is a little obsessed with Brick Mower and Black Wine,” Steinhardt says.) Both of the founders are still in Don Giovanni-associated bands: Gajewski plays bass in the headbanging punk band Nuclear Santa Claust, and Steinhardt occasionally plays under the name Modern Hut. “It’s a really a solo project,” he notes, “but there’s a lot of people who keep it going, because I’m honestly not very talented. My friend Marissa from Screaming Females is really what made it happen — I’ve actually been working on a Modern Hut record with her for, like, six years.”

Since 2008, Don Giovanni has also put together a big concert for its bands every February. The annual showcase has expanded to increasingly large venues; this year’s showcase was a three-day, 15-band blowout. “I always liked the idea of really big shows,” Steinhardt says, “and when I started it, none of our bands had ever played places like Maxwell’s. I thought if we could do a show there that was successful, those bands could get on the radar at those venues. We did, and it sold out, and it’s just kept growing — every year we try to push the limit.”

We asked Steinhardt to tell us a bit about the history of Don Giovanni’s relationship with half a dozen of its most significant artists.

Now a quartet of three singer/multi-instrumentalists — Ayer, Taylor Rice and Ryan Hahn — and drummer Matt Frazier, they recorded Hummingbird in Brooklyn with kindred spirit Aaron Dessner of the National. It’s a darker, more subdued album than Gorilla Manor, both in its lyrics and in its sound. But it’s buoyed up by the group’s resonant three-part harmonies and fondness for rich, swampy instrumental textures from outside the rock tradition.

eMusic’s Douglas Wolk spoke to Ayer as the band was getting ready to fly to Oakland for the second show of what promises to be another long tour.

It’s been more than three years since you released your first album. How did the songs for Hummingbird evolve over that time?

At the beginning, we were trying to find our bearings and write whatever felt good. We tried to rely on working hard and working a lot; we trusted that if we put in the work, we’d get something good out of it. Probably around five months in, we had seven songs we were excited about but we weren’t really sure what direction the album was taking yet. We had a breakthrough when Ryan and I got together and wrote the song that became “You & I” on the record. I’d had this piano riff forever, and a melody, but we just couldn’t figure out how to make it work. But I jumped on this SPD-S [electronic percussion] pad that we got, and we came up with that song, and it gave us a direction that we felt comfortable going in.

We all had bits and pieces flying around; I think I’ve had the chords for “Three Months” since 2009 or 2010. “Bowery” was a guitar riff that Ryan had had for a long, long time, since around 2007. But he totally revamped it on a demo where he played it on a Rhodes instead of guitar, and came up with this pulsating beat that ended up being what “Bowery” is now. That was cool to see how he reimagined it — you have something in your head for years, and then lightning strikes.

You’ve mentioned that one of the songs on Hummingbird has an entirely sampled drum part — which one?

That’s “Three Months.” At first we were really nervous about it — it’s such a departure for us, for a band that doesn’t even use many guitar effects pedals — but we just inched our way in, and it gradually felt good. Now I feel comfortable with it, and I couldn’t imagine the album without it. When we play it live, Matt is sampling each part of the drums on the SPD-S pad — he’s not actually playing it, but he’s triggering it in time. I don’t think it’s cheating.

You’ve spent an enormous amount of the last few years touring. How do you pass the time on the tour bus?

We all get along really well. I just bought a five-way splitter for headphones — that is a must for any touring band, ’cause you want to share what you’re watching, you know? With as many people as can fit on the bench.

Does the band have a favorite movie?

I think Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy is right up there. And we just watched the whole first season of Boardwalk Empire. I love Michael Shannon and Michael Pitt; I think they’re such amazing actors, and it’s cool to see them in one show together.

Local Natives famously decide on everything collectively. Does that work in practice?

Yeah, we can talk about the artwork for a billboard for hours. But we don’t know any other way to do it, and it’s worked so far. It really helps that we’re proud of everything that we’ve put out there so far.

Do you have models, within or outside music, for a career of making art?

The answer definitely differs from person to person, but for me — I’m a huge, huge Radiohead fan. If we could have anything close to the career they’ve had, that would be amazing. They’ve been around for so long, and changed into so many forms, and to this day they feel very current and alive. And they did it all without compromising any of their vision. That’s incredible. And also Damon Albarn — The Good, The Bad and the Queen? Have you heard that record? I just think he’s a pop mastermind. Every melody that comes out of him gets in your head, and it’s not cheesy.

Who has the best facial hair in the band?

People always say that about Taylor, so I will pick me. [Laughs.] As sick as I am of hearing about it, I would never want him to shave it, because it looks really, really great.

