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TOP 60 ALBUMS 1993-2003

10 Tortoise
Millions Now Living Will Never Die
(Thrill Jockey), 1996
What Millions Now Living essentially started was post-rock, the melding of a punk/indie ethos with jazz/dub aesthetics and, in the case of Tortoise, a surfeit of talent. It’s a fine line between “pushing boundaries” and “pretentious crap,” a distinction that became quite clear by the end of the ‘90s. Like Fugazi and Slint, Tortoise wasn’t only responsible for its own genius (an influential template of hypnotic, organic, complex instrumental rock) but also for the dozens of imitators left in its wake. So exciting and rare was the band’s ability that the gap between indie rock and avant-garde was momentarily bridged. (J. Gabriel Boylan)

9 Pavement
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
(Matador), 1994
Though 1992’s Slanted And Enchanted was the slack-rock shot heard ‘round the indie world, this follow-up is even more tuneful and focused. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain deftly mimics Big Star, the Fall and jazzman Dave Brubeck while infamously slagging Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots on the neo-country swing of “Range Life.” Though the creative motives behind these treasures can certainly be called into question—was the band honoring influences or mocking them?—what isn’t in doubt is that Crooked Rain is the most entertaining record from the genre’s most important band. (Matt Hickey)

8 Verve
Urban Hymns
(Virgin), 1997
The Verve was halfway to the cemetery by the time it convened to record Urban Hymns. A canyon of hatred separated its singer from its guitarist, and the group had been mercilessly garroted by drugs and bum sales. Urban Hymns is about recovery. It’s about understanding the drugs don’t work. It’s about confessing you miss her and you need her and you are useless without her. It’s about admitting you’re damaged and helpless, that you’re a slave to the money and every day you stare down the sneering cynics. It’s about realizing the sun still rises, that freedom comes and you are a lucky man. Laugh it off as emotional claptrap, file it under one-hit wonder or break down and admit what you already know to be true: Urban Hymns is the story of your life. (J. Edward Keyes)

7 Yo La Tengo
I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One
(Matador), 1997
The critical hoopla surrounding Yo La Tengo was finally justified with Heart, an aural scrapbook that houses three of the best feel-good pop songs of the ‘90s: “Sugarcube,” “Moby Octopad” and “Autumn Sweater.” Yo La Tengo showed disarming prowess by gobbling up the merits left by the burned-out shoegazer movement and marrying them to a future merely predicted by Tortoise, Aphex Twin, etc. The band’s Velvets/Feelies fixations were reworked into gold when they could’ve easily been left as filler. In that respect, Heart is perhaps the least lazy album from a decade that prided itself on flip, knockoff “accidental genius.” This is intentional. (Andrew Earles)

6 Breeders
Last Splash
(4AD/Elektra), 1993
After the Pixies split, Kim Deal trashed her second fiddle and took center stage for this muscular-on-the-outside, bittersweet-on-the-inside fuck-you to skinny white guys everywhere. Rougher than a dried-up tampon, Last Splash is an estrogen-steeped nightmare that follows the greasiest pork chop you’ve ever eaten: 15 hazy, hard, hook-heavy tracks that sweat more bullets than a trucker in the French Quarter. The Deal sisters’ stinging sadness and naked sincerity put Courtney to shame, and boys with any brains could take a lesson or two from the Breeders’ cut-throat power chords and cranky melodies. (Ashlea Halpern)

5 Belle And Sebastian
If You’re Feeling Sinister
(The Enclave), 1997
With a wink, a sigh and a bucketful of gallows humor, these six Glaswegians coaxed a small army of wilting intellects away from their dog-eared copies of Baudrillard and back into the record stores. If You’re Feeling Sinister was such an epoch-marker that other pop-culture zeitgeists can be traced directly back to it: an upswing in Nick Drake album sales, the quiet-is-the-new-loud phenomenon, cardigan sweaters. This was no small feat for a band that went to great lengths to shield itself from the public eye, politely shunning interviews and photo shoots. Yet what remains so compelling about Sinister is that it has none of the clichés that would come to typify its imitators. Stuart Murdoch’s characters are neither timid nor frail. They’re restless and horny and pissed-off, flipping fingers at the loutish football hooligans clogging the local pub. Other twee twerps are all flinches and shivers, but Belle And Sebastian has nothing but confidence—the kind of big-balled, brawny braggadocio that comes from knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that everyone else is beneath you. Even the tracks that lay bare Murdoch’s sad-angel voice (“The Fox In The Snow,” “The Boy Done Wrong Again”) feel like comforts rather than complaints. The songs possess an elegance that is almost baroque, ornamented with stately strings and gilded with glittering piano. Combined with Murdoch’s earthy humor, Sinister effortlessly manages the same marriage of cunning and class as Voltaire and Swift. “Nobody writes ‘em like they used to,” Murdoch brags regarding pop songs, “so it may as well be me.” And for one full record, that’s exactly what he did. (J. Edward Keyes)

