September 21, 2007 – Like a mushroom on a pile of shit, punk came up in one of New York City's foulest periods. Probably no other era could have produced it: Urban decay and lawlessness made Lower Manhattan a cheap place to live, and the desperate street vibe -- combined with the art community's down-forwhatever attitude -- made for take-no-prisoners music. Punk would spread around the world, mutating as it went. But New York (with due respect to Detroit) invented it. The musicians who assembled for the following roundtable are all "lifers," as Suicide's Alan Vega put it, and all were part of punk's birthing.

December 24, 2004 – Nirvana With the Lights Out Geffen/UME Listening to this, I can't help but think of the wisecracking carnival barker in that famous 1960s antiwar song "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin-to-Die Rag": "You can be the first one on your block / To have your boy come home in a box!" Kurt Cobain has indeed come home in a box, rectangular rather than heart-shaped, after years of legal wrangling between his bandmates and his widow. Sure, the material on the three-CD/one-DVD With the Lights Out--outtakes, B-sides, demos, live cuts, radio performances, and video footage--is mostly great. But this kind of posthumous vault-cleaning is always depressing, especially when it illuminates roads not taken, which this set does. So prepare to be depressed, when you're not being blown away. Or cracking up. Disc One recalls how funny Nirvana could be, at least in the early days.

October 29, 2004 – The Clash, London Calling: Legacy Edition(Epic/Legacy) Unlike Elvis Costello-whose reissues overflowwith killer non-album tracks-the Clash mostly gave youeverything they had on their LPs, though some of it was a littlehalf-baked (see Sandinista!). On this rerun, you get "TheVanilla Tapes" as a bonus: 21 rough album demos that, asidefrom the honky-tonkin' "Lonesome Me" and a coverof Bob Dylan's "The Man in Me," sound like, well,rough album demos. Watch the accompanying DVD and see dirtballproducer Guy Stevens smashing chairs to rev up the boys. Hey, itworked. Talking Heads, The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads (Sire/Rhino) In the studio, they wanted to unnerve you. Onstage, they wanted to make you shake it like a high-strung white girl. Finally available on CD after 20-plus years, this classic live comp gets nicely pumped up with 16 extra songs.

October 19, 2004 – It's Saturday night in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, and the kids in the back room of Trash are swigging Pabst from cans and "rocking out" to the Assault, a glammy local punk-metal trio given to winking Motörhead covers. The scene is familiar-except that the women onstage, in addition to their regulation hot pants and high heels, are wearing individually customized red T-shirts emblazoned with the words FUCK BUSH. It's a provocative double entendre. But as a band of '60s hippies once sang, there's something happening here-something that's just as unlikely as the mainstream success of Fahrenheit 9/11. You see it in underground-club events like "Drop Bush, Get Bombed" in Philadelphia and in Chicago's politicized Interchange Festival. In the Vote for Change tour, which has Death Cab for Cutie gigging with Bruce Springsteen and Bright Eyes with R.E.M.

September 30, 2004 – Nick DrakeMade to Love Magic (Reissue)Island/UMe Judging from oddballs like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom,eccentric English folk seems to be a new American indie-rock fetish.Guru of melancholy Nick Drake was certainly an eccentric Englishfolkie, but a bummed-out one; his gorgeous music was more sepulchralthan whimsical. Dead at 26 from an overdose of antidepressants, he leftbehind three completed albums, all essential, plus a bunch of worthyloose ends. This set rehashes some of the latter, along with a newlydiscovered finale, "Tow the Line," which finds Drake standing on thebrink, waiting for directions that he never got.

September 29, 2004 – The KinksThe Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (Special Deluxe Edition) (Reissue)Sanctuary Midline import The album that fellow Brit-rock elder Pete Townshend called Ray Davies'Sgt. Pepper's was slept on due to heavy competition when it came out in1968. But its back-to-the-English-garden pop, full of harpsichords andfaintly ironic la-la-las, is rife with more shiny hooks than a HomeDepot hardware aisle. This import inflates it to three discs, withpreviously unreleased cuts and alternate versions of nearly everytrack. Which is fine, since you'll want to play most on repeat anyway.

August 27, 2004 – LowA Lifetime of Temporary Relief: 10 Years of B-Sides & RaritiesChairkickers Just like fellow Joy Division fans the Cure, Minnesota's Loware releasing a four-disc rarities set before bothering to compile abox of their actual albums. And the fact that relatively few peoplehave heard of Low just makes it funnier. But this collection ofsparkling, slow-mo originals and covers (Wire, Bee Gees, the Smiths,Soul Coughing) is actually a sweeter listen than the Cure's Join theDots, partly because the tempo rarely outpaces a sleeping man'sheartbeat. Perfect for exploring the fabric on your couch.

August 22, 2004 – Acouple of birthdays ago, Jeff Tweedy got what might seem like a strangepresent from his wife, Sue--a guitar lesson from Richard Lloyd, ofpunk-jam legends Television. But the Wilco leader was obviously anenthusiastic student: Five shows into the debut tour of Wilco's newlineup, he stood strafing a crowd with the kind of extended,malfunctioning-machine-gun blasts that Lloyd trademarked in the late'70s--half lead, half rhythm, all frayed nerve endings. That's thestory of Wilco's jammy new A Ghost Is Born, on which the band mutates into Phish with a much cooler record collection. Tweedyis wisely touring with extra firepower: indie-rock workhorse PatSansone (guitars and keyboards) and Nels Cline, a genre-agnostic guitarvirtuoso who made a screaming John Coltrane covers album a few yearsago.

April 7, 2004 – 1/9/04Hammerstein BallroomNew York City Growing up is hard to do-so sometimes you need a drink. At the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' first hometown gig since the rough-sexy Fever to Tellcrashed all those year-end top-ten lists, banshee Karen O sucked downplenty of Coronas-though, as usual, she spit most of 'em at theaudience. ("That's my friend Frederick," she said, pointing into thefront row. "He's getting really soaked!") She also periodically slippedbehind the drum riser to swig from a champagne bottle. (Hadn't she beenwarned against mixing?) There was plenty to celebrate at thisshow, which was a sort of graduation ceremony for art-damagedBrooklynites who've revived the free-for-all of early-'80s post-punk.Dressed in a caftan, with dried flowers in his hair, Devendra Banhartplayed acoustic guitar cross-legged and warbled about being a littleyellow spider.

December 19, 2003 – 1. LED ZEPPELINDVD and How the West Was Won (Atlantic) LikeNirvana andRage Against the Machine, these golden gods begat asorry parade of copycats. But forget that -- what's amazingabout this archival bounty is how the band rocks even harder thanyou remember. The double-disc DVD is mainly 1970's RoyalAlbert Hall concert footage, wiry boys in hipster street clothes(except for Jimmy Page, who sports an argyle sweater-vest) playingtheir massive mutant blues to one another as if the audienceweren't even there. How the West Was Won is threediscs culled from two 1972 SoCal concerts. It's Zep at theirpeak, still loose enough to turn "Whole Lotta Love"into a 23-minute oldies medley, not yet bored with their first fourLPs. Even "Stairway to Heaven," God help us, feelsfresh-picked. 2.