I realize I might get some flack for this pick, but this is one of the forgotten grunge albums that really stands up after many years. There were a number of hits off this album, with Hey Jealousy being the Gin Blossoms most popular. Listening to the entire album now, it is a little more tame than a lot of grunge albums, but has surprising quality in both the lyrics and music. If you havn't listened to this album in awhile, give it another check now and decide for yourself how it holds up.

The side project by Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello is one of the best selling and well known Sub Pop albums of all time, and with good reason. Created by sending tapes across the country through the USPS (clever name huh?), this album fuses Gibbard's vocals with Tamborello's electronic music skills amazingly well.

I actually chose this since Ben Arnold recommended Owl City to me, after which I had to listen to this instead. Owl City is nice, like way way too nice for my extended listening, but they are definitely fans of The Postal Service.

This album is a bit of a modern classic, if you havn't given it a listen, I highly recommend it.

Know by Heart is an album by The American Analog Set, introduced to me by Mattbot. The lo-fi sound caught on right away with me especially with the aggressively named first track and the less than aggressive sound that came with it. This album is great to relax to as it won't surprise you after you know what you are in store for. That being said, it is still a great album to give a listen to.

While not one of the most popular Beck albums, Mutations is my personal favorite. Less poppy and more introspective, this is an album for a gray winter day, much like the album cover suggests it might be. That is not to say that the traditional "anything goes" sound of Beck is not featured throughout, it just means that you won't likely be playing many of the tracks on the dance floor, and that is OK with me.

A side project featuring a member of Vampire Weekend (Rostam Batmanglij) and a member of Ra Ra Riot (Wes Miles), this takes the sounds of each band and rams them through the electro-pop/Auto-Tune machine and produces something that is different but not all bad. While the entire album isn't fantastic, and at times I can't tell if they are mocking the Auto-Tune, there are some gems that can be pulled out.

The first song that really caught me was Can You Discover?, basically a redesigned version of Ra Ra Riot's Can You Tell (a song I love). As you progress through the album, you find songs like Carby, auto-tuned to the MAX but still decent nonetheless. The top song is the remake of the Jackson 5's I Want You Back.