If what they say about D.C. bands is true, then everything sounds like the Most Secret Method and the Most Secret Method sound like everyone else. Thanks to bands like Fugazi, Dischord is just as much the name of a genre as it is a record label. I’ve heard a couple of Fugazi and Burning Airlines songs, so I’m no expert, but if you ask me, the Most Secret Method kids kick more ass on the first three songs of Get Lovely than your average D.C. post-punk band.

“Suitland High School Theme Song” is an awesome kick-out-the-stops song you can—nay, will—scream along to, perfect for the days when you wish it were 1997 again so you could act the angry teenager and smash guitars. Because that’s what I did when I was 17, smash guitars all day. Or, you know, pretended to smash guitars all day, jumping around the bedroom with my arms in the air until I knocked something over and cut my foot or something. Ah, youth.

Back when the alt-music zine Addicted To Noise still existed as a part of Sonicnet, which has also since disappeared, they used to put together some great best-of-year lists. In fact, nearly everything ATN wrote was gold; spiritual successor Neumu just doesn’t recapture the magic somehow. Or maybe it’s because I’m not 16 anymore. But ATN was right about a great many things back in its heyday; they guessed that Elastica probably wouldn’t release a second album, nor would they need to, so great was their debut album. They championed the likes of Sleater-Kinney, one of the first bands I truly came to love. And their best-of lists were filled with diamonds in the rough I would’ve never thought to seek out otherwise, such was the vigour and enthusiasm with which their writers argued for their choices.

I bought In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, loosely related to the story of Anne Frank, on the strength of its 30-something placement on ATN’s best-of-1998 list. Six years later there’s still nothing quite like it; the distortion-laden fuzz guitar and the Spanish horns make “Holland, 1945″ a delightfully exuberant romp even while the lyrics speak of war and death. It’s one of the finest moments on an album full of gems. I don’t think I’d even realized, back when I bought this album, how much care and love Jeff Magnum and company put into In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, and it’s fitting that he hasn’t tried anything since.

It might be a little early to be building a pantheon to the great albums of the 1990s, but I’ll bet that when people look back on In The Aeroplane Over The Sea in a few more years, they’ll see it for what it rightfully is: a modern classic. Score another one for the late, great Addicted To Noise.