File under: Loud, fast, dumb, proud party music

For fans of: Circle Jerks, Dwarves, Andrew W.K., Agent Orange, Spinout

From: Los Angeles

Personae: Zac Carper (vocals and guitar), Elvis Kuehn (singing and guitar), Max Kuehn (drums), Brandon Schwartzel (bass)

The name FIDLAR is an acronym for a truism West Coast skate-punks quote immediately before executing some astonishingly dumbass feat of derring-do: “fuck it, dog, life’s a risk.” The L.A. quartet are literally second-generation punk rockers — brothers Elvis and Max Kuehn’s father is T.S.O.L. keyboardist Greg Kuehn. And for a band that makes a big deal of being hedonistic slackers (song titles: “Cheap Beer,” “Wake Bake Skate”), they’re amazingly productive. Over the past three years or so, they’ve been responsible for a steady stream of two-minute pop-punk blowouts in the forms of YouTube videos, EPs and live shows. They played more than 100 gigs last year alone, and they’re gearing up to spend most of 2013 on the road.

Shortly before the release of FIDLAR’s self-titled debut album, eMusic’s Douglas Wolk talked to bassist Brandon Schwartzel about the perils of playing more than a dozen songs in a single show, the state of the L.A. punk scene, their audience’s dangerous stunts, and their surprising connection to nu-metal band Trapt.

On the house and studio Schwartzel shares with singer/guitarist Zac Carper:

Me and Zac were both living in our cars, and we were trying to find a place where we could have a studio or make noise. Then we found this place on Craigslist that doubled as an apartment and a studio, so it worked out perfectly. We found out later that Trapt actually built the studio. They had left some gear here, like this big 412 guitar cabinet that had a giant T on it — some of the guys from Trapt actually came by and picked up their stuff.

On a live FIDLAR show’s typical audience:

We try to get the crowd into it as much as possible — loud, energetic, probably pretty drunk. There was this one house party where we were playing in the back yard, and all of a sudden we hear everyone go “whooooaaaa” — and this guy had jumped off the roof of the house we were playing into the crowd. He stagedived off the roof. There’s actually an awesome picture of this guy flying in the air. The crowd totally caught him, it’s all good…We love that shit.

On the band’s infamous “found footage” music videos:

Those we just do on iMovie — we get stoned and make a video. That’s something we’ve done since we started the band: record a song, post it online, make a video for it. The good-looking ones, like “Cheap Beer” and “No Wave,” are by our friend Ryan, who’s actually Zac’s brother-in-law. He’s kind of like our fifth member — he’s been very involved from the beginning. The CCR thing [the video for "Gimme Something," which is synched up with old performance footage of Creedence Clearwater Revival] — that was Ryan. He just did that for fun, too. It’s amazing.

On what it means to be an L.A. band:

One of the reasons we started is that there was such an indie take-themselves-too-seriously scene in Silverlake, where Zac and I were living at the time. We said, “There’s no fucking rock bands any more that just play and have fun.” And then we started finding bands in L.A. that were similar, and now there’s a cool, garage-y, DIY scene — all the Burger Records bands, there’s this band called the Shrine that we play with a bunch, this band Pangaea… The older L.A. bands we feel connected to are the ’70s and ’80s punk bands: Fear, Black Flag, Circle Jerks. X is a band we all love a lot.

On the making of the album:

We did it all at our house. It was set up as a studio, but there wasn’t any gear. So we found some shitty stuff, and borrowed some stuff — a lot of the production was us trying to make the most interesting thing possible with what we had. We’re all super into recording — Zac and Elvis met at a studio where they were both working. The album sounds pretty straightforward, but if you really listen to it, there’s a lot of weird shit and background textures. I really like the sound of “Gimmie Something” — we had all of our friends do group vocals and yell. Elvis played the guitar solo slightly out of tune, but I think it turned out really cool.

On the biggest risk FIDLAR have ever taken as a band:

I think, for us, it was just signing to a label. That was a pretty long process. We started the band as completely DIY, and we never thought about making a record — we just thought, “Let’s make songs and put ‘em out and give everything away for free.” When the idea of signing with [Mom + Pop Music] came up, we thought: Is it going to change anything? That was definitely something that we discussed quite a bit. But they gave us 100 percent creative control — we can do whatever we want and they will put it out.

On getting used to playing headlining shows:

Physically, with how we play, we could probably play for, like, an hour before we all passed out. We kind of give it our all when we play. It gets pretty exhausting. It’s tough now, because we’re used to playing 12 songs, which is half an hour for us, and now we’re playing like 17 songs. We gotta start jamming more. Or have 10 minutes of feedback.

An odd assemblage of Francophone, woman-sung garage pop

The French yé-yé scene of the ’60s had a handful of relatively presentable stars — Françoise Hardy, Sylvie Vartan, Johnny Hallyday and the like — and then a legion of garage knockoffs, cash-in artists, wannabes and arrivistes, many of whom had at least one completely awesome single in them. It’s the latter category whose dirty jewels are collected on this terrific set, a Nuggets-style anthology of a very specific subgenre: Francophone, woman-sung garage pop with production designed to sound a lot more expensive than it was.

