Klinger: Well, here’s a pleasant little surprise for us, Mendelsohn. I’d be willing to bet that when average music fans are asked to consider the most important artists of all time, Dusty Springfield isn’t a name that’s likely to leap to mind. And yet here we are just out of the Great List’s top 100 and here comes her 1969 excursion into soul music, Dusty in Memphis. Of course, most sentient humans are familiar with the album’s primary hit, “Son of a Preacher Man”, but this is also an album that runs deep with great music. At that time, Memphis was pretty near the center of the universe, from the geniuses at Stax to Willie Mitchell over at Hi Records to American Sound Studios, where this album was recorded under the guidance of the masterminds Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin, and Tom Dowd (when you see these three names on the liner notes, it’s generally a very good sign).

It’s time to talk about METZ. This Toronto-based noise-rock band has spent the past five years playing semi-legendary 30-minute ear-breaking shows around their hometown, building up a considerable fanbase but, apparently, refusing to record anything substantial. They’ve teased everyone who asked them (fans, press) with hints (lies, really) that their debut record was just around the corner, coming soon, for years. A couple 7”-ers were released, but nothing that adequately sated a growing audience that was now fairly loudly proclaiming METZ to be Toronto’s best band you’ve never heard. Perhaps themselves aware of just how good they were and of the potential their record might have to blow up, the trio held back and let the anticipation grow while they woodshedded. But, now, all of that waiting is over. Late last week we finally got to hear their debut (released on stalwart indie label Sub Pop, no less). And there was much rejoicing.

The result is what is already being hailed (by the astute Pitchfork critic Stuart Berman, among others) as one of the albums of the year. I had a chance to catch their record release show last Friday at the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, a revelatory, quite extraordinary concert that fairly ravaged the sold out room. I stayed far from the tumult at the front—holding up the bar at the back with some industry heavyweights and fellow critics, all of us too timid or too old (it was my 35th birthday, let’s face it) to move up front for the melee—but I did manage an amazing view as all those bodies were tossed around, fists were pumped, and that hot, white noise washed over it all. A hell of a thing, a hell of a band.

I’m going to preface this list by making an admittedly contentious assertion, and that is: The Replacements are the greatest American rock ‘n’ roll band to have ever existed. I’ve expressed this belief to friends of mine before and initially they rebuff it as exorbitant iconoclasm. But think about it a little bit, and I’m sure you’ll find that it’s absolutely feasible (as they eventually do)—bands like Nirvana and the Beach Boys are exempt obviously for falling slightly outside the “rock ‘n’ roll” genus. Tom Petty is whatever (sue me). You are lying to yourself if you believe anything R.E.M. has ever done in any sense of the word “rocks” (although this doesn’t necessarily make it a bad band). Big Star can’t qualify because it was arguably always more of a studio-generated enterprise than a real band, and (Alex) Chilton and (Chris) Bell would likely be the first people to acknowledge that fact.

Victoria Bergsman has had a pretty fantastic career. In fact, she’s had two of them.

First, she’s well known for being the voice of Swedish indie-rock group the Concretes, who formed in 1995 and have been recording ever since. A great deal of the group’s recognition coming from the albums recorded with Bergsman before her departure from the band in 2006. Since then, she’s been putting out albums under the moniker Taken by Trees, and a well-timed cover of Guns ‘N Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine”, which was used extensively in TV ads and movie trailers, helped slowly push Bergsman into the mainstream.

Now, with Other Worlds, her latest, she recontextualizes island music into her own world. By using instruments you’d normally find on Hawaiian albums and adapting them to create a dreamlike quality that only amplifies her well-honed pop chops, the whole thing sounding like precious few records out there today. To help celebrate the release of Other Worlds, Bergsman has sat down with PopMatters to discuss how mind-blowing animals are, why she finds a counterpoint in Harry Rabbit Angstrom, and proceeds to teach us some interesting Swedish turns of phrase . . .

If you’re one for listening to an album in the dark, a pair of headphones wrapped around your ears, and you somehow succumb to sleep during Bone Machine, it’s best that you don’t drift back to consciousness during the sixth cut, “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”.  The results of surfacing from a brief nod in the midst of such track could be . . . unsettling, to say the least.

In an album of experimentation, “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me” is the work’s most experimental piece, a spoken word meditation on a botched suicide. Even after listening to it umpteen times, and steeling yourself for its inevitable appearance through the first five songs, it’s still an uncomfortable listen. It conjures goosebumps, accelerates heartbeats, and leaves a seasick queasiness in the listener.  Subtle and primal thumping, the tolling buoy from “Dirt in the Ground” and the seesawing electrical coloration of the Chamberlin are all that accompany Tom Waits as he recounts his unrequited desire for a watery grave. Sounding as though he is fighting his way through a haze of ham radio static, Waits’ voice serves as the instrument around which the palpable creepiness is built, languidly whispering and drawing out syllables to convey the vividness of his imagery.