4 Radiohead
OK Computer
(Capitol), 1997
Despite its very public ambivalence about actually occupying the role, the plain truth of the matter is that Radiohead made itself over as the patsy for The Rock That Was with OK Computer, a gorgeously realized songcycle fairly dripping with emotion and permanently at war with its own intelligence. If Dark Side Of The Moon—an oft-cited point of comparison—meant to play with your head, OK Computer gathers up all the empty words that constitute your daily datastream and mainlines them directly to your heart: “No Surprises” hurts so bad it’s nearly impossible to listen to, while “Airbag” is one of the grandest album-opening salvos ever attempted. Even the computer-voiced “Fitter Happier” finds a poetic rhythm with words that tell us what it’s like to be human at the end of the 20th century. When it was new, OK Computer drew as much attention for how it was marketed (variously labeled an Orwellian treatise concerning technology, a diatribe against Bill Gates, a complaint to mass media) as it did for its content, setting the stage for pretty much the rest of Radiohead’s career. But let’s not kid ourselves: In the future, exactly no one will care about any of that. Heard now, OK Computer doesn’t just sound fresh: It wails its visions to the same world whose future it was wrongly accused of predicting. But that was its beauty and its terror. It predicted nothing. It accurately detailed the emptiness that we all secretly fear is located down there where we’ve always been told our hearts were. That it does so while cribbing a lick from the Violent Femmes’ “A Promise” on near-funk non-anthem “Paranoid Android” is so perverse as to beggar the imagination. (John Darnielle)

3 Guided By Voices
Alien Lanes
(Matador), 1995
Employing the same Buckeye ingenuity that keeps the Goodyear blimp afloat, Bob Pollard can polish a turd with Budweiser until it shines with 24-carat radiance, transmuting tossed-off, six-pack ideas into classic-rock artifacts. As captain of the drunken boat that is Guided By Voices, Pollard has built a cottage industry by churning out cheap, miniature, melodic masterpieces with all the fidelity of a ham-radio broadcast. GBV’s golden era was concurrent with Pollard’s tenure as an elementary-school teacher; not surprisingly, much of his lyrical imagery evoked the storybook world of fourth graders—the robot boys that earn gold stars, the cheerleader coldfronts, the crowded gymnasiums—and the gnomes, elves and Cyclopes in the fairy tales he would read to them. Flying machines were another obsession: the striped white jets, the self-inflicted aerial nostalgia, the hardcore UFOs, the blimps going 90, the saucer-shaped coffins. The combination of this whimsical lyrical patchwork, delivered in Pollard’s faux-British accent and backed up by his bestest drinkin’ buddies windmilling behind him like a garage-band Who, put Dayton, Ohio, at the center of the indie universe—for a time, at least. If your passion for GBV slowly diminished as the production values of each ensuing record steadily evolved from dust-bunny-on-the-needle fuzzy to hockey-arena radio-friendly, this is the album that will get you back to where you once belonged. Alien Lanes reminds you why you first fell in love with the myth of beer-pounding, ex-teacher old dudes building four-track masterpieces in the basements of the Midwest. (Jonathan Valania)

