The eMusic Dozen: The Mountain Goats Dozen

An unjustly obscure entry in an undercelebrated catalogue, Future Rhythm sounds better now than it did in '96 when it came out: Shock G's sung hooks are casually smooth, while the musicians he brings to the party are tight and focused, locked into a downtempo groove that never lets up. Meanwhile, his peace-rumps-and-understanding ideology breezes unintrusively across everything like a cool mist.

A collection of rocking, lurching sides from the Bay Area hip-hop DJ whose beats come with heavy eyelids and seem to emerge from a thick cloud of smoke. Wolf's masterpiece is My Vinyl Weighs a Ton, but I get more mileage from this one, which is so laid back that it practically comes with its own lawn chair.

Kaki sings! John McEntire produces ex-major-label-and-stoked-about-that-"ex" guitar whiz & trance-generator King as she saunters well outside her comfort zone. People used to accuse her of just copping Preston Reed's moves; who's funny now, haters? She is one of my favorite artists alive and this, her new album, is a quiet triumph.

Earth-toned, broad-canvas, variable-fidelity, this utterly cosmic album has been at the top of my best-of-2006 album since late spring. Like floating in the depths of the ocean, it's too good to describe.

This is a meditative, cinematic, small record that hints at longer views than you normally get from songs, and is as perfect for listening to in the dark on headphones as anything I know. The lyrics are the weak point, but the band settles into such a thick groove for the duration that it's easy to take the low-whispered vocals more as part of the overall palette than as an unnecessary point of focus. Better than most of the records that kicked its ass at the cash register in 2000.

I just never get tired of Anonymous 4, who unearth and present a cappella music of astonishing power, whether their sources date from the Middle Ages or the modern era. An English Ladymass finds them most in their element, reciting a sung mass to the Blessed Virgin Mary: simple, endlessly radical polyphony rises and fills the room like a fog of incense. Completely, completely, completely awesome.

Heads rightly go slack-jawed over fabled bassist Scott La Faro, but the first Bill Evans album to follow La Faro's tragic death found Evans in transcendent form: his voicing — the architecture of the chords, their placement on the keyboard — practically reinvents the chords he's playing. The sheer melodicism of this set utterly floors me, albeit in a very gentle way.

Soft static-drenched, repetitive, lilting, electronic in origin but organic in feeling, Biosphere's version of electronic music eschews the from-another-planet model to make music that sounds like it came from beneath the earth or inside the trunks of mighty redwoods. Like dub with the intensity buffed to a soft sheen.

This charmingly titled collection gives you the oud (a stringed Middle Eastern instrument) in various but related settings and moods. Why should you care? Because the oud sounds like God breathing life into clay, that's why. It's hard to listen to music of other cultures without wondering how much the non-native ear instinctively exoticizes unfamiliar instrumentation, but at the end of the day, I don't care about any of that too-much-thinking business: the music speaks for itself, both to the novice and to those who've mastered the vocabulary. This music is simply wonderful.

Method Man's verse on "Iron God Chamber" alone would justify the price of admission here, as it's as dense and rich as anything he's done since "Release Yo' Delf," but it's only one highlight on an album that's liberally sprinkled with smoky, summery moments. Very old-school, lovingly textured and quite generous with repeated listening.