Top 10 Merge Albums

When the members of Superchunk were in the midst of turning Merge from a hobbyist imprint into a fully-fledged company, a way of kick-starting the label became clear: release their own album. The fourth record for the Chapel Hill quartet came spring-loaded with their by-then-familiar indie-rock urgency —defined by Mac McCaughan’s distinctive coiled-up riffing and strangulated yelp— but added a sense of maturity. Essentially playing the lovelorned ‘fool’ throughout, McCaughan uses the album as some serious emotional bloodletting; a far cry from the band’s pogo-friendly early days.

In his 2006 lament for the online music era, “The Decline of Country and Western Civilisation,” Lambchop frontman Kurt Wagner railed against the popular perception that his orchestral-country big-band peaked with their second album. Which they, um, actually did. Without wishing to discredit Lambchop’s later old-soul stylings and/or tongue-in-cheek double-albums, How I Quit Smoking is the band’s most beautifully —or preciously, even— realised record. Here, the Nasvhille ensemble's 13 members gently daub at their orchestral parts, which sweetly frame Wagner’s voice; a gruff, cigarette-tainted cough that hacks up an array of odd, winning images.

Whenever the early-’90s revival truly takes pop-cultural hold, someone’s going to “uncover” Guv’ner’s second record, and hail it as the greatest album Pavement never made. The New Yorker duo’s frontman Charles Gansa bears striking vocal resemblance to Stephen Malkmus —snide, half-spoken, grimly ironic— but Guv’ner are a more good-time proposition. Highlighted by sing-along pop-songs like “She’s Evil” and “Break a Promise,” The Hunt finds Gansa and lovebird Pumpkin Wentzel kicking out the fuzzy, funny, silly-good indie-rock jams. Most impressively, all these years on, the record has this amazing quality of seeming both carefully-sculpted and completely casual; its unknown ratio of intentional-to-accidental an under-regarded musical mystery.

Back in the day, Neutral Milk Hotel were believed to have less sales-potential than their Elephant 6 pals Elf Power and the Apples In Stereo. No one would've predicted that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea would go on to become a perennially popular, infinitely influential entry in the alternative canon. The legacy this timeless set of fuzzy, brassy, open-hearted psychedelic pop leaves is its journey into the depths of Jeff Mangum's subconsciousness. Haunted by disturbing dreams, the specter of death, and the ghost of Anne Frank, Mangum fashioned an interior monologue that reads like the great American novel. And like some musical Salinger, Mangum has declined to follow his masterpiece, retreating further into permanent artistic hibernation.

Another Elephant 6 alumni, The Ladybug Transistor hit their creative peak with their third album; a suite of compositionally-complex, winsomely-orchestral tunes whose fluttering woodwinds and syrupy strings dueled with bar-room piano in all manner of odd keys. Wearing a confessed debt to Van Dyke Parks’ infamous Song Cycle on its paisley sleeve, The Albemarle Sound creates a pastoral psych-pop idyll, frolicking through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park with an unrestrained sense of joy.

With the second millennium coming to a cataclysmic close, Stephin Merritt —the erudite New Yorker behind the Magnetic Fields, the Gothic Archies, and Future Bible Heroes— decided to set himself an artistic task of biblical proportions: write 100 lovesongs in a year. Eventually deciding to curb his enthusiasm back to the more salacious, less taxing total of 69, Merritt served up his mighty 3CD set in one staggering lot. Having far more in common with Cole Porter and Irving Berlin than any contemporaries, Merritt fashioned a silly, witty, endlessly melodic set that showcased the sharpness of his songwriter’s pen.

The suits in the music bizzz had long since consigned Spoon to ‘also-ran’ status when the Austin, Texas troupe turned up with this completely killer, wiry-tight set of stripped-down, spirited-out songs. Mixing smart studio-sonics with rock-n-roll basics, Kill the Moonlight was one of the first discs whose slowly-growing popularity seemed the product of internet buzz.

Speaking of internet buzz, the Arcade Fire are almost the embodiment thereof: this grandstanding Québécois combo riding a wave of hype to the pinnacle of the pop-cultural zeitgeist with their epic debut disc. One part new-millennial lament, one part profoundly-humanist rallying cry, Funeral is an album steeped, somehow, in both tragedy and optimism. It’s a work perfectly defined by “Haiti,” in which Régine Chassagne presides over a joyous jamboree whose lyrics, dancing between English and Kreyòl, paint with the blood of “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s dictatorial Haitian regime.

Long dismissed as simple Belle and Sebastian acolytes, Scottish indie-pop sextet Camera Obscura stylishly staked out their own identity with their third album. Crammed to the gills with harmonious, charming, toe-tapping tunes, Let’s Get Out of This Country can stand alongside any of Belle and Sebastian’s beloved classics (well, maybe not If You’re Feeling Sinister, but otherwise...). Amidst its sweeping strings and salty lyricism, songstress Traceyanne Campbell shows she knows her pop-music place. When she tips her hat to the likes of Dory Previn and Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, Campbell shows she's spent quality time studying songsmiths most lyrically adept.

Daniel Bejar’s Dylan-esque discography is a maze of mirrors; the lithe lyricist authoring an ever-evolving, proper-name-fetishising songworld in which lyrical references draw webs of connections between tracks from all over his back-catalogue. His career-defining seventh album, Destroyer’s Rubies, marked the culmination of Bejar’s obsessive craft. Blessed with the best pop-songs of any Destroyer disc, it’s a sprawling, infinitely-replayable set of stirring, sterling songs showcasing the vocal range of his Bowie-esque falsetto, and the artistic range of his Bowie-esque dreaming.