“Olympia” was the last song we heard from British dream-pop band Lush, completing a three-album arc from the blissfully distorted haze of Spooky to the crystal clear Britpop of Lovelife. Drummer Chris Acland hung himself shortly after Lovelife’s 1996 release, leading to the dissolution of the band; had they continued to release an album at the same pace they had before, Lush would’ve had four more albums under their belt. Would their progression away from shoegazer pop have continued? Would “Ladykillers” have been the new template for the band? And if so, what would’ve happened when Britpop disintegrated a couple of years after Lovelife’s release? Maybe they would’ve gone heavy on the theatrics, like Pulp did with This Is Hardcore. Or perhaps they would’ve just ceased to be relevant. Lots of what-ifs, never to be explored.

But back in 1996, things looked bright for Lush. “Ladykillers” and “Single Girl” were two of the band’s biggest hits, giving them exposure in the promised land of America. The album was the band’s most successful to date, and all this came on the heels of a major stylistic change away from their original shoegazer sound. With Acland’s death, things unravelled quickly; Lush stopped playing shows, its members split to play in other bands, and singer Miki Berenyi—arguably the closest to Acland—retreated from public life entirely, popping up only occasionally to sing on other people’s songs. “Olympia,” the last track on Lovelife, is especially dissonant given the unfortunate ending to the story; it was a carefree slice of jangly britpop, and a brilliant affirmation of the band’s new direction. Bursting at the seams with flutes, strings and a horn section, “Olympia” is, in a word, lush. As an album closer, it pointed the way to brighter things to come; as a career ender, there’s a sad and unintended finality to the last line: “And now, time to switch off.”

And thus ends normal programming for the year. Coming up in December: a month-long review of the year. Other websites give you their best-of lists in one go; I have the wanton shamelessness to stretch it out to four weeks. 2005 was an oddly uninspiring year; whether that’s a comment on the state of music or just a sign of how out of touch I am, I couldn’t say. But there were some diamonds in the rough out there, and some surprising comebacks. Stay tuned, kids: the action starts December 1.

We’re getting close to the end of the year, which means very soon everyone will be rolling out their best-of-year lists. In this particular case, I am an enthusiastic lemming; expect to see the countdown starting in December. But while we’re still on the normal schedule, a note about those end-of-year lists.

The latest these lists ever come out is January or February, which causes any number of problems. For one, you don’t get to read them during the year they reference, which is sort of a bummer. But more objectively, is a month or two really adequate time to know what’s been great and what’s been awful during the year? A lot of releases come down the pipeline during the year, and it’s a rare year where I don’t find a great album I’d somehow missed the previous year, and subsequently forgot to list. One look at my last.fm stats is telling: at the top of the list is Rilo Kiley, a band who’ve never made it into a yearly post-mortem. It’s because I have horrible timing; the first album I bought of theirs was at the very tail end of last December, and it wasn’t even the album they’d put out that year; it was The Execution Of All Things, released back in 2002 and totally out of the running. I didn’t pick up More Adventurous until early this year, and by then it was too late.

All this illustrates is the foolishness of year-end lists; like we could possibly show such authority so soon. But it’s fun for the writers, and occasionally interesting to readers too, and so they’ll never die. But it’s worth looking back and remembering the 2004 albums I missed, like the Brunettes’ Mars Loves Venus or the Troublemakers’ Express Way. And of course, there’s More Adventurous, the album that propelled Rilo Kiley to its greatest heights yet. Jenny Lewis, Blake Sennett and company played the Opera House in Toronto this past summer, and I had middling-to-low expectations. It is, after all, the Opera House, home of the most uncomfortable floor to stand on, mediocre sightlines, and plastic beer cups. But the Brunettes put on a lovely opening show (hence the purchase of Mars Loves Venus), and after a bland and uninteresting set by Nada Surf, Rilo Kiley hit the stage and proceeded to sweep a fairly large Toronto crowd off their feet. By the end of the concert Lewis had the crowd singing the verses to “With Outstretched Arms” unaccompanied; a woman who can wield that much power over a Toronto audience must deal in the black arts. After that Toronto show, Rilo Kiley went on to open for Coldplay. Very soon, not even the Opera House will be able to hold them.

The Fiery Furnaces have always been difficult. Anyone who heard last year’s Blueberry Boat came out of the experienced either confused or converted, and even today it’s an album that’s much easier to respect and admire than to love. If anything, this year’s Rehearsing My Choir seems even more obtuse, better as a form of musical historiography than as pop music. If anyone’s still sitting on the fence about the Furnaces, though—maybe one of those people who respect the band but can’t seem to love them—you might like to know that it hasn’t always been a struggle to enjoy them.