Hot French Chicks in the Garage is a very odd assemblage of material, with inconsistent sound quality, and not everything seems to fit its remit — the Québécois group Les Musi-Q-airs, for instance, were neither French nor chicks, and Reggy van de Burght’s heavy-breathing “Eenzam op’t leidseplein” is unmistakably in Dutch. The only really familiar names here are France Gall (who turns up with a jingle she recorded for a wine company) and Englishwoman Sandie Shaw (remaking “Too Bad You Don’t Want Me” in French), although there are a handful of songs familiar from their English-language originals: one guess what Julie D’s “Aiko-Aiko” is translated from. Nearly every track here, though, has something delightful about it, from the drunken brass band wheezing along behind Aline’s “L’éducation” to the lascivious English professor intoning “I love, you love, she loves, he loves” on Chantal Kelly’s “Notre Prof’ D’anglais.”

A post-Leeds gig that makes clear of what's spontaneous and what isn't

The evening in February, 1970, after the Who played the show immortalized as Live at Leeds, they played another gig 50 miles or so down the road in Hull (initially released as part of the super-deluxe Leeds 40th-anniversary box a few years ago), once again including a slightly condensed run-through of their rock opera Tommy. As with Leeds, this purports to be a warts-and-all document of that gig; as with Leeds, it isn’t quite. (In particular, there’s allegedly some jiggery-pokery involving Jon Entwistle’s bass parts, some of which were apparently missing from the master tape.)

One of the things that earned Leeds its place in the pantheon is its suggestion of total spontaneity — Pete Townshend, Keith Moon and Entwistle all seem to be just on the verge of flying off in their own directions, but listening to one another closely enough that the Who machine somehow takes flight. And what makes Hull vital listening for Who buffs is that it becomes clear what’s spontaneous and what isn’t. The two shows have identical set lists (except that there’s no final encore of “Magic Bus” here); even the 15-minute jam on “My Generation” has a very similar structure. Instrumentally, though, the rhythmic anchor of the band turns out to be Townshend — his riffs are the ground around which Moon and Entwistle are constantly improvising. This is also a Keith Moon showcase like no other Who album: His drums are bright and loud in the mix, coming off like a free-form solo that magically sticks to the precise contour of the band’s groove for two straight hours.

The '80s indie-poppers' full-on comeback

The Primitives’ first incarnation, in the late ’80s, was an exemplar of its guitar-driven indie-pop moment. Still, guitarist P.J. Court and singer Tracy Tracy always had deep roots in the music of the mid ’60s, and the forgotten byways of the singles bins meant more to them than the high-profile hits. The band returned from a two-decade break in 2011 with the Never Kill a Secret EP (two originals, two covers) but their full-on comeback album is a set of covers of songs originally sung by women, most of them from that mid-’60s sweet spot and almost all of them utter obscurities. (“I’m Not Sayin’” — a Gordon Lightfoot song that Nico recorded as her first single, and that Court sings here — is probably the most familiar song here; “Move It On Over” is not the Hank Williams hit but a song by one Le Grand Mellon.) The Primitives effectively translate most of these songs into their own idiom: Only a whomping version of German duo Adam & Eve’s “The Witch” would have sounded out of place on their ’80s-era albums, and Court’s sparkling arpeggios on “Amoreux D’Une Affiche” (originally recorded by Laura Ulmer) are straight out of “Crash.” Court and Tracy have done their fans a service by digging up these lost antecedents of their own music, and they sound like they’re having the time of their lives playing them.

Tuneful and light, deliriously dramatic and grand

The German synth-pop group Propaganda was never the stablest group — their lineup mutated even during the course of making this debut album — but they had just about everything else going for them. They turned the sonic extremes of the rock underground, and the language and imagery of the sexual underground, into genuinely mainstream European pop (A Secret Wish includes a cover of Josef K’s “Sorry for Laughing,” and their stage repertoire also featured Throbbing Gristle’s “Discipline”). They had two extraordinary presences in singers Claudia Brücken, the one with the Nico-like purr, and Susanne Freytag, the one who could scream blue murder. They had surprisingly complementary musicians in Ralf Dörper (formerly of industrial band Die Krupps) and classical percussionist Michael Mertens. And they had glorious, panoramic production by Trevor Horn (on their debut single “Dr. Mabuse”) and Stephen Lipson.

A Secret Wish is tuneful and light in places, but it’s also deliriously dramatic and grand: It starts with a nine-minute setting of an Edgar Allan Poe poem, and it sequences “Duel” and “Jewel” — the same song in two radically different versions, one crooned by Brücken and one howled by Freytag — right next to each other. And its centerpiece is the European hit “p:Machinery,” an icy cage of metallic electronics with Brücken’s resigned voice floating up from its center.

