Wilco

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was so thick with static and vapor, it cost Wilco a record deal. Here they swerve into an equally shocking, poetic clarity: the wide-open menace around Jeff Tweedy's plaintive singing in "Hell Is Chrome"; the soft precision of the acoustic picking, like rustling trees on a wind-blown prairie, in "Muzzle of Bees." A knockout side effect: the way those big-rock guitars seem to bust out of nowhere in "At Least That's What You Said" and the Kiss-via-Kraftwerk epic "Spiders (Kidsmoke)."

Next: Brian Wilson

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