2 Nirvana
In Utero
(DGC), 1993
Nevermind may get all the chicks, but Nirvana’s final studio album has aged infinitely better. The rumors preceding the release of In Utero (“It’s unlistenable noise,” “Steve Albini ruined it” and so forth) seem almost quaint 10 years on, particularly considering it houses some of Nirvana’s most tuneful moments. For example, the quad-“yeah” breakdown during “All Apologies” proves Kurt Cobain loved the Beatles as much as he loved Big Black—and probably quite a bit more. The album’s glorious opening lyric (“Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old”) serves as a one-line summation of Cobain’s life, capturing his every angle, from cynical bastard to unsung humorist to the grunge gang’s only real proponent of the pop-vocal melody. “Heart-Shaped Box” and the luminous “Dumb” follow suit, and poured from a throat less damaged, they might not even be considered dire. This isn’t to suggest In Utero ever comes across as sunny, but it’s the push-and-pull of the grindingly caustic and the undeniably pretty that sets the album apart both from its predecessors and all of what it inspired. Dirgey and abrasive, “Scentless Apprentice” makes perfect cosmic sense next to the gently disturbing “Rape Me,” and the record’s power stems from a band able to juxtapose them so convincingly. Just before its release—and after a bit of post-Albini tinkering by producer Scott Litt and the band—the terminally unsatisfied Cobain expressed near-complete satisfaction with In Utero. Even beside undeniably monumental older brother Nevermind, it shines. (Josh Modell)

1 Neutral Milk Hotel
In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
(Merge), 1998
To compare Neutral Milk Hotel’s second full-length to something as low and gauche as a rock record does it a damn grievous disservice. Jeff Mangum concocts a perilous landscape in which innocence must confront surreal dehumanization a la Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. The album is as puzzling and powerful as Roberto Benigni’s tragicomic film Life Is Beautiful. Lyrics about being fed “tomatoes and radio wires” and “playing pianos filled with flames” recall Bruno Schulz’s manner of writing from a child’s point of view. For a Cliff’s Notes version of the above: The Elephant 6 peaks here, channeling Lewis Carroll imagining a ghetto under fascism.
But to hell with explanations and critical detachment. Aeroplane isn’t a museum piece; it’s a kickass weeper, 40 minutes of a musical vision captured on tape. Mangum’s guitar accomplishes as much with the chords F, G and C as Mexican cuisine does with beans, rice and flour. His widowed vocals are often campfire-giddy during full-band punk tracks dotted with whoa-ohhhhs and deedidididees, only to go berserk with indignation on the folkier acoustic numbers. Why didn’t Robert Schneider ever produce another record (say, for Apples In Stereo) this perfectly, with soft walls of fuzz, palpably empty space and a crisp, thunderous drum sound? Horn-ridden, cinematic instrumental “The Fool” is either a circus waltz with Darth Vader or the exit march of a wedding whose principals later had to mail out handwritten apologies instead of prefab thank-you notes. Face it, folks, this outing is indie rock’s “Amazing Grace.”

A saw sings through the title track, which lyrically contemplates the improbability of finding love. Even the odds against existence are mystifying to Mangum when he bellows, “How strange it is to be anything at all.” Songs such as “Holland, 1945” hint at grandiose historical inquiries: Why was a watercoloring vegetarian allowed to slaughter so many people? The buoyant gravity of “The King Of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two & Three” begins with a rousing proclamation of love for Jesus Christ before it spirals into thrash pop. Resurrections are everyday occurrences on this album; Jesus is presented as fodder for what Mangum cites as the record’s theme: “endless endless.”

What the brazen hell is a zanzithophone? “Ghost” by itself wipes the listener out. Strum-and-trumpet finale “Oh Comely” is so entrancing, you’ll have to lob your smoke detector’s nine-volt across the foyer when your shrimp-primavera thing burns. Aeroplane is a pinnacle of everything embarrassing and triumphant about indie rock, a phantasmagoric masterpiece that’s the exact opposite of fitter, happier and more productive. “Semen stains the mountaintops,” Mangum sings. People choose to have “their faces filled with flies.” “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.” These lines, looking forward to the cracks through which our species will slip, are more beautiful—and dangerous—than your spouse or grandchildren or garden.