In another universe, though, Teenage Fanclub might not have been the band for the part, and “The Concept” not the song Theron listens to. Plenty of other bands had the same things going for them, but have been (more or less) lost to time. For instance: the North Carolina-based group the Connells. Like Teenage Fanclub, the Connells were a reliable, likeable power-pop band with multiple songwriters; they were all over college radio around the same time as Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque, and had a sizeable European hit with “’74-’75.” But if you bring their name up now, you’ll likely get only blank looks. And for every Teenage Fanclub whose 20-year-old records are enduring favorites, there are three or four more bands who also seemed like a big deal in the early ’90s, and who settled instead into obscurity. Have you heard anyone talking much lately about Sky Cries Mary or the Cranes or King Missile or Magnapop or Buffalo Tom? Exactly.

As 2012 draws to a close and publications across the web are busy crowning a new batch of future classics (and there are 100 of them right here on eMusic), we thought it was a good time to ask: What separates the Teenage Fanclubs from the Connells of the world? How do you become one and avoid becoming the other? We’ve come up with a handful of simple rules. Up-and-coming bands, pay attention: This is how you survive.

1. Having records in print beats a legend every time.

The brutal, precise trio Bitch Magnet made a handful of terrific records between 1988-90 that pointed, directly or indirectly, to a whole generation of arty but tough bands, from Gastr Del Sol to Oneida. Then they broke up, their discography fell out of print, and they fell out of the conversation. Now their albums have finally been reissued (have a listen to Umber‘s “Navajo Ace,” for starters), and they toured in 2012, but they’re still far too little-known among people who didn’t hear them the first time around. It’s possible to imagine what might have happened to their reputation if their music had been continuously in circulation. Bitch Magnet’s career arc might have been something a little more like Sunny Day Real Estate’s: a cult item, not particularly pop-focused, that inspires a subsequent wave of artists and gradually gains admirers as the aesthetic they anticipated catches on.

2. Burning bridges is a bad long-term idea.

Butthole Surfers were a hugely popular touring band for a good chunk of the ’80s and the early ’90s, and when they had an actual commercial radio hit with “Pepper” in 1996, it looked like their profile was about to get much bigger. Instead, they had well-publicized fallings-out with various labels, their manager, and others; they haven’t managed to complete a new studio album since 2001. So where are Butthole Surfers in 2012? That doesn’t seem to be a question many people are asking.

3. Side projects never hurt anyone.

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore joked in SPIN a few years ago that if they’d broken up after Daydream Nation or Dirty, then reunited after 15 years, “you’d be interviewing me at the Chateau Marmont as I’m waiting for my limousine.” Well, maybe — but they stayed together, letting the spotlight shine in turn on all three of their very different songwriters. They may (or may not) be defunct now, but they’ve spent the last couple of decades releasing a never-ending string of side projects, collaborations, solo records and official bootlegs, every one of which added to the gravitational force of Sonic Youth proper as a cultural institution.

4. Don’t use a band name unless all the crucial members are present.

Very few bands with sub-cultural cachet have been able to get away with replacing their lead singer. Black Flag pulled it off, but only because guitarist Greg Ginn was clearly their star until their fourth singer Henry Rollins arrived. But nobody wants to hear Bad Brains without H.R. (fortunately, he sings on this year’s Into the Future), or the Misfits without Glenn Danzig. Gene Loves Jezebel were once in roughly the same alternative-rock tier as the Cure and Depeche Mode; now the identical twin brothers who once fronted the band each lead their own Gene Loves Jezebel, and the group’s name is practically a punch line.

By contrast, one of the most satisfying reunions of 2012 was the Afghan Whigs. They’d broken up more than a decade ago, but the new version wasn’t just singer Greg Dulli with a pickup band: He hadn’t used the band’s name until he could reconvene its classic lineup with bassist John Curley and guitarist Rick McCollum.

5. Nostalgia is poison.

Performing an old album in its entirety may be a worthwhile idea for a band that’s been constantly active in the meantime (Sonic Youth’s return to Daydream Nation), or that only does it once (as with many of the bands who’ve played the “Don’t Look Back” concert series). Otherwise, it can also be an admission that their best ideas are far behind them, as with the Lemonheads’ 2008-12 tours rehashing their 1992 album It’s a Shame About Ray.

Swans, conversely, have 30 years’ worth of music behind them, most of which they barely touch in performance. Their live shows in support of this year’s titanic album The Seer included several as-yet-unrecorded songs, and only one older song. (“Last time we did two or three, and I began to feel a little inauthentic about it halfway through the tour, so we started dropping them,” frontman Michael Gira told Pitchfork.) The Lemonheads had two gold albums and a string of modern-rock hits; Swans have never had anything like that level of mainstream success. But guess which band’s whole career seems more vital in 2012?

