The hardest thing to do, after once making a truly epochal record, is to make another one so astonishing that the clenched fingers of your fans, clutching your old record to their hearts, go involuntarily slack. Please, everybody, look around you. I seem to have dropped my copy of Lolita Nation, and though it's now only my second favorite Scott Miller album, I still don't want it trodden on.

If there is epiphany in the complex, then so too is there rapture in simplicity. I think I could listen to Interbabe Concern and Living With Ghosts in alternation for the rest of time, and not miss a nutrient. This is an album to restore your faith in perpetual motion, cold fusion, telepathy, spell-casting and every other wishful construction of human minds that rattles the chains of evident mortality like they're a tavern puzzle that will fall open with a whisper if you can only make out the topology in the iron.

The haunted soul of a country music that never knew artifice or affect, cast out by its host, roams the Earth, and occasionally it settles for a moment, like a chill shadow, across a receptive mind. It has no speeches to deliver, and no puppet-master designs on the living, but you can feel its eyes watching you from in between the guitar strings, and in the music made in its presence you can hear the echoes that bounce off the arid walls of its purgatory canyon, and the supplicant humility in a voice that roars of its unfathomable loves, spread out under an endless, vigilant sky.

Mythology for a private culture we can never be sure isn't also ours.

If the most dangerous stories are the ones we tell ourselves, then the hardest stories to tell are the ones about what that storytelling does to us, the stories of how we live in the frightening, unexplored worlds we can't keep our own words from creating.

The national anthem of a new beginning.

Beach music for the Sea of Tranquillity. Low provides quiet for the airlessness and slow motion for the gravity, Rachel's offers the soundtrack for the long crossing that turns a crater into an ocean, and the Blue Nile explain the virtue of unearthly calm.

Every bleak, disturbing album I own has just turned into the potential for its successor to capture the moment when a bright new wing pokes out of the assumptions, resignations and envy.

Where most anthems try to turn you away from your own frailties and disappointments toward some sun, Too Much Joy's bring momentousness to the moments in which you actually live.

Songs from the no-man's-land between love letters, apologies, confessions and emotional-prison journals. Like a calendar landscape in which the impassive Irish fog shrouds rolling hills and burial mounds alike.

What "You Oughta Know" turns into after introspection replaces vindictiveness, and you add a digeridu.

The year's best b-side, and its most flawless explication of elemental pop charm.

Despair and imminent loss silhouetted and frozen in charisma's halogen dazzle.

Sometimes the music's quiet duty is to let a story tell itself.

And sometimes it's to hold you down and slash you to ribbons.

When a song is a thought before it's music, the chorus' arrival doesn't always mean there's a lot left to say.

In love and dreaming, part of you still watches from wakefulness.

Remember when "Alternative" used to mean something?

This is what 1996 sounded like.

Sufficient conviction can exhume the truths that even the deepest cliches bury.

A guitar and a voice, and I'm as mesmerized as if a muse had fallen to earth.

Neither Jason nor Vent 414's Miles Hunt are new to music, but they approach their new lives as if they were their first, and listening to them I can believe that their pasts belong to someone else. Sometimes "new" is relative.

A bittersweet wake for the champions of swelling hearts.

One decade struggles to finish honoring the previous one. RPM deserves a medal for prying these records out of Polydor's crypt-keeper's grasp.

A songwriters' treasury could begin with just these.

Reinterpretation can be simply a matter of holding your camera steady until the subject turns around.

Another year, and more pasts catch up to mine.

Sounds change; songs both do and don't.

A whole city can make an album together. Out of Boston's pain comes an album that reiterates its character and resolve.

An unexpectedly open-hearted rock album, and a sad swansong.

The best development the piano-making industry has seen in a decade.

The bad news about the transcripts from the prototype Alien-to-English translator is that we still have no idea at all what they're trying to tell us.

A night walk through the statuary of neglected beliefs.

And for nights when nostalgia beckons, a bottle of the shimmer and glow with which they used to make pop.