The other truth, though, the one I'm going to get in trouble for revealing, is that if you're an even cursorily informed music listener, almost none of the bands you've never heard plays music that is significantly different, in nature, from the music you know. If you know the Cardigans, Aimee Mann, Live, Weezer, Nirvana, the Goo Goo Dolls, Hole and Elliott Smith, for example, to pick a random set of people to whom you might easily have been exposed without undertaking any special research, then I have a thousand more records whose general outlines will be familiar to you. The details are important, of course, so some of these records might seem initially familiar in outline and then change your life anyway, later. But mostly obscurity has depths, not breadths. A tour through Hope and Adams, the second record by the Taunton, Massachusetts band Wheat, can be conducted entirely by reference to better-known landmarks without much trouble: the calm instrumental intro, "This Wheat", would fit in fine as the soundtrack to a Hal Hartley reverie or a time-lapse nature documentary; "Slow Fade" could be Counting Crows thinly disguising their envy of the Goo Goo Dolls; the pensive "Don't I Hold You" has about as much crossover potential as the Verve Pipe's "Freshmen"; "Raised Ranch Revolution" has a frayed, vaguely country-ish jangle somewhere between the Gin Blossoms and solo Paul Westerberg; "San Diego" trails off into strange noises, but "No One Ever Told Me" is half the Replacements and half Third Eye Blind; "Be Brave" is drenched in feedback, but "Who's the One" sighs like Buffalo Tom; "Off the Pedestal" mutters and skips like Folk Implosion; "And Someone With Strengths" is a hushed confessional in the vein of Elliott Smith or Aimee Mann; "Body Talk (Part 1)" belongs to the same spectrum of Americana as Soul Asylum, Son Volt, Wilco and the Jayhawks, and the second part sounds to me like an especially haunting cross between the Replacements "Skyway" and Elliott Smith's "Miss Misery"; "More Than You'll Ever Know" might be what's left after Trent Reznor got through with a Tom Petty song, but "Roll the Road" lifts the verses of Petty's "Free Fallin'" nearly verbatim. It's a wistful, subdued and ultimately open-hearted album of unhurried American guitar music with an earnest and artless singer, and you've probably heard a dozen albums that fit all those adjectives, if not a hundred, starting at least as far back as Neil Young.

But then, I've probably heard three or four hundred albums of this basic description, and yet months after I got this one I'm still taking it to work on days I know will be crazy, and to bed when I think my passage out of distressed wakefulness will be turbulent. Quiet, beautiful albums are a no more exhaustible form, to me, than paintings of people's heads. These songs give off twilight luminescence and resonant composure, the roughness around the edges affected, clearly, but also effective, like photographs matted to show the unexposed borders of the film, or movies whose dialogue hasn't been re-recorded in sealed booths. The instant when "Slow Fade" slips into double-time reminds me of the childhood exhilaration of running down hills (an especially fond memory for me, at the moment, as ten days after spraining my ankle I've just today taken my first laughably token steps without crutches). "Don't I Hold You" is like a b-side for John Waite's "Missing You", the song for after the camera crews have gone and simple sincerity is permissible again, and while it's playing I can believe that the three-note guitar-hook in the bridge is the direct transliteration of "I love you" into music (as well as a stylistic link between Sebadoh and Marillion). "Raised Ranch Revolution" could have come off of the last Mutton Birds album, but where the Mutton Birds echo Crowded House, Wheat manage to remind me of Jules Shear, the Connells, Anton Barbeau, Stretch Princess and Jimmy Eat World. "San Diego" counterposes sweeping strings and blippy synth noises, but leads into the gruffly and unapologetically sweet "No Over Ever Told Me", which, if it had been done a few years earlier, might have spared us the Wallflowers. "Be Brave" seems like a digression, to me, but "Who's the One" strains like Bill Janovitz, and "Off the Pedestal" pulses like Lou Barlow in a holding pattern, but then lifts off on pealing guitar and chirping keyboards. The firm, measured drums on "And Someone With Strengths" refuse to let the song subside into balladry. Spare piano rings through the old-fashioned "Body Talk (Part 1)", which I think will now be how I demonstrate my long-standing contention that "Leaving Las Vegas" is inexcusably banal. The intimate, sparkling second part is as perfectly uncluttered as the Arrogants' "Lovesick" or the Steinbecks' "Karma". The blasted "More Than You'll Ever Know" has an unsettling habit of waking me up just as I'm finally drifting off, but at least that means I'm awake again for the elegiac "Roll the Road", which has the sense to recognize, as "Free Fallin'" itself does not, that we don't have to be roused every two minutes. I don't want to reach the end of this album shaking my fist at nothing, I want to be re-centered. I want my metabolism to slow down, give my blood time for a leisurely circuit. There are a lot of albums shaped like this, but there are a lot of spaces shaped like my back yard, and yet surprisingly few of them have a shade tree and a hammock. The stacks of obscure records that trail away behind every popular one matter not because what you know without them is wrong, they matter because truth is solid, and any one record is flat.

