• 

  The Complete Plantation Recordings

  Muddy Waters

  1993 | Geffen

  I love Muddy Waters, he'd always have a couple entries in my Top 20. I saw him play in Detroit. I actually liken that scene to The Stooges, because at that time all the British guys were coming over and playing the blues back to us [Americans], and at some point, you go, "Well, that's good, but it ain't the real thing," so then we'd start going [back] to the old guys... and listening to them, and in a way that's what happened to us: people are coming back to watch us, because we did the original work. We're kind of the old blues guys of rock!
  
  Iggy went to live in Chicago, pre-Stooges, to check out that scene. He was the drummer for a band called The Prime Movers, and they were very much a Chicago Blues-style band. They were quite good actually.

  more »
• 

  Charley Patton: The Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Volume 1

  Charley Patton

  2013 | Document Records / The Orchard

  There's a lot of real esoteric original delta blues — Robert Johnson and all those guys — and you just can't touch them. I haven't tried to play it much, but I love to listen to this stuff.

• 

  Most Things Haven't Worked Out

  Junior Kimbrough

  2000 | Fat Possum Records

  I didn't ever see him myself, but Iggy took him out on the road, and I think they made a record, or at least a couple of songs together. I initially got in contact with Fat Possum because RL Burnside, Junior and all those guys were on that label. I started looking at their catalogue, and I said, "Hey you guys, I'm this guitar player, could you send me some of your... stuff?" and they ended up sending me this huge boxful of almost everybody that was interesting on their catalog. So I'm quite familiar with their stuff!

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• 

  El Camino

  The Black Keys

  2011 | Nonesuch

  I like the Black Keys, especially this later stuff. It's some of their best songwriting.

• 

  Talking Book

  Stevie Wonder

  2000 | Motown

  All this Motown stuff was in the air while we were growing up in Detroit. Stevie Wonder would actually play at the state fair, which was just an open field basically with a bunch of equipment, and he'd be on a stage which wasn't more than two feet high, with four guys around the edges so he wouldn't fall off, and he'd play "Fingertips," right up close and personal. I love "Superstition"... too — it's a great song.

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• 

  A Love Supreme

  John Coltrane

  2003 | IMPULSE!

  Coltrane was a master. A Love Supreme, that's also an amazing record. He was completely plugged into something.

• 

  The Köln Concert

  Keith Jarrett

  1999 | ECM

  My favorite is the Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett, which would've been in the mid-to-late '70s, but Spheres is pretty good, too, from around the same time. He's an improvisational pianist, and some of the things he's done are just incredible, very free, almost jazzy sometimes, but very melodic. He's also played with a ton of very good musicians.

• 

  Roger The Engineer / Over Under Sideways Down

  The Yardbirds

  2009 | The Yardbirds / Cadiz

  I was a huge Yardbirds fan, I saw them play both with Jeff Beck and with Jimmy Page. That was prominent in my evolution. They were so exciting. They had a big hit over here with 'For Your Love', and then that attracted a lot of people to get their albums and stuff, and those albums were incredible, like Over Under Sideways Down — all those songs. Jeff Beck is one of... my very top guitar heroes. A couple of years ago, we were in France, but we came over to the UK to see an artist, and he was playing with her, so I got to meet him backstage, and that was a big thrill for me.

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• 

  Are You Experienced

  The Jimi Hendrix Experience

  2010 | Legacy Recordings

  Before I joined The Stooges, we had a friend in common: Ron Richardson, who was the manager for the first band I helped found, called The Chosen Few. He was someone Ron Asheton knew, and he went out to California for the Monterey pop festival, and brought back home Are You Experienced? It was just a game-changer for all of us — after that, nothing was the same.

• 

  Bringing It All Back Home

  Bob Dylan

  1987 | Columbia

  I was into Bob Dylan even more than Iggy was. I patterned my whole life around Bob Dylan. He would be No. 1 on my list, every record he made except for a few, I like 'em all! Bringing It All Back Home is a great album.

• 

  Kick Out The Jams

  MC5

  1999 | Rhino

  The MC5 were well established at the time when The Stooges started. I wasn't in the band at that time, but I saw all those guys play at the Grande Ballroom and so forth. They were pretty mindblowing, I always liked them. They were quote-unquote, high-energy. Kick Out The Jams was a great tune, but the thing about the 5, though, was that they were all caught up with this political thing,... too. They had that Trans-Love thing going on, and lots of hippie politics. That aspect of the band didn't really resonate with me, but they were good guys, and great players, and they still are, the ones that are left. Fred Smith was a really good songwriter — real simple.

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• 

  Loaded

  The Velvet Underground

  1987 | Atlantic Records/ATG

  I loved that Loaded album [final Velvet Underground album, from 1970], I used to play it all the time. A couple of years later, the Raw Power Stooges played Max's Kansas City [legendary rock 'n' roll club] in New York, and Lou came in and sat down at our table and was trying to pitch us to do a couple of his songs. Because of course he was in the last wave... of the Tin Pan Alley music writers. I had to inform him, "We write our own songs, Lou, we don't want any of yours!" Maybe in hindsight we were stupid, because he does write good songs.

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• 

  Radio Ethiopia

  Patti Smith Group

  1996 | Arista

  She's a good friend. When I first went to New York in The Stooges, we always would stay at the Chelsea Hotel, and they had coffee makers in the room. I was making coffee, and in those days I was using sugar, so I knocked on Ig's door and said, "You know anybody around here? I need some sugar." And he said, "Well, I know this girl upstairs," so I went knocking... on her door, and I said, "Hey, I'm here in the hotel with the Stooges, and, er, do you have any sugar?" So that was the first time I met Patti Smith. She lived there of course, so she had sugar!

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• 

  New York Dolls

  New York Dolls

  1987 | Island Def Jam

  We were contemporaries of The New York Dolls, and I really liked those guys. We'd see them on tours and stuff, and hang with them sometimes when we were in New York. I knew The Ramones a little bit as well. When they'd come out to Hollywood, they'd hang with me. They were nice guys!

• 

  Double Nickels On The Dime

  Minutemen

  SST Records / The Orchard

  This album was the heyday for those guys. It's a good record. They were great players unlike some bands in the punk era, and Mike's really a talented musician. Today, in his own band, he's writing what he calls operas, but they're basically a huge string of one-minute songs, and they play them back to back [à la vintage Minutemen], and it's amazing to see how they can remember all that stuff... — there's maybe 30 or 40 of those things back to back. He's a very astute student of the industry as well, so he an interesting guy to work with.
  
  I didn't pay attention to any of this kind of music when I was out of the business. At first I didn't even believe that all these guys were copying my style. I'm like Rip van Winkle, I just left everything and went to sleep.

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• 

  Push the Sky Away

  Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds

  2013 | Bad Seed Ltd / AWAL

  We played in Australia with them. I do feel that Nick's live act — I think he's taken a few pages out of Iggy's book. There's nothing wrong with that — I mean, even The Boss [i.e. Bruce Springsteen] crowd-surfs now. You gotta go with what works, right?

Donald Byrd, “Jeannine”

• 

  At The Half Note Cafe: Vols 1 & 2 (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition)

  Donald Byrd

  2004 | BLUE NOTE

  Donald Byrd assembled a great band in the late 1950s, and At the Half Note Cafe captures them in sizzling form. There's a vigor and energy to this live recording that's lacking in some of Byrd's early Blue Note studio sessions. On the joyous "Jeannine," Byrd is economical and restrained, willing as always to give ground to those around him. In this case that includes Pepper Adams's nervy, wild sax and Duke... Pearson's spritely piano.

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Donald Byrd, “Hush”

• 

  Royal Flush

  Donald Byrd

  2006 | BLUE NOTE

  By 1961, the 29-year-old Byrd had established himself as a hard-bop cornerstone, recording five studio albums for Blue Note and guesting on many more. Few listeners who dropped the needle on Royal Flush could have guessed they were witnessing the debut of a legend. The breezy, bluesy gem "Chant" introduced the world to Herbie Hancock, who Byrd had mentored throughout the early 1960s. Years later, Hancock would remain grateful for Byrd's belief... in him, as well as this piece of advice from Byrd that the young, struggling pianist wouldn't understand until years later: never give away your publishing rights.

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Donald Byrd, “French Spice”

• 

  Free Form (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition)

  Donald Byrd

  2004 | BLUE NOTE

  By 1962's excellent Free Form, Byrd was beginning to stray from the bop-derived formulas that had long defined mainstream jazz. His band was evolving, thanks to an increasingly confident Hancock, and here they're joined by Wayne Shorter, in one of his last freelance gigs before signing on with Miles Davis. Byrd's role as a connector of ideas is particularly evident here on the moody, abstract title cut, the funky "Pentecostal Feelin'" and... the playful, elegant "French Spice."

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Donald Byrd, “Christo Redentor”

• 

  A New Perspective (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition)

  Donald Byrd

  1999 | BLUE NOTE

  Byrd was entering a fruitful, adventurous phase of his career by the time of 1963's A New Perspective. But if the album cover suggested a turn toward the modern — Byrd leans against the door of a curvy sports car — his experiments would have to plumb the distant past first. This was one of Byrd's best "spiritual" records, essentially a hard bop record featuring a gospel choir. Fantastic and life-affirming from... start to finish, the choir's textures and exhortations perfectly complement the band's rhythms and effervescent solos. It's highlighted by "Christo Redentor," Byrd's mournful trumpet rising above a chanting din.

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Donald Byrd, “Fancy Free” and “The Dude”

After cutting a few solid, if straightforward, Blue Note sides in the mid ’60s, Byrd began moving away from acoustic jazz in the later part of that decade. Miles Davis had gone “electric,” and soon others were following suit. For Byrd, it began with Duke Pearson’s electric keys, which radically shaped the texture of 1969′s Fancy Free, lending everything a freer, more felicitous feel. In 1970, he released Electric Byrd and there was no going back. In retrospect, plugging in suited Byrd’s accommodating style. “The Dude” isn’t radically different from some of his more rhythm-driven numbers from the early 1960s, only the groove is front and center. Fusion remains a dirty word among some jazz devotees, but it was more than a tweaking of the jazz sound. It was also a new approach to composition and recording. Electric Byrd‘s “Xibaba,” for example, is an absorbing, almost shapeless piece that finds Byrd and his new band — featuring Brazilians Hermeto Pascoal and Airto Moreira — concerned more with ambience and energy than structure.

• 

  Fancy Free

  Donald Byrd

  1993 | Blue Note Records
• 

  Electric Byrd

  Donald Byrd

  1996 | BLUE NOTE

Donald Byrd, “Black Byrd”

• 

  Black Byrd

  Donald Byrd

  1992 | BLUE NOTE

  Electric Byrd and 1971's Ethiopian Knights had formalized Byrd's turn toward the funkier, fusion sound then sweeping the jazz community. It was 1973's Black Byrd that turned jazz's civil war into a popular phenomenon. Thanks largely to production from Larry and Fonce Mizell — a member of the Corporation, Motown's hit-making production squad — Black Byrd didn't sound like anything else around. "Black Byrd" was a groove, but one you could sing... along to. While Miles was flirting with avant-garde classical composition and psychedelic chaos, Byrd and the Mizells were turning toward radio-friendly rhythm and blues. To the horror of traditionalists, Black Byrd — with its attention-grabbing synths, funky percussion and vocals — was one of Blue Note's best-selling albums of the decade.

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Blackbyrds, “Blackbyrds’ Theme”

• 

  The Blackbyrds

  Blackbyrds

  2007 | Fantasy Records

  Byrd held a series of university teaching posts throughout the 1970s, and at least two bands formed out of his classes: North Carolina Central University's N.C.C.U. (which later became his backing band in the late 1970s) and Howard University's Blackbyrds. Byrd and the Mizells produced the first few Blackbyrds records, but they were never just a Byrd vanity project. They always seemed like a very creative funk band with jazz chops, especially... on their trio of classic early albums — 1974's self-titled debut ("Funky Junkie," "Summer Love"), Flying Start ("Walking in Rhythm," "Blackbyrds' Theme") and 1975's City Life (featuring the B-boy classic "Rock Creek Park").

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Donald Byrd, “Think Twice” and “Wind Parade”

The partnership between Byrd and the Mizells peaked on these two albums from the mid ’70s, Stepping into Tomorrow and Places and Spaces. It was on tracks like the sensual “Think Twice” or the genial funk of “Dominoes” that they began distinguishing their sound as more than just jazz with R&B characteristics. The compositions are sophisticated and atmospheric, as indebted to the instrumental interplay of Byrd’s past as to the technology of their present. There’s an open, spacey feel to the albums, a sign of Byrd and the Mizells’ growing confidence within this new jazz idiom. Occasionally, the songs from this era are also ridiculously catchy, as on the adventurous, frequently sampled classic “Wind Parade.”

• 

  Stepping Into Tomorrow

  Donald Byrd

  2000 | BLUE NOTE
• 

  Places and Spaces

  Donald Byrd

  1997 | BLUE NOTE

Donald Byrd and 125th St. N.Y.C., “Love Has Come Around”

• 

  Love Byrd

  Donald Byrd And 125th Street, N.Y.C.

  2008 | Rhino/Elektra

  By 1981, Byrd could safely claim some kind of connection to every significant jazz musician of the previous 30 years. The only thing left, obviously, was to record an album with soul man Isaac Hayes. Backed by 125th St, N.Y.C. (previously known as N.C.C.U.), Love Byrd is a fairly snoozy effort highlighted by an unlikely gem: "Love Has Come Around," a dancefloor scorcher (and playlist staple of legendary DJ Larry Levan).

Black Moon, “Buck em Down (remix)” and Guru and Donald Byrd, “Loungin’”

Hip-hop and dance music made jazz relevant to kids in the early ’90s. Not everyone cared for the repurposing of their old sounds, but Byrd embraced it. After all, Byrd’s jazz-funk had been divisive in the ’70s, but decades later it was these intrepid works that producers like DJ Premier of Gang Starr or the Beatminerz gravitated toward. Byrd was sampled countless times, but I’ve always loved how the Beatminerz’s Evil Dee rearranged “Wind Parade” for Black Moon’s “Buck ‘em Down” remix, lending the steely original a bit of grace. For Guru, Gang Starr’s other half, his Jazzmatazz series was essentially a way to give back. “Donald Byrd — word/ On the track, quite exact,” Guru hails, and Byrd matches the rapper’s gruff monotone with some playful, old school riffing.

• 

  Diggin' In Dah Vaults

  Black Moon

  2005 | Nervous Records
• 

  Jazzmatazz Volume 1

  Guru

  1993 | NOO TRYBE

J Dilla, “Think Twice”

• 

  Welcome To Detroit

  Jay Dee aka J Dilla

  2003 | BBE Music / !K7 Records

  Jay Dee made a name for himself as one-third of A Tribe Called Quest's beat-making faction (the Ummah). Thanks to his work on Common's critically acclaimed Like Water for Chocolate and Q-Tip's post-Quest endeavor Amplified, Dee has also established himself as a hip-hop super-producer. While Dee's stock continues to rise (working with Janet Jackson, Erykah Badu, and Macy Gray), his underground projects have been less fruitful. Reason being, when it comes to... enlisting new MCs to collaborate with, Dee has yet to locate a lyricist capable of augmenting his sublime production. This fact became apparent during Dee's short-lived stint as a member of Slum Village, and the trend continues with his first solo outing, Welcome 2 Detroit. Here, Dee continues to showcase a diverse assortment of sensuous melodies and booming funk samples. The Detroit-bred MCs who Dee chooses to highlight -- Phat Kat on "Rico Suave Bossa Nova" and Beej on "Beej-N-Dem, Pt. 2" prove to be very mediocre lyricists. Yet Dee did manage to round up a few hometown prospects, as Frank N Dank liven up "Pause" and Elzhi rips a few furious verses on "Come Get It." Though Dee flips a few clumsy bars as well, Welcome 2 Detroit really takes off when he sticks solely to an instrumental script, retouching trumpeter Donald Byrd's "Think Twice" and transforming Kraftwerk's indelible "Trans-Europe Express" into the strippers'-anthem-in-waiting "B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)."

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Los Pirañas,Toma Tu Jabón Kapax

• 

  Toma Tu Jabón Kapax

  Los Pirañas

  2012 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

  These three young guys from Bogotá had the same backround as I did in rock, punk and DIY, and they decided to bring back cumbia in their own manner. They recorded this live studio album in a very free, experimental way. When their recordings came into the office, we had to figure out how to tag them for distributors: Basically, it sounds like Krautrockers playing experimental cumbia on bass, guitar, and drums... with no overdubs. Their main sound is cumbia, but it's a natural sort of fusion that really works. Their other bands are Frente Cumbiero and the Meridian Brothers.

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Cumbia Beat, volumes 1 & 2

We did this in collaboration with a good Peruvian friend who turned me on to his country’s music. He brought all his records to Europe and played me stuff every time I was at his place. This Amazonic psychedelic stuff was totally unheard and really vibrant. He said, “Let’s put them out. No one else is and I know the labels and musicians. I saw some of these bands with my father as a kid. On Sundays we’d go to a park and drink beer, eat food, and dance.”

• 

  Cumbia Beat Vol. 1

  Various Artists

  2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard
• 

  Cumbia Beat Vol. 2

  Various Artists

  2012 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

Back to Peru, volumes 1 & 2

When you open a music book in the occident, it says things like, “In the ’60s, rock ‘n’ roll turned into the British invasion, then psychedelia, then progressive and then blah blah blah.” Peru has a similar progression but it’s not so clearly defined: It’s very mellow and mixed and special. Back to Peru is provides a general introduction to Peruvian music of the ’60s and ’70s. There’s some dance music, like the Gozalo compilations, but there’s a lot that’s moodier, midtempo and more psychedelic, like good Badfinger or late Beatles. They’re also good with melodies, like the Brazilians; maybe it has to do with their weather, food and education. Most of them are self-taught but were serious about making it sound good in the studio. You can find stuff like We All Together or Telegraph Avenue, who make a terrific sound comparable to any American band of the time.

• 

  Back To Peru Vol 1

  Various Artists

  2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard
• 

  Back To Peru Vol 2

  Various Artists

  2009 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

¡Gózalo!, volumes 1 & 2

Gozalo means “enjoy” in Spanish, and these compilations focus on tropical dance music for partying and good times. Like Colombia, Peru is like a little continent unto itself. So much was happening there in the ’50s, ’60s and early ’80s, before the military took over in South America and everything turned a bit grayer. Listening to this music makes me jealous of anyone who lived there during that time because it was very open.

• 

  ¡Gózalo! Vol 1

  Various Artists

  2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard
• 

  ¡Gózalo! Vol 2

  Various Artists

  2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

¡Saoco! The Bomba and Plena Explosion in Puerto Rico 1954-1966

• 

  ¡Saoco! The Bomba and Plena Explosion in Puerto Rico 1954-1966

  Various Artists

  2012 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

  We got in touch with Yannis Ruel, a French journalist. His wife is Puerto Rican, so he spent a lot of time there and found out about all this music. It was like when we started reissuing Fania stuff: You could find it in markets on cheaply done CDs with no liner notes. He thought it should be done right, and very few albums in Puerto Rico are like it. He wrote... an incredible essay that reads like a sociological and musicological dissertation. We're at work on volumes two and three.

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Rangarang: Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Pop

• 

  Rangarang

  Various Artists

  2011 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

  A guy based in Washington, D.C., claimed to be the grandson of the guy who recorded these tracks. His grandfather was killed by the Iranian revolutionaries. He sent us a bunch of material to select and compile. It was very difficult. We couldn't find much information about some of the artists. We went by the music rather than by famous names or big hits. It's fascinating to think about this music in... the context of where it was being made and what came before it — a musical explosion in a strange social moment.

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Bola Johnson, Man No Die

• 

  Man No Die

  Bola Johnson

  2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

  The guy representing Nigeria's Premiere label sent us a batch of 1960s and '70s material this trumpeter and bandleader recorded for Phillips. We learned that Bola has even more recordings out, but we don't know how many because even though he's on Facebook, he never replied to us for information or pictures or anything. He's still playing but doesn't seem to care. The world may seem much smaller these days, but there... are still big holes everywhere. Bola's a complete performer who can play all kinds of African music. This compilation has everything from soft highlife to hard funk like Fela Kuti's, who influenced him.

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Flipper Psychout

• 

  Flipper Psychout

  Various Artists

  2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

  This was compiled by Alessandro Casella, a record collector and DJ who runs Rome's Micca Club. He got deep into Italian library music and was hired by Flipper to go into its vaults and find material to offer to labels. Mainly, it's music done for publicity, films and television in the early '70s, and the number of different moods and styles was endless. Alessandro came to us with tracks that are psychedelic,... sexy and quite incredible. That kind of music was being produced in Britain, of course, but it was also being done in southern Europe — France, Italy and even Spain. There's a lot more on the way. We're working on a project with the Spanish library music of Warner Chappell, which has something like 15,000 recordings. But it's too much. You need an expert or else you'll spend half your life on it.

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Los Saicos, ¡Demolición! The Complete Recordings

• 

  ¡Demolición! The Complete Recordings

  Los Saicos

  2010 | Munster / The Orchard

  This is the most significant Munster release at the moment for me. Los Saicos recorded six singles in 1964 and '65, but no albums at all. It was very mysterious. I used to play them for all my friends. I'd put the needle down and they'd say, "What is this?!" The band only played its own stuff, no covers. Their themes were a bit sinister: cemeteries, jails, executions, bombings and demolition. They... even had their own Peruvian TV show. They were stars, and then they split up, quit and didn't play any more music. The bandmember we got in touch with lives a very wealthy life in Washington, D.C., where he works for NASA. He became an engineer. We've gotten many licensing requests for them. I'm very proud of this because we may never see anything as unique as Los Saicos again.

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Lyres, Lyres, Lyres

• 

  Lyres Lyres

  Lyres

  2012 | Munster / The Orchard

  I really worshipped the Lyres during my formative years when I was doing the fanzine, and I saw them live a few times. A gap opened between the punk explosion and grunge, and the Lyres were one of the more interesting bands to appear. It was not easy to deal with Jeff Connolly; he's a bit of a perfectionist [laughs]. But it's very good music and I'm glad we did it. No... one else had reissued them except for Matador more than 15 years ago. I'm happy we've made them wider-known.

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Andy Votel Shares 5 Treasures from the Finders Keepers Trove

• 

  L'enfant Assassin Des Mouches

  Jean Claude Vannier

  2007 | B-MUSIC

  Orchestral, psych-rock concept album by Gainsbourg's right-hand man, and FK's first release.
  
  
  When we set up Finders Keepers, I'd already had this record for about four years. There was a rumour going around that there was a sequel to Histoire de Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg, who I'm a big fan of, but it soon became evident that I was more a fan of his arranger, Jean-Claude Vannier, as most of the stuff... I like was between 1968-73 — their years together. Nobody could find this album because there's nothing written on the sleeve — no title or name — but after years and years, I just found a copy in a shop. Everybody in France put me off speaking to Vannier — they told me he was arrogant and that he couldn't speak English — but it was like they were protecting him, really. When I finally met him I discovered he was a polite, encouraging and influential man who has since become a good friend — and he can speak English better than I can. No one dared release this record in France, but I just thought, it has to be out there.

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• 

  Minor White

  Emma Tricca

  2010 | B-MUSIC

  Spare and timeless, finger-picked folk-blues from John Renbourn-approved singer-songwriter.
  
  One of the key attractions of music for me is its femininity and sadly, you don't get that much in Manchester. All I ever talk to Emma about is Italian horror films, because she's Italian. I never talk to her about music, because I'm really not qualified; she's almost like a genius. Jane [Weaver, recording artist and Votel's wife] and I saw her at... the Green Man Festival in 2006 and couldn't believe how brilliant she was, but you could put her up a tree and she'd be amazing. Emma could have existed 300 years ago and she could exist in 300 years time. What she does is 100 per cent honest.

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• 

  Possession

  Andrzej Korzyñski

  2012 | FINDERS KEEPERS

  Polish composer's previously unreleased, experi-chestral OST for the 1981 horror classic.
  
  Korzynski was a mainstay in my record collection for years, but I didn't know anything about him. It's hard to find out about anything Polish, really, but I've been collecting Polish records since I was about 18, when I went to there on an art-school trip. Soundtracks were never released as records in their own right in Poland, and as Korzynski was... primarily a soundtrack artist, he wasn't a household name. But he did go to Paris in the late '60s and that explains everything about Korzynski's sound — people always say he's like the Polish Jean-Claude Vannier.

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• 

  Selda

  Selda

  2007 | B-MUSIC

  Debut Anatolian folk/psych-rock album from acclaimed Turkish singer/ songwriter and musician.
  
  Selda's a folk heroine, but super-militant; she'll wear Gucci sunglasses and a Fendi handbag, with a parka and a bullet-belt. I discovered Turkish music when I was in Germany and there was a really heavy, fuzz guitar sound on this record that blew my mind. Then I realized it was actually a saz, put through a fuzz pedal. People say The Beatles... are the most influential band in the world, but they're not. The Shadows are, because they're instrumental, so language isn't an issue. That's how the Andalou rock scene started and Selda was one of its earliest female musicians. She has this incredible voice, full of pain that's just unrivaled.

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• 

  Man Chest Hair

  Various Artists

  2012 | FINDERS KEEPERS

  Compilation of hirsute and avowedly male '70s rock from the Mancunian underground.
  
  Manchester has got a habit of approaching music with its elbows out, pushing to the front of the queue; it's very male-oriented. But the stuff that didn't force its way to the front got forgotten. It sickens me that people think music in Manchester just went straight from The Hollies to The Smiths, like the '70s didn't exist. In the '60s... when all the clubs in the city centre got shut down, the music went to satellite towns like Bolton and Stockport. There was a German record I'd been after for years and years, and then I found out the band were from Stockport and that blew my mind.

