The eMusic Dozen: More Alt-Punk Essentials

This is it: Ground Zero for American hardcore punk. There had been earlier loud-fast-rules records -- see Black Flag and Bad Brains -- but the unbelievable speed, power and precision of this DC quartet, led by Ian MacKaye's hectoring pronouncements, convinced disaffected teenagers around the world to draw Xs on their hands, knock beers out of showgoers' hands and write 55 second, 4-chord blitzes. MacKaye and drummer Jeff Nelson launched the Dischord label to release a single by their earlier group, Teen Idles, and MacKaye went on to form celebrated bands including Egg Hunt, the Evens and most famously Fugazi. Even now, there's something shockingly pure about these first twelve songs, and it's not just the band's Puritanism: their absolute economy of style still communicates with perfect clarity what it's like to be young, male and out of step with the world.

Four black guys from Washington, DC who'd been in a fusion band until punk rock changed their lives, Bad Brains added two essential ingredients to the formula. One was incredible musicianship that let them play faster than any punk band had before: the single "Pay to Cum!," included here, set the bar for hardcore velocity. The other was their enduring love of reggae and dub -- the direction singer H.R. later headed with his solo career. Every punk band in the '80s had a copy of this brilliantly sequenced yellow cassette in their tour van and modern-day punk from Green Day to At the Drive-In sometimes seems like one big Bad Brains homage.

The English quartet Bauhaus became the godfathers of goth, a common point of reference for anybody with an all-black wardrobe. They set the tone for their career with their first single, "Bela Lugosi's Dead": ten minutes of dissonant droning, scraping and tapping that coalesced into a song so spooky you can feel the wind from a vampire's wings. But their grand theatricality was only part of a fully realized aesthetic. They repaid their debt to early-'70s glam with covers like a lunging version of T. Rex's "Telegram Sam," included here, and beneath the bluster and menace of their noise and Peter Murphy's dramatic bellow was a sense of groove that made those pale, dark-clad bodies race onto smoky dance floors.

From 1983-1985, when these tracks were recorded, K Records' house band sounded perversely radical: in place of the precision and machismo that had overtaken punk rock, they were deliberately featherweight, ramshackle and childish, right down to the stick figure kitty cat on the cover. But what attracted them to the idea of childhood was that it's the time when everything feels scaldingly intense, love is scary and new, and establishing an identity is more important than anything. They created a subcultural style of their own: an entire generation of indie-pop followed in the wake of the "International Pop Underground" that rumbling-voiced frontman Calvin Johnson brought into being, simply by declaring its existence.

The undisputed kingpins of West Coast punk rock, Black Flag evolved rapidly and radically, beginning as the Ramones' jokier, nastier brothers and ending up (many lineups and thousands of touring miles later) as a brutally heavy, sweat-dripping jam-punk ensemble. This greatest hits, released a year after sole permanent member Greg Ginn disbanded the group, condenses their huge recording career to twelve solid fist-in-the-air hits about drunkenness, madness, self-loathing and bitter cravings; it veers around their experimental side and their fire-breathing live recordings, but it's an unimpeachable introduction.

Alternative music has always had a difficult relationship with classic rock, and most of Camper Van Beethoven's third album is a wrestling match with the Woodstock generation's dreams and soundtrack. Highlights: multiple Led Zep jokes, a sardonic recitative called "Peace & Love" and a Pink Floyd cover that dissolves into entropic noise over the course of eight minutes. CVB, however, was also very much a California band, dancing in the trash-strewn wake of punk rock and Reagan-era politics. The group's best records ran on the friction between singer David Lowery's deadpan jokes and violinist Jonathan Segel's woozy Eastern European folk-inflected melodies, and this one's got their funniest and most plangent moments.

In Stereolab's early days, they figured out the conceptual basis of their band -- iconography drawn from retro audiophile recordings and revolutionary-left documents, pounding bare-bones rhythms inspired by the Velvet Underground and '70s German experimental rock, the dreamy drone of old analog keyboards and singer Laetitia Sadier's utopian French and English poetry echoed by second vocalist Mary Hansen -- and generated their music from those principles. Their first full-length album is as raw as they've ever been and guitarist Tim Gane makes extensive use of his beloved two-chord "Roadrunner" riff; what's amazing is how much variety, richness and dark beauty they're able to get out of their simple template.

Guided by Voices' Cinderella story is that schoolteacher Robert Pollard and a bunch of his pals had a make-believe band, recording in their basements and putting out records for their own amusement. Eventually, the world started to notice, and this album made everyone sit up and pay attention for the rest of their flabbergastingly prolific career: 20 badly damaged but glorious songs, recorded over a decade of first takes and tape accidents. Pollard (like his bandmate and foil Tobin Sprout, who contributes a couple of the best tracks here) seemingly absorbed and synthesized 35 years' worth of '60s pop, and his songs sound like a fever dream interpretation of AM radio, with stream-of-consciousness lyrics attached to an endless procession of hooks.

Jeff Mangum's band only made two studio albums and then vanished into the realm of mystique. Neutral Milk Hotel was affiliated with the Elephant 6 collective, a loose group of psychedelic bands that traded home-recorded tapes and contributed to each other's projects. On this debut, Mangum was backed up by members of the Apples in Stereo, and they cascaded cheap keyboards, fuzzboxes, xylophones and trombones in march formation around his keening voice, like a funeral procession in a toy factory. He's a magnificent, almost prayerful songwriter, and although In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is probably NMH's better-loved record, On Avery Island's surreal imagery and cascading energy are a joy.

The second album by Stuart Murdoch and the chamber ensemble of Glasgow amateurs he'd assembled around him is a masterpiece of indie-pop -- the bloom of the bad seeds Beat Happening planted a decade before, transplanted to the fertile soil of Love and the Smiths. It's ten delicate, slightly bitter songs about confused erotic longing and identity crises, delivered with Murdoch's dry wit, J.D. Salinger-like fascination with the spiritual torments of adolescence and grandly arcing melodies. Characters seem to recur from song to song, until Murdoch's inventions become a sort of compassionate union of alienated youth. The alienated youth he was singing to, naturally, made the album their totem.

For a long time, alternative music was wary of being nailed down -- unironic earnestness was a sign of taking oneself a little too seriously. Then this Montreal mob, fronted by married couple Win Butler and Regine Chassagne, came along. Their first full-length album, a memorial to lost family and friends, is as passionate, emotive and conceptually grand as any stadium-rock record you can name. What makes it alternative (besides its economic signifiers, like being released on an independent label) is that it clearly belongs to the post-punk tradition of opening up possibilities for sound: Butler's quavering cry, the use of accordions and strings as rock instruments and their lurching rhythms are all the product of a lineage that valorizes sounding unlike anybody else.

After almost two open-eared, exploratory decades together in the high-turnover NYC indie rock scene (they're actually based in Hoboken, New Jersey), Yo La Tengo made their strongest album just a couple of years ago. They're one of the few bands in their cohort that can actually jam productively and this album is bookended by ten-minute-plus tidal waves of hive-mind roar. Between them, there are punk rock blowouts, whisperingly quiet meditations, a bit of jazz, a few in-jokes, a fabulous beach-soul pastiche called "Mr. Tough" and the frail but unbreakable voices of three subtly masterful singer/songwriters who double as a married couple and their longtime friend.