It’s possible to imagine the mixtape Mavis Gary’s boyfriend made her in that alternate-universe Young Adult —the one where the song she listens to over and over is, perhaps, the Connells’ “Stone Cold Yesterday.” It might also have had Bettie Serveert’s “Palomine” on it, or the Chills’ “Effloresce and Deliquesce,” or Basehead’s “2000 BC,” or Soho’s “Hippychick,” or Urge Overkill’s “Ticket to L.A.” Some of us who lived through the era of those songs are nostalgic for them, too. Still, “The Concept” and “Achin’ to Be” and “Feel the Pain” — the songs that actually are in Young Adult, and that we now understand as the representatives of that era — mean more, and maybe even sound better, in 2012, because the bands who created them never gave their listeners an excuse to forget them.

File under: Taut, zippy, witty old-school punk rock

From: Brooklyn

Personae: Andrew Savage (voice, guitar), Austin Brown (voice, guitar), Max Savage (drums), Sean Yeaton (bass)

One of the most thrilling debuts of the year, Parquet Courts’ Light Up Gold goes back to the first principles of punk that get forgotten every so often: speed, precision, brains and attitude. The group is a very simple quartet — two guitars, bass, drums, and a pair of yelpers who take turns one-upping each other — and they knocked out the album in a three-day weekend (after a year of woodshedding and live shows). But it’s as bracing and funny as NYC rock gets, packed end-to-end with crisp little hooks, and populated by songs that get straight to the point and get out. (Seven out of 15 are less than two minutes long; the only one that sticks around for more than five minutes is the two-chord wonder “Stoned and Starving.”)

The group’s de facto frontman Andrew Savage — who’s also played in Fergus & Geronimo and Teenage Cool Kids, among other bands — met his fellow singer/guitarist Austin Brown in college in Texas. Along with Savage’s brother Max and former Bostonian bassist Sean Yeaton, they moved to New York City and started Parquet Courts, armed with some very strong opinions about what punk culture needs to do.

As the band set up for one of their many gigs, eMusic’s Douglas Wolk talked with them about their place in the New York scene, the inspirations behind their sound and graphics, and their feelings about what’s missing in music right now.

On how Parquet Courts developed their sound:

Andrew Savage: It was fairly premeditated. One of the first things we did was release a mix tape of influences for the band — we had an idea of what we wanted to do. We all, for the most part, like a lot of the same music. And we all really like writing; everyone’s a writer, in the band, in some capacity. That’s one common ground that we all have.

Austin Brown: We were writing together and playing together for over a year before we recorded Light Up Gold.

Sean Yeaton: A lot of the songs are riffs that we really had fun playing. Most of the songs only have one or two parts — we decided we didn’t really need anything else, because we were fine with what we had.

On the difference between being a Texas band and being a New York band:

Savage: The scene we came out of, those of us who are from Texas, is, I think, a little more sincere than a lot of stuff that’s been coming out of New York for the last decade. It comes from a more punk background. There are a lot of bands that have been coming out of where I’m from, Denton, doing interesting stuff. There’s always music going on in New York, but as far as the kind of music we do, the scene we exist in is kind of going through a change right now. There’s a shift in underground guitar-based music — things are going away from the indie-rock side, and swinging back over to the punk side. Or so I would like to think.

On the distinction between “indie rock” and “punk”:

Savage: Words like “indie” and “counter-culture” and “alternative” have become meaningless terms, but you gotta remember that when those terms came about, some things were counter to the main culture. A lot of indie rock is just a scaled-down version of pop culture. But there are still people like us who want to present an aesthetic alternative: something that’s different from pop music. We’re not the only ones doing it; there are bands like the Men and PC Worship that are coming out of New York. What it comes down to is an attitude and sincerity. One thing that lacks in the stuff they call indie rock is emotional honesty.

On Light Up Gold‘s snarling opener, “Master of My Craft”:

Brown: “Master of My Craft” is a third-person perspective from someone who…possibly would be like an established person from the New York scene, telling another person that they kind of know everything. It’s more of a dialogue than a story.

On the album’s impassioned closer, “Picture of Health”:

Savage: It’s a song about someone I know — something I wanted to say to someone who, at the time, I couldn’t necessarily say it to. I really thought about cutting that song from Light Up Gold, and still, when I listen to the record myself, that song I don’t listen to. It’s just different; it comes out with a Guided By Voices kind of sound, which I would say otherwise isn’t really on the record.

On the visual presentation of Parquet Courts:

Savage: I do most of the art. The style that I’ve been working on for a while has became associated with Dull Tools, the label that me and my friend Chris Pickering do. When you see a Black Flag record and see the Raymond Pettibon art, you think “man, that’s gotta be pretty cool” — and then you hear the band and it kind of all makes sense. There aren’t too many bands who care about that any more, which is maybe another distinguishing factor between really good music and stuff that’s really blasé.