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eMusic Editors’ Finders Keepers Picks

• 

  Pomegranates: Persian Pop, Funk, Folk and Psych of the 60s and 70s

  Various Artists

  2010 | B-MUSIC
• 

  Sarolta Zalatnay

  Sarolta Zalatnay

  2009 | B-MUSIC
• 

  Paint a Lady

  Susan Christie

  2007 | B-MUSIC
• 

  Well Hung

  Various Aritsts

  2009 | B-MUSIC
• 

  Selda

  Selda

  2007 | B-MUSIC
• 

  Absolute Belter

  Various

  2010 | FINDERS KEEPERS
• 

  Solla Solla

  Ilaiyaraaja

  2011 | FINDERS KEEPERS
• 

  The B-Music of Jean Rollin

  Various Artists

  2012 | FINDERS KEEPERS

Waxahatchee

• 

  Cerulean Salt

  Waxahatchee

  2013 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

  I was a huge, huge fan of [Waxahatchee singer/songwriter Katie Crutchfield's former band] P.S. Eliot — they were an incredible band. They were from Alabama, but they were a Don Giovanni band that wasn't on Don Giovanni. We just didn't do their records, because they weren't local. Katie and her sister moved to Brooklyn, and they did this project called Bad Banana. I e-mailed Katie and told her I wanted to do... a Bad Banana record. By that time, they were barely around, but she told me, "But I'm doing this new thing, Waxahatchee." We put out their first album [American Weekend] in January of last year, and no one cared — and by the end of the year, it was like the biggest record ever. You don't know what's going to happen, sometimes. We would do records like that if they never picked up, but it's always really nice when they do.

  more »

Hilly Eye

• 

  Reasons to Live

  Hilly Eye

  2013 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

  They're one of the most recent bands to join the label, and a band that sort of came into the scene through the label. They played with Shellshag and Screaming Females a lot; I bought their demo at one of their shows, and I just really liked it. Until this year, we really only worked with local bands. But I booked them on shows, and at some point I told them, "Just... so you know, we would do your record if you want — I like your band." They got back to me when they were doing a record, and it was just a natural fit: They fit with all our ideals, they fit with all our bands. They're great people.

  more »

California X

• 

  California X

  California X

  2013 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

  I'm working on a Ph.D. right now, and I live in Ithaca, but before I was in Ithaca I was in Syracuse. And in Syracuse, I met this guy Josh who moved to Amherst and was in California X, and was going to put out their record. I heard them and I thought, "I love that band." I booked them for shows — I usually book bands I like, it's not, like,... a label thing. Josh left the band on really friendly terms, but he wasn't putting out their record, and they were kind of in a quandary. I talked to Zach about it. We'd kind of cemented our "only doing local bands" thing, but we thought, "Fuck it, the record's awesome, it's the kind of thing we'd do anyway, we can help the band, let's do it." And then it was easy. They're part of the scene anyway — Waxahatchee played the first California X show.

  more »

Shellshag

• 

  Rumors In Disguise

  Shellshag

  2011 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

  They're my favorite band. They're a really important band, not just to me but to the world, and I hope someday the world realizes that. I remember when they moved from California to Brooklyn — they were famous to me and my 10 friends. I don't like playing favorites, but Shellshag are probably my favorite band on the label, and I don't think any of the others would be upset to hear... that. Any label that was thinking about the bottom line would never do some of the things we do for Shellshag, but I think it's really important that their records exist and get noticed. The lyrics they write — they're old but they're young. The fact that they just keep doing what they're doing, and damn the music industry, is really inspirational to me. I got married in August, and we only had two bands play: a Misfits tribute band, and Shellshag.

  more »

Big Eyes

• 

  Hard Life

  Big Eyes

  2011 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

  Big Eyes have just been around our scene forever. I met Kate when she was 14, and when she was 18 she started a band called Cheeky, who were maybe the best band ever when they were around. We were supposed to do their album — there's even a feature on YouTube about the making of the album for our label — and then they broke up and didn't finish it. I... said, "Kate, let me do your next band," and that was Big Eyes. They relocated to Seattle at a certain point, which is partially why we're not doing their records any more. But there's no bad blood. I love them. I'm booking a Don Giovanni show for them right now.

  more »

Screaming Females

• 

  Ugly

  Screaming Females

  2012 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

  They were one of my favorite bands in New Brunswick, and we didn't work with them until their third album because they were doing their own records. I thought that was really cool — I love it when bands put out their own records. Then, one day, a mutual friend of ours played matchmaker: "You know, Screaming Females really like your label, Joe, they want you to put out their records…" And... he told them, "You know, Joe really likes you guys…" So we talked, and I think I said something like that I was going to kill myself if they didn't let me put out the next record, and thankfully they didn't call my bluff on that. At the time, for all I knew, that would be all we ever did: Most of our bands, at that point, did one record and broke up and that was that. But I can go back and see that that was a huge thing — we've ended up working with them for six years. A lot of the way Don Giovanni functions is because of working with Screaming Females and figuring out how to do new things: licensing, royalties, booking agents, all these things we didn't know about and they didn't know about, and we've figured everything out together. I don't think Marissa realizes her own talent sometimes. There are things she can do so effortlessly that she's so modest about. Everyone thinks she's really serious and scary, but people don't know that she's really silly and funny.

  more »

Free SXSW Sampler

Pissed Jeans

• 

  Honeys

  Pissed Jeans

  2013 | Sub Pop Records

  Snarling and spitting, growling and kicking, Honeys won't surprise those who love the Allentown, Pennsylvania-based Jesus (Lizard) freaks Pissed Jeans, nor is it likely to attract those that deplore the band. "Write what you know," as they say, and Pissed Jeans knows pummeling, antisocial punk. When lead yeller Matt Korvette isn't "in the hallway screaming" (that's from riotous opener "Bathroom Laughter"), he can often be found smirking. You'd think four dudes who... all recently became fathers would be tamer than this. — Austin L. Ray

  more »

Marnie Stern

• 

  Marnie Stern

  Marnie Stern

  2010 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  In years past, Marnie Stern's shorthand description usually involved the words "guitar" and "shredding," but the New Yorker has grown equally adept over her career at revealing just how big her heart is. Stern's frenetic fingertapping and the bonkers drumming of Kid Millions illustrate the way that the best response to bone-crushing sadness is, sometimes, a pealing laugh. Confidence and the lack thereof are also common lyrical themes, although the bravado with... which Stern wields both her guitar and her anguished voice masks those facts on first listen. — Maura Johnston

  more »

Waxahatchee

• 

  Cerulean Salt

  Waxahatchee

  2013 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

  As Waxahatchee, Katie Crutchfield uses her brief tracks to paint a very specific but familiar portrait of 20-something American youth, first on the deeply personal, lo-fi acoustic guitar-filled American Weekend, and now on the plugged-in Cerulean Salt, in which her subtle gut-punches translate just as powerfully once the volume's been dialed up. — Carrie Battan

Charles Bradley

• 

  No Time for Dreaming

  Charles Bradley

  2011 | Daptone Records / The Orchard

  It's time to put to bed, once and for all, Charles Bradley's oft-repeated origin story as a James Brown impersonator. The Screaming Eagle of Soul, The Original Black Swan and, most recently, The Victim of Love, Bradley is at this point a performer fully his own, possessing boundless charisma, gallons of passion and the kind of unstudied, unadulterated joy that SXSW — a week fully fucking lousy with marketing and branding and... consumer-facing outreach opportunities — desperately needs. To stand in the presence of Charles Bradley is to be basked in 100 percent pure love — so completely unsullied and unpolluted you feel yourself choking up before the first song ever hits the chorus. To put it another way: if James Brown were alive today, he'd be impersonating Charles. — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

METZ

• 

  METZ

  METZ

  2012 | Sub Pop Records

  On their debut album, Canadian trio METZ has delivered a sound that's reasonably scarce in 2012: post-hardcore, pre-grunge, noise-addled punk rock. You can hear the influence of the Jesus Lizard in particular everywhere: in Alex Edkins's strained screams; in Hayden Menzies's crashing drum assault; in their relentless wave of screeching guitars, in the frenzied pace of "Wet Blanket," in the sludgy industrial instrumental "Nausea," and in their grim, dour lyrics. But the... sheer volume and force of the music don't take away from their musicianship. — Evan Minsker

  more »

Torres

• 

  TORRES

  TORRES

  2013 | TORRES / TuneCore

  Torres's songs feel as if they were bound to come crawling out of singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott's body no matter what she did or where she was. Dominated by the wavery tones of her Gibson 355 electric, the songs explore the fragile architecture of human relationships, often finding Scott standing amid a steaming pile of rubble, wondering not about what caused the house to fall but what to do, now, with all the... shattered pieces left behind. — Rachael Maddux

  more »

Parquet Courts

• 

  Light Up Gold

  Parquet Courts

  2013 | What's Your Rupture?

  On Light Up Gold, the irresistible debut from Brooklyn band Parquet Courts, the principal songwriters Andrew Savage and Austin Brown cast a jaundiced eye on our troubled times with a series of infinitely quotable bon mots: On regional cuisine? "As for Texas: Donuts Only. You cannot find bagels here." On the value of wisdom? "Socrates died in the fucking gutter." These nuggets are dropped between jagged guitar lines that sound like they... were lifted from Wire's 154 — bent-coathanger leads that teeter on the steep incline between punk and post-punk. — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

Matthew E. White

Roc Marciano

• 

  Reloaded (Deluxe Edition)

  Roc Marciano

  Decon

  Roc Marciano's music exists to remind you what NYC rap sounds like in the idealized bubble of your memory, and he's frighteningly good at it. He's so good, in fact, that after awhile you forget that his music is a kind of Civil War reenactment, one in which Swizz Beatz plays General Sherman and the Battle of Five Forks is the moment he started fooling with a Casio. Marciano's rap world exists... before all of that, a vanished kingdom of urban despair, gnarled street slang, and unglamorous night shifts conducted out in front of public housing. — Jayson Greene

  more »

Mac DeMarco

Solange

• 

  True

  Solange

  2012 | Terrible Records / The Orchard

  Sure, Solange is the sister of R&B/pop princess Beyoncé — a fact that will probably never be omitted from her CV. But while her musical means (a soaring soprano; wisely chosen collaborators) are similar to the elder Knowles, the ends are significantly different. For her 2012 EP True, she enlisted production help from Blood Orange's Dev Hynes and ended up with a candy-coated, left-of-center R&B playground. — Laura Studarus

The Coup

• 

  Sorry To Bother You

  The Coup

  2012 | Anti/Epitaph

  Boots Riley has had a few other things to do than rap for Oakland collective the Coup as of late — appearing at the forefront of the Occupy movement, for one. But for their seventh album in 20 years, Riley's loose sense of humor remains intact in much the way as his taste for lyrics that spell out rebellion. — Michaelangelo Matos

Samantha Crain

• 

  Kid Face

  Samantha Crain

  2013 | Ramseur Records / The Orchard

  Oklahoma singer-songwriter Samantha Crain has always sounded like an old soul, her dusty alto worn down by restless thoughts and free-floating anxiety. On her latest LP Kid Face, she comes into her own as a lyricist, using the songs to examine her place in the world. — Annie Zaleski

Autre Ne Veut

• 

  Anxiety

  Autre Ne Veut

  2013 | Software

  Arthur Ashin typically spends the duration of his performances as Autre Ne Veut curled up on the ground like a potato bug. So if you go to see him at SXSW, you should kind of prepare for the fact that you might not actually see him. That's OK, though: His music is more about feeling than seeing. If Terence Trent D'Arby returned from self-imposed exile and pulled off the perfect comeback record,... it might sound a lot like Ashin's recently-released Anxiety: supple, R&B-informed vocal lines glide over stormy-sea synthesizers, the tensions perfectly mirroring the existential unease in his lyrics. Case in point? His most beautiful song, the slinky "Counting," is about his terror that his grandmother was going to die. How can you expect a man to have the strength to stand upright while singing about things like that? — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

Maria Minerva

• 

  Will Happiness Find Me?

  Maria Minerva

  2012 | Not Not Fun / Revolver

  Maria Minerva, a somewhat mysterious artist from Estonia, has a playfulness that's alternately cerebral and coy, and a lightness of touch at the controls. She sings too, with a voice that stretches out and rises up from deep pools of echo. On her latest effort, Will Happiness Finds Me?, she plays with different sounds and different tempos, with a mind toward both vintage club music and futuristic pop at once. — Andy... Battaglia

  more »

My Gold Mask

• 

  Leave Me Midnight

  My Gold Mask

  2013 | Goldy Tapes / CD Baby

  Chicago duo My Gold Mask amplify the effects of a breakup album on their debut, Leave Me At Mightnight. They don't skimp on dramatics, with Gretta Rochelle's pleading vocals, Jack Armondo's spiraling guitar riffs, and lyrics that grapple with psychosis and reference Gothic literature and Italo horror flicks. The result achieves a spellbinding emotional intensity that's easy to inhabit. — Marissa G. Muller

Skeletonwitch

• 

  Forever Abomination

  Skeletonwitch

  Prosthetic / The Orchard

  Hands-down the most fun you will ever have a metal show, period, Skeletonwitch combine blasphemous guitar firepower with a self-aware sense of humor without ever tipping once into icky archness or loathsome, smirking heavy meta. It helps that they're an astonishingly tight band, whipping from one burst of split-second riffery to the next with all the frenzy and fury of a speed-of-sound rollercoaster car desperately hugging the curves. Who knew unabashed Satanism... could be so uplifting? — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

Icona Pop

• 

  Iconic EP

  Icona Pop

  2012 | Big Beat Records/Atlantic

  Here is Swedish duo Icona Pop summed up in six words: "I don't care! I love it!" That refrain — cribbed from last year's giddiest breakup song — perfectly captures Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo's exuberance and reckless abandon. Their songs are straight-up sugar shots, firework synths and hollered vocals and drum machines that wallop and squelch like medicine balls full of purple Kool-Aid. It's the sound of pure joy — a... nonstop barrage of leaping neon exclamation points. — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

Pearl and the Beard

• 

  Killing the Darlings

  Pearl And The Beard

  2011 | Family Records / The Orchard

  Pearl and the Beard are a trio of loud and goofy Brooklyn songwriters, their songs a mix of acoustic folk and jazzy cabaret via a soft-voiced guitarist (Jeremy Styles) and a cellist and percussionist (Emily Hope Price and Jocelyn Mackenzie) who seamlessly switch between brassy wails and Disney-princess croons. — Laura Leebove

Chelle Rose

• 

  Ghost of Browder Holler

  Chelle Rose

  2012 | Lil' Damsel Records / TuneCore

  Even Satan knows better than to fuck with Chelle Rose. That's the truism she lays out in the center of the slow-moseying, creepy-as-hell "Leona Barrett," seething, "I don't know who I trouble more: The mean ol' devil or the good ol' Lord." Need further proof? It's all over the brooding, beautiful Ghost of Browder Holler, a record that takes the same sinister spirit found in bands like Nick Cave & the Bad... Seeds and transplants it to ragged booze-bucket country music. Rose's voice is a wonder, a smartass sneer that jabs like a hundred middle fingers. Her pronunciation drips with delicious contempt: she shrugs off a louse of a lover by drawling, "My skin ain't sowft enuff, my kisses would not douww." She dispenses with him like she's flecking a fly from the lip of her MGD. — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

Night Beats

• 

  Night Beats

  Night Beats

  2011 | Trouble In Mind Records / TuneCore

  Here's the ideal environment for enjoying the music of gloomy garage ghouls Night Beats: It's 4 a.m. and you've ended up, after a long night of boozing and carousing, at some sparsely-attended party in a barely-furnished loft apartment in some remote part of the city, and a band is bashing out sneering numbers that sound like Nuggets with an upset stomach while a movie projector beams lava-lamp-like images on to their swaying... bodies. Also, it's 1967 and you're in an instructional film about the hazards of LSD. Failing that, a stage in the sunlight in Austin, Texas, is the next best thing. — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

Dana Falconberry

• 

  Leelanau

  Dana Falconberry

  2012 | Antenna Farm Records / The Orchard

  Dana Falconberry writes delicate orchestral-folk songs; her airy mezzo accompanied by plucked strings, fingerpicked guitar and gentle rim clicks. Though she's now based in Austin, her debut LP is an ode to her childhood spent in northern Michigan's lush Leelanau peninsula. — Laura Leebove

Royal Thunder

• 

  CVI

  Royal Thunder

  2012 | Relapse Records

  One of last year's best new bands by a long sight, Royal Thunder's greatest asset is the unsettling, purple-blue bellow of frontwoman Mini Parsonz. Over a bevy of murky, churning chordage, she serenades the undead, sings of ancient family curses and groans out the very kind of infernal incantations those old Christian anti-rock 'n' roll videos used to warn against. That the songs are so tuneful is a sly infernal trick: the... best way to get people to sing the praises of the devil is to make that praise hooky as hell. — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

Holydrug Couple

• 

  Noctuary

  The Holydrug Couple

  2013 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

  In case the name didn't clue you in: This is heavy-lidded, slow-moving, psyched-out, pinwheel-eyed bliss. The Chilean duo Holydrug Couple imagines what might happen if you put a brick on the turntable while you were playing old Byrds records. A loose netting of guitars drifts down slowly, drums thud and shudder and vocal lines — keening and melodic — expand like echoes in the Grand Canyon. In the midst of the hyperactive... Austin chaos, Holydrug Couple provide a grinning, dreamy respite. — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

Jacco Gardner

• 

  Cabinet of Curiosities

  Jacco Gardner

  2013 | Trouble In Mind Records / TuneCore

  Indie rock's own Little Prince, Jacco Gardner's music is magic and precious, sumptuous orchestral pop that summons the spirits of The Zombies and The Left Banke while sounding openly derivative of neither. In fact, it's Gardner's own assured gift for melody that makes Cabinet of Curiosities such a wonder — even more than the swirling, meringue-like strings. His vocal lines dart off at odd acute angles, poking rude holes in the tissue-paper... orchestration. Witness opener "Clear the Air": xylophones and mellotrons and violins pirouette like tiny ceramic music box ballerinas; but then Gardner's weirdo trapezoidal voice spirals in, making what was once simply soothing seem suddenly ominous and mysterious. It's like the unadulterated versions of Aesop's Fables, where childlike fantasy often gives way to moments of genuine, thrilling danger. — J. Edward Keyes

  more »

• 

  ATO Records Spring Sampler 2013

  Various Artists - ATO Records

  2013 | ATO Records
• 

  Don Giovanni Records Sampler

  Various Artists - Don Giovanni Records

  Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital
• 

  Polyvinyl SXSW 2013 Sampler

  Various Artists

  2013 | Polyvinyl Records
• 

  Dead Oceans Winter 2013 Sampler

  Various Artists - Dead Oceans

  2013 | Dead Oceans / SC Distribution
• 

  Here's To Another 21 Years! - SAMPLER

  Various Artists

  2012 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye
• 

  Wind-up 15th Anniversary Sampler

  Various

  2012 | Wind-Up
• 

  Stash Rituals: Mexican Summer/Software Spring 2012 Sampler

  Various Artists

  2012 | Mexican Summer
• 

  Hey Girl, Hey

  Various Artists

  2012 | Polyvinyl Records
• 

  ATO Records Fall Sampler 2012

  Various Artists - ATO Records

  2012 | ATO Records
• 

  The Modern Jazz Stylings of Blue Canoe Records Volume 1

  Look What The Cats Drug In

  2008 | Blue Canoe
• 

  Nacional Records eMusic Label Sampler

  Various Artists

  2012 | Nacional Records / The Orchard
• 

  Now Hear This! - The Independent Music Awards 11th Annual Winners

  Various Artists

  2012 | Various Artists / TuneCore
• 

  METAL BLADE RECORDS 2012 Summer Sampler

  Various Artists

  2012 | Metal Blade Records / The Orchard
• 

  Broken Ground - Single (Alt Edit) [eMusic Exclusive Advance]

  Jodis

  2012 | Hydra Head Records / Redeye

Four Essential Ed Kuepper Albums

• 

  The Complete Radio Sessions, Vol. One

  Ed Kuepper

  2011 | Prince Melon Records / CD Baby

  This is an anthology collected from various CDs I put out and it's a mixture of solo and band recordings. All of them were recorded live, most of them for Australian radio. It gives a nice sense of the difference between recorded versions of songs, studio versions and what I do live. I've presented them in a modest way as bootlegs, with everything that that implies, but they're actually very well recorded.... And, of course, beautifully performed.

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• 

  The Complete 2009 Live Recordings

  Laughing Clowns

  2011 | Prince Melon Records / CD Baby

  The Clowns were invited to play All Tomorrow's Parties in 2009, when Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds were curating. When they asked me if I'd consider putting the Clowns back together, I got in touch with the people who were still around and they were keen. The shows were very good, so it was a fantastic experience. This recording is of one show we did at the Gallery of Modern Art... in Brisbane.

  more »
• 

  Second Winter

  Ed Kuepper

  2012 | Prince Melon Records / CD Baby

  A couple of years ago I was approached to do a tour around the albums Electrical Storm (1985) and Today Wonder (1990) and it went really well. It went so well that I thought we had to go into the studio and record the set properly, and it developed more as the tour progressed. During that time, things start to change and initially, the most extreme change was the orchestrations, and the... ambient sounds we were introducing into the shows. We did some field recording out in the desert, and of the noises electrical wires made…that sort of thing. But it's all used discreetly; it's a very musical album.

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• 

  Serene Machine

  Ed Kuepper

  Hot Records

  This is a really concise group of songs that were all done on acoustic guitar, drums and acoustic bass; it sounds intentionally small. I was quite chuffed to get an ARIA [Australian Record Industry Association] award for this album, and it was kind of humorous, too. At that stage I was putting out records so quickly, I was never sure if the judges thought they were voting for the one that they... knew, or for the one that was actually in the running. I think my biggest album at the time of my second ARIA was Honey Steals Gold, but the follow-up, Black Ticket Day actually won the prize, because it came out just four months later.

  more »

Album of the Year

Record of the Year

• 

  Somebody That I Used To Know

  Gotye

  2012 | EP/SINGLE

  Stepping out from behind the piano/drums of Melbourne indie pop three-piece the Basics for the third time, Belgian-Australian multi-instrumentalist Wally De Backer, aka Gotye's first solo record in five years, Making Mirrors, reveals a love of the '80s pop scene, which extends far beyond the usual influences of the current nu-synth brigade. Unexpected chart-topper "Somebody That I Used to Know," a collaboration with New Zealand vocalist Kimbra, is an oddball break-up song... whose stuttering rhythms, reggae hooks, and hushed vocals sound like the Police as remixed by the XX.

  more »

Song of the Year

• 

  We Are Young

  fun.

  2011 | Fueled By Ramen

  fun. is one of those bands that came seemingly out of nowhere to ascend to the top of the charts. Usually, those groups piggyback the steez of some other currently radio-ruling act. fun. doesn’t. On its breakout second album, the New York trio draws from hip-hop, power-pop, emo, ’70s art-rock, singer-songwriter balladry, contemporary R&B and Broadway; a combo you’ll likely only find right here. Singer Nate Ruess — who also writes the... ardent lyrics and highly sing-able melodies — has a Freddie Mercury thing going on vocally, and Some Nights opens with a flurry of Queen-y harmonies and symphonic gallantry. But after that, all bets are off. The runaway success of “We Are Young,” the first substantial rock song in ages to not only top the pop charts but also put a justified critic’s darling, avant-R&B diva Janelle Monae, on the radio where she belongs, is particularly amazing considering that Ruess’s first band, the Format, was dropped by the same major that now distributes both fun. and Monae.

  more »

Best Pop Vocal Album

• 

  Stronger

  Kelly Clarkson

  2011 | RCA Records Label

  It's been nine years since Kelly Clarkson was crowned as the inaugural American Idol, and in that time she's remained the show's ideal; she's a technically gifted singer with charm to spare, an inviting smile, and a knack for inhabiting hooks like they're barnhouse lofts squirreled away on Texas farm. Even the most Idol-allergic music consumers have embraced the combination of melody, perfectly calibrated guitar grit, and wailing that made up her... 2004 hit "Since U Been Gone"; other songs in her catalog, like the sassy "Walk Away" and the girl-group throwback "I Want You," are similarly indelible.
  
  In keeping with Clarkson's career — and the ethos of Idol — her fifth album takes its inspirations from all over the pop map. While Dr. Luke and Max Martin, who shepherded "Gone" and the lead single from Clarkson's previous album All I Ever Wanted, aren't present, the producers in the mix give Stronger a texture that shows how the genre of "pop" can be a jumping-off point, and not an endgame. "You Love Me" is muscular guitar-pop with gorgeous new-wave flourishes blossoming on its pre-chorus; "Dark Side" has a delicate lullaby threaded throughout; "Honestly" opens with a floating haze of guitar distortion that could be mistaken for a chillwave track. The through line between all these stylistic leaps is Clarkson's voice, a formidable instrument that knows when to get vulnerable and when to absolutely blow. (Chillwavers could probably stand to learn a lesson or two from her.)
  
  What gives Stronger its extra oomph is the confidence exhibited by Clarkson as she sings lyrics about self-acceptance being a key to love ("Dark Side") and rumor mills that she wishes would stop churning ("You Can't Win"). Escaping the Idol machine has been a great thing for Clarkson, who sometimes takes on the role of the pop world's ombudsman when she's defending her former show against the "authenticity" police or rolling her eyes at former Idol meanie Simon Cowell's declarations that she's not interested in being a pop star. That Stronger allows her to drop the façade that other pop stars might depend on for dear life, and address both the characters in her songs and her audience directly, speaks both to Clarkson's charm and to her growing maturity as an artist.

  more »

Best New Artist

• 

  Some Nights

  fun.

  2012 | Fueled By Ramen

  fun. is one of those bands that came seemingly out of nowhere to ascend to the top of the charts. Usually, those groups piggyback the steez of some other currently radio-ruling act. fun. doesn't. On this, its breakout second album, the New York trio draws from hip-hop, power-pop, emo, '70s art-rock, singer-songwriter balladry, contemporary R&B and Broadway; a combo you'll likely only find right here. Singer Nate Ruess — who also writes... the ardent lyrics and highly sing-able melodies — has a Freddie Mercury thing going on vocally, and Some Nights opens with a flurry of Queen-y harmonies and symphonic gallantry. But after that, all bets are off. The runaway success of "We Are Young," the first substantial rock song in ages to not only top the pop charts but also put a justified critic's darling, avant-R&B diva Janelle Monáe, on the radio where she belongs, is particularly amazing considering that Ruess's first band, the Format, was dropped by the same major that now distributes both fun. and Monáe. That Arizona band teamed with Redd Kross/OFF! bassist Steven McDonald for its second album, 2006's Dog Problems, and Ruess and McDonald continued honing their smarty-pants eclecticism on fun.'s 2009 debut Aim and Ignite, with the help of its multi-instrumentalists Jack Antonoff and Andrew Dost, formerly of Steel Train and Anathallo. Here the trio trade McDonald for Jeff Bhasker, a hip-hop/R&B guy who produced monster hits for Kanye West, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Together, they layer seemingly incompatible genres with reckless but radio-friendly glee, as if a music nerd's iPod somehow got into the hands of a Bruno Mars.

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Best Dance/Electronica Album

• 

  Bangarang EP

  Skrillex

  2011 | Big Beat Records/Atlantic

  Nominated for five Grammy Awards, shortlisted for the prestigious BBC Sound of 2012 poll, and courted by everyone from Chicago producer Kaskade to metal icons Korn, former From First to Last frontman Sonny Moore's transition from post-hardcore vocalist to dubstep producer couldn't have realistically gone any smoother. However, despite his unprecedented success, there's still a question as to whether he can apply his now trademark, demonic, wobble bass drops and thumping syncopated... beats to a whole album. Named after the battle cry of the lost boys in Steven Spielberg's Hook, his fourth consecutive EP Bangarang (also his first Top 40 entry in both the UK and US) suggests he'll have to be on his game on the forthcoming full-length Voltage if he's to avoid an Emperor's New Clothes scenario. While the bombastic Wall of Sound displayed on 2010's Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites initially provided a unique take on the UK dubstep genre, Skrillex's lack of progression means there's a distinct sense of déjà vu among its seven tracks, particularly on the relentless, scattershot bleeps, chopped-up vocal hooks, and repetitive loops of opener "Right In" and the rap-metal fusion of "Kyoto." Even when he does think outside the box -- as on "Right on Time," a percussive, hard house collaboration with 12th Planet and Kill the Noise which eventually builds into a feverish slice of happy hardcore, and "The Devil's Den," a chaotic hook-up with Wolfgang Gartner which takes in everything from old-school rave to ska to techno — the results are more headache-inducing than thrilling. There are a few more encouraging signs, such as the Doors-featuring "Breakin' a Sweat," which combines proggy guitar hooks, psychedelic organ chords, and Jim Morrison samples with a snarling, Prodigy-esque vocal and a filthy slab of dub bass to produce one of the year's most unexpectedly successful partnerships, and the multi-layered trance of closer "Summit," given an ethereal sheen thanks to Ellie Goulding's lilting tones, both of which suggest Skrillex should utilize his melodic leanings more often. But overall, Bangarang is a disappointingly formulaic affair which hints for the first time that the wheels may soon slowly begin to fall off.

