Chris Ott is the managing editor at the esteemed Perfect Sound Forever and the author of Unknown Pleasures.

The Beatles– In My Life, [Rubber Soul]

Forget the guitar production in the left channel, that’s a book in itself. Forget the melody, and the avalanche of adjectives one could unload describing it. Set aside the bobbing, lazy-Sunday tempo, those stop-start stoner drums, and definitely ignore Martin’s Baroque breakdown (that’s right out, I have to suspend disbelief to even get through it…which is also true of Ringo’s post-alarm-clock fuckup in “Day in the Life”). None of that: what brings me back to “In My Life” time and again is the studious tease of its finale, the first willful fake-out on a major pop record (that “Strawberry Fields Forever” has a rep as the first-ever fake ending is just another reminder of the stark division between Albums and Singles not so long ago). It’s childlike, maybe even childish, but it’s also a thinking fan’s nod; you can hear they’re seconds shy of giggling during the slowing “I love you…more,” slouching to bow out before the lights come up on another bar. “Clever,” a cynic might have called it, had there been any at the time.

[buy Rubber Soul here]

Milf– Me, [Ha Ha Bus!]

I’m not going to tell you that Milf should have made it, that you missed the boat, or that your life will be any different should you seek them out. Milf were not overlooked—even today, they deserve only a second glance—and if they toiled in obscurity, well, that’s the ‘90s for you. But I will tell you that I cherished them, and still do, and haven’t heard many bands like them, which is odd, because they’re totally ordinary. A chewy pudding of drone tunings, budget production, fuzzboxes and lip-curling, aloof croon-ery, Milf had only one thing going for them—a Sound. But creating and capturing a Sound is, in my experience, the rarest feat in rock; which is to say, Milf sound like Milf, and for that I cut them a lot of slack. I’ll grant that theirs is a samey sound—the guitars are so dense and monotonous as to fade into dissociative ambience in just a few minutes (which was the case with many shoegaze bands, and this led to all sorts of inaccurate comparisons; Milf were, if not anathema to that fey genre, harder, harsher and much more direct)—but they managed to bridge fury and depression while resigned to both, and though it didn’t always work (both Ha Ha Bus! and especially Antidope are uneven albums; if they weren’t, you’d have heard of them), “Me” (track four from Ha Ha Bus!) is so overwhelming in its self-loathing, even the most deluded, self-pitying mope comes away thinking, “Wow, that guy got fucked over.”

[read about Ha Ha Bus straight from the drummer’s blog here, buy Ha Ha Bus here]

The Czars– Dave’s Dream, [Before…But Longer]

9/11 nostalgia is so gauche, but, that’s the morning I first heard the Czars. Look, I’ve never told the story, I’ve never talked about 9/11 before, and I never will again—I don’t even have much of a story, so don’t read it like I’m some blubbering widower clutching to memories I should have buried two years ago. To be blunt, 9/11 still means very little to me, having lost a family member to terrorism fifteen years ago. It just wasn’t shocking on that alien level it seems to have been for so many.

I’d just downloaded “Dave’s Dream,” from Before…But Longer, off of the Czars’ website. It was a horribly compressed encoding, so I was fiddling with the bullshit “bass boost” and “super stereo” faders on the PC speakers, trying to overcompensate for the watery, 128kbps sound. I was at work, in the basement of my office (in Boston), IM-ing a girl I’d gone to high school with; we’d lost touch, and recently reacquainted. She relayed the news in that sender-default black and blue AIM text we all speak in these days, and, like most of the world, I proceeded to do my part to crash CNN.com, F5-ing the site into seizure. And John Grant asked, “Do you like asphyxiation?”

What memories I have of the day are tainted with disgust. I wandered around in slow-motion, staring at panicky people who had no idea what they were panicking about. I mean, terrorists, in Boston? No small joke the hijackers were leaving Wonder Bread land, is it. Which is not to suggest I’ve any experientially-drenched, savvy world-view, or that I understand where other races are coming from; my issue was the certainty with which my fellow isolates presumed to discuss the day’s events. And that’s not just Boston, and I wasn’t alone, watching stupefied as newscasters stammered over words like Taliban, Kabul and Al-Qaeda (did you know “Al-Qaeda” checks out in Microsoft Word now? Fucking progress). The image of Tom Brokaw standing in front of a map of the Middle East like a fucking weatherman, to explain the geography of Earth to Americans…that was worse than the towers going down, for me.

I retreated to “Dave’s Dream” a few times that day, which was certainly an escapist move, but in the moment, the perfectly-reverbed toms and guitar leads, and Grant’s descending chorus were easy cousins. It was a beautiful afternoon, and I tried to remind myself of it a few times, poking my head out the door for a breath of fresh air to chase this chorus, “I don’t mind/ I won’t find out anyway/ I’m too blind/ To see you at all.”

[visit The Czars website here, buy Before…But Longer here]