The sound of someone who's seen a lot and has had some time to reflect on it

In 1976, Vic Godard was the leader of one of the first British punk rock bands, Subway Sect. Over the next few years, though, he drifted away from punk and developed a taste for American soul and Cole Porter, then quit music in the mid-’80s. He returned to songwriting and recording with this album, released in 1993 (and recorded by his old scenemate Edwyn Collins, on an eight-track machine in his bedroom). It’s a look back at punk as a music of misfits, from a musician who didn’t even fit in with that scene. Godard never really had a shouter’s voice, and several decades on it’s become a reedy, conversational, distinctly un-punk tenor, nicely accompanied here with sinuous lead guitar and a crisp rhythm section: this is the sound of someone who’s seen a lot and has had some time to reflect on it. It’s an impressively varied, thoughtful set–over the course of the album, Godard resurrects an old Subway Sect instrumental (“Imbalance”), eulogizes the New York Dolls’ Johnny Thunders, and imagines the crumbling of Yugoslavia transplanted to England (on the title track). Best of all is “Won’t Turn Back,” a tribute to Northern soul that Collins later covered himself.

File under: Spooky, pulsating, guitar-and-bass-driven grooves that alternate between hovering in midair and raining chilly ectoplasm

For fans of: The Animal Collective, SECTION 25, Black Dice, APSE, Sigur Ros

From: Brooklyn

Personae: Robert Toher, Austin Stawiarz (voices, guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion, electronics)

From 1999-2011, Robert Toher led the atmospheric post-rock band Apse, but by 2010, he was growing frustrated with that group’s direction and organization. He started working on a separate project, ERAAS, with Apse guitarist Austin Stawiarz – Toher is drawn to the word “eras,” he says (it had also been the title of a limited-edition Apse album). Toher and Stawiarz holed up in an old house in Northampton, Massachusetts, and gradually refined their new sound: dark, repetitive, richly-textured grooves, incorporating dissonant found sounds and unnerving reverberations. Before long, ERAAS became the duo’s main musical outlet.

After relocating to Brooklyn, they completed their self-titled debut album in 2011, although it’s taken more than a year to see the light of day. It’s a splendidly unnerving recording, moving from eerie chamber music (“Black House”) to spidery rock songs (“Ghost”) to a pair of spectral dance-rock tracks, “At Heart” and “Briar Path,” that come off like a blurrier, weirder version of the kind of skeletal funk ESG was playing in the early ’80s. Toher’s echoing high tenor appears here and there on ERAAS, although it’s often hard to tell exactly what he’s singing – “voice as instrument is important to me,” he says. The only attempt to transcribe his lyrics that’s appeared thus far is so riddled with gaps and guesses that it looks like translated fragments of lost literature, which seems appropriate.

eMusic’s Douglas Wolk talked with Toher about the inspirations – musical and spiritual – that went into the making of ERAAS’s debut album, as well as what the band is planning next.

On being a city band:

My old project Apse was New England-based – I was 17 when we started that band, and we broke up only a year and a half ago. I draw a lot of inspiration from rural places; they tend to gravitate toward a certain kind of thinking that’s different than it is in the city. I haven’t lived in New York for that long. I grew up a little over an hour away, but obviously it’s much different when you’re rooted here. Here, I tend to be more interested in percussive, electronic elements; in the country, I’m more drawn to sprawling atmospherics.

On what ERAAS’ “ritual music” is trying to do:

There’s no agenda at hand except creating a mood. Our music has always been sort of spiritually based – not a particular faith or denomination, but trying to get in touch with or at least address some of those energies. Even my early music and lyrics, with Apse, address spiritual paranoias, questioning faith, things like that. I think we’re just trying to access a particular kind of emotion or mood, or express a feeling that’s sublime, interesting, arresting, romantic.

On playing ERAAS’ music live:

We have a live band that’s four of us – we kind of take the songs, in their recorded form, and take them back: We make them ours again. We’re always changing them as time goes on. The percussion is a much more visceral, heavy sound live. We have a drummer who plays a full kit, and I play a floor tom and snare and ride cymbal, and we have Austin with his setup, which is a guitar and a bass, and we have a bass player. There’s a lot of percussive volleying that happens. When I go see a band I like them to do things differently – it’s boring for me to go see a band if it sounds just like the album. We don’t like to use a lot of pre-recorded sounds, which is what a lot of bands do these days – they’ve got the laptop with the Apple logo right up on stage.

On the process of recording their next album:

We’re working on it right now – the first album has been finished for over a year, and we’ve had material developing since then. We’re getting more into the idea of sampling, not necessarily in the sense of taking stuff from a record and putting stuff over it, but sampling as a creative function. Starting with something like a Chicago house record pitched down, playing at a slow speed, and taking that as a core element, it starts you off in a place you would never choose on your own to begin when you write a song. It takes you out of your natural element—all the fallback things you do. We’re experimenting a lot with that. There are recordings we’re working on where it starts with a sample and we build a song around it, and then the sample comes out at the end, and what we’ve built around it remains.