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Best Rock Album

• 

  El Camino

  The Black Keys

  2011 | Nonesuch

  The Black Keys, Akron's unsuspecting blues-rock saviors, faced ridiculous pressure in following up their expansive 2010 breakout effort, Brothers. Big things happened in the subsequent year: The duo (vocalist/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney) graced the cover of Spin, tucked away three GRAMMYs, played SNL and raked in huge piles of advertising cash — big-deal developments for a band that recorded their debut album in a basement nearly a decade earlier.... Brothers found the band at a creative and commercial high-point, simultaneously embracing soulful pop melodies and the spirited muscle of their live shows, even as they gently experimented with psychedelic overdubs — emphatically darting away from the sleepy, awkward soundscapes of the Danger Mouse-produced identity crisis Attack & Release.
  
  On El Camino, the Black Keys are done trying to impress anybody, sounding wonderfully unhinged throughout the album's compact 38 minutes. The name of the game is hard-hitting focus; spontaneity; keeping it simple, stupid; never over-thinking or over-cooking any swampy chorus or tossed-off lyric ("Hey, my my, she's a money-maker/ Hey, my my, she's gonna take ya," goes one gem). After only producing one Brothers track (the emphatic "Tighten Up"), Danger Mouse returns to man the boards — and though his approach on Attack & Release was heavy-handed, never quite gelling with the duo's style, he takes a wiser backseat approach on El Camino. His presence still lingers (check that whirring Hammond organ and retro-glock twinkle on the hooky "Dead and Gone"), but this time around, he's adapted to the Keys' raw rock approach, instead of forcing a synthesis with his bread-n-butter symphonic electro-pop.
  
  The looseness is intoxicating. "Money Maker"'s beastly bass lags behind a millisecond or two, pushing and pulling in gnarly blues warfare with Auerbach's guitars. Carney, charmingly, still swings with the finesse of a caveman on Ritalin — despite his finest efforts at a multi-tiered groove on standout "Stop Stop," dude nearly trips over his own drum sticks. Those sassy female vocalizers on "Gold on the Ceiling" would fit nicely onstage in a broke-down backwoods bar. The acoustic-ballad-turned-electric-stomper "Little Black Submarines" unintentionally evokes Tenacious D channeling Led Zeppelin, and the result is a goofier (yet no less rocking) "Stairway to Heaven" demoed in a truck-stop bathroom stall. Meanwhile, "Sister" is the Black Keys at their glammiest and hammiest, Auerbach's fuzz-bathed, bee-stung guitars layered impeccably over a wicked Carney stomp.
  
  Perhaps the Black Keys are America's finest rock band only because the competition is so depressingly slim. Regardless, with two straight knock-outs on their resume, these guys have clearly earned the title.

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Best Alternative Album

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  Making Mirrors

  Gotye

  2012 | Samples & Seconds / Republic

  Stepping out from behind the piano/drums of Melbourne indie pop three-piece the Basics for the third time, Belgian-Australian multi-instrumentalist Wally De Backer, aka Gotye's first solo record in five years, Making Mirrors, reveals a love of the '80s pop scene, which extends far beyond the usual influences of the current nu-synth brigade. The hugely experimental follow-up to 2006's Like Drawing Blood doesn't discriminate against other decades, as evident on the impossibly uplifting... '60s retro soul of "I Feel Better," the '70s West Coast harmonies of the ethereal lullaby-like closer "Bronte," the '90s Beck-esque scuzzy garage rock of "Easy Way Out," and the 2000s hushed, claustrophobic dubstep of "Don't Worry, We'll Be Watching You." But seemingly unaffected by the constant comparisons with the likes of Sting and Peter Gabriel, it's the era of early new wave, dub, and worldbeat which defines its 12 tracks. Unexpected chart-topper "Somebody That I Used to Know," a collaboration with New Zealand vocalist Kimbra, is an oddball break-up song whose stuttering rhythms, reggae hooks, and hushed vocals sound like the Police as remixed by the XX, "Smoke and Mirrors" echoes the avant-garde pop of Gabriel's So, with its pounding tribal drums, orchestral flourishes, and new age melodies, while there are also nods to George Michael's "Faith" on the acoustic gospel-pop of "In Your Light"; the impassioned Aussie rock of Midnight Oil on the ecologically themed "Eyes Wide Open," and electro pioneer Thomas Dolby on the strange, vocodered vocals, spoken word samples, and skank guitars of the trippy "State of the Art." Familiar they may be, but some credit has to go to De Backer for managing to weave these eclectic retro sounds into a cohesive affair, which proves that along with recent efforts by Art vs. Science and Architecture in Helsinki, Australia is fast becoming one of the biggest purveyors of quality experimental pop.

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Best R&B Album

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  Black Radio

  Robert Glasper

  2012 | BLUE NOTE

  Pianist Robert Glasper has jazz chops sophisticated enough to satiate diehard purists and an affinity for hip-hop and R&B that has resulted in collaborations with Q-Tip, Maxwell and Mos Def. Black Radio scrambles these influences, with Glasper's Experiment quartet (including Derrick Hodge on electric bass, Casey Benjamin on sax and vocoder, and Chris Dave playing drums), laying unpredictable music beneath a bevy of high-profile guests. In this era of... Pandora-style musical-profiling, where listeners can narrow down exactly what they think they want, the project absorbs genres like a sponge and squeezes out surprises with a tinge of tang and froth. It avoids the sappiness of "smooth jazz," the stilted self-reference of "hip-hop jazz" and the suffocating cushion of "quiet storm," yet there's a lush sensuality that permeates the beats, bop rhythms and bracing moments of curiosity and intellect.
  
  Glasper understands that this Experiment is best undertaken as a tactile experience - as Shafiq Husayn rap-drawls in the opener, "Lift Off," all you need is your ears and your soul. To drive home the point, the beguiling yawl and coo of Erykah Badu sends the Afro-Cuban classic "Afro Blue" into the air like a large kite in a steady wind, its tail trilling. Rappers Lupe Fiasco and yasiin bey (better known as Mos Def) variously distill verbal science and wig out on wordplay ("turtles from a man hole"?), knowing the live quartet can alter the texture and freestyle the route as the situation warrants, on "Always Shine" and "Black Radio," respectively. There is a throwback nature to Black Radio, and not only because Sade ("Cherish The Day," with Lalah Hathaway on vocals), David Bowie ("Letter to Hermione," featuring Bilal channeling Stevie Wonder) and Nirvana (a deconstructed and vocoderized "Smells Like Teen Spirit") are covered. There are moments reminiscent of the soul-jazz fusion of Bobbi Humphrey and Donald Byrd back on Blue Note in the late '70s, or Soul II Soul and Me Phi Me back in the '80s, or Alphabet Soup and Mint Condition in the '90s, with a dollop of 21st-century hip-hop on top. Why reinvent the wheel when you can modify the ride?

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Best Rap Album

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  Take Care (Deluxe Version)

  Drake

  2012 | Cash Money Records/Young Money Ent./Universal Rec.

  Drake shot to the upper echelon of hip-hop fame by bypassing nearly every single rule of traditional cred-getting, and none of the ensuing jokes about his role as Wheelchair Jimmy on DeGrassi: The Next Generation or his own penchant for soft-batch hashtag-rap have knocked him back down. If anything, sophomore album Take Care actively doubles down on the things that make him so contentious among traditionalists — the emotional exposure, the singsong... delivery (now manifested more often as straight-up R&B singing), the lyrical focus on relationships — but infuses them with a subtle dose of self-aware ambivalence.
  
  He still acknowledges success — the first line on the album is "I think I killed everybody in the game last year, man" — while "Underground Kings" and "Crew Love" are human-scale acknowledgments that he can afford nice cars and expensive vacations. Yet he still carries himself as though his main concern is connecting with other people without letting status obscure his intent. Most of the people in question are women; they get romantically flattered ("Make Me Proud"), ruefully drunk-dialed ("Marvin's Room"), anxiously reconciled with ("Take Care") and coldly, then regretfully, dumped (the Stevie Wonder feature, "Doing it Wrong").
  
  In the process, Drake foregoes hashtag gimmickry and stretched-to-fatigue punchlines in favor of straightforward confessions, letting the guests — including top-form Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Andre 3000 and mentor Lil Wayne — fill in the pull-quotes. The production does the rest — a gauzy atmosphere of post-Dirty South beats, built around muted, glowing ambient tracks from Noah "40" Shebib, T-Minus and one-shots from Boi-1da, Just Blaze, Jamie xx and Lex Luger — and the sound complements the nuances of Drake's voice in a way that subsumes it almost completely. The end result is an album that feels like the most integral fusion of hip-hop structure and R&B soul-baring since 808s and Heartbreak.

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Best Country Album

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  Uncaged

  Zac Brown Band

  2012 | Southern Ground/Atlantic

  In a sense, it's possible to measure the progress of the Zac Brown Band by the magnitude of their guest stars. In 2010, they consolidated the breakthrough of 2008's Foundation by enlisting Jimmy Buffett and Alan Jackson for duets — elders whose very presence suggested they were passing a torch (although, to be sure, Buffett has a far greater pull on Brown's sound than Jackson). Two years later, it is the Zac... Brown Band who occupy the power position, drafting in peers, not idols, to play alongside. And it is a diverse batch: twee, twiddly Jason Mraz co-writes the sprightly opening cut, "Jump Right In," with Zac, Trombone Shorty colors "Overnight" with some New Orleans funk, and upcoming folk/blues troubadour Amos Lee sings on "Day That I Die," each guest representing a different field for the ZBB, each suggesting the range of this ever-evolving nominal country band. And at this point, the Zac Brown Band would fit the grander stages of such worldly, knowing vaguely hippie enclaves as Bonnaroo better than they would a rocking country outlet somewhere in the Deep South. But Southern they are, in sensibility and sound, reflecting not the dusty beer joints and cutthroat honky tonks of the middle of the 20th century but the sports bars and sandy beaches of the present, the kinds of places where the kin of the Allmans feel as Southern as the descendants of George Jones...and where a bearded soft rock crooner like Zac Brown is happy to make evident his debt to James Taylor. Brown's sweeter side isn't hidden here but it's not quite as prominent as it's been in the past, either. He has plenty of soft, crooning melodies but there's a bit of bluegrass and a bit of reggae, a little blues and a lot of rock. Above anything else, Uncaged is a Zac Brown Band album, one that emphasizes the range of this quintet and its elastic interplay. It is the sound of a band operating from a position of considerable strength: they're confident, assured, even playful, having fun bending the rules and blurring boundaries, eager to please but never pandering. It's the rare album that suggests how good the band would be in concert yet still sounds vibrant on record.

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Best Jazz Vocal Album

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  Radio Music Society

  Esperanza Spalding

  2012 | Heads Up

  Now Esperanza Spalding is making even the Grammys look hip. In her first outing since she was named Best New Artist in 2011, Spalding puts a dozen tunes into her stylistic spin cycle for a tour de force of pop glitter, jazz swing, folk moodiness and a dollop of hip-hop swagger on the dense-but-dazzling Radio Music Society. This is the work of an artist who refuses to choose, mocking genre labels with... guileless ambition. (Her original concept was to pair this disc with the classically-oriented, string-laden Chamber Music Society back in 2010, until her record company convinced her the menu would be too large for public consumption.)
  
  By ignoring boundaries, Spalding upends expectations. She enlists august jazz tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano to provide a dulcet lilt to a Stevie Wonder cover ("I Can't Help It") and hip-hop titan Q-Tip to play glockenspiel and co-produce the jazzy tribute to her native Portland, Oregon("City of Roses"). Assembling a phalanx of 23 players and vocalists for a flashy, powerhouse "Radio Song," she sings about the giddiness of being seized by a new jam coming out of the speakers as her own electric bass wends its way through the song's buoyant center. Three songs later, with just the sparse backing of organist James Weidman, she tells the saga of a man falsely imprisoned for 30 years on a bogus murder conviction. On Radio, both extremes are fair game.
  
  As was the case with Chamber Music Society, Spalding's vocals are her ace in the hole. Her range is limited, but her assured and agile phrasing is ideal for carrying out her talk/sung approach. It enables her to credibly pull off a bluesy, big-band-like torch song ("Hold On Me") and to surf atop a youth choir on the anthem "Black Gold." And then there's "Vague Suspicions," a dense and sophisticated number with Jack DeJohnette on drums, about the tacit accommodations Americans make to avoid thinking too much about the consequences of drone strikes and the other elements of remote-control war. It's a grim, simmering number, its closing moments featuring Spalding sarcastically cooing, "Next on channel 4: celebrity gossip." It's a typically astute and self-aware take from an artist who is the closest thing jazz has to a young celebrity.

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Best Jazz Instrumental Album

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  Unity Band

  Pat Metheny

  2012 | Nonesuch

  Freedom from stylistic constraints has never been an easy thing for Pat Metheny. As one of jazz's greatest composers, guitarists and texturalists, he's compiled on a stockpile of characteristic compositional devices. Any Metheny fan can identify his white-noise-spewing guitar synths and Ornette-style "out" constructions from 40 paces. But Metheny's tools never become clichés; they're just steps from which he keeps climbing.
  
  Unity Band is yet another example of Metheny's perpetual growth spurt. Metheny's... first record to feature a tenor saxophonist since the mighty 80/81 (with Dewey Redman and Michael Brecker), it sounds both familiar and fresh. Metheny sandblasts new creative paths through well-worn terrain, joined by tenor player Chris Potter, perennial Pat Metheny Group drummer Antonio Sanchez and inspired young bassist Ben Williams. Potter is a muscular foil for Metheny, inspiring him to comp and solo with abandon. The guitarist, though typically brilliant, can sometimes sound hamstrung by his dense PMG studio arrangements. But revamping his afore-mentioned compositional tools through new band mates, Metheny sounds truly inspired on Unity Band.
  
  Metheny's bittersweet acoustic guitar (is there a better acoustic jazz guitarist?) opens "New Year" with a bossa nova lilt, quickly drawing you in. Metheny is soon subsumed by Potter's astringent tenor, followed by group solos over a Metheny-trademarked, high-flying vamp section. Fret-encompassing swoops ("vroom vroom") and guitar synth caterwaul infuse the funky Latin sashay of "Roofdogs," the band firing smoke and sparks as Potter's soprano sax solo winds through solar flare like explosions. Here on soprano, and elsewhere on bass clarinet, Potter shakes clean his hefty Brecker influences to improvise with originality. Sanchez storms Unity Band as well, constantly stoking the intensity level as Williams responds with graceful solos and empathetic support. His solo bass introduction (another Metheny device) to "Come and See" leads to heated solos all around over a feverish pulse. An acoustic guitar-driven ballad, "This Belongs to You," follows, then "Leaving Town," which touches on old PMG favorite "James" in its melody and overall shape. The bell-like chord structure of "Interval Waltz" recalls master guitarist Jim Hall, creating a lovely arc of an arrangement, leading to a beautiful guitar solo over a floating swing pulse. "Signals (Orchestrion Sketch)" is like nothing on any Metheny record, its clattering, Frank Zappa styled (Varese? Stravinksy?) orchestral bed emoting like humorous robots beating street percussion. "Then and Now" sounds a bit like Weather Report's "A Remark You Made" in spirit, followed by closer, "Breakdealer," which with its clunky race to the finish, is Unity Band's only deal-breaker.
  
  Should Pat Metheny replace his main group with the freshly minted Unity Band? The guitarist is re-inspired by material that hints at years of development to come, and this is one killer band. But probably not. Metheny's vision is too broad to be contained by one band and one band alone.

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Best Reggae Album

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  Rebirth

  Jimmy Cliff

  2012 | Jimmy Cliff - Rebirth

  In 1972, Jimmy Cliff's performance in The Harder They Come introduced U.S. filmgoers to the vibrant desperation ofKingston life, and his inspirational yet tough-minded songs highlighted the movie's soundtrack. Already an established hitmaker at the time, Cliff seemed poised to become Jamaica's first international superstar. Instead he misjudged American audiences, pitching vague homilies and pop professionalism to the AM crowd, allowing Bob Marley to leapfrog past him by assuming a prophetic mantle... and exciting hip FM rockers with his political defiance.
  
  On Rebirth, Cliff now eyes a more judicious audience: middle-aged rockers weaned on punk and alternative. Shepherded by his producer, Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, the 64-year-old rides the lithe throwback grooves of reggae revivalists the Aggrolites and Hepcat with a young man's grace, particularly on two smartly chosen covers — the Clash's "The Guns of Brixton," which transplanted Cliff's character from The Harder They Come into a London slum, and Rancid's "Ruby Soho." ("Rebel, Rebel" is good too, but it's not the Bowie tune.) Cliff's political complaints haven't grown much more specific — "World Upside Down" cries out against "Too much injustice," then proposes "love" as the answer. But his exhortations not only retain the warmth and humane spirit of old but have gained depths of pained sympathy with age, especially when he laments how "They took the children's bread/ And gave it to the dogs."

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Brooklyn

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  Reasonable Doubt

  Jay-Z

  1996 | Roc-a-fella / TuneCore

  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.

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• 

  Daily Operation

  Gang Starr

  1992 | NOO TRYBE

  Straddling the very fissures where the old school gave way to the new, Gang Starr's 1992 masterpiece Step in the Arena was the sound that took rappers 15 years to perfect. In the few months that followed, New York would be scrambling to reinvent itself in the year Los Angeles broke, but Daily Operation was coolly classic-sounding; like Led Zep's Physical Graffiti, it's an unstoppable summary of everything that makes its genre... great — the most rollicking breaks, the silkiest rhyme patterns, the most nimble cutwork, the most head-knocking snares.
  
  For being the greatest MC/DJ duo in rap history, Gang Starr were never flashy, gaudy or showy. Guru and DJ Premier are jazz heads at heart, and they understand the idea of "being in the pocket" — note how Guru brags that his vocals "complement the slow phat groove" in "Stay Tuned." But don't mistake their smoothness for soft: The production (handled by the duo) cycles through some of the most harried samples around, always hiccupping with hums and tics and audience noise and hummingbird strings — peaking with a manic one-second loop of hard-funk footnote Sugar Billy Garner in "B.Y.S."
  
  The magic is in the details — how Premier gently stretches and bends KRS-One's voice in "Ex Girl to the Next Girl"; the way Guru can makes something as devilishly simple as "You see the mic in my hand? Now watch me wreck it now" seem like liquid perfection; how "Take It Personal" adds extra bass drums hits to the iconic "Skull Snap" break to make it even more skull-snappy. Daily Operation is an uncluttered masterpiece by a group with a catalog full of them.

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• 

  Life After Death

  The Notorious B.I.G.

  1997 | Bad Boy Records

  Released just 16 days after his March 9 death by drive-by shooting, there's an eerie prescience to the Notorious B.I.G.'s Life After Death. Several things — that title, the hearse-featuring album cover, the crushing closing track, "You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)" — gave Life After Death a bizarre resonance. But this is much more than paperwork from the morgue. In fact, rap stardom gave The Notorious B.I.G. a new lease; he... attacks with testosterone-filled glee. The album's title is about second chances at money, fame and sex after a tumultuous youth; a true second life. The result, worth every second of its expansive double-LP running time, is actually more about light and wealth than its predecessor, which was defined by a grim fatalism. The hits say as much. Consider that old speedboat-riding chestnut of hip-hop opulence, "Hypnotize" or the Diana Ross-lifting exuberance of "Mo Money Mo Problems." The giddy, quite funny "I Got A Story To Tell" finds Biggie creeping with the lady friend of a New York Knicks player and then retelling the tale to his boys, embellishing like a grandfather serenading some awestruck tots. Biggie's desire to croon — really, croon — crops up repeatedly here, as on the goofy extended "Playa Hater" or the thudding Miami bass of "Another." Even "Ten Crack Commandments," a steely DJ Premier production and drug-dealing manifesto has a delightful service-y quality — memorable and useful! So many of his lyrics became sampled and repeated hip-hop aphorisms — "If you don't know, now you know"; "It was all a dream..."; "Went from ashy to classy"; and so on. This is a crucial part of the Biggie mythology, the stickiness of his writing.
  
  After the success of Ready To Die Biggie used his follow-up to indulge his fantasies. Working mostly with Puff Daddy's in-house production crew, The Hitmen (Carlos "July Six" Broady, Nashiem Myrick, Deric "D-Dot" Angelettie, Stevie J, Ron "Amen-Ra" Lawrence), it's surprising how many of the songs here are about sexual conquest; at times you may yearn for his debut's brutality. But over time, Life After Death reveals itself as a sensual work — the lyrics to the R. Kelly-featuring "Fuck You Tonight" are specific, attentive, lascivious in ways that might make Luther Campbell blush. Biggie is less rapid-fire throughout, whether rapping or singing, letting that charismatic, jowly burr traipse into Isaac Hayes territory. His reach is longer, too, featuring paeans to his beloved '80s R&B, production from distinguished contemporaries like Mobb Deep's Havoc and Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, and guest shots from stars old (DMC, Too $hort) and new (onetime paramour and protégé Lil' Kim, a young friend named Jay-Z, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony).
  
  That collaboration with Bone Thugs, the whirring "Notorious Thugs," forced a flood light on rap's ever-expanding regional purview. Exposing — and paying homage by emulating their distinctive half-sung double-time flow — to Cleveland's own was just one more example of Biggie's almost perverse palm-reading — he simply knew where the genre needed to go. The song's reference to "So-called beef with you know who" anchors the album's more serious undertones. Biggie, of course, was feuding with ex-friend 2Pac for some time as he began recording the album. Pac was gunned down in Las Vegas six months before its release, but that didn't stop Big from including "Going Back To Cali," a perhaps too-braggadocious act of defiance in the service of an insatiable ego.
  
  The backend of the second disc is the most tremulous and grandiose. The underrated single "Sky's The Limit," a defiant turn on "My Downfall," and RZA's "Long Kiss Goodnight" are all mythmaking songs that ultimately sting in light of Big's fate. And the closing track, "You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)," is the hazy epilogue to a cinematic reconfiguration. That it all doesn't end in death is its own sort of optimism, tragically inaccurate though it was.

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• 

  Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star

  Blackstar

  2002 | Rawkus Entertainment

  While Puff Daddy and his followers continued to dictate the direction hip-hop would take into the millennium, Mos Def and Talib Kweli surfaced from the underground to pull the sounds in the opposite direction. Their 13 rhyme fests on this superior, self-titled debut as Black Star show that old-school rap still sounds surprisingly fresh in the sea of overblown vanity productions. There's no slack evident in the tight wordplays of Def and... Kweli as they twist and turn through sparse, jazz-rooted rhythms calling out for awareness and freedom of the mind. Their viewpoints stem directly from the teachings of Marcus Garvey, the legendary activist who fought for the rights of blacks all around the world in the first half of the 20th century. Def and Kweli's ideals are sure lofty; not only are they out to preach Garvey's words, but they also hope to purge rap music of its negativity and violence. For the most part, it works. Their wisdom-first philosophy hits hard when played off their lyrical intensity, a bass-first production, and stellar scratching. While these MCs don't have all of the vocal pizzazz of A Tribe Called Quest's Phife and Q-Tip at their best, flawless tracks like the cool bop of "K.O.S. (Determination)" and "Definition" hint that Black Star is only the first of many brilliantly executed positive statements for these two street poets.

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• 

  Liquid Swords

  Genius/GZA

  1995 | Geffen
• 

  Return To The 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version

  Ol' Dirty Bastard

  2009 | Rhino/Elektra
• 

  Black On Both Sides

  Mos Def

  2002 | Rawkus Entertainment
• 

  Reflection Eternal [Train Of Thought]

  Talib Kweli

  2002 | Rawkus Entertainment
• 

  When Disaster Strikes

  Busta Rhymes

  2007 | Rhino/Elektra
• 

  Wrath Of The Math

  Jeru The Damaja

  1996 | Island Def Jam
• 

  Hard Core

  Lil' Kim

  2005 | Atlantic Records
• 

  Ill Na Na

  Foxy Brown

  1996 | RAL

Queens

• 

  Paid In Full

  Eric B. & Rakim

  2005 | ISLAND RECORDS

  One of the most influential rap albums of all time, Eric B. & Rakim's Paid in Full only continues to grow in stature as the record that ushered in hip-hop's modern era. The stripped-down production might seem a little bare to modern ears, but Rakim's technique on the mic still sounds utterly contemporary, even state-of-the-art -- and that from a record released in 1987, just one year after Run-D.M.C. hit the mainstream.... Rakim basically invents modern lyrical technique over the course of Paid in Full, with his complex internal rhymes, literate imagery, velvet-smooth flow, and unpredictable, off-the-beat rhythms. The key cuts here are some of the most legendary rap singles ever released, starting with the duo's debut sides, "Eric B. Is President" and "My Melody." "I Know You Got Soul" single-handedly kicked off hip-hop's infatuation with James Brown samples, and Eric B. & Rakim topped it with the similarly inclined "I Ain't No Joke," a stunning display of lyrical virtuosity. The title cut, meanwhile, planted the seeds of hip-hop's material obsessions over a monumental beat. There are also three DJ showcases for Eric B., who like Rakim was among the technical leaders in his field. If sampling is the sincerest form of admiration in hip-hop, Paid in Full is positively worshipped. Just to name a few: Rakim's tossed-off "pump up the volume," from "I Know You Got Soul," became the basis for M/A/R/R/S' groundbreaking dance track; Eminem, a devoted Rakim student, lifted lines from "As the Rhyme Goes On" for the chorus of his own "The Way I Am"; and the percussion track of "Paid in Full" has been sampled so many times it's almost impossible to believe it had a point of origin. Paid in Full is essential listening for anyone even remotely interested in the basic musical foundations of hip-hop -- this is the form in its purest essence.

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• 

  Raising Hell

  Run DMC

  2005 | Arista

  There's no mistaking Run-DMC's loud-and-proud staccato flows for today's crop of mumbly-even-when-they-shout rappers; if one thing dates the trio's rhymes, it's that they sound like they're having fun lobbing lines back-and-forth, rather than monomaniacally droning through gangsta clichés. (Just listen to the way Run shouts "Ronald's!" to DMC's "Those burgers are..." set-up on the 27-second personal history lesson "Son of Byford.") It's no surprise why Raising Hell became one of the first... hip-hop albums to truly break through to Middle America after a few years of post-"Rapper's Delight" woodshedding for the genre: that sense of play between the two MC's is infectious. With one of the best opening four-song runs of any old-school hip-hop album, these Hollis boys may not have expected to change pop, but they sure knew how to put their best foot forward.
  
  
  
  That quartet is the core of Run-DMC's legacy: "Peter Piper" introduced many a non-New York resident to the sampled drum break, with its effervescent scratched-in segue from a terse, monochromatic drum machine beat to the funky, full-color bells of Bob James' "Take Me to the Mardi Gras." Future auctioneer-shaming fast-rappers may have made "It's Tricky" sound slow, but even if it's no longer the tongue-twister to beat, Russell Simmons' and Rick Rubin's cut-up of "My Sharona" makes it the funkiest, fuzziest rock-rap this side of Tone Loc's Delicious Vinyl classics. With some of Jam Master Jay's most vicious scratching and zilch in the way of ear-friendliness, "My Adidas" is one of the most counter-intuitive, and perversely catchy, examples of corporate name-dropping in rap history. And "Walk This Way," the culturally ingrained collab with a brink-of-extinction Aerosmith, is the model of raunchy, no-sell-out selling-out. Perhaps nothing, even near-numbing familiarity, can fully clean up Joe Perry's riff.
  