When it came out, Gallowsbird’s Bark received a mere fraction of the attention its sucessor did. Even back in 2003, the Fiery Furnaces were writing and performing some complex songs, but compared to the songwriting acrobatics of Blueberry Boat the songs on Gallowsbird’s Bark were positively simple-minded. Not quite overloaded with ideas for two-minute song fragments, the brother-sister duo of Eleanor and Matt Friedberger were able to stick to just one or two big ideas per song. The result is a much more immediately likeable album, even if it doesn’t quite reward repeated listening like its bigger brother. The middle section of Gallowsbird’s Bark, anchored at either end by “Inca Rag/Name Game” and “Crystal Clear,” is a spectacular run; a little noodling here, a bunch of fun choruses there, and a dash of mid-song structure shifts everywhere. Yes, it’s Fiery Furnaces-lite. But some of us prefer a little easy listening in our diet, and Gallowsbird’s Bark is perfect for those times when you don’t need or want the full-blown complexity of the Furnaces’ later work.

The life of Olympia band Mocket was perhaps too short; the band self-destructed during tour duties for their last album, 1999’s Pro Forma. On the other hand, perhaps they got out just in time; it wouldn’t be long before the rest of the Olympia scene, best represented by regional labels like Kill Rock Stars and K, started to scatter to the four winds, leaving a ghost of its former self. But back to the beginning.

It’s hard to say whether Mocket started first, or if Matt Steinke’s other project, Satisfact, was the real beginning; I’ve seen both described as “side projects,” another occupational hazard of playing music in the Pacific Northwest around that time. Evidence suggests that Mocket was Steinke’s main concern, though. In any case, Mocket began life as a hard-charging yet completely harmless post-punk band, with Audrey Marrs providing riot-grrl vocals and the keyboard to Steinke’s guitar and deadpan voice. You can hear the similarities to Satisfact on their second release, Fanfare, though Mocket’s modus operandi sacrificed nuance and variety for a concise, almost clinical approach to rocking out; where Satisfact’s first release is a bit meandering and experimental, Fanfare hits its target with every track. Perhaps it’s the dueling vocals of Steinke and Marrs, each with their own take on the irony-laden punk deadpan singing style. Or maybe it’s just that the songs are better, free of the slow tempos and experimental wankery that occasionally marred Satisfact’s work. In any case, Mocket had fashioned a pretty respectable album that, in the grand Olympia tradition, went unheard outside the Pacific Northwest.

1999’s Pro Forma changed a couple of things. While Marrs and Steinke stayed on, the rest of the band (Carolyn Rue and Danny Sasaki) disappeared, replaced by members of the Need. The sound changed, too; while Satisfact continued to play with electronic sounds, Mocket went even further and became a snarling punk electronica outfit. Around the same time, Kathleen Hanna started playing with Casios and released a one-off album under the name of Julie Ruin, work that would eventually lead to Hanna’s second coming in the form of Le Tigre. Maybe if Mocket had stuck around, their buzzsaw guitars and noisy electronics would’ve made it big as well; hell, they already had the toneless ironic vocals down. But something happened at the turn of the century; by 2000, the band had split company. The semi-official word from Marrs, on the Kill Rock Stars site: “matt’s turned into a robot so we can no longer communicate.” The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly, had a different take: during the band’s tour in Europe, Steinke quit the band suddenly over a parking ticket that threatened to decimate their already-thin touring budget, leaving Marr to pick up the pieces (including an irate French promoter, who threatened to “smash your face if don’t pay”).

Since then, Marrs has played with a bunch of local bands, most notably touring and recording with Bratmobile in 2002. Steinke kept up his third, even more experimental project, Octant, with girlfriend Tassy Zimmerman until 2000’s Car Alarms and Crickets. Then the couple packed up their bags and left for the midwest. No one involved seems to have given any thought to Mocket or Satisfact ever since, though Octant may one day resurface in Chicago. A slice of Olympia history, then, to be dug up and pondered occasionally before being buried again for someone else to discover.

The first song to (apparently) leak from the last Weakerthans album, Reconstruction Site, was a stripped down version of the title track. Whether it was a solo live performance from frontman John K. Samson or an early demo, I don’t know; all I know was that when I first heard it, I didn’t like it. The refined, intelligent not-exactly-punk the Winnipeg band was known for had disappeared, and in its place was a vaguely uncomfortable try at Jack Johnson territory. Even the long and winding narratives sounded forced; it was like the band had lost everything that made them special. And of course there was a giant warning sign: for their third album, the Weakerthans left the comfort of G7 for Epitaph, a much higher profile American label. Considering Samson’s long history with G7, in both the Weakerthans and the much more aggressive and political punk band Propagandhi, a change of label is a pretty big move. Was it an attempt to go big, and if so, would it work? Early evidence wasn’t promising.

A couple of years after that first demo, however, and it’s pretty obvious that Reconstruction Site has earned its place alongside the rest of the Weakerthans canon. While it is much more polished and less “punk” than the band’s previous outings, the comfortably literate rock foundation remains. The added spit and shine even helps out a couple of songs, like “Plea From A Cat Named Virtue.” “Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)” is one of the most enjoyable songs they’ve ever penned, with a hilariously silly video to boot. And “Benediction” gives the Weakerthans a lovely duet to add to their library, thanks in part to Sarah Harmer. (She’s playing with the Weakerthans later this month at the Glenn Gould Studios; sadly, the show is unsurprisingly sold out.)

And as for “Reconstruction Site,” the song? With some country twang, vocal overdubs and a drummer, it comes off a lot better. Trading too-precious-by-half acoustic emo for country-inflected indie rock was a good choice.