However, I digress. Pavement still sitting on the sidelines is egregiously insane, but it'll be selected soon enough as will some similarly other ridiculous oversights still unremembered.
I want to focus on smaller albums. In some instances, maybe "one-hit wonders". Regional albums that never had enough push to make it nationally back when you needed some kind of national patron in print media or at MTV or indie radio.
Here's a good one to start with:
Let's get this out of the way. Mark Kozelek is an asshole and the Sun Kil Moon schtick only goes so far, but somehow an album comprised solely out of lush, mostly acoustic Modest Mouse covers just fucking works. It's the rare covers album that not only stands on its own feet but informs the source material in a way that is profound itself. Kozelek takes a song like Tiny Cities Made of Ashes, which in Modest Mouse's hands was a kind of absurd attempt at a Talking Heads-esque punk streak of consciousness and completely de and re-constructs it into a weepy folk anthem that Woody Guthrie would be proud of.
This is not easy to do and Kozelek makes it seem like he just tore these songs off in the studio between more pressing business.
Modest Mouse
Sun Kil Moon
It works quite simply because Kozelek is neither revering Modest Mouse nor taking the piss. He understands the songs can be interpreted many different ways in a way that honors and respects Modest Mouse, but takes the wisdom of age and experience to point the songs in a different direction.