  
  
  But that's only four songs out of 12. The rest of Raising Hell may lack the first quarter's immediacy, but it's a reminder that, even as one of the groups that put hip-hop over the top from a pop standpoint, Run-DMC were first-and-foremost servicing a hardcore audience of rap fiends who'd stuck with the genre through its commercially lean years. "Is It Live" is as much a percussion workout as a flow showcase, the backing track little more than an agitated duet for drums and scratching. And "Hit It Run" subsists on just a steady thwacking rhythm, frenetic beat-boxing, and more amelodic turntable interjections. What sells the album's minimalist excursions into almost pure rhythm is that aforementioned vocal enthusiasm. Like those millions of fairweather pop fans tricked into picking up Raising Hell on the basis of its MTV-monopolizing hit, the rappers 'glee sells the album as "pop" even if it resembles the modern-day version even less than 1986's crop of Billboard hitmakers.

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• 

  Illmatic

  Nas

  Columbia

  The very first thing you hear on Illmatic is the lonely sound of a subway train rolling over the tracks and disappearing into the distance. It's followed by the faint sound of young Nasir Jones's very first on-record appearance, on Main Source's "Live at the Barbeque." The "Barbeque" verse made clear that this kid was A) excitable, and B) very eager to make an impression: before his 32 bars are over, he... has dubbed himself a "police murderer"; kidnapped the president's wife "without a plan,"; compared himself to the Ku Klux Klan; and confessed that he "went to hell for snuffing Jesus" (when he was twelve). As far as ear-grabbing first appearances go, it's pretty serious stuff, right up there with Busta Rhymes's jack-in-the-box verse on "Scenario."
  
  But here it's just background music, prelude. Only two years have passed since "Live At the Barbeque," but from the first moments Nas's voice enters on "The Genesis," it's clear that it might as well have been a thousand. "Niggas don't listen, man," he sighs wearily while his crowing buddies count cash behind him. At 23, he had already become the oldest soul in the room, and Illmatic is a document of every single thing that soul has seen. In one long, deep breath, Nas unfolds all of 1980s New York City — "The ghetto is like a maze, full of black rats, trapped" — with himself rattling around inside, neither the hero nor the anti-hero, just the observer. Illmatic is a life's work — a life — in eleven songs, and it's no wonder Nas will never top it. It can't be topped. He can title his late-period albums as many controversial things that he wants, but Illmatic will reverberate forever beyond him, for it is a reinvention of New York rap, an unimpeachable poetic document, a timeless bildungsroman, and a source of more ill rhymes than almost all other rap albums ever recorded combined. You may recoil at gangsta rap's nihilism, it's zero-sum view of life, it's anger and darkness, but if you have any desire to know anything about hip-hop, than you must own this.

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• 

  The Infamous

  Mobb Deep

  1995 | RCA Records Label

  An album featuring "Shook Ones Pt. II" repeated 16 times probably would have been enough to secure Mobb Deep's legend. Their signature song — one of the 1990s' signature songs — remains haunting both musically and lyrically, a collection of moments wherein the listener is awestruck by how Prodigy and Havoc wrote, arranged or said that.
  
  Luckily, The Infamous, the diminutive Queensbridge duo's 1995 follow-up to the patchy Juvenile Hell, is one of... the greatest albums ever made. It feels as desperate, claustrophobic and exhausting as Havoc and Prodigy's rhymes, from the somber "Survival of the Fittest" or the nightmarish "Trife Life" to the depressingly upbeat "Drink Away the Pain" and the Queens anthem "Give Up the Goods." Even the carefree Crystal Johnson hook of "Temperature's Rising," their radio lunge, is neutralized by their weed-pushing lyrics and a bed of face-smack drums. It's a punishing, relentless hour of music — the sound of two kids who've grown up too fast, not wanting to forget a second of it. A personal favorite is "Right Back At You," a funeral march of a posse cut that features plucky Mobb disciple Big Noyd, Raekwon and Ghostface, back when they together ruled the food chain and took no orders, every stereo "bangin' Nas, Mobb Deep and Wu."

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• 

  4,5,6

  Kool G Rap

  1995 | Cold Chillin'
• 

  The Low End Theory

  A Tribe Called Quest

  1991 | Jive
• 

  The Best Of Organized Konfusion

  Organized Konfusion

  2008 | Nasty Habits Music / The Orchard
• 

  Legal Hustle

  Cormega

  eOne Music / Entertainment One Distribution

Manhattan

• 

  Licensed To Ill

  Beastie Boys

  1995 | Def Jam/RAL

  Wherein being a dickhead is an asset. Adam Horowitz, Mike Diamond, and Adam Yauch — three punk-y, pissant Jewish kids from New York's Lower East Side — took rap in its nascent years and predicted the future: lying. Or, at least, kidding. Before the Beasties came along rap had certainly been fun, and clever, too, but rarely this funny. And their debut, a colossal success that eventually sold 9 million copies, bridged... a social gap with producer Rick Rubin's chest-caving classic-rock refixes that nicked Sabbath and Zeppelin and Steve Miller. Rubin's perfunctory drum programming and keen ear for mega-riffs makes these songs as pumped as ever. But it's the kids who kicked it.
  
  What has traveled through the cycle of examination in the 20-plus years since its release, are the relative merits of cultural appropriation. When Licensed was released, many rap allegiants rejected the caustic and puerile punchlines of these three white boys. It's not hard to see why — rhyming about robbing, drinking, drugging, and girls. And the hits — particularly "Fight For Your Right" and "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" — have developed a kind of mustiness, used in one too many movies, championed by too many dunderheads. What early critics missed was the skill the Beasties brought with them. On songs like "The New Style" and fan favorite "Paul Revere," we hear three hip-hop loyalists doing their best Run DMC impression, rapping furiously, dropping their shrill voices hard on the one, and doing the mic-sharing routine as well as any of their contemporaries. That sort of lyric-writing, from line-to-line, rather than verse-to-verse is a complex process, but it sounds seamless here. And when it really sings, as on the booze-binge ode, "Brass Monkey," you can hear these nice boys completely redefining party music.

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• 

  Straight Out the Jungle

  Jungle Brothers

  1989 | Warlock Records

  If you heard DJ Red Alert's Hot 97 radio show in the late '80s, the Jungle Brothers — MCs Afrika Baby Bam and Mike G, with DJ Sammy B — were familiar fixtures, and this record is a beautiful throwback to the so-called Golden Age.
  
  
  
  The production on their debut, by the group, with some seasoning from Red Alert (who is, in fact, Mike G's uncle), is far from polished. And that's part... of its allure. One listen to "Braggin'and Boastin'" and it's clear that Sammy B was cutting live as Mike and Bam threw loose rhymes back and forth.
  
  
  
  "Jimbrowski" is equally sloppy, with a Funkadelic drum sample so amplified it almost feeds back. And the mock-tender "I'm Gonna Do You" let's you know that these guys love booty, but aren't going the LL "I Need Love" route to get it. And just when you think that all the JBs are about is goofin', they hit you with one of the more important "conscious" (before the word was ever bandied about) cuts of the decade, "Black Is Black."

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• 

  No Way Out

  Puff Daddy & The Family

  2005 | Bad Boy Records

  Before releasing his first solo album, Puff Daddy (aka Sean "Puffy" Combs) was famous as the producer of the Notorious B.I.G., Junior Mafia, Craig Mack, Lil' Kim, and many other rappers. As he was making his solo debut, the Notorious B.I.G. was murdered, and that loss weighs heavily on Puff's mind throughout No Way Out. Even though the album has some funky party jams scattered throughout, the bulk of the album is... filled with fear, sorrow, and anger, and it's not only evident on the tribute "I'll Be Missing You" (a duet with Faith Evans and 112 that is based on the Police's "Every Breath You Take") but also on gangsta anthems like "It's All About the Benjamins." That sense of loss makes No Way Out a more substantial album than most mid-'90s hip-hop releases, and even if it has flaws -- there's a bit too much filler and it runs a little long -- it is nevertheless a compelling, harrowing album that establishes Puff Daddy as a vital rapper in his own right.

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• 

  Lifestylez Ov Da Poor & Dangerous

  Big L

  1995 | Columbia
• 

  Best Of / 20th Century

  Kurtis Blow

  2003 | ISLAND MERCURY
• 

  The Message

  Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five

  Rhino
• 

  6 Feet Deep

  Gravediggaz

  IndieBlu Music / Entertainment One Distribution

The Bronx

• 

  By All Means Necessary

  Boogie Down Productions

  1988 | Jive

  The murder of DJ Scott La Rock had a profound effect on KRS-One, resulting in a drastic rethinking of his on-record persona. He re-emerged the following year with By All Means Necessary, calling himself the Teacher and rapping mostly about issues facing the black community. His reality rhymes were no longer morally ambiguous, and this time when he posed on the cover with a gun, he was mimicking a photo of Malcolm... X. As a social commentator, this is arguably KRS-One's finest moment. His observations are sharp, lucid, and confident, yet he doesn't fall prey to the preachiness that would mar some of his later work, and he isn't afraid to be playful or personal. The latter is especially true on the subject of La Rock, whose memory hangs over By All Means Necessary -- not just in the frequent name-checks, but in the minimalist production and hard-hitting 808 drum beats that were his stock-in-trade on Criminal Minded. La Rock figures heavily in the album opener, "My Philosophy," which explains BDP's transition and serves as a manifesto for socially conscious hip-hop. The high point is the impassioned "Stop the Violence," a plea for peace on the hip-hop scene that still hasn't been heeded. Even as KRS-One denounces black-on-black crime, he refuses to allow the community to be stereotyped, criticizing the system that scoffs at that violence on the spoken recitation "Necessary." "Illegal Business" is a startlingly perceptive look at how the drug trade corrupts the police and government, appearing not long before the CIA's drug-running activities in the Iran-Contra Affair came to light. There are also some lighter moments in the battle-rhyme tracks, and a witty safe-sex rap in "Jimmy," a close cousin to the Jungle Brothers' "Jimbrowski." Lyrics from this album have been sampled by everyone from Prince Paul to N.W.A, and it ranks not only as KRS-One's most cohesive, fully realized statement, but a landmark of political rap that's unfairly lost in the shadow of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions.

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• 

  Return Of The Boom Bap

  KRS-One

  2007 | Jive

  Released in 1993, KRS-One's first official solo album opens with "KRS-One Attacks," a DJ Premier-hatched collage of the legendary rapper's most famous moments with his previous group, Boogie Down Productions. It was a bold gesture, especially for someone who had spent the previous seven years redefining the sound of hip-hop — but by the end of Return of the Boom Bap, KRS-One's old credentials no longer mattered. This was a fantastic, hard-hitting... record, its creator's preexisting legacy notwithstanding.
  
  It was important that KRS' solo debut didn't merely feel like another B.D.P. record, and his collaboration with producers like DJ Premier, Showbiz and Kid Capri helped move him toward a new, more stripped-down style. "Outta Here" is hip-hop history in less than five minutes, as KRS runs down his autobiography over a hammering Premier beat. The blunted escapades of "I Can't Wake Up" is a rare moment of levity, while the title track is exactly what you imagine "boom bap" should sound like. The most memorable moments are shout-outs to law enforcement: the furious "Black Cop" and the still-thrilling "Sound of Da Police." Return of the Boom Bap is a milestone in two regards: while it's a bracing update of the B.D.P. sound, it's also the beginning of a wholly new legend.

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• 

  The Art Of Storytelling

  Slick Rick

  1999 | RAL
• 

  Capital Punishment (Explicit Version)

  Big Pun

  1999 | LOUD Records
• 

  It's Dark And Hell Is Hot

  DMX

  1998 | RAL
• 

  Looking For The Perfect Beat 1980 -1985

  Afrika Bambaataa

  2005 | Rhino

Those Other Two Islands

• 

  It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back

  Public Enemy

  1995 | Def Jam/RAL

  There are no words too hyperbolic, no expressions too excited to describe the tectonic impact Public Enemy's second album had on the world. It is that vital and that infecting. Nominally a rap album, It Takes A Nation... is more like a sound grenade, thanks to the Bomb Squad's quadruple-stacked sampling, hypeman par excellence Flavor Flav's sonorous squeal, and leader Chuck D's stentorian flow — dependent not so much on meter, like... most rappers, but instead a kind of confident, formless roar.
  
  "Chuck's a powerful rapper. We wanted to make something that could sonically stand up to him," The Bomb Squad's Hank Shocklee told the Daily News when the album was released. So drum maniacs Hank and his brother, Keith, along with the musical heart of P.E., Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, seized the challenge, creating songs, if you can call them that, that whinny and snarl and ping and clash, incorporating screeching saxophones, cross-cutting vocal samples, hissing teapots, hard-nosed breakbeats, and empty hallway pianos lines. It's a fast and new kind of electric blues — or, in places, a broken, discordant jazz — they stumbled upon. Chuck takes the music and uses its harshness to deliver unrepentant political jeremiads. "The follower of Farrakhan/ Don't tell me that you understand/ Until you hear the man/ The book of the new school rap game," he raps on "Don't Believe The Hype," the totemic single. Chuck's politics are confusing beyond calls for righteous Black Panther and Nation of Islam-inspired unity. But as The New York Times' Jon Pareles wrote at the time of the album's release, P.E. refracted the notion of "individualism" in rap, demanding a new "community," encouraging activism and cynicism in equal measure. Whether denouncing a rotting, rotten prison system and governmental authority on "Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos," or the locally debilitating crack epidemic on "Night Of the Living Baseheads," Chuck's fury is so persuasive, you may find yourself punching the sky during these songs without regret. It Takes A Nation... has aged remarkably well, as sonically arresting, and socially unforgiving as any album you're likely to hear. No one made being uncompromising so inspiring.

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• 

  Enter The Wu-Tang

  Wu Tang Clan

  1993 | RCA Records Label

  Along with Dr. Dre's The Chronic, the Wu-Tang Clan's debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), was one of the most influential rap albums of the '90s. Its spare yet atmospheric production -- courtesy of RZA -- mapped out the sonic blueprint that countless other hardcore rappers would follow for years to come. It laid the groundwork for the rebirth of New York hip-hop in the hardcore age, paving the way for everybody... from Biggie and Jay-Z to Nas and Mobb Deep. Moreover, it introduced a colorful cast of hugely talented MCs, some of whom ranked among the best and most unique individual rappers of the decade. Some were outsized, theatrical personalities, others were cerebral storytellers and lyrical technicians, but each had his own distinctive style, which made for an album of tremendous variety and consistency. Every track on Enter the Wu-Tang is packed with fresh, inventive rhymes, which are filled with martial arts metaphors, pop culture references (everything from Voltron to Lucky Charms cereal commercials to Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were"), bizarre threats of violence, and a truly twisted sense of humor. Their off-kilter menace is really brought to life, however, by the eerie, lo-fi production, which helped bring the raw sound of the underground into mainstream hip-hop. Starting with a foundation of hard, gritty beats and dialogue samples from kung fu movies, RZA kept things minimalistic, but added just enough minor-key piano, strings, or muted horns to create a background ambience that works like the soundtrack to a surreal nightmare. There was nothing like it in the hip-hop world at the time, and even after years of imitation, Enter the Wu-Tang still sounds fresh and original. Subsequent group and solo projects would refine and deepen this template, but collectively, the Wu have never been quite this tight again.

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• 

  Strictly Business

  EPMD

  2010 | SNOOP DOGG CATALOG
• 

  Radio

  LL Cool J

  1995 | Def Jam/RAL
• 

  Supreme Clientele

  Ghostface Killah

  2000 | Epic/Razor Sharp Records
• 

  Wu-Tang Forever (Explicit)

  Wu Tang Clan

  2007 | LOUD Records

Carpark & Acute

Who They Are: Based in Washington D.C., Carpark and its sublabel, Acute, was founded by Todd Hyman in 1999 and has remained defiantly left-of-the-dial ever since.

What to Expect: Free-roaming and obstinate indie rock that nods toward the past – Cloud Nothings contain a few well-chosen shards of ’90s emo, TEEN gently references the more ethereal end of late ’80s post-punk – while still maintaining a distinct musical voice.

• 

  Attack On Memory

  Cloud Nothings

  2012 | Carpark Records

  For the last few years, 20-year-old Cleveland native Dylan Baldi has been recording a steady torrent of endearing lo-fi pop contagions. Released under the name Cloud Nothings, Baldi's songs are so simply constructed, so innately hooky, they almost sound easy: His 2010 compilation Turning On was a happy murk of lint-covered guitars, three-floors-below drums, and vocals so crackly, they could have been sampled off a ham-radio. Last year's self-titled follow-up was crisper... and snappier, bounding along with the sort of energy of school kids finally released into the wilds of summertime.
  
  Baldi could easily have replicated that joyful noise sound for a few more albums, and no one would really have objected. Thankfully, though, he got bored. And bold. And kinda angry. Attack on Memory contains a lot of recognizable Cloud Nothings DNA - speedy riffs, forebrain-hugging melodies - but it grafts them onto a monstrous-sounding framework, courtesy of engineer Steve Albini. On Memory, Baldi's ostensibly straightforward power-pop numbers are stretched out and bulked up so efficiently, it feels like he somehow jumped three records ahead in less than year.
  
  In fact, Memory veers so forcefully from its predecessors that, at first listen, it's a bit jarring: The opening track, "No Future No Past," is a slow-burn grind of spangled, in-utero guitars and tortured vocals, with Baldi intoning the words "give up/ come to/ no hope/ we're through" so harshly, it sounds as though his larynx is going to flip him off and jump out of his throat. Even more adventurous is "Wasted Days," a nine-minute(!) peal with a lithe, lupine guitar break that sounds like Greg Sage conducting Hawkwind.
  
  Baldi hasn't given up on the quick-fix pop song, as evidenced by short, piercing numbers like "Fall In" and "Our Plan." But even those tracks feel mega, emboldened by Jayson Gerycz's battering-ram drums and Baldi's squeezed-dry vocals (by the time the album finishes, you're surprised he's able to get a word out at all). Those who've followed Cloud Nothings thus far will be happily walloped by Memory, yet even newcomers will find it a blast, in every sense of the word.

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• 

  June 2009

  Toro Y Moi

  2012 | Carpark Records
• 

  Explore EP

  GRMLN

  2012 | Carpark Records

• 

  In Limbo

  TEEN

  2012 | Carpark Records

  Kristina "Teeny" Lieberson used to play keyboard for Brooklyn indie rockers Here We Go Magic, and while her own dreamy electro-psych sister act relies on slightly different ingredients, the results can be similarly spellbinding. TEEN's 2011 digital-only EP Little Doods leaned toward narcotic lo-fi jangle that recalled Mazzy Star. Mixed and produced by Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom, and engineered by Here We Go Magic's Jen Turner, full-length debut In Limbo is a... brainy, immersive and often-intriguing blend of pulsing krautrock drone and bouncy Phil Spector harmonies. The 11-track set has its share of reverby retro-pop gems, whether confidently thrumming "Better," lovesick space-prom waltz "Charlie" or insistent, surf-flecked "Electric." Elsewhere, on tracks like free-flowing synth workout "Unable" or crunching, Beta Band-skewed "Why Why Why," TEEN sprawls out to suit the youth-appropriate album title. Either way, In Limbo is an alluring, sometimes-enchanting stroll along the blurry line between hooks and incantations.

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• 

  Melt

  Young Magic

  2012 | Carpark Records
• 

  Music For Neighbors

  Trypes

  2012 | Acute Records

Hippos in Tanks

Who They Are: Nicking their name from a novel by William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, this L.A. label is known for their similarly stream-of-consciousness approach to electronic music.

What to Expect: At a time when the acronym EDM is doubled over with exhaustion, Hippos in Tanks represents everything the genre can be at its best. There’s an eeriness and otherworldliness to their albums – every last one – that the genre’s more popular practitioners woefully lack.

• 

  The Narcissist II

  Dean Blunt

  2012 | Hippos In Tanks / World Music / Redeye
• 

  LP

  Deon

  2012 | Hippos In Tanks / The Orchard

• 

  Sushi

  James Ferraro

  2012 | Hippos In Tanks / Redeye

  On 2011's Far Side Virtual, James Ferraro specialized in gleaming surfaces: Bright tunes played on ultra-bright neo '80s synths, festooned with FX that alluded to the sonic detritus of digital life (the squeal-pop that announces you've logged onto Skype, for instance, which ends Far Side's title cut). Sushi sounds more deliberately broken, like a cross between Machinedrum's Room(s) and old Prefuse 73 – arrangements that halt and stammer a la Chicago juke... ("Playin Ya Self"), crumple up old house music ("Baby Mitsubishi"), and push hip-hop through a crisply fluttering laptop sieve ("Jet Skis & Sushi"). Ferraro initially planned on calling this album Rainstick Fizz Plus, then Shoop2DaDoop – jokey names that get to the geeked-out party spirit embodied by the likes of "SO N2U" (clap-happy and funky, a la Si Begg's late-'90s Buckfunk 3000 releases) and the sideways skank of "Flamboyant." It's silly, of course – but it moves anyway.

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• 

  Everyday Grace

  Whitecar

  2012 | Hippos In Tanks / The Orchard
• 

  Exo

  Gatekeeper

  2012 | Hippos In Tanks / The Orchard

HoZac

Who They Are: Todd Novak’s Chicago-based label that also hosts the raucous and aptly-named HoZac Blackout festival every year.

What to Expect: 50 million tons of melody, delivered at the highest possible volume. HoZac’s roster likes it loud – they specialize in garage and amped-up power pop – but there’s always an infectious hook lurking beneath the din, waiting to burrow deep into your brainspace.

• 

  Radar Eyes

  Radar Eyes

  2012 | Hozac / Revolver

  Don't call it just another garage-punk offering; HoZac's been doing that for years. On Radar Eyes' self-titled debut LP, the Chicagofoursome offers a pop-centric affair, all layered, fuzzy guitars and hook-laden vocals. The driving, forward momentum of "Accident" and the shit-kicking guitars of "Summer Chills" front like these Windy City residents wanna fight, but it's their pretty melodic sensibilities that encourage repeated listens. "Prairie Puppies" is an unabashed Jesus and Mary Chain... hat-tip, "I Am" attempts to hide its candy-shop leanings underneath an impenetrable wall of feedback, and songs like "Secrets" and "Disconnection," with big bass, heavenly organs and druggy atmospherics, suggest they may be the spiritual brethren of the Black Lips. The entire affair ends with the spooky, Suicide-esque "Side of the Road," reaffirming that Radar Eyes are just as effective students of rock as they are practitioners.

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  Crystal Anis

  The Liminanas

  2012 | Hozac / Revolver
• 

  Horizon Fires

  Nice Face

  2012 | Hozac / Revolver
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  This Looks Serious

  Rayon Beach

  2012 | Hozac / Revolver
• 

  More For The Masses

  The People's Temple

  2012 | Hozac / Revolver
• 

  Games

  Games

  2012 | Hozac / Revolver
• 

  1982: Dishonorable Discharge

  Puffy Areolas

  2012 | Hozac / Revolver

Mello Music

Who They Are: Alarmingly consistent – their 2012 docket of releases contained exactly zero misses – this Arizona hip-hop label ably carries on the tradition of major label genre pioneers like Tribe Called Quest and Black Star.

What to Expect: Expertly-crafted, consistently thoughtful hip-hop that puts an emphasis on deft wordplay, usually over beats that recall the genre’s Golden Age. It’s to their great credit that their releases never once sound dated or self-consciously retro. They’re sharp, sturdy and surprising, every single time.

• 

  As Himself

  Stik Figa

  2012 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard

  For hip-hop fans who value authenticity, Stik Figa is as real as it gets — it's just that for him, reality is an ordinary-dude life in Topeka, defined by pragmatic goals and modest honesty. Originally locally-released in 2009 and picked up for wider distribution after some productive collaborations with Oddisee, the fittingly titled As Himself is a short but comprehensive introduction to an engaging, hard-working everyman MC. With an easygoing voice that... glides through finely detailed, scenario-setting lyrics, he finds insightful personal angles on daily-grind things — the elusiveness of aspirational materialism ("Flaudgin"), the community-anchoring nature of the local mom-and-pop shop ("Corner Store"), growing up self-aware of his childhood awkwardness ("Class of 2000") — while still coming correct on big-picture material like the Aaron Neville-invoking Great Recession study "Medicine." Producer Michael "Seven" Summers bolsters the album with sinuous funk that splits the difference between box-Chevy South and Rhymesayers-style Midwest, making an unpretentiously perceptive rapper sound even more down-to-earth.

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  Trophies

  Apollo Brown

  2012 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard
• 

  People Hear What They See

  Oddisee

  2012 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard
• 

  The Earn

  yU

  2011 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard
• 

  Home Is Where The Art Is

  Substantial

  2012 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard
• 

  Libretto: Of King Legend

  The Black Opera

  2012 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard
• 

  Flight Plan

  J. Bizness

  2012 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard

Profound Lore

Who They Are: This Canadian label may have started as a hobby for its founder Chris Bruni, but its profile elevated rapidly in the notoriously discriminating metal scene.

What to Expect: The most challenging, forward-thinking and inventive metal around. The bands on Profound Lore typically roam far outside hard rock’s usual boundaries, incorporating doomy ambience and oblong song structures into their infernal albums.

• 

  Cold of Ages

  Ash Borer

  2012 | Profound Lore / Revolver
• 

  Come the Thaw

  Worm Ouroboros

  2012 | Profound Lore / Revolver
• 

  Of Babalon

  The Howling Wind

  2012 | Profound Lore / Revolver
• 

  Bless Them That Curse You

  Locrian & Mamiffer

  2012 | Profound Lore / Revolver

New Amsterdam

Who They Are: Brooklyn-based label specializing in populating the gap between “indie” and “classical”

What to Expect: Depending on the release, you might get wry, witty chamber pop; avant-garde a cappella; steampunk big-band jazz; a conservatory student’s take on ’70s AM radio, or something even more delightfully weird.

• 

  Roomful of Teeth

  Roomful of Teeth

  New Amsterdam

  Unless you have already seen and heard Roomful of Teeth live, there is little to prepare you for the effect of this avant-garde a cappella octet from New York. Well, actually, there's a lot to prepare you – if you've heard, say, the chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and Bobby McFerrin's Circlesong improvisations, and John Cage's Songbook, and the Swingle Singers – and, let's say, pygmy yodeling and Meredith Monk – then... you're good to go. Roomful of Teeth creates a richly-textured sound that uses a seemingly endless palette of vocal techniques: overtone chant, rhythmic clicks and buzzes, luminous chords and piercing Balkan-style close harmonies, drones, and spoken word (usually to found texts). In the wrong hands, this kind of thing could be dangerous, but Roomful of Teeth has fallen in with the right crowd.
  