Though it boasts chaptered songcycles, Aeroplane will likely have no sequel. Mangum is rumored to be teetering on Syd Barrettville now, creating sound collages on his computer and insisting fragments are better than wholes. These regrettable circumstances make the album’s final seconds more poignant: A wooden chair bristles as Mangum rises and abandons his guitar. But I prefer to think that Mangum, having said so much, has resigned himself to listening. Perhaps refueling. (William Bowers)

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	TOP 60 ALBUMS 1993-2003
	10 Tortoise Millions Now Living Will Never Die (Thrill Jockey), 1996 What Millions Now Living essentially started was post-rock, the melding of a punk/indie ethos with jazz/dub aesthetics and, in the case of Tortoise, a surfeit of talent. It’s a fine line between “pushing boundaries” and “pretentious crap,” a distinction that became quite clear by the end of the ‘90s. Like Fugazi and Slint, Tortoise wasn’t only responsible for its own genius (an influential template of hypnotic, organic, complex instrumental rock) but also for the dozens of imitators left in its wake. So exciting and rare was the band’s ability that the gap between indie rock and avant-garde was momentarily bridged. (J. Gabriel Boylan)
	9 Pavement Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (Matador), 1994 Though 1992’s Slanted And Enchanted was the slack-rock shot heard ‘round the indie world, this follow-up is even more tuneful and focused. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain deftly mimics Big Star, the Fall and jazzman Dave Brubeck while infamously slagging Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots on the neo-country swing of “Range Life.” Though the creative motives behind these treasures can certainly be called into question—was the band honoring influences or mocking them?—what isn’t in doubt is that Crooked Rain is the most entertaining record from the genre’s most important band. (Matt Hickey)
	8 Verve Urban Hymns (Virgin), 1997 The Verve was halfway to the cemetery by the time it convened to record Urban Hymns. A canyon of hatred separated its singer from its guitarist, and the group had been mercilessly garroted by drugs and bum sales. Urban Hymns is about recovery. It’s about understanding the drugs don’t work. It’s about confessing you miss her and you need her and you are useless without her. It’s about admitting you’re damaged and helpless, that you’re a slave to the money and every day you stare down the sneering cynics. It’s about realizing the sun still rises, that freedom comes and you are a lucky man. Laugh it off as emotional claptrap, file it under one-hit wonder or break down and admit what you already know to be true: Urban Hymns is the story of your life. (J. Edward Keyes)
	7 Yo La Tengo I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One (Matador), 1997 The critical hoopla surrounding Yo La Tengo was finally justified with Heart, an aural scrapbook that houses three of the best feel-good pop songs of the ‘90s: “Sugarcube,” “Moby Octopad” and “Autumn Sweater.” Yo La Tengo showed disarming prowess by gobbling up the merits left by the burned-out shoegazer movement and marrying them to a future merely predicted by Tortoise, Aphex Twin, etc. The band’s Velvets/Feelies fixations were reworked into gold when they could’ve easily been left as filler. In that respect, Heart is perhaps the least lazy album from a decade that prided itself on flip, knockoff “accidental genius.” This is intentional. (Andrew Earles)
	6 Breeders Last Splash (4AD/Elektra), 1993 After the Pixies split, Kim Deal trashed her second fiddle and took center stage for this muscular-on-the-outside, bittersweet-on-the-inside fuck-you to skinny white guys everywhere. Rougher than a dried-up tampon, Last Splash is an estrogen-steeped nightmare that follows the greasiest pork chop you’ve ever eaten: 15 hazy, hard, hook-heavy tracks that sweat more bullets than a trucker in the French Quarter. The Deal sisters’ stinging sadness and naked sincerity put Courtney to shame, and boys with any brains could take a lesson or two from the Breeders’ cut-throat power chords and cranky melodies. (Ashlea Halpern)
