Quarantine the Past by Pavement

A best-of for a band that broke into the Billboard Top 200 once and the Billboard Top 150 never, but is nonetheless one of the most essential American bands of them all. Poets who thought they were rockstars, they were meaner than Green Day, funnier that Nirvana, and cooler than Radiohead. They made irony sincere and sincerity ironic all in a ghostly jam of nostalgic riffs and familial haze. Sure you should probably just buy the five albums they made in their short life (If you don’t own the first two, stop reading this and buy them now.), but this contains EP tracks and such goodies and you can play it start to finish and love every song. That’s 23 songs you can cherish forever for the price of Ke$ha’s new record. 5/5