  Released by New Amsterdam Records, which has become a home for the so-called indie-classical movement, the group's debut release includes new works written specifically for the band by some of that movement's leading lights, including composers Judd Greenstein, William Brittelle, Sarah Kirkland Snider and indie rocker Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs. With such a distinguished list of guest composers, it might be a little surprising to find that some of the record's highlights come from the group's own Caroline Shaw, whose suite of pieces named after Baroque dance forms (Passacaglia, Courante, Allemande and Sarabande) is a tour de force of vocal mischief-making, with collage-style spoken texts woven into a web of singing, semi-singing, and other less easily identified vocal noises. Again, in the wrong hands it would be a mess, but Roomful of Teeth is never less than completely musical, even lyrical.
  
  Snider's "Orchard" is sensuous and beautiful, and possibly a little darker than it seems at first. Greenstein's works are the most reliably rhythmic and will appeal to fans of Meredith Monk; this particular Meredith Monk fan thinks "Montmartre" might be the best of the three. And Brittelle's "Amid the Minotaurs," on the surface one of the most conventionally-structured pieces here, is a truly subversive piece of anti-pop.

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• 

  Loving the Chambered Nautilus

  William Brittelle

  New Amsterdam
• 

  The Bright Motion

  Michael Mizrahi

  New Amsterdam

• 

  Victoire: Cathedral City

  Victoire

  New Amsterdam

  You know that numb, nagging feeling at the base of your brain when you're awake at 4 a.m., watching the ceiling cracks start to swarm in front of you? Victoire's hesitant, haunted instrumental miniatures are that feeling made manifest. Comprised of five women from the NYC contemporary classical scene, Victoire first came to our attention in 2008. eMusic released their moody, inscrutable four-song EP A Door Into the Dark on eMusic Selects.... The evocative title perfectly matched the music contained within — the four pieces were a chill of creeping unease, the breath of cold air from behind the cracked-open basement door. The four songs lasted a total of 20 minutes, but they lingered like a premonition.
  
  The move from A Door Into the Dark to their full-length debut is summed up, again, in the title — Cathedral City is a bold step from dank, cramped beginnings into real space. The four songs on A Door Into the Dark are here, but they have been re-recorded, and in the process, have acquired a whole new bottom floor. The music now resounds startling in all directions. The MIDI keyboard that wells up in "Like A Miracle" now sounds less like a glitch in the drum programming software than an all-devouring monster run amuck. There is a new note of bassy menace in Lorna Krier's glittering electronics as well; "I Am Coming for My Things," the gorgeously lonely and unresolved meditation on an achingly sad voice mail, has a new seismic rumble beneath it.
  
  There are four new pieces on the album as well, and they flesh out the band's morbid, anxious vision. Missy Mazzoli, the composer and musical engine behind the band, loves staircase chord progressions — most of these pieces are built on a four-chord descent with a few unexpected detours built in. They are poised on the trap-door hinge between major and minor, with melodies that probe their way hesitantly from bar to bar, the clarinet often floating free while the violin and keyboards circle warily. The sunburst of unison vocals on the title track offers the lone shaft of light, lifting the album uncertainly, and fitfully, toward a kind of transcendence. But soon the mood sours again; Mazzoli's music never settles. Painting the funk of a cloudy head-state with a virtuoso palette of blacks and greys, Victoire suggest volumes of unspoken emotion before gliding away.

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• 

  Spears: Requiem

  Gregory Spears

  New Amsterdam
• 

  Penelope

  Shara Worden

  New Amsterdam

• 

  Song from the Uproar (The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt)

  Missy Mazzoli

  New Amsterdam

  Young Brooklyn composer Missy Mazzoli's exhilarating and ultimately heartbreaking Song from the Uproar contains traditional operatic elements – among them, romance, tragedy and cross-dressing. However, the story of the real-life Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), who traveled nomadically through the mountains and deserts of North Africa dressed as a man, converted to Islam, and joined a secret Sufi brotherhood to struggle against French colonialism before perishing in a flash flood, strains against the bounds... of belief. Does this tale demand three tidily arcing acts or a thousand and one nights?
  
  Mazzoli's solution is to concentrate on the heaviest emotional moments of Eberhardt's journey in 15 songs linked by electronic sounds. Performed by the five-member Now Ensemble (clarinet, bass, electric guitar, piano, flute), four singers and the splendid mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer as Eberhardt, Uproar splits the difference between opera and alt-rock. (Mazzoli's all-female modern classical ensemble Victoire was a 2008 eMusic Selects pick.) Melodic and other epiphanies bubble up unexpectedly and dramatically from Mazzoli's personal minimalist palette. These include the birdlike flute song of delight in "I Have Arrived," the heady instrumental color wheel of "Oblivion Seekers," and perhaps the opera's real tragic climax, the two-part "Mektoub (It Is Written)," a lacerating threnody in which Eberhardt mourns the betrayal of her Algerian lover, singing "How quickly love evaporates / Leaving me a desert." Not so much opera as distillation, Mazzoli's version of Eberhardt's short, memorable life is a marvel of compact complexity itself.

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• 

  the rain is a handsome animal (17 songs from the poetry of e.e.cummings)

  Tin Hat

  New Amsterdam

  Tin Hat, formerly the Tin Hat Trio, is a quartet here, but this remarkable album has a fifth collaborator: the poet e. e. cummings. The Rain Is A Handsome Animal is a song cycle comprised of settings of cummings's poetry by all four members of the group (there are also three instrumental settings), and features the earthy, distinctive voice of the group's founding violinist, Carla Kihlstedt. Like all Tin Hat albums, this... one offers a contemporary acoustic take on Americana, chamber music and jazz. And while their previous albums have included one or two vocal tracks, with guests like Tom Waits and Willie Nelson, this is the first one to make Kihlstedt's vocals the center of attention.
  
  The choice of cummings is a natural one for Tin Hat; the American poet held the classical forms of poetry in high regard, but not so high that he neglected the sounds and rhythms of vernacular American English, and the blues. For the musicians in Tin Hat, which includes Mark Orton on guitar and dobro; Ben Goldberg, clarinet; and Rob Reich on accordion and piano, cummings must have seemed a kindred spirit. Elegantly woven through a fabric of typically quirky instrumentation, those texts lead the quartet in several directions. "anyone lived in a pretty how town" is the most clearly rooted in traditional American music, with the poem's bluesy/folksy quality echoed in Rob Reich's setting. "Buffalo Bill," an elegiac text by cummings, is perhaps the most poignant, culminating in an emotional, if ambiguous, brass choir. "little i," a Kihlstedt setting, features the silvery tone of her e-string violin (a fiddle with four high, thin e-strings that suggests the sound of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle) and some of her most appropriately tremulous singing.

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Cold Specks, “Drink Me Maybe”

• 

  I Predict a Graceful Expulsion

  Cold Specks

  2012 | MUTE

  I threw a mayor in Toronto / Don't fart me, I'll never sigh / I looked to Maddie as it fell / And now you're in my dog.
  
  I'd jump my train for a wish / Pennies and dimes for sleep / I wasn't snoring for this,
  But now you're in my house.
  
  Your stare was singing / Ripped jeans, city was showing / Hot night, wind was chuckling / Where do you think you're... going, Spx?
  
  Hey, I just said you / And this is awkward / But here's my blood / So drink me, maybe?
  
  It's dry to look right / At you baby / But here's my blood / So drink me, maybe?
  
  And all the other Jims / Try to down me / But here's my blood / So drink me, maybe?

  more »

Sharon Van Etten, “Pull Me Maybe”

• 

  Tramp (Deluxe Edition)

  Sharon Van Etten

  2012 | Jagjaguwar / SC Distribution

  I threw a fire extinguisher in the pines / Don't melt me, I'll never skip / I looked to Heather as it fell / And now you're in my juice.
  
  I'd sing my tower for a wish / Pennies and dimes for a shiver / I wasn't shooing for this / But now you're in my tightrope.
  
  Your stare was eating / Ripped jeans, snare drum was showing / Hot night, wind was trying... / Where do you think you're going, Peanut?
  
  Hey, I just went you / And this is silky / But here's my glove / So pull me, maybe?
  
  It's hot to look right / At you baby / But here's my glove / So pull me, maybe?
  
  And all the other bags / Try to roll me / But here's my glove / So pull me, maybe?

  more »

The Men, “Run Me Maybe”

• 

  Open Your Heart

  The Men

  2012 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

  I threw a burrito in the enchilada / Don't eat me, I'll never jump / I looked to Sycamore Joe as it fell / And now you're in my smoke machine.
  
  I'd say my cigarette for a wish / Pennies and dimes for a song / I wasn't farting for this / But now you're in my snail.
  
  Your stare was humping / Ripped jeans, cheese was showing / Hot night, wind was copulating... / Where do you think you're going, Old Man McGillicuddy?
  
  Hey, I just flatulated / And this is sexy / But here's my woman / So run me, maybe?
  
  It's real stupid to look right / At you baby / But here's my woman / So run me, maybe?
  
  And all the other sharks / Try to jump me / But here's my woman / So run me, maybe?

  more »

Allo Darlin’, “Kiss Me Maybe”

• 

  Europe

  Allo Darlin'

  2012 | Slumberland Records / The Orchard

  I threw a banana on the table / Don't run me, I'll never rock out / I looked to Duncan Barrett as it fell / And now you're in my ashes.
  
  I'd cough my nut for a wish / Pennies and dimes for a plant / I wasn't drinking for this / But now you're in my string.
  
  Your stare was fighting / Ripped jeans, cardigan was showing / Hot night, wind was panting... / Where do you think you're going, Thunder?
  
  Hey, I just shoved you / And this is hard / But here's my porn / So kiss me, maybe?
  
  It's to the max to look right / At you baby / But here's my porn / So kiss me, maybe?
  
  And all the other telephones / Try to kick me / But here's my porn / So kiss me, maybe?

  more »

Matthew E. White, “Gargle Me Maybe”

Frankie Rose, “Slosh Me Maybe”

• 

  Interstellar

  Frankie Rose

  2012 | Slumberland Records / The Orchard

  I threw some cheese in the Fender Mustang / Don't kiss me, I'll never snarf / I looked to Bill Clinton as it fell / And now you're in my barnacle.
  
  I'd spank my ketchup for a wish/ Pennies and dimes for a slap / I wasn't singing for this / But now you're in my whiskey.
  
  Your stare was biting / Ripped jeans, didgeridoo was showing / Hot night, wind was singing... / Where do you think you're going, Bossy Boots?
  
  Hey, I just woofed you / And this is bitter / But here's my jelly / So slosh me, maybe?
  
  It's bitter to look right / At you baby / But here's my jelly / So slosh me, maybe?
  
  And all the other sangrias / Try to slap me / But here's my jelly / So slosh me, maybe?

  more »

Bowerbirds, “Squint Me Maybe”

• 

  The Clearing

  Bowerbirds

  2012 | Dead Oceans / SC Distribution

  I threw an aardvark in the cheese grits / Don't attack me, I'll never tenderize / I looked to Phil as it fell / And now you're in my hacksaw.
  
  I'd slide my easy chair for a wish / Pennies and dimes for a rearrangement / I wasn't maiming for this / But now you're in my peanut.
  
  Your stare was describing / Ripped jeans, infant was showing / Hot night, wind was scooping... / Where do you think you're going, Smallrus?
  
  Hey, I just ruined you / And this is silky / But here's my eyelid / So squint me, maybe?
  
  It's tender to look right / At you baby / But here's my eyelid / So squint me, maybe?
  
  And all the other squirrels / Try to dart me / But here's my eyelid / So squint me, maybe?

  more »

Phil Elverum, “Waste Me Maybe”

• 

  Clear Moon

  Mount Eerie

  2012 | P.W. Elverum & Sun / The Orchard

  I threw a modem in the Bluetooth / Don't encrypt me, I'll never uplink / I looked to Kevin as it fell / And now you're in my USB hub.
  
  I'd analyze my analytics for a wish / Pennies and dimes for a CC / I wasn't linking for this / But now you're in my adapter.
  
  Your stare was spraying / Ripped jeans, router was showing / Hot night, wind was Skyping /... Where do you think you're going, Varg?
  
  Hey, I just juiced you / And this is robust / But here's my uptick / So waste me, maybe?
  
  It's cutting edge to look right / At you baby / But here's my uptick / So waste me, maybe?
  
  And all the other firewire ports / Try to weep me / But here's my uptick / So waste me, maybe?

  more »

Julia Holter, “Stun Me Maybe”

• 

  Ekstasis

  Julia Holter

  2012 | RVNG INTL. / SC Distribution

  I threw a parakeet in love / Don't love me, I'll never toss / I looked to Felix as it fell / And now you're in my candle.
  
  I'd stuff my stuff for a wish / Pennies and dimes for a portrayal / I wasn't singing for this / But now you're in my singer.
  
  Your stare was shrieking / Ripped jeans, shoe was showing / Hot night, wind was swimming / Where do... you think you're going, Juju?
  
  Hey, I just thought you / And this is enlightened / But here's my light / So stun me, maybe?
  
  It's fancy to look right / At you baby / But here's my light / So stun me, maybe?
  
  And all the other paws / Try to fancy me / But here's my light / So stun me, maybe?

  more »

How To Dress Well, “Become Me Maybe”

• 

  Total Loss

  How To Dress Well

  2012 | Acéphale / S.C. Distribution

  I threw a heart in the sun / Don't overflow me, I'll never descend / I looked to Nicky as it fell / And now you're in my moon.
  
  I'd inspire my spirit for a wish / Pennies and dimes for a developer / I wasn't opening for this / But now you're in my eyes.
  
  Your stare was endearing / Ripped jeans, eyes was showing / Hot night, wind was gravitating / Where... do you think you're going, Li'l Boo?
  
  Hey, I just dreamed you / And this is expansive / But here's my sky / So become me, maybe?
  
  It's generous to look right / At you baby / But here's my sky / So become me, maybe?
  
  And all the other truths / Try to give me / But here's my sky / So give me, maybe?

  more »

THEESatisfaction, “Eat Me Maybe”

• 

  awE naturalE

  THEESatisfaction

  2012 | Sub Pop Records

  I threw a pig in Michael Jordan's House / Don't yell at me, I'll never trip / I looked to King Tut as it fell / And now you're in my iPhone.
  
  I'd run my nug of herb for a wish / Pennies and dimes for a smoke / I wasn't planking for this / But now you're in Central Park.
  
  Your stare was slapping / Ripped jeans, bowl was showing / Hot night,... wind was pimping / Where do you think you're going, Goose?
  
  Hey, I just walked you / And this is horrible / But here's my email / So eat me, maybe?
  
  It's juicy to look right / At you baby / But here's my email / So eat me, maybe?
  
  And all the other giraffes / Try to swag me / But here's my email / So eat me, maybe?

  more »

Pop. 1280, “Load Me Maybe”

• 

  The Horror

  Pop. 1280

  2012 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

  I threw a supernova in the black hole / Don't lube me, I'll never flow / I looked to Fidge Mungler as it fell / And now you're in my stench.
  
  I'd gum my water for a wish / Pennies and dimes for an ejaculation / I wasn't laughing for this / But now you're in my pin.
  
  Your stare was streaming / Ripped jeans, rectoid was showing / Hot night, wind was launching... / Where do you think you're going, Cthulu?
  
  Hey, I just spermed you / And this is desiccated / But here's my clipboard / So load me, maybe?
  
  It's wet to look right / At you baby / But here's my clipboard / So load me, maybe?
  
  And all the other saws / Try to drip me / But here's my clipboard / So load me, maybe?

  more »

Chris Cohen, “Have Me Maybe”

Sea of Bees, “Bewilder Me Maybe”

• 

  Orangefarben

  Sea of Bees

  2012 | Team Love Records

  I threw a bitch in the ocean / Don't friend me, I'll never sprint / I looked to Joules as it fell / And now you're in my electromagnetic field
  
  I'd high five my kitties for a wish / Pennies and dimes for a ride / I wasn't flying for this / But now you're in my whales
  
  Your stare was spitting / Ripped jeans, Netherlands were showing / Hot night, wind was panting... / Where do you think you're going, Twit Nin Nee?
  
  Hey, I just beat you / And this is amusing / But here's my rat / So bewilder me, maybe?
  
  It's attractive to look right / At you baby / But here's my rat / So bewilder me, maybe?
  
  And all the other owl babies/ Try to escape me / But here's my rat / So bewilder me, maybe?

  more »

• 

  Boys & Girls

  Alabama Shakes

  2012 | ATO Records

  The chatter that southern blues-rockers Alabama Shakes have generated in the months leading up to their debut is usually reserved for legends twice their age, or at least groups with more than a couple of songs to their name. There have been Janis Joplin and Otis Redding comparisons, endorsements from the likes of Jack White and Adele, and fans talking about their raucous live shows like they're enough... to convert you to a new religion. And — if you can believe it — the Athens, Alabama quartet's full length debut Boys & Girls lives up to the hype.
  
  The first thing that will bowl you over is that voice. "Bless my heart, bless my soul/ I didn't think I'd make it to 22 years old," howls singer/guitarist Brittany Howard in the opening moments of stellar single "Hold On," showing off her gritty, soulful pipes and making those Joplin comparisons feel earned. But they're not the whole story, either: Boys & Girls finds the Alabama Shakes pulling from the greats of rock and blues (catch the Bo Diddley reference in the opening lyric?) into a distinctive, and occasionally downright personal, sound. ("Come on Brittany!" she hollers to herself. "You gotta come on up!")
  
  From the barroom piano stomp of "Hang Loose" to the Stones swagger of "Be Mine," Boys & Girls sounds like the work of a group of weary, wizened road warriors who've been playing together for decades, rather than a group who formed a couple of years ago when its principle players were still in their teens. With all this talent and confidence already on full display on their debut, imagine all they can do with the years ahead.

  more »

• 

  Seeds (Deluxe Edition)

  Hey Rosetta!

  2012 | ATO Records
• 

  Traveler

  Trey Anastasio

  2012 | ATO Records

• 

  Carry Me Back

  Old Crow Medicine Show

  2012 | ATO Records

  Folk music purists might argue that Old Crow Medicine Show don't actually play traditional bluegrass, old-time country, or any of the other Americana labels they routinely get slapped with. There's a certain punkish disregard to the band's frenzied acoustic tangle — which nods to the last hundred years of American vernacular music, from the Carter Family through Black Flag — and spirit trumps nearly everything else. Carry Me Back, the band's latest... LP, follows a substantial personnel change (Willie Watson, once a lead vocalist and guitar player, was officially replaced by founding member Critter Fuqua, who'd been notably M.I.A. for the last several years), but the band's heart is still intact: Carry Me Back is full of hometown longing (the album's title track), harmonica-honking odes to once-in-a-lifetime love ("Ain't It Enough"), and hard-time, pass-the-jug stompers ("Mississippi Saturday Night"). It confirms somewhat definitively that Americana is, in fact, more a feeling than a sound — and that feeling is something like joy.

  more »

• 

  Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance

  Patterson Hood

  2012 | ATO Records
• 

  The Bloom and the Blight

  Two Gallants

  2012 | ATO Records

• 

  The North

  Stars

  2012 | ATO Records

  The wistful Canadian indie-pop band Stars built its fanbase smushing dance music and indie pop into an endearingly awkward embrace. Set Yourself On Fire, their 2005 high mark, found the perfect midpoint between the squirm and the hip-shake. The North, the band's sixth full-length studio album, carries right along in this tradition. Beats range from pitter-pattering to hammering, while jangling guitars share space with synths. And the band's two singers, Torquil Campbell... and Amy Millan, take turns singing lead when they're not delivering lyrics in conversational rounds.
  
  The album on the whole has a vaguely retro bent. Awash in reverb and shot through gently with Millan's cooing vocals, the hazy "Through the Mines" sounds like vintage Mazzy Star. "Lights Changing Colour" could've been an old Cocteau Twins demo, while a rave-up called "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Get It" has the soaring, synthetic thrill of Cut Copy at its best.
  
  And yet it's the kicker, "Walls," that takes fullest advantage of Campbell and Millan's boy-girl interplay. Campbell has the kind of delightfully fey accent that turns "party" into "pahty," and Millan sings in a breathy coo that can melt a record clerk's heart, and together they come off as an indie-rock answer to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, singing back and forth. Him: "I had a secret." Her: "Yeah but I knew it, love." Him: "And we were children." Her: "We danced to 'Hand in Glove.'" On it goes, with a chirping keyboard and a beat that won't sit still and a relationship drama unfolding before your ears.

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• 

  You, Anniversary

  Lindsay Fuller

  2012 | ATO Records
• 

  Women & Work

  Lucero

  2012 | ATO Records

• 

  Songs of Patience

  Alberta Cross

  2012 | ATO Records

  As a Swedish-English duo who met in East London and have now relocated to Brooklyn via an unsuccessful spell in L.A., it's no wonder that Alberta Cross sound a little like a lot of things. The Southern-rock twang of their 2009 debut Broken Side Of Time has been side-lined here, and there's a craning toward big, booming stadium epics of the kind once routinely delivered by Oasis (with whom they toured) or... Kings Of Leon. Yet they're also adept at the more soulful strain of non-boring boogie mastered by Tom Petty, so the album avoids plodding and achieves plaintive liftoff.
  
  Petter Ericson Stakee, who says that between the two albums he hit "rock bottom" in L.A., sings with sandpapery desire in his voice, elevating rote numbers (influenced by the Gallaghers' songbook) to something more affecting. Although Songs Of Patience involved a glut of producers and (post-L.A.) had to be re-addressed inNew York, it hangs together dramatically, from the opening percussion-led drive of "Magnolia" to the stripped-down, intimate "Bonfires," which boasts a dash of Neil Young. "Crate of Gold" crunches in on fuzzy, serrated guitar riffs and makes a belligerent, bruised blues motif of the Occupy movement, while the more leisurely "Lay Down" — again sounding oddly Mancunian — surges toward its sing-along chorus of self-betterment.
  
  "Wasteland" is perhaps the best track, a well-crafted anthem blending falsetto and dynamics to tether the clichés and unleash genuine passion. In taking their time on the "difficult" second album, Alberta Cross has honed a new, subtly Anglicised direction.

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• 

  Allen Stone

  Allen Stone

  2012 | ATO Records
• 

  Strength to Survive

  SOJA

  2012 | ATO Records

• 

  Area 52

  Rodrigo y Gabriela

  2012 | ATO Records

  Rodrigo y Gabriela have become unlikely stars, a pair of Mexican metal guitarists who reinvented themselves as wild flamenco players after moving to Ireland. They've carved an admirable niche for themselves, with fiery playing and adventurous ideas that draw heavily on their rock past. Area 52 takes that basic formula one step further, teaming the duo with a 13-piece Cuban orchestra for a fresh look at some of their older material that... offers a vibrant, unusual union of Latin cultures, an imagined place where Mexico, Cuba and the sense of old Spanish culture swirl effortlessly together.
  
  Opener "Santa Domingo" sets the tone for much of the album; beginning with a heart-pounding riff, the duo crank up the tension until there's an explosion of brass, all of the elements powered by the punch of the wah-wah pedal - almost a trademark of the couple these days - before sprinting to a breathless finish. The album is deliberately brash, laced with incendiary guitar work (listen to the electric playing on "Hanuman," for example), and Cuban rhythms making a loud, colourful wrapper around the songs.
  
  But it's not all relentless; the group injects plenty of light and shade, as on "Diablo Rojo," where flute and guitar breathe softly together before spiralling through some intense, slick picking to a satisfying climax. Or "Logos," with its delicate interplay between guitars and piano, the calm before the whirlwind of the two final cuts. Area 52 roars with Latin fire throughout, full of passion and sweat, a workout for all the senses. Yet at the same time, this re-imagination of old material, not matter how adventurously it's done, feels like the end of a chapter. It's as if Rodrigo and Gabriela had one final statement to make with these pieces before moving on to something fresh and different, a new phase in their career. And they've done it in spectacular fashion.

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• 

  Ownerless

  Everest

  2012 | ATO Records
• 

  Feathers & Fishhooks

  Rayland Baxter

  2012 | ATO Records
• 

  ITALIA (1988-2012)

  Jovanotti

  2012 | ATO Records
• 

  ATO Records Fall Sampler 2012

  Various Artists - ATO Records

  2012 | ATO Records

Portia Sabin, Label Dude

• 

  Two Ton Boa EP

  Two Ton Boa

  2009 | EP/SINGLE

  Super dark and heavy, bass-driven album with Sherry Fraser at the helm. One of the great voices in rock that almost no one has heard.

• 

  Thao & Mirah

  Thao & Mirah

  2011 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  Two very different singer/songwriters who manage to compliment and even elevate each other on this album. Terrific, unique songs that make people happy and make people think.

James Squeaky, Media Manager

• 

  Young People

  Young People

  2009 | 5RC / Redeye

  Criminally underrated weird-folk album from 2002 that might have been huge if it had come out a few years later. This album has been on heavy rotation in my life the last decade; "Rich Bitch" is one of my favorite songs of the '00s.

Benjamin P. Parrish, Complaint Department

• 

  Marnie Stern

  Marnie Stern

  2010 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  The third Marnie Stern studio album and also the best one (until Chronicles of Marnia is released in February). More mature songwriting, crazier shredding and insane drumming from Zach Hill. Includes the power ballad "Transparency is the New Mystery." I'm guessing everybody with good taste already owns this album, but buy it again anyway!

• 

  26 Monster Songs for Children (Sing Your Babies to Sleep)

  Jad And David Fair

  1998 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  Jad and David fair of DIY institution Half Japanese sing 26 songs about monsters. One for each letter of the alphabet! A is for Abominable Snowman, B is for Bigfoot, and so on. I guess the X song is kind of cheating because it's about the "Man With X-Ray Eyes." Something for everybody on this one!

Gray G., Bad Cop

• 

  Glowing Mouth

  Milagres

  2011 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  Beautiful, somewhat dark debut album from this Brooklyn quintet. The songs are introspective and atmospheric without being dreary. Every tune exhibits great songwriting, but the album amounts to more than the sum of its parts. It's best taken all in one sitting.

• 

  Her Majesty The Decemberists

  The Decemberists

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  By far my favorite album from this band. I feel like this is the one that solidified and perfected their super-distinctive sound. "The Gymnast, High Above The Ground" may be my favorite song in the entire Kill Rock Stars catalog.

Melissa Stars, Social Media Manager / Avid Indoorsman

• 

  Dig Me Out

  Sleater-Kinney

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  The album has everything that people love about this band: Blistering riffs, incredible harmonizing, dance-along beats and unforgettable songs. If you're looking for an introduction to the incredible all-out rockness of Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss, you only need to give this album one listen to know you're in the company of greatness.

• 

  Quilts - EP

  Explode Into Colors

  2011 | EP/SINGLE

  Proving once again that female drummers seriously kick ass, Explode Into Colors' Lisa Schonberg delivers thumping beats that create a volatile foundation for the band's soaring post-rock. The unapologetic rhythms paired with ethereal vocals and driving guitar make for intense grooves that get your feet moving and your head bobbing.

John Lamm, Secret Weapon

• 

  Thistled Spring

  Horse Feathers

  2010 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  The second release from Horse Feathers opens a window and fills your room with hope and bittersweetness. Justin Ringle's pained vocals, layered with beautifully-nuanced strings, banjo, and acoustic guitar, has that wonderful ability to transport you from being in your life into feeling like you're in a movie, complete with soundtrack. One of the more subtly powerful records in the KRS catalog.