On the music that inspires them these days:

Austin read the 33 1/3 book about Paul’s Boutique. He was really inspired by that, and he lent it to me and I read it as well. That was really the thing that made us want to get into that world – you read about the way the Dust Brothers were working back then, with the homemade samples that were on tapes and stuff, and when you go back and listen to Paul’s Boutique, it’s a totally different experience. He and I have always liked old Wu-Tang stuff – Raekwon and Ghostface and all that. Some kinds of Krautrock are definitely an influence on us: Can and Faust, definitely. I’d say [producer] Martin Hannett, certainly, because of the idea of a limited palette of sounds. And I really like Geoff Barrow’s project BEAK>, and the darker repetitive stuff like that.

The most surprising and challenging Costello has made in years

Elvis Costello and the Roots’ drummer/majordomo ?uestlove have a couple of big things in common: For one, they’re both the children of professional musicians. (?uest’s parents were in the Philly soul group Congress Alley; Costello’s father, Ross MacManus, sang with the Joe Loss Orchestra.) They’re also both gigantic record nerds, the kind of omnivorous music collectors who can go off on the minutiae of alternate pressings and mixes. ?uest has a legendarily mammoth record collection, from which he’s absorbed seemingly every groove anyone’s ever recorded. And Costello’s right up there with him in terms of obsessive music fandom: When he catalogued his 500 favorite albums for Vanity Fair in 2000, the list seemed like it could easily have gone on 10 times as long.

The new Costello/Roots collaboration Wise Up Ghost — mostly recorded in the Roots’ dressing room for their regular gig on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon — sounds like the product of a couple of intense music nerds cheerfully impressing each other, and it’s drenched in musical history. Costello’s always been a habitual quoter of and alluder to other people’s songs: From his very earliest recordings onward, his discography is strewn with small and large echoes of his favorite records. (How many of the punks of 1977 who listened to his first album, My Aim Is True, noticed that “Blame It on Cain” borrowed the groove of Sam Cooke’s “That’s It – I Quit – I’m Movin’ On”?) The most extensive homage in his discography, 1980′s Get Happy!!, is pretty much a tribute to the sound of ’60s-era Stax Records — compare “Temptation” to Booker T. and the M.G.’s’ “Time is Tight.”

The curious thing about Wise Up Ghost is that the catalog Costello spends most of his time revisiting is his own. Several songs set nearly entire lyrics from old Costello compositions to new music: “Wake Me Up” is “Bedlam” from 2004′s The Delivery Man, and “(She Might Be a) Grenade” is the same record’s bonus track “She’s Pulling Out the Pin”; “Stick Out Your Tongue” is “Pills and Soap” from 1983′s Punch the Clock, with a verse from “Hurry Down Doomsday” stuck into the middle; “Refuse to be Saved” is “Invasion Hit Parade” from 1991′s Mighty Like a Rose (Ross MacManus, in fact, played trumpet on the original version).

The open question, though, is how many of the album’s meta-songs will stay in Costello’s repertoire. It’s been Elvis’s pattern for a few decades now that he treats his albums with his main rock band — the Attractions, originally, and more recently the Confederates — as his “real” repertoire, the source of most of the material he plays live. His work with other artists is more often collaborator-specific; it’ll be surprising if many of the songs from Wise Up Ghost appear in his stage show when he’s not playing with the Roots (although “Tripwire” turned up at a solo gig he played the week before its release). Still, it’s a remarkable record, the most surprising and challenging album Costello has made in many years. If he has to set up his throne in a hall of mirrors, this one would be a fine choice.

In honor of the release of his 35th(!) album, Tempest, we invite you to listen to these overlooked gems in isolation, away from the blinding flare of his most famous records; you’ll find they sparkle much more vividly.

Evoking the sound of early-'80s New Zealand

This Melbourne, Australia, quartet makes no secret of what inspires them: the “Dunedin sound” that came from a little cluster of bands in New Zealand in the early ’80s, especially the Clean, and the records the Australian group the Go-Betweens were making around the same time. As it happens, they’re incredibly good at evoking that moment — not only does singer/guitarist Marty Frawley’s voice sound a whole lot like the Clean’s David Kilgour, but they’ve got the rhythms and guitar tones and production touches down too. (The background vocals in the chaotic waltz “Don’t Be Suprised” — hollering “whoa-oh!” from what sounds like the next street over — are the kind of brilliant touch that nobody thinks of if they live too far from the Tasman Sea.) And when Julia MacFarlane takes over singing on “This Guy,” it’s all but functionally indistinguishable from a great lost Look Blue Go Purple song. Twerps’ lyrics are alternately psychedelic existentialism and low-key vehicles for vowel sounds (the way Frawley draws out the title of “Who Are You” is particularly terrific), but this is a band whose focus is the feel of their songs: the rush of a simple beat, the echoing depths of a strummed riff or casually plucked-out guitar lead.