What keeps me up, though, just as with NMH and AMC, are the words. I couldn't really tell you what Wheat's songs are about. I assume they're mostly about relationships, since melancholy songs usually are, but they could be broadsides for zoo deregulation, for all I know, and they don't appear to mind that I don't check. Bazan's album, though, it gradually but inexorably dawned on me, is a single eight-scene morality play. "Slow and Steady Wins the Race", the prologue, is the self-assured self-image allegory of an amoral man who fully expects to be welcomed into heaven, its most disturbing twist the concluding "I will trust my neighbors / Confident that they deserve / To be there in Heaven, too", circular logic clanging closed. "Simple Economics" is the one scene not entirely told in first-person (the printed lyrics include quotation marks in the right places, to make sure the structure is clear), an embattled-campaign-headquarters tableau in which the narrator, a minor political candidate, muses about the appeal and elusiveness of power and then cheerfully points out "It's good to know that just like sex it can be paid for". "To Protect the Family Name" is the run-on-sentence clemency plea of a detained drunk, presumably the candidate's brother, an ugly piece of self-contradictory reasoning that wouldn't be out of place in a Raymond Carver story. The story then skips an integral scene, which leaves "A Mind of Her Own" terrifyingly ambiguous, a smug rant that oscillates between religious self-righteousness and barely-restrained violence. "I took their wrong and I took their lies / And I made them right", the candidate insists, except as the song ends the narrator's wife is attempting to phone for help, so I'm guessing his earlier triumph wasn't rhetorical. We then miss a few more minutes, but by "Never Leave a Job Half Done" the man is muttering self-help jargon while he disposes of his wife's body, and "Eye on the Finish Line" finishes the murder sequence with what sounds like the man's confused soliloquy in preparation for his own eventual suicide. "Bad Things to Such Good People" finds him in jail, though, his suicide apparently thwarted, comforting himself that at least he's ruined his parents lives. After all this, the bland epilogue, "Winners Never Quit" itself, is shudderingly creepy. "Count it a blessing / That you're such a failure, / Your second chance might / Never have come". I assume he's addressing his brother, since there'd be no point in admonishing his dead wife or his aged parents to try again. The best gloss I've devised for that last line is that he (the candidate) won't get a second chance because he was successful, in the most ruthless sense, the first time, but that the brother, fumbling through life without such conviction or purpose, wins the right to trying again as a consolation prize. Winners, I think the point is, never get a chance to quit. The competition swallows them. The competitive urge, this argues, is self-destructive. I'm not sure Bazan is right, even if that is what he means, and I'm certainly not sure that I won't eventually think of a way in which this whole macabre saga turns out to be about relationships after all. But for the time being this is a short, muted, cathartic pop album that leaves me contemplating the moral repercussions of treating real life like a game, and that's more than I get out of thirty-four minutes of insomnia most other nights.

And so I also believe that if we rounded up one hundred people who have heard the first four REM records and the first four Byrds records, locked them into listening booths with American Kestrel, the fourth album by the New York band Saturnine, and a few back issues of Analog, that they would all generate the following identical explanation of how the band came to be: In 1982, right after they finish recording Chronic Town, REM are abducted in their sleep by agents from an alternate universe. In this alternate universe AIDS, animal rights, Tibet and East Timor are all non-issues, stardom is boring, nobody will sell Peter Buck a mandolin, and there is no Courtney Love, but on the other hand, the Byrds never existed. Freed from everything that would end up distracting them back in our reality, and given an obvious void to fill, REM proceed to try to recreate the Byrds, from memory, as exactly as possible. Their first three attempts are only partial successes, but then they deliver American Kestrel, and their captors, tearful with joy that now they can hear what they were missing, allow the band to return home to their own universe. Unbeknownst to the abductors, however, Mike Mills has smuggled a copy of the album back with him. The band consider releasing it under their own name, but Michael Stipe is self-conscious about how clear his singing voice sounds, so in the end they opt to put it out under a pseudonym. They name the fake band after the one other difference between the two universes other than the Byrds, which is that in the other one the planet Saturn has only nine moons.