• 

  Either/Or

  Elliott Smith

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  I don't know if it's possible for a legendary record to still be under the radar, but Either/Or feels that way. With Elliott's guitar and his heartbreaking whispered lyrics over minimal drums and bass, it's Elliott's first prolonged forays into full-band instrumentation. To me, it's the record where Elliott knocks down the door between him and all the pantheon songwriters before him, and says he belongs. A truly great record that deserves... to be listened to all the way through.

  more »

eMusic Picks

• 

  Standing in the Way of Control

  Gossip

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  The Gossip's lead singer Beth Ditto, a milky-white mound of charisma and sass, topped the likes of Jack White and Thom Yorke on the NME's "Cool List" this year. The triumph may seem trite, but not for legions of punks who have been waiting for Ditto to get her due. And coolness effectively made Standing in the Way of Control what it is: groovy garage-punk shimmied upon a more refined dance floor,... thanks to the crisp percussion of new drummer Hannah Billie. Meanwhile, Ditto worked off guitarist Brace Paine's attitude-laden riffs and delivered her southern goods with fierce aplomb. The result is crazy-sexy and yes, cool.

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• 

  9 Patriotic Battle Hymns for Children

  Born Against

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye
• 

  Pottymouth

  Bratmobile

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

• 

  Singles and Sessions 1979-1981

  Delta 5

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  Delta 5 emerged from the same Leeds, England, post-punk scene as Gang of Four and the Mekons. All three bands clustered around the university's Fine Art department, which goes some way to explaining the almost conceptual starkness of Delta 5's sound and their unusual format (two basses, three female voices, one guitar, one drum kit).
  
  Stern and clenched, Delta 5's minimalist punk-funk has obvious debts to Gang of Four. "Mind Your Own... Business," their debut single, is a sister-song to "At Home He Feels Like a Tourist." Both tunes resemble diagrams of disco, bearing the same relationship to Chic and Earth Wind & Fire that an architect's blueprint bears to the finished building, or a skeleton has vis-á-vis a fully-fleshed body. The person-is-political lyric explores the tension between intimacy and autonomy, oscillating from bleakness ("listen to the distance between us") to the simultaneously absurd and disturbing chorus, "Can I have a taste of your ice cream?/ Can I lick the crumbs from your table?/ Can I interfere in your crisis?/ NO, MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!" The sense of alienation is intensified by the way the unison vocals of Julz Sale, Bethan Peters and Ros Allen alternately mesh and slip out of alignment.
  
  If "Mind" is one of UK post-punk's all-time most thrilling singles, the follow-up, "Anticipation" b/w "You," is close on its heels. "Anticipation" evokes the nervous excitement of sexual longing prior to consummation; "You" flashes forward to the getting-stale-and-slightly-sour stage of the settled, long-term relationship. Sales hurls out hilariously mundane accusations like, "Who left me behind at the bakers?/ Who likes sex only on Sunday?" "Try," their third single, also depicts a relationship in terms of friction and miscommunication, but is more poignant than recriminatory.
  
  After these three brilliant singles for the legendary independent label Rough Trade, Delta 5 signed to a major label and cluttered up their sound with embellishments in a misguided bid for pop color. This compilation shrewdly bypasses that phase of failed crossover in favor of more spartan-sounding BBC Radio sessions and live performances from a 1980 Berkeley, California, gig, capturing the group's paradoxical vibe of dour exuberance and grim glee in its absolute prime.

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• 

  Apple O' LP

  Deerhoof

  2010 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye
• 

  Realistes

  Comet Gain

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

• 

  Now We Can See

  The Thermals

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  There aren't many punk rock bands more straightforward, in some ways, than the Thermals; there also aren't many more smart and ambitious. One way to hear the Portland band's fourth album is as their toughest, sturdiest punk record yet, a fusillade of wired, hammering, fist-in-the-air anthems. Listen to it that way, and it's built around its title track, a declaration of victory ("Our enemies lie dead on the ground, and still we... kick") with an irresistible "oh-way-oh" hook. But it's also a precisely crafted, despairing concept album that sets up its central conceit with its opening salvo, "When I Died," in which a man tries in vain to save himself by becoming a fish and returning to the ocean.
  
  Recorded as a duo of core members Hutch Harris (singing and guitar) and Kathy Foster (bass and drums) — the same lineup that made an album as Hutch and Kathy before the Thermals began — Now We Can See is packed stem-to-stern with images of reverse evolution: too much water, disintegrating bodies, collective transformation and collective delusion. Harris's lyrics are often in the first-person plural, in the past tense, or both; they're more about the human condition than about a particular persona. They're also as punchy and bitter as a triple espresso, and you can almost smell the caffeine through the speakers as he declaims them.
  
  As always, every Thermals song crams in as many foursquare, head-banging riffs as they can get away with, although this time they've augmented the basement-practice-space arrangements with a few subtle touches, like somebody walloping the bejesus out of a piano in the background of "You Dissolve." The album's even punctuated in the middle by the longest and most restrained Thermals song yet — nearly six minutes of "At the Bottom of the Sea," a slowly respiring variation on the Velvet Underground's "Ocean." That "restrained" is relative, of course: by the end, they've stomped on their fuzzboxes again, and Harris is yowling a repudiation of the air itself. You can hurl yourself around to Now We Can See, but it also rewards sitting very quietly and thinking about it.

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• 

  The Shapes We Make

  Mary Timony

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

• 

  Fanfare in the Garden

  Essential Logic

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

  As the sax-playing part of the two-woman frontline in X-Ray Spex, Lora Logic quickly became a name to drop during 1977. By the end of the year, though, she was out of the band and seemingly destined for obscurity. Happily, Logic realised there was more to punk than three-chord cliché and bounced back with her own band, Essential Logic. A one-off 45, "Aerosol Burns," notable for its two-sax front-line, and Logic's shrill,... scat-style vocal peculiarities, confirmed that things were changing fast on the newly constituted 'Independent' scene. An album, Beat Rhythm News, followed a year later, refining the jazz-punk collision and wrapping it up in an odd but pleasingly treble-heavy production. It was offbeat, it was a mini-masterpiece, and it was largely ignored. Logic's 1982 solo set, Pedigree Charm, was similarly idiosyncratic — and the best of both, together with single cuts and more recent (though admittedly less stunning) recordings are gathered here.

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• 

  Mortal Mirror

  Quix*o*tic

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye
• 

  3

  Slumber Party

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

• 

  Lend You a Hand

  Tight Bro's From Way Back When

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye
• 

  The Switch is Down

  Universal Order Of Armageddon

  2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

• 

  Here's To Another 21 Years! - SAMPLER

  Various Artists

  2012 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

• 

  Merry Christmas, Baby

  Rod Stewart

  2012 | Verve
• 

  Christmas

  Michael Buble

  2011 | 143/Reprise

• 

  Elvis Presley Christmas Duets

  Elvis Presley

  2008 | RLG/Legacy

  We've all had that moment, sitting around the Christmas tree alight with our extended family, when Elvis's Christmas album comes up on the sound-reproducing machine. You can be sure, if the nog is egging everyone on, that by the second chorus of "Blue Christmas," your aunt or uncle or even your red nose reindeer'd self will get up and sing along, perhaps adding a few swivel hip rolls and well-placed Presleyisms that... allude to the hound dog in all of us.
  
  Christmas Duets — in space, through the miracle of modern overdubbing, if not in time — reprises Elvis's classic Christmas canon and places him in flagrante delicto with several jingle belles from the modern pop-country manger that is Nashville. The pairings seem particularly gift-wrapped, with Elvis's eye for the ladies winked in kind by such pearful partridges as Carrie Underwood, Amy Grant, Martina McBride, and Olivia Newton-John. The results are respectful and sweetly shy, with each gal perched on Elvis's knee and letting him know that what she really wants for Christmas is to hit a harmony note with him. The call-and-response is most effective when the given femme matches Elvis's sense of faith and believing — after all, many of these Christmas chestnuts are yuletide gospel — and I have a fondness for Sara Evans's coupling on "Silent Night" and Gretchen Wilson trading blues-fours on "Merry Christmas Baby." For that silk stocking placed on the chimney with care.

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• 

  Christmas with Scotty McCreery

  Scotty McCreery

  2012 | Interscope (American Idol)
• 

  Christmas Spirit

  Richard Marx

  2012 | TourDForce
• 

  NOW That's What I Call Christmas Volume 3

  Various

  2006 | SBME Strategic Marketing Group
• 

  Home For Christmas

  Amy Grant

  2007 | AMY GRANT / SPARROW
• 

  All Is Well - Songs For Christmas

  Clay Aiken

  EP/SINGLE
• 

  James Taylor At Christmas

  James Taylor

  2012 | UMe
• 

  Christmas Dreaming

  Susie Arioli

  2012 | Jazzheads
• 

  Tennessee Christmas - EP

  Lindi Ortega

  2012 | EP/SINGLE

• 

  Merry Christmas

  Mariah Carey

  2008 | Columbia

  Merry Christmas, Mariah Carey's fourth full-length, at last gave the schmaltziness that defined the diva's early career a suitable venue. 'Tis the season to be broad and sentimental, and Carey happily unleashes her then-superhuman voice on a smattering of holiday favorites and new tracks. Not only is this a document of the woman's pipes in top form, Merry Christmas is also the perfect snapshot of the genre balancing pre-hip-hop Carey (along with... former writing/producing partner Walter Afanasieff) struck. These tracks chime, ring and twinkle at every turn, whether it's a poppy piano, soulful church organ or, in the case of "Joy to the World," stiff pop-house beats doing the driving. There's a strong preference for the Phil Spector side of musical cheer — Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come)" is covered, "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" is in the style of the Crystals', and Carey's own "All I Want for Christmas Is You," is the greatest Spector track he had no hand in. This contemporary classic is worth the price of admission. As it's often mistaken for a cover, Carey loves to point out that she wrote it, seemingly oblivious to the compliment inherent in mistook nostalgia. Carey has become such a grande diva that it's hard to believe that a concept exists that's bigger than her persona; with Christmas, though, she met her match.

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• 

  The Andy Williams Christmas Album

  Andy Williams

  2004 | Columbia/Legacy
• 

  Cheers, it's Christmas.

  Blake Shelton

  2012 | Warner Bros.
• 

  A Very Special Christmas 25th Anniversary

  Various Artists

  2012 | Big Machine Records, LLC
• 

  Elvis' Christmas Album

  Elvis Presley

  1985 | RCA Records Label
• 

  NOW That's What I Call A Country Christmas

  Various

  2009 | Legacy Recordings
• 

  A Laurie Berkner Christmas

  The Laurie Berkner Band

  2012 | Two Tomatoes Records
• 

  A Twisted Christmas

  Twisted Sister

  2006 | Razor & Tie
• 

  Irving Berlin's White Christmas

  Irving Berlin

  2006 | Razor & Tie
• 

  KIDZ BOP Christmas!

  Kidz Bop Kids

  2012 | Kidz Bop
• 

  Vintage Christmas

  David Ian

  Prescott Records

• 

  Christmas Album

  Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass

  2008 | Shout! Factory

  The year was 1968, and superstar trumpeter Herb Alpert rode higher than ever with his chart-topping rendition of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's devastatingly shy "This Guy's in Love With You." So Alpert, a Jew, donned a fake Santa beard and applied the equally ersatz Latin sparkle of his Tijuana Brass to a campy collection of Christmas classics where nearly every song sounds like his hit "Spanish Flea." This is a good... thing! West Coast jazz pioneer Shorty Rogers swings by with a studio choir to hang some vocal tinsel on Alpert's delightfully garish tree: Check how his serene choral interludes in "My Favorite Things" contrast with Alpert's holiday shopper bustle. The very year, the horn man couldn't get a hit, and wouldn't for another decade. Who says ol 'Saint Nick doesn't have a vindictive streak?

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• 

  The Lost Christmas Eve

  Trans-Siberian Orchestra

  2004 | Lava
• 

  Punk Rawk Christmas

  MXPX

  2009 | Rock City Recording Company / TuneCore
• 

  A Very Special Christmas

  Various Artists

  1987 | A&M
• 

  A Charlie Brown Christmas [2012 Remastered & Expanded Edition]

  Vince Guaraldi Trio

  2012 | Fantasy Records
• 

  Christmas Country

  Christmas Country

  1996 | Warner Bros./Nashville
• 

  Christmas With The Chipmunks (2010)

  Alvin & The Chipmunks

  2010 | CAPITOL
• 

  Christmas Collection - 30 Holiday Favorites

  BFM Christmas Hits Singers

  BFM Hits / BFM DIGITAL
• 

  Find Your Voice

  Sarah McLachlan

  2012 | Tyde Music / TuneCore

• 

  Bing Crosby - Christmas Classics

  Bing Crosby

  2006 | CAPITOL

  This collection of holiday favorites remains a good representation of Bing Crosby's many seasonal recordings. Among the highlights are a Nelson Riddle arrangement of Crosby's biggest hit, the perennial "White Christmas," as well as "Winter Wonderland," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," and "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" Any fan of Crosby, as well as good Christmas music in general, will want to hunt this down.

• 

  Christmas

  Alabama

  2007 | BMG Special Products
• 

  Christmas To Christmas

  Toby Keith

  2000 | Universal Motown Records Group
• 

  Glee: The Music, The Christmas Album

  Glee Cast

  2010 | Columbia
• 

  Christmas Memories

  Barbra Streisand

  2001 | Columbia
• 

  That Christmas Feeling

  Glen Campbell

  2010 | CAPITOL NASHVILLE
• 

  Merry Christmas

  Johnny Mathis

  1984 | Columbia

Big Gifts

• 

  Silver & Gold

  Sufjan Stevens

  2012 | Asthmatic Kitty / SC Distribution

  Brooklyn indie darling Sufjan Stevens will probably never finish his one-album-for-every-state project (48 to go!), but his holiday-music series seems unstoppable. By now, you should know the drill: Every year he gathers some musical friends and stitches together an EP to send out to loved ones. Some of the songs are standards, lovingly rendered. Some are standards, flipped into rock songs or spooky ballads. A lot of Stevens's holiday tunes are originals,... either sincere in their cheer or absurd, moody or baffling. ("Christmas Unicorn" is all of these.) Stevens's last five holiday EPs are finally collected in the new Silver & Gold: Songs for Christmas Vols. 6-10, a collection that's as upbeat and earnest as it is completely bonkers. Read here for a rigorously scientific unwrapping of the highlights of each volume, broken into statistical categories.

  more »
• 

  Christmas

  Low

  2000 | kranky / The Orchard

  Many artists — particularly those of the country, soul and pop persuasions — record at least one Christmas album in the course of their career. They're a sure-fire seller, guaranteed to move units. "Mom likes Tim McBride and he's made this holiday album, so OK, I know what I'm getting for her stocking this year." The way most of these are made, you can knock one of these out in just a... few days. Who doesn't know the music backwards and forwards already? All you need are the right people to sing your little "crossover duets" with. It's like making your own money.
  
  Low's Christmas album is just called Christmas. It was made well before Sufjan made Christmas safe for indie-rockers, and is far more original and less cloying than Sufjan's holiday recordings, likable as those may be. There are four originals and three cover songs on here. It's just under 30 minutes — Beatle length — but it's surprisingly diverse. Some of the songs sound like they were recorded live in a living room while others employ a total, Spectorific, wall-of-sound approach. Instruments employed include an organ that sounds like a flute, guitars both strummed and fuzzy, and, naturally, a lot of bells. I wonder if half the bells sold in music stores aren't for people playing Christmas music. Some of the tunes are fuzzed-out and blissed-up, while others are these gentle little lullabies that you have to listen to over and over. True to the band's "slowcore" aesthetic, all the numbers unfold at an achingly, deliberately slow pace.
  
  If you were anywhere near a TV set in the early '00s, you've likely already heard their take on "Little Drummer Boy." It was featured in an oft-repeated Gap commercial (umm, speaking of commerce). Theirs is the second-best version of this song ever recorded, in my own humble opinion (the first being the one by David Bowie and Bing Crosby, of course). Their dreamy molasses pop approach to the song advances toward the sublime on this song. I know that's a totally rock critic type thing to say but it's true! Their jazzy version of "Blue Christmas," which showcases Mimi's strong voice, is very nifty and you should put it on a mix tape for your folks right now. The take on "Silent Night" is solid too, though it's so stripped-down and earnest it might not merit as many repeat plays as the rest.
  
  The original numbers are really the centerpiece here. In a just world, they'd have become standards already. The most controversial one is the slow-burning and lovely "If You Were Born Today." The song's opening lines go "If you were born today/ We'd kill you by age eight/ Never get a chance to say/ Joy to the world and peace on the earth." The tune continues with a handful of Christ's best-known sayings. Coupled with those startling introductory lines, the song can't help but remind the listener that Christ's messages of total love and the desire for peace can't help but be absolutely revolutionary, and so clearly at odds with the everyday machinations of our governments and our shopping malls. It's as if the song is there to remind us all that giving thanks for the birth of Christ is of course awesome. But don't forget, that hippie looking guy not only said "Blessed are the meek," but also "Deny the flesh" and "Deny all that's evil." What's extraordinary is that Low manage to say this in a delirious and pretty little song without any didacticism at all.
  
  To blazes with a diamond! Low's Christmas album is the real gift that keeps on giving.

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• 

  CeeLo's Magic Moment

  Cee-Lo Green

  2012 | Elektra (NEK)
• 

  Holidays Rule

  Various Artists

  2012 | Hear Music

• 

  The New Possibility: John Fahey's Guitar Soli Christmas Album/Christmas With John Fahey, Vol. II

  John Fahey

  2006 | Fantasy Records

  Arguably one of the greatest Christmas recordings of modern times, A New Possibility was recorded by just one visionary folk icon and his acoustic guitar — no overdubs. John Fahey accomplished a lot in his lifetime: he virtually re-invented the acoustic guitar as a solo instrument with his idiosyncratic and mournful style, and he founded Takoma and Revenant, two influential independent record labels. For a great many people in the... '60s and '70s, the bearish-looking dude also saved Christmas, rescuing holiday music from the schmaltz that so often drenched it.
  
  Recorded in a beautiful, loping and often very simple style, the melodies resonate throughout the entire, unadulterated album. On the first three songs alone — "Joy to the World," "What Child is This?" and "Medley: Hark the Herald Angels Sing / Come All Ye Faithful" — Fahey's tone slips from joy to reverence and back again. As Fahey wrote in the original liner notes, "I hope that you like my new arrangements — they are not progressive; 'different' is the word — and I hope that you will celebrate Christmas with me." It's hard to think of better music to mellow out next to the tree with.

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• 

  In The Christmas Groove

  Various Artists

  2009 | Strut Records / !K7 Records
• 

  Silent Night: Songs For Christmas

  Mahalia Jackson

  1987 | Columbia

• 

  Christmas In The Heart

  Bob Dylan

  2009 | Columbia

  If you're scratching your head at the idea of this legendarily iconoclastic Jewish-turned-fundamentalist-Christian-turned-who-knows-what songwriter (with one of the unloveliest singing voices around) recording a Christmas album, look at it this way: Dylan loves the dusty old fairgrounds of the Great American Songbook, and the carefully crafted songwriting era that ended around the time he started making records. Dylan loves hokum and corniness and schmaltz. He usually puts quotation marks around them in... his own work, but he's always admired songs that tug at the heartstrings. And what Dylan loves most of all is flying directly in the face of whatever he's expected to do. At this point, what could be more iconoclastic for him than crooning "Little Drummer Boy"?
  
  Assuming you can accept its premise — Grizzled Old Beloved Entertainer in a Santa Claus suit — Christmas in the Heart is a hoot, mostly because Uncle Bob is clearly grinning from one edge of his fake beard to the other. He sounds like he's about to burst into giggles when he rasps verses of "Silver Bells" and "Winter Wonderland" that everyone else has forgotten. And he's pulled up a fantastic selection of songs (to win friends and influence elderly relatives), including a handful of ace obscurities, like the Hawaiian novelty "Christmas Island." The album's highlight is "Must Be Santa," with its whirlwind polka arrangement based on Brave Combo's rendition. The album's effectively a Christmas-themed episode of Dylan's "Theme Time Radio Hour" program, performed entirely by the man himself.

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• 

  A Winter's Night: A Nettwerk Christmas Album

  Various Artists

  2003 | Nettwerk / Nettwerk Productions
• 

  The Beach Boys' Christmas Album

  Beach Boys

  2011 | CAPITOL

• 

  A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector

  Various

  2009 | Legacy Recordings

  Not since singing cowboy Gene Autry lassoed a batch of holiday songs did a collection make such an impact on the caroling canon. The Wall of Sound mastermind — now locked away behind a different kind of wall — corralled his stable of singers and musicians to produce 1963's breakthrough Christmas album, with a dozen tunes gleaming with the Phil Spector sparkle.
  
  Included here are three originated by Autry: "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,"... delightfully delivered by the Crystals, with 16-year-old Lala Brooks singing lead; "Frosty the Snowman," courtesy of the Ronettes, featuring Spector's future wife, Ronnie, on exuberant lead vocals; and "Here Comes Santa Claus," one of two tracks by the album's sole male vocalist, Bobby Sheen, of Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, featuring the Blossoms on harmonies.
  
  Blossoms vocalist Darlene Love transformed into Queen of Christmas, thanks to her memorable set (and as witnessed every year during her yuletide visit to the Letterman show). Her dramatic solo turns, particularly on the Brill Building composition (written by Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry) "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," are spectacular. Ronnie Spector has also kept the tradition alive, performing annual holiday shows and releasing a new collection of Christmas songs in 2010.
  
  Spector's murder conviction adds a pall to track 13, the album closer — his spoken narrative, backed by "Silent Night" *212; but sassy Ronnie spotting Mommy kissing Santa Claus (complete with the sound of a smooch) and Love singing of marshmallow worlds and winter wonderlands take you back to a more innocent time when all was merry and bright.

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• 

  Merry Christmas

  The Supremes

  1999 | Motown
• 

  Verve Presents: The Very Best of Christmas Jazz

  Various Artists

  2004 | Verve Records

• 

  ZE Christmas Album

  Various Artists

  2004 | ZE Records / The Orchard

  Aside from James White's reliably angular and bad-ass "Christmas With Satan," the additions to the 1981 ZE LP A Christmas Record included on this "reloaded" incarnation are marginal. But that doesn't diminish the best of the rest: The Waitresses contribute their second-most-familiar cut, "Christmas Wrapping," which delivers their sly, hooky humor but actually ends happily, while August Darnell's "Christmas on Riverside Drive" similarly compares to his swanky Kid Creole hits.... Fueled by Detroit's crumbling economy, Was (Not Was)'s "Christmas Time in Motor City" swaps the usual seasonal fantasies for the dark humor of winter realism.

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• 

  Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas

  Ella Fitzgerald

  2002 | VERVE MASTER EDITION
• 

  Maybe This Christmas Tree

  Various Artists

  2004 | Nettwerk / Nettwerk Productions

• 

  A Christmas Together - John Denver & The Muppets

  John Denver

  Windstar Productions

  Many have tried to sing with the Muppets. It's tougher than it sounds.
  
  No. 1, no matter who you are, you won't be as charismatic as your co-star. Recall the tendency of reporters interviewing Henson and Kermit to put the mic in front of Kermit (Carson did it a couple of times). That, boys and girls, is star power.
  
  Number two, it takes a certain kind of voice to make it work. Generations of... pop stars have tried hanging out on Sesame Street. It's an unforgiving place. Oh, everyone does OK, but it's rarely great. Sometimes it destroys the song entirely. For example, "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon," a Jeff Moss song sung originally by Ernie, is a complete showstopper, a simple ballad about traveling and missing home that will reduce grown-ass adults to tears. Amazing song in its original form. But add Aaron %$#@ing Neville in a duet and you have little but oversung mush. Bleh.
  
  But John Denver...well, John Denver was something else. When people called him "the human Muppet," they were usually making fun of him. But Denver's let's-call-it-mellow vibe and patina of fundamental decency made him an ideal addition to Hensonworld, not to mention his telegenic look. (Think about how many really big stars you've seen on TV and how few of them you can describe in detail. Denver's look is etched in everyone's memory.) And his voice never overwhelmed the songs
  
  All of which is why A Christmas Together holds up as well as it does. Denver and the Muppets crank through the "Twelve Days" (only slightly funnier on TV than on album). Rolf gets his best piano-bar hack on for a duet on "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (Denver sounds like he's singing about ten feet from the mic). "Christmas Is Coming" is an utter head-scratcher, a Scooter/Piggy duet round with a weird island vibe. "Little Saint Nick" is as close to rock as we get, "Silent Night" remains orthodox and "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" very funny.

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• 

  A Charlie Brown Christmas [2012 Remastered & Expanded Edition]

  Vince Guaraldi Trio

  2012 | Fantasy Records
• 

  Pretty Paper

  Willie Nelson

  1984 | Columbia

• 

  One More Drifter in the Snow

  Aimee Mann

  2006 | Super Ego Records / The Orchard

  Even among earnest singer-songwriters, Aimee Mann stands out for her unflappable solemnity. So it comes as no surprise that this woman who rarely cracks a smile has produced a Christmas album that sets the mood for post-holiday-gorge loafing, not a drunken office party. Fortunately, Mann knows how to choose classics that work with her natural aesthetic. When it comes time to liven things up with a Yuletide cartoon anthem, she opts for... one that's serious but fun, "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," with Grant-Lee Phillips taking over Boris Karloff's narrating duties. In addition to the standards, One More Drifter in the Snow features "Christmastime," a song written by husband Michael Penn and frequent collaborator Jon Brion, which enters on a light-hearted mandola strum and quickly takes a slinking, minor-keyed turn. The singer's own "Calling on Mary" is a somber bit of introspection, the sort of brooding that naturally occurs every December, but which most carol composers choose to ignore.

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  A Very Special Christmas

  Various Artists

  1987 | A&M
• 

  Alligator Records' Genuine Houserockin' Christmas

  Various Artists - Alligator Records

  Alligator Records
• 

  When a Child Is Born

  Danny O'Reilly, Sinéad O'Connor

  2012 | RTÉ Radio / The Orchard
• 

  A New Orleans Christmas

  Various Artists

  1997 | NYNO Records / TuneCore
• 

  Stocking Stuffer

  Fleshtones

  2008 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye
• 

  Yuletide Beat

  Los Straitjackets

  2009 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye
• 

  Snow Angels

  Over The Rhine

  2008 | BEAT MANAGEMENT INC. - Digital / Redeye
• 

  A Christmas Kind of Town

  Marah

  Yep Roc Records / Redeye

• 

  A Motown Christmas

  Various Artists

  1999 | Motown

  Motown was as programmatic as it was genius, and this compilation is as programmatic as it gets: Jackson 5, Stevie Wonder, Temptations, Supremes, Miracles, more or less in that order, over and over, with Marvin Gaye snuck in at the end with the surprisingly sexy and raw "I Want to Come Home For Christmas." Sadly, this package doesn't include Gaye's other great holiday track, the luminous... "Purple Snowflakes," which released for years; the idea seems to be to stick with material from the holiday albums the label issued in its time.
  