At first, Up was one of the many labels that focused on 7-inch singles by local artists. But There’s Nothing Wrong With Love ended up taking off, and that album’s success — along with subsequent records by Modest Mouse and Quasi, among others — enabled Up to keep up an impressive release schedule for the next six years. Takino died of leukemia in October 2000; his companion Pete Ritchey agreed to keep the label going as an outlet for the artists with whom Up was already working.

Up’s release schedule eventually slowed; its most recent release was Feral Phantasms, a 2006 album by the instrumental group Polar Goldie Cats (whose guitarist Bobb Bruno now plays with Best Coast). “The status of Up is in catalogue,” Ritchey says. “I’m trying to get to the point where I have everything organized so much that I can kind of shut down our office.” Still, he suggests that there are a couple of albums that Up might yet release if they ever get completed: “We’d been planning on putting out another Duster record. All three of them had been separately working on music — they’re all crazy-talented musicians and really prolific, but it’s just never worked out for them to all get together and record an album.” There’s also a Sick Bees album that’s “pretty much done, but not completely — the stuff I heard finished I thought was really great, but at some point they decided they didn’t want to be a band anymore.”

Ritchey is the kind of super-knowledgeable music fan who hates to see his favorite records go ignored, so he told us the stories behind five Up releases he’d like to see get a little more attention, and we picked another five Up classics.

A declaration of Doug Martsch's awesome songwriting and guitar-playing powers

The second album by Doug Martsch’s long-running band is a declaration of his awesome powers as a songwriter and guitarist. Martsch makes it clear how ambitious he is — his declaration in “Car” that “I wanna see movies of my dreams” is hardly an exaggeration — but there’s also a bracing emotional vulnerability and specificity to his lyrics, especially coming from his high, weedy voice. (“Big Dipper” includes the devastating line “He thought an Albertson’s stir-fry dinner would make his apartment a home.”) The brief hidden track at the end, a string of deliberately awful variations on Built to Spill’s sound, is pretty hilarious, but it also illustrates how carefully Martsch has shaped the rest of the album. There’s Nothing Wrong With Love is the work of an artist who gets to treat Boise, Idaho, as a rock capital because he can outplay anyone: The sheer variety of instrumental textures Martsch crams into these songs’ riffs and fills and raw solos is amazing on its own.

Stretching beyond their punky/poppy vibe

A remarkable document of an odd moment in Seattle’s music, Juned’s second and final album finds them stretching out far beyond the punky/poppy vibe of their first. (Its first song is named after stoner-metal icons Kyuss; its last is an airy waltz that’s a showcase for Seattle experimental violinist Eyvind Kang.) One of Juned’s escape routes from alt-rock purgatory was the delay-heavy guitar sound Dale Balenseifen and Claudia Groom had picked up from British new wave; another was their feathery two- and three-part harmonies. The result is a little bit like an Americanized version of Lush, except with a rhythm section that kicks extra-hard — the bridge of its single “Possum” is basically Juned demonstrating that they can do metal too.

Finding the intersection between awkward and funky

Up’s roster was mostly artists from the Pacific Northwest, but not entirely: Alan Sutherland’s one-man sample-and-loop project first recorded in Seattle, but by the time Up released its records, Land of the Loops was (and still is) based on the East Coast, and this album’s only direct connection to the I-5 corridor is vocals on a few tracks by Beat Happening’s Heather Lewis. There were a lot of cut-and-paste acts operating in the mid ’90s, but most of the ones who were willing to create recordings with a not-perfectly-squared-off, DIY vibe were more interested in laughs than in beats. Sutherland can be funny when he feels like it (“Multi-Family Garage Sale,” which appeared in a beer commercial, has some nutty vintage movie samples), but his prime gift is figuring out how to get to the intersection of “awkward” and “funky.”

Gas stations, drinking binges and obsessive existential meditation

Modest Mouse were already experienced road warriors by the time they released their second full album, and it’s very much a record about spending enormous amounts of time on highways: its longest jam is unsurprisingly called “Truckers Atlas.” (See also “Convenient Parking,” a thrilling chant-and-scream piece that’s built on cyclical repetitions large and small.) Isaac Brock’s voice isn’t just dry, it’s parched; his favorite trick as a guitarist is to hit a single note and let it wobble and arc; his lyrics call up gas stations, drinking binges and obsessive existential meditation. And this lineup of Modest Mouse was, more than anything else, a wildly unusual groove band — almost every song is built on tightly arranged rhythms more than riffs.