	5 Belle And Sebastian If You’re Feeling Sinister (The Enclave), 1997 With a wink, a sigh and a bucketful of gallows humor, these six Glaswegians coaxed a small army of wilting intellects away from their dog-eared copies of Baudrillard and back into the record stores. If You’re Feeling Sinister was such an epoch-marker that other pop-culture zeitgeists can be traced directly back to it: an upswing in Nick Drake album sales, the quiet-is-the-new-loud phenomenon, cardigan sweaters. This was no small feat for a band that went to great lengths to shield itself from the public eye, politely shunning interviews and photo shoots. Yet what remains so compelling about Sinister is that it has none of the clichés that would come to typify its imitators. Stuart Murdoch’s characters are neither timid nor frail. They’re restless and horny and pissed-off, flipping fingers at the loutish football hooligans clogging the local pub. Other twee twerps are all flinches and shivers, but Belle And Sebastian has nothing but confidence—the kind of big-balled, brawny braggadocio that comes from knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that everyone else is beneath you. Even the tracks that lay bare Murdoch’s sad-angel voice (“The Fox In The Snow,” “The Boy Done Wrong Again”) feel like comforts rather than complaints. The songs possess an elegance that is almost baroque, ornamented with stately strings and gilded with glittering piano. Combined with Murdoch’s earthy humor, Sinister effortlessly manages the same marriage of cunning and class as Voltaire and Swift. “Nobody writes ‘em like they used to,” Murdoch brags regarding pop songs, “so it may as well be me.” And for one full record, that’s exactly what he did. (J. Edward Keyes)
	4 Radiohead OK Computer (Capitol), 1997 Despite its very public ambivalence about actually occupying the role, the plain truth of the matter is that Radiohead made itself over as the patsy for The Rock That Was with OK Computer, a gorgeously realized songcycle fairly dripping with emotion and permanently at war with its own intelligence. If Dark Side Of The Moon—an oft-cited point of comparison—meant to play with your head, OK Computer gathers up all the empty words that constitute your daily datastream and mainlines them directly to your heart: “No Surprises” hurts so bad it’s nearly impossible to listen to, while “Airbag” is one of the grandest album-opening salvos ever attempted. Even the computer-voiced “Fitter Happier” finds a poetic rhythm with words that tell us what it’s like to be human at the end of the 20th century. When it was new, OK Computer drew as much attention for how it was marketed (variously labeled an Orwellian treatise concerning technology, a diatribe against Bill Gates, a complaint to mass media) as it did for its content, setting the stage for pretty much the rest of Radiohead’s career. But let’s not kid ourselves: In the future, exactly no one will care about any of that. Heard now, OK Computer doesn’t just sound fresh: It wails its visions to the same world whose future it was wrongly accused of predicting. But that was its beauty and its terror. It predicted nothing. It accurately detailed the emptiness that we all secretly fear is located down there where we’ve always been told our hearts were. That it does so while cribbing a lick from the Violent Femmes’ “A Promise” on near-funk non-anthem “Paranoid Android” is so perverse as to beggar the imagination. (John Darnielle)
	3 Guided By Voices Alien Lanes (Matador), 1995 Employing the same Buckeye ingenuity that keeps the Goodyear blimp afloat, Bob Pollard can polish a turd with Budweiser until it shines with 24-carat radiance, transmuting tossed-off, six-pack ideas into classic-rock artifacts. As captain of the drunken boat that is Guided By Voices, Pollard has built a cottage industry by churning out cheap, miniature, melodic masterpieces with all the fidelity of a ham-radio broadcast. GBV’s golden era was concurrent with Pollard’s tenure as an elementary-school teacher; not surprisingly, much of his lyrical imagery evoked the storybook world of fourth graders—the robot boys that earn gold stars, the cheerleader coldfronts, the crowded gymnasiums—and the gnomes, elves and Cyclopes in the fairy tales he would read to them. Flying machines were another obsession: the striped white jets, the self-inflicted aerial nostalgia, the hardcore UFOs, the blimps going 90, the saucer-shaped coffins. The combination of this whimsical lyrical patchwork, delivered in Pollard’s faux-British accent and backed up by his bestest drinkin’ buddies windmilling behind him like a garage-band Who, put Dayton, Ohio, at the center of the indie universe—for a time, at least. If your passion for GBV slowly diminished as the production values of each ensuing record steadily evolved from dust-bunny-on-the-needle fuzzy to hockey-arena radio-friendly, this is the album that will get you back to where you once belonged. Alien Lanes reminds you why you first fell in love with the myth of beer-pounding, ex-teacher old dudes building four-track masterpieces in the basements of the Midwest. (Jonathan Valania)