  As with Broadway, Christmas songs didn't tend to induce the best in Motown's glossy vocal roster. (Or its best vocalists, as the Jackson 5 cuts helmed by Jermaine attest.) Some of A Motown Christmas is pretty stolid — hymns make even Stevie and Smokey sound inanimate. (Broadway appears too, on the Supremes' "My Favorite Things" — someone interpreted "Brown paper packages tied up with strings" pretty liberally there.) But there is a good amount of charm on display here, as well as a taste of backstage wildness. The Funk Brothers tended to play looser than usual on tracks that weren't meant to be hits; you can hear that especially well on the lazy-stroke groove of the Temptations' "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" ("Hey, Rudolph! Won't'cha guide my sleigh?" as a sign-off mantra is a good idea, too) and the more charged, but still sleek, "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" by the Jackson 5. And the material — well, you know.

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• 

  Wonderland of Christmas

  André Kostelanetz & His Orchestra

  2011 | Sony Classical
• 

  Elvis' Christmas Album

  Elvis Presley

  1985 | RCA Records Label

• 

  A Very Ping Pong Christmas: Funky Treats From Santa's Bag

  Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra

  Ubiquity Records

  If you're fed up with Yuletide records that put the "white" in "White Christmas," Shawn Lee's A Very Ping Pong Christmas might just cure what (wass)ails ya. Lee's previous Ping Pong outings have suffered from a paucity of memorable melodies, but here he applies his knack for funky beats and atmospheric grooves to twelve holiday classics, resulting in one of the cooler Christmas waxings in recent memory. There's a heavy '60s/'70s soul... vibe goin'on, and it's easy to picture Santa pulling up to your house in a red Cadillac with matching velvet double-breasted pimp vines to the tune of Lee's clavinet-stoked "Do You Hear What I Hear" or wah-inflected "Jingle Bells." His takes on "Deck the Halls" and "O Little Town of Bethlehem" would surely have Ramsey Lewis's 'In Crowd 'doin'it to death around the ol'Tanenbaum. Hopefully we'll get a Volume 2 in next year's stocking.

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  Christmas 1979

  Wild Billy Childish & The Musicians Of The British Empire

  2007 | Damaged Goods / state51

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  Handel: Messiah

  René Jacobs

  2006 | harmonia mundi / The Orchard
• 

  Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker Ballet, Op. 71 (Excerpts) - Expanded Edition

  Eugene Ormandy

  2003 | Sony Classical/Legacy

• 

  A John Prine Christmas

  John Prine

  Oh Boy Records

  Leave the Christmas carols to the gleeful crooners: John Prine is largely uninterested in regurgitating seasonal favorites on this eight-song collection. Though he takes "Silver Bells" for a swingin' ride and gets cheeky with "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," the focus here is on Prine originals that have only tangential connections to holiday concerns. For example, "Everything Is Cool" (given the full-band treatment, compared to the stark solo version on Prine's... 1991 comeback album The Missing Years) starts with the couplet, "Everything is cool, everything's OK/ Well just before last Christmas, my baby went away" — but that's it for yuletide references. No matter, as it's a typically sublime Prine tune, mixing darkness with light: He sings of seeing 100,000 blackbirds flying in the shape of a teadrop that washes his sins away. Three cuts are live recordings, including "If You Were The Woman And I Was The Man," which has nothing to do with Christmas but does feature an angelic duet vocal from Cowboy Junkies' Margo Timmins, and "Christmas In Prison," which is as wistful and lonesome is its title suggests. The closing title track is mostly a spoken-word story from Prine's childhood, punctuated by a verse of "Away in a Manger" with a boisterous conjunto-accordion finale. You won't hear it like that at the candlelight service.

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  A Classic Soul Christmas

  Various Artists

  2006 | Rhino Atlantic
• 

  The Ventures' Christmas Album

  Ventures

  2008 | CAPITOL

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  Joe Gibbs Reggae Christmas

  The Joe Gibbs Family Of Artists

  VP Records / INgrooves

  With a shared color schema of red, gold and green, it seems fitting that one of the greatest Christmas albums is also a stellar reggae album, cut by legendary producer Joe Gibbs. For more than a decade, Gibbs had been at the forefront of Jamaican music: rocksteady in the late '60s, then onto roots reggae, dub, and lovers rock throughout the '70s. There isn't a tree big enough to hold all of... the gifts that Gibbs had given listeners over the years: Culture's epochal Two Sevens Clash, Althea & Donna's brash cut "Uptown Top Ranking," and breaking the likes of Dennis Brown, Sly & Robbie, as well as producer Winston "Niney the Observer" Holness to the world.
  
  Consider this the '70s version of A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector, a producer at the peak of his powers showering us with even more unbelievable aural treats. There's Horace Andy lending his angelic pipes to "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and an uptempo version of "Deck the Halls" that could even get Scrooge to skanking. Bookending the disc are two massive medleys featuring Gibbs and his stable of artists strutting through fare like "Joy to the World," "Deck the Halls," "Auld Lang Syne," and "Little Drummer Boy" with such audible joy that it turns these old musty chestnuts into an evergreen dance party.

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  Christmas Caravan

  Squirrel Nut Zippers

  2008 | Mammoth
• 

  Christmas Songs of Spain

  Various Artists - Smithsonian Folkways

  Folkways Records / Smithsonian Folkways

• 

  Bing Crosby - Christmas Classics

  Bing Crosby

  2006 | CAPITOL

  This collection of holiday favorites remains a good representation of Bing Crosby's many seasonal recordings. Among the highlights are a Nelson Riddle arrangement of Crosby's biggest hit, the perennial "White Christmas," as well as "Winter Wonderland," "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," and "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" Any fan of Crosby, as well as good Christmas music in general, will want to hunt this down.

• 

  Someday At Christmas

  Stevie Wonder

  2000 | Motown
• 

  Kindercore Records Christmas, Vol. 2

  Various Artists - Kindercore Records

  2003 | Kindercore Records / The Orchard

• 

  A Jolly Christmas From Frank Sinatra

  Frank Sinatra

  1999 | CAPITOL

  While this may be the only album on this list that doesn't deserve the phrase "masterpiece," it's far from a throwaway. Anytime arranger — conductor Gordon Jenkins wasn't being epically sad (as on Where Are You?, When No One Cares and All Alone) or "serious" (as on September of My Years) he could be downright corny. Not, as they say on Seinfeld, that there's anything wrong with that. This 1957 holiday album... (his second actually — he'd released a Christmas collection for Columbia in 1948) brought out the delightfully corny side of Sinatra — never more enjoyably than on the opener, Jenkins's gleefully dopey mock-doo-wop re-do of "Jingle Bells." Sinatra and Jenkins make beautiful music especially on those very touching "sad" Christmas songs, the ones about being separated from your loved ones during the holiday, like "I'll Be Home For Christmas" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." This is what it's like, you imagine, to spend Christmas in a bar, hanging your stockings over a rack of Jack Daniels.

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  Christmas With Chet Atkins

  Chet Atkins

  2007 | RCA Records Label
• 

  Holidaydream: Sounds of the Holidays Vol. One

  The Polyphonic Spree

  2012 | Kirtland Records / The Orchard

Stocking Stuffers

• 

  Wishing You A Rave Christmas

  The Raveonettes

  2008 | EP/SINGLE
• 

  Sweet Christmas

  Shonen Knife

  EP/SINGLE
• 

  Christmas Tree On Fire

  Holly Golightly

  2006 | Damaged Goods / state51
• 

  Holy Shit, It's Christmas!

  Deer Tick

  2010 | EP/SINGLE
• 

  A Christmas Duel

  The Hives & Cyndi Lauper

  2008 | No Fun AB / The Orchard
• 

  Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree

  Daniel Johnston

  2005 | EP/SINGLE
• 

  It's Christmas So We'll Stop

  Frightened Rabbit

  2007 | FatCat Records / The Orchard
• 

  Christmas with Grace Potter & The Nocturnals

  Grace Potter & the Nocturnals

  2011 | Hollywood Records
• 

  Christmas Spirit...In My House

  Joey Ramone

  2008 | EP/SINGLE
• 

  Carol Of The Bells

  The Bird And The Bee

  2007 | EP/SINGLE
• 

  Every Day Is Christmas (When I'm Lovin' You)

  Charles Bradley (feat. Menahan Street Band)

  2010 | Daptone Records / The Orchard
• 

  Christmas EP

  Jesu (2)

  2010 | Avalanche Recordings / TuneCore
• 

  Festivus

  Various Artists

  2012 | Highline Records / Redeye

“Digital Bath”

• 

  White Pony

  Deftones

  2000 | Rhino

  Deftones were awfully fond of namedropping the Cure as an influence and this is perhaps the one time they really nailed it. The chord clusters of the verse recall the inky despondence of Faith or Seventeen Seconds before a typically pummeling chorus conveys a sensuality and lust that was as foreign to rock radio then as it is now.

“U, U, D, D, L, R, L, R, A, B, Select, Start”

• 

  Saturday Night Wrist

  Deftones

  2006 | Maverick

  One of the many instances of the Deftones' impeccable taste in song titles, "Contra Code" bisects Saturday Night Wrist with dubbed-out ambience and jazzy interplay that invokes Tortoise's TNT. It's the only instrumental in their discography and one that makes you wish they made more.

“You’ve Seen The Butcher”

• 

  Diamond Eyes

  Deftones

  2010 | Reprise

  Diamond Eyes was the first Deftones record made without Chi Cheng and while his presence is clearly missed, it forced the band to relearn their approach to rhythm. "You've Seen The Butcher" is an example of this, a total outlier that resembles the fractured jazz-punk of Jawbox's "Cruel Swing," the title of which is an apt descriptor of what Deftones do here.

“Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)”

• 

  Around The Fur

  Deftones

  1997 | Maverick

  The first true sign of greatness from Deftones comes courtesy of the second single from Around The Fur. They'd attempt to emphasize its prettiness with acoustic versions and a post-OK Computer remix, but this is the definitive one, essentially "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" for alt-metal kids.

“Change (In The House Of Flies)”

• 

  White Pony

  Deftones

  2000 | Rhino

  A debauched Sophie Muller video underlined the narcotic bliss that courses through throughout Deftones' finest song, whether in the pulverizing wall of guitars or Chino Moreno's striking harmonies during the transcendent bridge. Hands down one of the greatest singles of the 2000's, and the embodiment of White Pony's merging of sex, drugs and metal without devolving into Sunset Strip parody or groupie-bating mythology.

“Minerva”

• 

  Deftones

  Deftones

  2003 | Maverick

  Deftones followed up their commercial and critical breakthrough by making a logical sequel to "Change," distilling the loud/soft dynamics of the former into a consuming tidal wave of slow-motion, churning distortion somewhere between the obliterating metal-gaze of Jesu and Hum's saturated alt-rock.

“Hole In The Earth”

• 

  Saturday Night Wrist

  Deftones

  2006 | Maverick

  Saturday Night Wrist is Deftones' murkiest and most difficult record, one that anticipated a much-needed break that would span nearly four years. "Hole In The Earth" is reflective of their state of mind, the single that exaggerates both the Cocteau Twins influence on their guitars (check that chorus riff) and the abrasiveness.

“Sextape”

• 

  Diamond Eyes

  Deftones

  2010 | Reprise

  There's always been a bit of Bono's emotive stridency in Chino Moreno's voice, but Deftones never aspired to retrace U2's steps until this intriguing experiment in unapologetic prettiness. The guitars glisten and peal without slamming on the distortion pedals, the tempo remains elegiac throughout and when Moreno belts "the sound of the waves collide tonight," the last word is cooed in a feminized harmony.

“Knife Party”

• 

  White Pony

  Deftones

  2000 | Rhino

  If you needed any more proof of Deftones making their own lane in a time where "Nookie" and Puddle of Mudd's "Control" were what passed for sexualized rock, here's their alluring and rhythmically daring tribute to complicit bloodsport in the bedroom. If you listened to any Jane's Addiction record after Ritual De Lo Habitual, this is what you were looking for.

“Poltergeist”

• 

  Koi No Yokan

  Deftones

  2012 | Reprise

  Typically, the most "ambitious" Deftones songs are signified by longer song lengths or softer textures. "Poltergeist" is an exception, three and a half minutes of coil-and-strike math-rock dynamics punctuated by drum machine claps that suggest the Sacramento band might just be keeping their ear titled north towards the Bay Area's hip-hop scene.

• 

  Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

  of Montreal

  Polyvinyl Records

  Hissing Fauna is the third fantastic album in a row from Athens, GA, pop band Of Montreal, but this time the band departs from the previous formula of '60s psychedelic storytelling for more confessional lyrics set with a DayGlo new wave flare. Bandleader Kevin Barnes sings of his sad-sack adventures in a breathy, eager voice with falsetto used liberally for faux-sassy ironic commentary. Find him telling tales of Norway as an electronics-only... Talking Heads ("A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger"), rejecting a suitor who lacks "soul power" in an indie pop monologue ("Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider") and looking for a guru in the church of DFA Records ("Gronlandic Edit"). Put on the 12-minute "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal," a goth-tinged and psychosexually-charged dance track, and let Barnes take over the room with his unique, head-trip approach to stereo production.

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  Hey Girl, Hey

  Various Artists

  2012 | Polyvinyl Records
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  Longtime Companion

  Sonny & The Sunsets

  2012 | Polyvinyl Records

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  Celebration Rock

  Japandroids

  2012 | Polyvinyl Records

  Japandroids' Celebration Rock begins and ends with fireworks — not the county-fair variety, but the cheap, barely legal kind you set off in the woods with friends and then run away, giggling uncontrollably. The sound sets the tone for a sizzling, incandescent burst of a record, one that conjoins punk-rock fist-aloft solidarity and weepy heartland-rock sentimentality in one 35-minute-long bro-hug. Expect a lot of sloppy back-patting, acres of generous sentiment and a... surplus of the sorts of lines perfectly calibrated to shout joyously in the face of your closest friends. "We're lashing out at evil's sway tonight," for example. Or "Don't we have anything to live for?/ Well, of course we do, but until they come true/ We're drinking." It's a record that demands to be heard, and loved, in groups.
  
  Which doesn't make it mindless. As is usually the case with especially fierce good cheer, Celebration Rock is borne of desperation: The two-man Japandroids were minutes away from breaking apart, wilting under a lack of momentum, when they recorded its eight gasping, suitcase-compact anthems. Lead singer Brian King nearly died (perforated ulcer, an ailment about as far from "carefree rock 'n' roll" as you can get). A scan of the lyrics, excised from endorphins, unearths some fairly dark thoughts: "It's a lifeless life/ With no fixed address to give/ But you're not mine to die for anywhere, so I must live," King screams on "The House That Heaven Built." With just a guitar and a drum kit, meanwhile, the lifelong friends generate enough heat and momentum for an entire E Street band. Songs surge forward recklessly, explode, and then plow forward again. The relentless hurtling mirrors the philosophy expressed in the lyrics: Embrace life with the energy of an over-eager Labrador Retriever, no matter what it throws your way.

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  Post-Nothing

  Japandroids

  Polyvinyl Records

  A sad and funny and moving account of what it means to have a quarterlife crisis. Two twenty-something Canucks careen around Vancouver in the rain, missing ex-girlfriends, worrying about the rent, getting nostalgic for the old days when just getting drunk was enough. "You can keep tomorrow / After tonight we're not gonna need it," they insist, and they play like they're telling the truth: Brian King strikes his guitar like he's... burning through matches, David Prowse fist-fights his drum kit, distortion crackles with pent-up energy. Somewhere in all that noise is the sound of growing up — restlessly, reluctantly. "We used to dream," they sing, "Now we worry about dying."

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  Heart Like A River

  Ida

  Polyvinyl Records
• 

  Hall Music

  Loney Dear

  2011 | Polyvinyl Records

• 

  Some Racing, Some Stopping

  Headlights

  Polyvinyl Records

  Some Racing, Some Stopping opens with a steady humming organ, a twinkle of guitars and — shooting upward from the darkness — a soaring, pleading vocal. It's dramatic and it's perfect, the kind of prologue bigger bands break their backs trying to create. The second record from Illinois trio Headlights is full of casual beauty, moments of pop elegance that arrive with natural grace rather than with blunt force and blaring fanfare.
  
  Some... Racing was recorded in a farmhouse outside Champaign, IL, and the songs it contains are, appropriately, airy and utterly cloudless. Vocalists Tristan Wraight and Erin Fein sing like they're sharing secrets: their voices are low and cottony, gliding gently over lacy guitars and blinking vibraphone. Even when the tempo escalates — "April 2" is shoved along by a walloping backbeat — the voices remain subdued.
  
  The songs themselves are shimmering marvels; they don't hurtle so much as hydroplane, speeding forward a few inches above the ground. Fein's voice is light and cherry-flavored, and she drizzles it slowly across the length of each composition. Some Racing is the perfect tonic for fans of the small statement, a record for people who wished the world was full of more groups like The Field Mice. It's music that's meek but gorgeous.

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  American Football

  American Football

  2003 | EP/SINGLE
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  Aabenbaringen Over Aaskammen

  Casiokids

  2011 | Polyvinyl Records

• 

  Two Thousand and Ten Injuries

  Love Is All

  2010 | Polyvinyl Records

  Love Is All are at their most charming when they transform nerve-wracking anxiety into perky post-punk rave-ups. They've calmed down a bit on their third full-length, Two Thousand And Ten Injuries, but their songs still burst with manic, joyful noise. The album, written and recorded while the Swedish quintet had no label, is their most playful to date. Left to their own devices, the group have expanded their artistic range, yielding both... sunny Turtles-esque psychedelia (on "Kungen") and Slits-like punk-reggae (on "False Pretense").
  
  As always, the band's songs showcase the unique voice of Josephine Olausson, whose trebly yelp conveys as much self-deprecating humor as jittery angst. She can sound vulnerable and delicate, but most often she comes across like a tiny person standing up with determination against something rather enormous — even if it's just the anxieties percolating in her head. The band's lyrics and music are small in scale, giving voice to brief moments of panic without losing perspective or blowing them too far out of proportion. Even when the tracks get especially uptight and antsy, as on "Less Than Thrilled" and the bold single "Repetition", the band never get bleak or overbearing. Instead, the combination of Olausson's oddball wit and the band's bright guitar tones and springy beats maintain a tone of world-weary levity throughout the record.
  
  Whereas many of the band's older songs leaned hard on the rhythm section for hooks, they've become more confident with melody, resulting in particularly hummable tunes in the rowdy opener "Bigger Bolder" and the lilting album highlight "Never Now." They also sound more assured on relatively relaxed cuts like "A Side In A Bed" and "Take Your Time", allowing for moments of prettiness without losing too much momentum. Love Is All have evolved into a more well-rounded band without sacrificing a trace of their distinct identity — they've loosened up, but thankfully, they're still tightly wound.

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• 

  Skeletal Lamping

  of Montreal

  2008 | Polyvinyl Records

  Any good concept album has a compelling character at its core, and Skeletal Lamping is no exception. Protagonist Georgie Fruit isn't just any transgender middle-aged black man — he has undergone multiple sex changes, making him the perfect alter ego for charismatic and chameleonic Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes, whose musical persona is capricious, unsettled and over-the-top. And also very horny.
  
  Skeletal Lamping is packed with blush-worthy come-ons draped in imitation-Prince squeals. Georgie,... throughout the album, comes across alternately as a savvy bedroom connoisseur and a disposable plaything for the sexually curious. He's a product of the disco era, and his after-bar stories are set to limber bass lines and a driving beat. But the quieter moments reveal his insecurity, his damaged self-esteem and contemplation of yet another surgery.
  
  Despite the personal crisis that shapes the album's narrative, Barnes, perhaps unsurprisingly, never loses his playful side. In "For Our Elegant Caste," for instance, he refers to Georgie's transformation as "a freaky permutation, something like Voltron," making clear that Georgie's stints under the knife didn't sacrifice his sense of humor.
  
  As they have graduated and mutated from modest indie pop to extravagant, massive glam-pop, Of Montreal's vision has become grander, and their approach more intricate. An album like Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? with its kaleidoscopic sound palette (and album cover) piled sounds and ideas and moods and approaches in elegant layers. Skeletal Lamping takes it even farther, with results that require patience. But with its majestic three-part falsetto harmonies and engrossing narrative, it's patience well spent.

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  Life Like

  Joan Of Arc

  2011 | Polyvinyl Records
• 

  Team Boo

  Mates Of State

  2003 | Polyvinyl Records

• 

  The Sunlandic Twins

  of Montreal

  Polyvinyl Records

  Coming off their highly praised seventh album, the 2004 psych-pop masterpiece Satanic Panic in the Attic, Of Montreal was confronted with a (not unwelcome) problem: how to follow-up? The surprising solution: synths and cheeky dance smarts. Unapologetic Elephant 6 harmonies and kooky conceptualism remain, but The Sunlandic Twins is less Brian Wilson, more Afrobeat boogie and Can propulsion smacked wacky by a post-Eno David Byrne. "The Party's Crashing Us" is the essence... of this: leader Kevin Barnes 'too-smart-for-pop verbosity turns sincere for love while a dozen disco melodies vie for space around the bass. They all end up winning.

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  The Nature Of Maps

  Matt Pond PA

  2002 | Polyvinyl Records
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  At Home With Owen

  Owen

  Polyvinyl Records

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  Places Like This

  Architecture In Helsinki

  Polyvinyl Records

  Architecture in Helsinki went for a different mood on their third studio album, and you can hear it from the moment Cameron Bird starts spitting lyrics (rather than singing them in his usual sweet, wavering falsetto) on the cowbell-driven banger "Red Turned White." The Australian twee-poppers have grown a little less adorable, but they're also a lot more fun.
  
  2005's In Case We Die theatrically wandered, like an epic saga performed on... a children's stage. The instrumentation was grand-scale — as if the teacher had insisted that everyone get a chance to play the trumpet and harp and violin. It sure was fun, but it's tough to call yourself a rock band when your highest decibel levels are reserved for the Sesame Street shout-along of "It's 5!"
  
  With Places Like This, Architecture radiates a block party vibe — their songs are both less complicated and a little more wild. They've even tossed their usual strings and instead funk things up with steel drums and congas, sounding as if they've taken their dancefloor cues from Talking Heads and the B-52's. (Bird and the band's female members even conjure a decent Fred Schneider-and-the girls impression for the "hey-ya-ya" refrains on "Hold Music.") That's a pretty good way to get people to stop calling you precious and start shaking their stuff.

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  Ghost Town

  Owen

  2011 | Polyvinyl Records
• 

  Long Knives Drawn

  Rainer Maria

  2002 | Polyvinyl Records

• 

  Share the Joy

  Vivian Girls

  2011 | Polyvinyl Records

  After releasing two albums and multiple singles equally in love with girl-group harmonies and cassette-tape fidelities, the Vivian Girls decided it was time for a change. On Share The Joy, producer and Woods member Jarvis Taveniere turns down the static and sharpens the focus. As if that wasn't enough of a transformation, the record kicks opens with a six-minute tune ("The Other Girls") that has little in common with the loose,... punchy pop people have come to expect. Despite these cosmetic changes, though, the Girls haven't forgotten their roots — the one-two punch of "Sixteen Ways" and "Take It As It Comes" are on-point homages to the girl groups they strive to emulate, while "Lake House" shows they haven't forgotten how to make an enjoyable ruckus — they're just seeing what else they're capable of. It's not as radical as, say, changing their name to the Vivian Women, but it's clear from Share The Joy that these girls are growing up.

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• 

  Let It Sway

  Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin

  2010 | Polyvinyl Records

  Surviving the hype-mongering early stages for a buzz band can be a treacherous thing. Fortunately, the Missouri quartet Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin have the chops, and the wherewithal, to withstand the buzz's fading light. Their third full-length, Let It Sway, is a power-pop crowd-pleaser, rippling with shout-alongs and hand-clap revivals. "Banned (By The Man)" is as straightforward and charming as they get — give some credit goes to production guru... and Death Cab For Cutie guitarist Chris Walla, whose sharp and steady hand gives this album the same gleeful, exploding joy as so many of the other indie pop bands (Ra Ra Riot, The Thermals, Tegan and Sara) he's helped shepherd in recent years. Someone Loves You Boris Yeltsin are lucky and good. Sometimes you need both.

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  All Your Summer Songs

  Saturday Looks Good To Me

  2003 | Polyvinyl Records
• 

  Broom

  Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin

  Polyvinyl Records

• 

  Deerhoof vs. Evil

  Deerhoof

  2011 | Polyvinyl Records

  After 16 years, 11 albums and numerous personnel changes, San Francisco's Deerhoof are coming of age. Far from slowing down, on Deerhoof Vs. Evil their itchy, primary-colored avant-rock is fuelled on compressed energy. Their ball-of-lightning sound fizzles with disorienting production tics — flashes of dub, electronic percussion and dropped-in abstract interludes, which throw weird angular shapes beneath bassist Satomi Matsuzaki's ludicrously catchy stream-of-consciousness vocal hooks.
  
  Twin guitarists John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez dominate... the mix, equally comfortable with delicate Spanish guitar trills ("No One Asked To Dance"), kora-like repetitions ("Must Fight Current"), overdriven Keith Richards licks ("Secret Mobilization") and thick, dueling power chords. Greg Saunier's drums — informed by both house and hip-hop — clatter and worry the music along. "The Merry Barracks" — written, according to Satomi, to overcome her fear of low bass frequencies from cars — riffs on a glam rock bass line stomp; instrumental "Let's Dance the Jet" with its pungent, soupy electric organ, seems lifted from the soundtrack for a Greek film; Brazilian Tropicalia lurks behind the stream-of-consciousness "Must Fight Current." Rapturous closer "Almost Everyone, Almost Always" points to a parallel universe in which the band is a more synth-dominated outfit. The huge-sounding Deerhoof Vs. Evil was entirely self-recorded and produced in a variety of practice spaces and basements. Evildoers of the world, be very afraid.

  more »

• 

  Pershing

  Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin

  Polyvinyl Records
• 

  Reptilians

  STRFKR

  2011 | Polyvinyl Records

• 

  Frame & Canvas

  Braid

  2003 | Polyvinyl Records

  If Braid hadn't split in 1999, there's no telling the millions they would be counting in the mainstremo era. Frame and Canvas is a near-perfect distillation of late-'90s emo, a mass of fist pumps, slow kisses and deep sighs. "Never Will Come For Us," in which Chris Broach and Bob Nanna trade heart-sick barbs, and "A Dozen Roses," a too-fast ballad (or too-slow rave-up) about — what else? — rejection set to... a Polaroid-perfect guitar progression, were both tailor-made for crushed-out mix-tapes. Your sister loves this album, and so should you.

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• 

  Always

  Xiu Xiu

  2012 | Polyvinyl Records
• 

  Home Acres

  Aloha

  2010 | Polyvinyl Records

• 

  False Priest

  of Montreal

  2010 | Polyvinyl Records

  Right — the Prince stuff. Let's start there. "Our Riotous Defects," track two of False Priest, Kevin Barnes's 11th album either with or as Of Montreal, channels Prince in a way that's even more direct than usual. Over the last few Of Montreal albums, Barnes hasn't been shy about his desire to come as close as possible to that sound and standard while still remaining his weirdo, hyperkinetic, Athens, Georgia-bred indie-pop self.... But he's seldom imitated him so directly as he does on "Defects" — specifically, the verses are done in an exacting, precise imitation of the spoken coda of "If I Was Your Girlfriend," from Sign 'O' the Times.
  
  Especially on Sign, Prince was entirely comfortable tweaking his own persona — playing it up here, undercutting it slightly there. Nothing about the "Girlfriend" coda, in which Prince's voice is slightly sped up, is un-self-aware. But Barnes's use of that nattering tone is utilized in the service of a bunch of lines that up the self-awareness factor a few notches: "I know it's fucked, but just before we got together, I even hooked up with one of your cousins just to feel somehow closer to you. 'Cause I knew, like, you guys were best friends and you talked every day, and it was thrilling to touch something that had touched you." Sure, he's singing to the "crazy girl" of the chorus ("I supported your stupid little blog, got a Bowflex," he recounts, bewildered), but he's also singing, as a listener, to Prince himself, about hearing yourself in another person's song — or of wanting to get inside that song and make it your own.
  
  Jon Brion helped produce False Priest; two songs feature Janelle Monáe; one has Solange Knowles. "Thick R&B influence" were Barnes's words to Pitchfork. It's not a surprise to see Brion in that company — his work with Fiona Apple got the attention of a lot of R&B fans even before he worked with Kanye West on Late Registration in 2005. But Brion brings a buffeting style that meshes well with Barnes's hyperkineticism. The last Of Montreal album, 2008's Skeletal Lamping, was dense and jagged and sharp-edged; False Priest goes down smoothly without diluting any of what makes Of Montreal it billowing, weird self.
  
  But what Brion really brings out — and I now feel foolish for not hearing it earlier — is how very high-school-musical Of Montreal is. That makes sense: The band was spawned from Elephant 6's collectivist ethos, which Stars and Arcade Fire seem to have picked up, and those groups have a similar gang-putting-on-a-show aspect as well. Of course, the reason I feel foolish noticing this now is that Of Montreal are always in costume and makeup. They use stage props, for Christ's sake. Their last album was narrative about Georgie Fruit, a black transsexual character that hybridizes earlier, more unaffectedly heroic rock archetypes from Bowie on out.
  
  Archetypes and icons are Barnes's lyrical preoccupation. (The False Priest itself is an archetype — think of Jimmy Swaggart begging forgiveness of his sins.) "I thought she was my Annie Hall, or at least Ali MacGraw," he sings on "Famine Affair," which despite its Sly Stone-tweaking title could have been on a Blondie record. "How can I trust my fractious heart/ When I know I have the enemy gene?" he and Monáe ask together on "Enemy Gene." (Rather than showing off, Monáe slips easily and well into a helpmate role both here and on "Defects.") There's always something askew in his universe, though he's happy to dance around it — and indeed, the music sounds spryer than it has since 2005's The Sunlandic Twins.
  
  "Enemy Gene" is lovely, almost Christmassy pop in early Todd Rundgren mode — and Barnes has a lot in common with Rundgren. Both are smart, and smart-alecky, multi-instrumentalist studio rats with a taste for R&B and the off-kilter. Bringing Brion into the mix just makes it more apparent. The squee-sliding synths that climax "Hydra Fancies" are the kind of touch you'd expect from Something/Anything?; on an earlier Of Montreal album they might seem harsher. Here they fizz with delight.
  
  Martin may sound a bit silly singing, "You look like a playground to me, playa," on "Sex Karma," his duet with Knowles the younger. But his weirdo take on R&B really does groove when that's what he's aiming for. "Girl Named Hello" is a bustling disco track — it could have come out on P&P around 1980 — that features Barnes doing a few voices (curling falsetto, absent-minded rasp) to make it sound all the more offhanded. Then there's "Like a Tourist," the album's other big Prince swipe — the wide-swinging drum track effectively channels Graffiti Bridge while the haughty, throaty spoken stuff is closer to the snide parts of "Sexuality." I almost expect Barnes to say, "What? No flash again?" But on this album, that wouldn't be the case at all.

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• 

  Fluorescence

  Asobi Seksu

  2011 | Polyvinyl Records

  Brooklyn-based nu-gaze quartet Asobi Seksu have, on their fifth album, worked out both what they're best at, and when to stretch. Long-recognized as being in thrall to the sonic textures of My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins (and proudly displaying album artwork by legendary 4AD in-house designer Vaughan Oliver), on Flourescence they purvey those textures beautifully while simultaneously leavening them with a host of outside influences — from '60s girl-group pop to... unabashed tempo-mangling Prog. If they've occasionally stuttered since their 2006 breakthrough Citrus, they're now in thrilling voice again. "Fluorescence" flickers with florid genius.
  
  Yuki Chikudate's high-pitched coos assert themselves over busy, blistering arrangements that are loaded with treated guitars and squalling keyboards, while the rhythm section rustles up energy to match Animal Collective or the Flaming Lips. "Trails" imagines Karen O and Kevin Shields competing for dominance, but Chikudate's blend of stridency and innocence is a beacon through the layers, and something that could have been cacophonous ends up mighty catchy. "My Baby" skips along on stop-start beats and shivering sonic sidebars before exploding into euphoria; "Perfectly Crystal" reboots classic shoegazing tropes until they gleam with new life. The album's centerpiece is "Leave the Drummer Out There" which glides from hectic to frenetic, then shape-shifts into contrasting phases and moods with gravitas that wouldn't shame early Genesis. It's perhaps as a counterbalance that "Sighs" is as sweet as Blondie's chirpier side, but by "Pink Light" the band is reaffirming their trippier, endlessly echoing motifs.
  
  Dream-pop isn't in short supply these days, but Asobi Seksu (colloquial Japanese for "playful sex") thrive through a mix of exuberance and guile. Their fusion of charm and chaos isn't easy to achieve but always sounds fluid and sparkling. Everything they've absorbed from their idols pours out as bright light.

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“Mama Kin”

• 

  Aerosmith

  Aerosmith

  2011 | Columbia

  This rave-up about the gypsy life and the lost innocence that results has a simple riff, coy lyrics, and just enough horns to make it boogie; Joe Perry's guitar solo shows off his chops but doesn't sacrifice melody to the gods of virtuosity. Two decades after its release on Aerosmith's debut, it was – appropriately – covered by the '80s heirs to Aerosmith's rock-hedonist throne: Guns N' Roses.

“S.O.S. (Too Bad)”

• 

  Get Your Wings

  Aerosmith

  2011 | Columbia

  This taut rocker about Tyler getting in trouble with the ladies has an almost power-pop-like pep, though its propulsive low end is firmly rooted in the blues. The "Toxic Twins" pairing of Steven Tyler and Perry is in peak form here, with Tyler's wail and Perry's slide down the fretboard in perfect unison on the chorus.

“Round And Round”

• 

  Toys In The Attic

  Aerosmith

  2011 | Columbia

  Offering a hint of the bleary-eyed dankness that would come on Aerosmith's next album, "Round and Round" is a bleak, circular grind, the band powering through an increasingly urgent endless-loop riff while Tyler pleads his romantic case to a less-than-forthcoming lover. That the music sounds better suited to soundtracking an apocalypse than a breakup is probably a large part of the point.

“Nobody’s Fault”

• 

  Rocks

  Aerosmith

  2011 | Columbia

  Rocks is the pinnacle of Aerosmith's early years – a dark, swampy album dredged up from the blues' deepest abyss. On "Nobody's Fault," Tyler is in street-corner preacher mode, warning of fire and brimstone and dark days because, "Man has known and now he's blown it/ upside-down and hell's the owner sound"; behind him, the band chugs away through a dazed and confused elegy for the now-dimmed world around them.

“Bright Light Fright”

• 

  Draw The Line

  Aerosmith

  2011 | Columbia

  Joe Perry handles lead vocals on this speedy track, which has a squealing sax and a pumping beat that recalls a hangover-borne rush of blood to the head. Which is appropriate, given that it's about the horror that can only be experienced during a Morning After.

“Lord Of The Thighs”

• 

  Live! Bootleg

  Aerosmith

  2011 | Columbia

  Tyler is operating at peak levels of lasciviousness on this dogged cut from Get Your Wings; the version on the '70s concert compilation Live! Bootleg, recorded during a Chicago concert in 1978, stretches "Thighs" to its breaking point, turning its ending into a sweaty, extended tug-of-war. (The Breeders' cover is also worth checking; bassist Josephine Wiggs took over vocal duties, offering an almost-blasé reading of the lyrics as the band pummels its... instruments behind her.)

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“No More No More”

• 

  Toys In The Attic

  Aerosmith

  2011 | Columbia

  As Aerosmith got bigger, the travails of fame began to creep further into their lyrics – though it's a credit to the band's self-aware swagger that those tales rarely dip into self-pity. "No More No More" opens with a riff that could almost be called airy, then adds some back-of-the-barroom piano; both provide a fever-dream counterpoint to Tyler's stories about the road's less glamorous aspects.

“Draw The Line”

• 

  Classics Live II

  Aerosmith

  2011 | Columbia

  The chiming title cut of Aerosmith's second album possesses even more energy in this live version, taken from a 1978 show in southern California. (It appears on a live compilation celebrating Perry's mid '80s return to the Aerosmith fold.) The interplay between the riffs, Perry's squawking lead, and Tyler's matter-of-fact delivery is at peak form, and even though this version doesn't have the down-from-heaven backing vocals of the take committed to wax... it does pack a nice left hook.

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“Jaded”

• 

  Just Push Play

  Aerosmith

  2001 | Columbia

  This 1999 track has a chunky riff that could have easily been lifted from one of the indie-rock darlings dominating college radio at the time – but Aerosmith turn it into just one segment of a grand look back at caddishness gone by, with Tyler lamenting his assistance in innocence lost and buried-in-the-mix strings underscoring his guilt.

“Lick & A Promise”

• 

  Rocks

  Aerosmith

  2011 | Columbia

  The intro of "Lick & A Promise" – Joey Kramer's frenetic drumming fading in, growing louder as it gets more intense – sets up the lyrical conceit of this jumpy tune, which follows an up-from-the-depths rock star who's trying to juggle as many women as he can while also pleasing crowds night after night. It's a testament to the "na-na-na-na-na" pre-chorus's sublimity that the love-'em-and-leave-'em conceit doesn't seem too troubling.

• 

  Stridulum

  Zola Jesus

  2010 | EP/SINGLE

  Nika has been on the label since she was a teenager. She is our daughter, our sister and our best friend. Watching her raw talent grow over the last four years into an unstoppable global takeover is awe-inspiring. Every time she hands in an album she outdoes herself, refusing to stay stagnant or create the same work and over again. Conatus is no exception; it is the sound of her crystallizing her... ideas into a totally uncharted sonic landscape. We could not be more proud of her and are delighted that the rest of the world is finally catching on.

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• 

  The Horror

  Pop. 1280

  2012 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution
• 

  Playin' In Time With the Deadbeat

  Slug Guts

  2012 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

• 

  Open Your Heart

  The Men

  2012 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

  The Men are a true punk band in the classic D.I.Y. sense of the word. These are the dudes we call when we need to borrow a drum kit at 2 a.m., or when we need 300 LPs screened in 24 hours. There is no “wave” that can contain them, and they intend to keep it that way. To support their first record, they embarked on a U.S. tour -- self-booked —... that found them playing 47 shows in 39 days. Open Your Heart was one of the most gripping releases we've ever listened to.

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• 

  Through Donkey Jaw

  Amen Dunes

  2011 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution
• 

  Under the Pale Moon

  Wymond Miles

  2012 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

• 

  Horribles Parade

  Gary War

  2009 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

  New Raytheonport absolutely blew our minds the first time we heard it. We were thrilled to have the opportunity to work with him on his follow-up LP, Horribles Parade, which exponentially exceeded our expectations. Gary War's singular vision is absolutely inspiring; he is one of the most forward-thinking, psychedelic minds out there. Genius is an understatement.

• 

  Immer Etwas

  Nice Face

  2010 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution
• 

  The Complete Discography

  13th Chime

  2009 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

• 

  Cult of Youth

  Cult of Youth

  2011 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

  Sean Ragon has been a friend for some time, and in the early days, Cult of Youth was his solo project. Rooted largely in neo-folk tradition, Sean made some amazing records on his own and worked with some labels we really respect. It wasn't really until the first time we saw them as a full band that we realized what their potential could be. They delivered one of the finest records we... have ever heard, and they have absolutely no counterpart in the current “indie” climate.

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• 

  Eight Ways to Start a Day

  The Cultural Decay

  2009 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution
• 

  The World is Just a Shape to Fill the Night

  Case Studies

  2011 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

• 

  Rise of the Green Gorilla

  Timmy's Organism

  2010 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

  Timmy Vulgar is the last bastion of authentic, weird punk. Timmy is a true artist; he makes his own videos, designs his own albums and posters, and creates perfect other worlds where aliens and humans co-exist in a psychedelic punk utopia. He is a kind and wonderful asset to our family, and truly supports his local Detroit scene and the punk scene at large. The world would be a terribly boring place... without him.

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The Blueprint Makers

• 

  Superfly

  Curtis Mayfield

  2007 | Rhino

• 

  Rust Never Sleeps

  Neil Young

  1979 | Rhino
• 

  The Very Best Of Solomon Burke

  Solomon Burke

  2005 | Rhino Atlantic

• 

  Astral Weeks

  Van Morrison

  1968 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

• 

  Closing Time

  Tom Waits

  1990 | Rhino/Elektra
• 

  Purple Rain

  Prince

  1984 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

Art School

• 

  Bona Drag

  Morrissey

  1990 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

• 

  The Best Of

  Joy Division

  2008 | Rhino/Warner Bros.
• 

  Songs To Learn And Sing

  Echo and the Bunnymen

  2004 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

• 

  Remain In Light

  Talking Heads

  1983 | Warner Bros.

• 

  Marquee Moon

  Television

  1994 | Elektra Records
• 

  Second Edition

  Public Image Ltd.

  2005 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

• 

  Psychocandy

  Jesus And Mary Chain

  2004 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

• 

  The Queen Is Dead

  The Smiths

  1986 | Rhino
• 

  Loveless

  My Bloody Valentine

  2003 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

• 

  Entertainment!

  Gang Of Four

  2005 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

Dark & Stormy

• 

  Richard D. James Album

  Aphex Twin

  2005 | Rhino/London-Sire

• 

  Heaven And Hell

  Black Sabbath

  2008 | Rhino/Warner Bros.
• 

  Holy Diver

  Dio

  1983 | Rhino/Warner Bros.
• 

  Cowboys From Hell

  Pantera

  1990 | Rhino
• 

  Violator [digital version]

  Depeche Mode

  2006 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

Loud & Thrashy

• 

  Nevermind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols

  Sex Pistols

  1977 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

• 

  Let It Be

  The Replacements

  2006 | Ryko/Rhino
• 

  The Stooges

  The Stooges

  2003 | Rhino/Elektra

• 

  Kick Out The Jams

  MC5

  1999 | Rhino

• 

  Electric Warrior

  T. Rex

  2007 | Rhino/Warner Bros.
• 

  Van Halen II

  Van Halen

  2007 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

• 

  The Real Thing

  Faith No More

  1997 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

• 

  Summertown

  The Mayflies USA

  1998 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: I think we have to give [the dB's'] Chris Stamey some credit for this. We had an awareness of the band, and we'd worked with them on an EP before this record, but Chris was really pushing them to us. We thought this was just a perfect indiepop record. Going back and listening to it, I still feel the same way. I think that there's tons of energy in this band... – there's three different singers, they knew how to write great songs at a young age, and they had a lot of attitude, which was something that was difficult to harness. They were basically a rock 'n' roll band playing pop songs.

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• 

  Jet Set

  Los Straitjackets

  2012 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Hansen: You never know, with this band, what their big idea is going to be from one record to the next. Whether it's Sing Along with Los Straitjackets, or with this, their most recent record, where they pulled in this amazing producer and took it to the next level in terms of of sonic production. It's fun to work with a band that's really open to a lot of ideas.
  Dicker: They... totally get it. They're an instrumental band, and you can only put out so many records like that. So they really do try to come up with a different concept every time. Everything they do is very funny, and from the get-go, they wanted to be where they have no business being. The silliest possible thing you could come up with? That's what they want to do.

  more »
• 

  Down With Wilco

  The Minus 5

  2004 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: Scott [McCaughey] called us one day and was excited about the fact that we had Nick Lowe on the label. He basically said, "I'd love to be on the same label as Nick Lowe." [Laughs.] That made things pretty easy. And then he was like, "It just so happens that I've just finished this record. The band on the record is Wilco. Jeff [Tweedy] sings a couple of songs, but I... do most of the singing. It's called Down With Wilco. Do you think that would be something that would interest you?" We were like, "Fuck yeah!" Scott's just got this bottomless energy for music. It never stops. When he was on the road touring with R.E.M., he'd be recording in his hotel room after the shows.

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• 

  While You Weren't Looking

  Caitlin Cary

  2002 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: We put out this compilation early on called Revival, and it had a Whiskeytown song on it. So there was this connection with Caitlin already from there. Add to that the fact that we were based locally, and that she was just getting started on her own without Ryan [Adams], and it seemed like it was the perfect fit. Essentially, nobody knew who she was in terms of her solo stuff... – it was brand new. We were just proud of where we were able to take this. It was a big record for us, because we were heavily involved in getting her on the road, getting her overseas. Our success with her definitely attracted other artists. People would be like, "I saw that record everywhere."

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• 

  Sonik Kicks

  Paul Weller

  2012 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: This kid in our office knew we were fans of Paul Weller, and he came up and mentioned one day that he saw that Paul Weller had a new record coming out in the UK, but there was no US street date. We had learned early on is that the worst that can happen is that someone says no, so we basically cold-called his UK label and asked to put this... out in the US. Our timing was great – though we didn't get to put it out until six months after [it came out overseas], we still managed to sell more than his last record did. We don't have a ton to work with – he doesn't tour in the States as much as we would like him to because it doesn't make financial sense. But this record is just ambitious – it's definitely more on the psych side of things, that sort of English psych that Paul grew up loving. It's a very creative record – he's just constantly stretching the borders of what he's done.

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• 

  ¡Let Freedom Ring!

  Chuck Prophet

  2009 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Hansen: Working with Chuck is more than a pleasure. What was great about this record is that when we heard it, it was like, "Man, I think this might be Chuck's best record." In terms of songwriting, there's full, memorable songs on there. I think Chuck feels really strongly about this record, and it clearly matched up with everybody's feelings here. When that happens, it's a magic moment. It's a record that... will continue to leave a lasting impression.

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• 

  Conductor

  The Comas

  2004 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: They're a band we always did fun stuff with. The record before this, we did the record release show at a roller rink. We rented out a roller rink, and all the mass media from Chapel Hill – all three people! – plus all the record stores were there. We had a ton of people, and it was just a fun thing to do – we had a big keg in... the middle of the floor. For this record, we filmed this movie, and did a party at the local theatre. We really feel like this band should have been a huge success.

  more »
• 

  I Can See The Future

  Eleni Mandell

  2012 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: When we heard this record, we just thought it was something special. There was a maturity about her songwriting – she has this attitude about what she does, I wouldn't say it's dark, but there's something slightly off about it.

• 

  Ashgrove

  Dave Alvin

  2004 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Hansen: Dave's songwriting and his records are really great, but what really holds this guy is his constant interaction on the road. When you go to a Dave Alvin shows, you're seeing some of the best roadhouse guitar playing you could possibly see, along with the gritty, road-worn history that he's been delivering his whole life. It's a real pleasure to work with someone who has a lifetime of playing on the... road.
  Dicker: We've just always been fans of Dave's. We didn't have a pre-existing relationship or anything – we just liked him a lot, and were always talking to him. Dave's just one of the best. He plays every night, he drives the van himself – he's in the same lineage as the classic blues guys.

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• 

  KEEPER

  John Doe

  2011 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: John is probably best known for leading the L.A.-based band X, but as a songwriter, he has matured into a very special force. His songs still have the ability to rock you, and an edginess that it seems like he invented. There are some truly soft moments on this that suck you in completely. In contrast to his other records, when he wrote Keeper, he was truly in a good place.... Which I think was challenging to him as a songwriter, but he obviously found a way to deliver, and then some.

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• 

  Take a Good Look

  Fleshtones

  2008 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Hansen: I honestly think this is the best Fleshtones album. Not many people would think of this band as "classic American songwriters," but I think this album shows how well they've mastered a variety of rock songwriting styles. It all comes together quite well. I remember reading a book about the Brill Building called Always Magic in the Air shortly before I heard Take A Good Look, and it really struck me... that, on this record, these guys have put together songs that could be from that classic era of American songwriting. They aren't just doing what they have done for the past 35 or so years – they're continuing to improve as songwriters.

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• 

  Wildwood

  Chatham County Line

  2010 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: Yep Roc has worked with Chatham County Line from the get go. They used to open for Tift Merritt's band the Carbines, so we saw them early on. They were never really a traditional bluegrass band, but they had all the elements of one: banjo, fiddle, no drums. They stood for something that really engaged young people as well. They had an energy and an attitude that spoke to the kids,... but the maturity of their songwriting appealed to people of all ages. This is their most country record probably, but it leans on a West Coast vibe more than it does, say, popular country. And the songwriting just soars.

  more »
• 

  Never Hear the End of It

  Sloan

  Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Hansen: We were always fans of Sloan, but when we heard this album, we were blown away. Creatively, this was a big step forward for the band. It's 30 songs that mostly run into each other – kind of a "B-Side of Abbey Road" vibe. It just flowed amazingly. It's very ambitious, but each song delivers individually.

• 

  Sky Full of Holes

  Fountains of Wayne

  2011 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: This is the first album we'd done together, and it was a great start. It's probably pretty obvious we're big fans of power pop, and the band really nailed it on this record. They're super well-known for "Stacy's Mom," but to their hardcore fans it was always about their consistently great songs. Chris and Adam deliver some of the best of their career here.

• 

  More Bad Habits

  Ronnie Dawson

  2000 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Hansen: Ronnie Dawson was a force of nature, plain and simple. He made his records in the only way he knew how: completely raw, honest and bare bones rockin' without any extra padding. He'd always take time to get to know and talk to people on the road. He was a truly caring individual, and was also quick to make sure you were taking care of yourself. He used to jog laps... around the van when he was gassing up to keep himself as fit as possible. He was a big runner. Best of all, he could kill you on stage with his smile or his fierce-but-hypnotic guitar attack. He is missed. If you need to hear the best of what rockabilly music is all about, and you like your songs about food and good times, this is the album for you.

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• 

  The Convincer

  Nick Lowe

  2001 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

  Dicker: I had known Nick Lowe from before we started Yep Roc. When he came around to wanting to do a new record, we just kept in touch with him. We were fortunate enough to build up our infrastructure here to be able to do a good job with it. That still is one of our proudest moments – we took that record and sold more than any of his previous independent... releases. It was a really great thing. We were just able to connect to his fans.

  more »

Also On Sale

• 

  I Often Dream of Trains

  Robyn Hitchcock

  2007 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  Body Of Song

  Bob Mould

  Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  New Seasons

  The Sadies

  2007 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  V.O.T.E.

  Chris Stamey

  Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  Learn to Sing Like a Star

  Kristin Hersh

  Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  Oceans Apart

  The Go-Betweens

  Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  Once Around

  The Autumn Defense

  2010 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  Honey In The Hive

  The Bigger Lovers

  2004 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  I'll Be Lightning

  Liam Finn

  2008 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  Little Moon

  Grant - Lee Phillips

  2009 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  Acrobats

  Peggy Sue

  2011 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye
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  Underwater Moonlight

  The Soft Boys

  2010 | Yep Roc Records / Redeye

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  Millions Now Living Will Never Die

  Tortoise

  2004 | Thrill Jockey

  Beautiful, imposing, complex and impossible to understand – Millions Now Living is like Ulysses or Tree of Life or a French exchange student. The album reflects Chicago's obsession with modernism, the appropriation of old and sometimes obscure forms (krautrock, minimalism, dub, musique concrete) bent into new shapes. It's symptomatic of a citywide aesthetic: If you can't see that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot stood on the shoulders of Millions Now Living, may Ditka... have mercy on your soul. Critics were extolling this album's importance almost upon its release in 1997, and they were mostly correct about its mathematical elegance, sonic detail, and how 21-minute opener "Djed" might be the best album side of the decade. What's less well-documented is how many stoner epiphanies will alight from your speakers, as angels from Heaven or Humboldt Park.

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  Red Line

  Trans Am

  2004 | Thrill Jockey

  Pioneers of the ironic mustache and cheeky proponents of retro-futurism, Trans Am tend to get snickered off the post-rock dais. Truth be told, there can be a Sprockets-like element to the krautrocking sounds put forth by this Washington, D.C., trio – a vocoder-filled vein that Stereolab never touched. But the very notion that humor would have no place in the millennial indie-rock landscape is a pretty bleak situation. 2000 double album... Red Line represents the full range of Trans Am's power, from Queens of the Stone Age-style rock with vocals ("Play In The Summer") to primetime '70s prog ("Lunar Landing"). Few bands in history have simultaneously been this weird, arty and heavy.

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  Directions In Music

  Directions

  2004 | Thrill Jockey

  This is what a lost weekend in Chicago, circa 1996, sounded like. Former Tortoise member Bundy K. Brown summoned drummer Doug Scharin (Rex, June of 44, HIM, Codeine) and guitarist James Warden to Idful Studios to cut eight untitled instrumentals over two days and release them into the world under a Miles Davis-styled moniker. Directions in Music is a little-known gem in the catalog and the dark horse on this list, a... testament to the raw creativity and collaboration among these musicians. The album seems to consist of three movements, with the pair of opening numbers ("Untitled 1" and "Untitled 2") focused on Scharin's master-class percussion; tracks 3-5 bringing in rolling, pastoral guitar melodies; and tracks 6-8 providing long tonal stretches and psychedelic space-outs. Even listeners who are uninterested in post-rock or instrumental music will be engaged by this album's guitar hooks and generally brisk pace.

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  Scope

  Nobukazu Takemura

  2004 | Thrill Jockey

  Japanese composer Nobukazu Takemura made his name in American indie-rock circles as a remixer, deconstructor and collaborator with the likes of Tortoise, Yo La Tengo and DJ Spooky. When left to his own devices, as on 1999's Scope, he can still be heard dealing in pastiche, arranging discrete sounds – speaker-panning blips, buzzes and clicks – that are sometimes connected by melody and sometimes just left to bask in the wide-open spaces... of musique concrete. Scope is an appropriate title; the album ranges from the soft, bell-choir "Kepler" to the queasy, subsonic electronics of "Taw" to the ping-ponging, melting-Casio lullaby "Tiddler." For a supposedly minimalist composer, that's quite a maximalist thing to do.

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  In Evening Air

  Future Islands

  Thrill Jockey

  As any practiced insomniac will tell you, the human body can go for about 30 hours straight before things start getting weird. At that point, your ears get choosy, your voice drops to a slurred cackle, and your brain pops with the sort of deep-moored emotions that'll keep you awake for another half-day or so. It's a sensation both euphoric and disorienting, and it's evoked frequently on this Baltimore trio's gorgeously murky... third effort.
  
  Led by frontman Sam Herring, a troubled-mind wordsmith with a soulful growl, Future Islands merge synth-rock bombast with post-punk jitter. "Long Flight" and "Inch of Dust" are both hazy colossuses, pile-ons of drum-machine tick-tocks, airy keyboards and Herring's sinuous vocals, which switch from effete to engorged and back again. But the stand-out here is "Tin Man," a post-breakup gut-pour that finds Herring pleading over twinkling steel drums and blurry power chords: "You couldn't possibly know how much you mean to me," Herring sings in a gnarled choke. "You couldn't possibly look inside my tarot." Like much of In Evening Air, it's bleak and beautiful, the sort of track that inspires dreams or nightmares — assuming you can get to sleep in the first place.

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