	2 Nirvana In Utero (DGC), 1993 Nevermind may get all the chicks, but Nirvana’s final studio album has aged infinitely better. The rumors preceding the release of In Utero (“It’s unlistenable noise,” “Steve Albini ruined it” and so forth) seem almost quaint 10 years on, particularly considering it houses some of Nirvana’s most tuneful moments. For example, the quad-“yeah” breakdown during “All Apologies” proves Kurt Cobain loved the Beatles as much as he loved Big Black—and probably quite a bit more. The album’s glorious opening lyric (“Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I’m bored and old”) serves as a one-line summation of Cobain’s life, capturing his every angle, from cynical bastard to unsung humorist to the grunge gang’s only real proponent of the pop-vocal melody. “Heart-Shaped Box” and the luminous “Dumb” follow suit, and poured from a throat less damaged, they might not even be considered dire. This isn’t to suggest In Utero ever comes across as sunny, but it’s the push-and-pull of the grindingly caustic and the undeniably pretty that sets the album apart both from its predecessors and all of what it inspired. Dirgey and abrasive, “Scentless Apprentice” makes perfect cosmic sense next to the gently disturbing “Rape Me,” and the record’s power stems from a band able to juxtapose them so convincingly. Just before its release—and after a bit of post-Albini tinkering by producer Scott Litt and the band—the terminally unsatisfied Cobain expressed near-complete satisfaction with In Utero. Even beside undeniably monumental older brother Nevermind, it shines. (Josh Modell)
	1 Neutral Milk Hotel In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Merge), 1998 To compare Neutral Milk Hotel’s second full-length to something as low and gauche as a rock record does it a damn grievous disservice. Jeff Mangum concocts a perilous landscape in which innocence must confront surreal dehumanization a la Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. The album is as puzzling and powerful as Roberto Benigni’s tragicomic film Life Is Beautiful. Lyrics about being fed “tomatoes and radio wires” and “playing pianos filled with flames” recall Bruno Schulz’s manner of writing from a child’s point of view. For a Cliff’s Notes version of the above: The Elephant 6 peaks here, channeling Lewis Carroll imagining a ghetto under fascism. But to hell with explanations and critical detachment. Aeroplane isn’t a museum piece; it’s a kickass weeper, 40 minutes of a musical vision captured on tape. Mangum’s guitar accomplishes as much with the chords F, G and C as Mexican cuisine does with beans, rice and flour. His widowed vocals are often campfire-giddy during full-band punk tracks dotted with whoa-ohhhhs and deedidididees, only to go berserk with indignation on the folkier acoustic numbers. Why didn’t Robert Schneider ever produce another record (say, for Apples In Stereo) this perfectly, with soft walls of fuzz, palpably empty space and a crisp, thunderous drum sound? Horn-ridden, cinematic instrumental “The Fool” is either a circus waltz with Darth Vader or the exit march of a wedding whose principals later had to mail out handwritten apologies instead of prefab thank-you notes. Face it, folks, this outing is indie rock’s “Amazing Grace.” A saw sings through the title track, which lyrically contemplates the improbability of finding love. Even the odds against existence are mystifying to Mangum when he bellows, “How strange it is to be anything at all.” Songs such as “Holland, 1945” hint at grandiose historical inquiries: Why was a watercoloring vegetarian allowed to slaughter so many people? The buoyant gravity of “The King Of Carrot Flowers Pts. Two & Three” begins with a rousing proclamation of love for Jesus Christ before it spirals into thrash pop. Resurrections are everyday occurrences on this album; Jesus is presented as fodder for what Mangum cites as the record’s theme: “endless endless.” What the brazen hell is a zanzithophone? “Ghost” by itself wipes the listener out. Strum-and-trumpet finale “Oh Comely” is so entrancing, you’ll have to lob your smoke detector’s nine-volt across the foyer when your shrimp-primavera thing burns. Aeroplane is a pinnacle of everything embarrassing and triumphant about indie rock, a phantasmagoric masterpiece that’s the exact opposite of fitter, happier and more productive. “Semen stains the mountaintops,” Mangum sings. People choose to have “their faces filled with flies.” “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.” These lines, looking forward to the cracks through which our species will slip, are more beautiful—and dangerous—than your spouse or grandchildren or garden. Though it boasts chaptered songcycles, Aeroplane will likely have no sequel. Mangum is rumored to be teetering on Syd Barrettville now, creating sound collages on his computer and insisting fragments are better than wholes. These regrettable circumstances make the album’s final seconds more poignant: A wooden chair bristles as Mangum rises and abandons his guitar. But I prefer to think that Mangum, having said so much, has resigned himself to listening. Perhaps refueling. (William Bowers)