For all the chatter over the state of music discovery lately (Jim, preach!), some things never change: your favorite bands have favorite bands. I looked up ‘80s underdogs Felt entirely on the recommendation of The Clientele, hoping to find an antecedent to the London band’s spectral folk-rock. In Forever Breathes The Lonely Word, I got something else – a missing link between New Wave and the birth of the twee movement.

The 1986 album, the Birmingham band’s sixth in as many years, was released just a year before the launch of Sarah Records and within months of The Smith’s The Queen Is Dead, both touchstones in Felt’s sound. Like their colleagues in The Smiths and, to a lesser extent, The Church, Felt’s music is founded on layered guitar melodies of varying bombast backed by glimmering chords, a template later further simplified and embraced by a generation or two of indie-pop acts. While the synth tones should ring a bell for Belle & Sebastian fans, singer Lawrence Hayward’s voice is another story, a dorky, romantic warble that’s equal parts Buddy Holly and Lou Reed. Song for song, the album’s remarkably consistent — and remarkably great. How do records like this one become lost in the mists of time so easily? Friends: get Lonely.

Felt – “Down But Not Out Yet”: stream

(Forever Breathes The Lonely Word was released by Creation in 1986; stream it on Spotify)

In the late ’90s, I was listening heavily to Owsley’s self-titled debut, Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn, Ben Folds Five’s The Autobiography of Reinhold Messner and whatever sad, weird pop I could get my hands on. Harvey Williams’ California would’ve blown my mind back then, but over a decade later (I’m old! Fuuuuuck!), it sounds no less revelatory. Everything about California is pretty much wonderful: Williams’ sensitive, British Ben Folds vocals; the Burt Bacharach-influenced songwriting; the songs’ spare, piano-driven arrangements; the weirdly ’80s room sound; the happy music paired with pained melodies. It seems simple enough, but it’s nearly impossible to find music that nails this sort of thing. I feel lucky every time I do. (It should be noted that Williams was/is an incredibly prolific twee journeyman – read up on him here.)

Harvey Williams – “Cindy’s Been and Gone”: mp3

(California is out of print)

In 2006, Kool & The Gang’s “Summer Madness” appeared on a LeBron James/Nike commercial, one of the greatest music supervision decisions of all time. “Summer Madness” is about as good as a song can be, four minutes of Kool & The Gang reinventing the word “smooth” and exploring the new possibilities of ’70s synthesizers; the rising tones that comprise the track’s hook escalate like a skilled masseuse heading toward a happy ending. It’s the sexiest moment on the group’s Light of Worlds, their seventh studio album, though not the hottest: that honor goes to the unstoppably funky “Street Corner Symphony,” whose disco breaks and jabbing horn blasts only slow down to high-five Stevie Wonder.

The group is at its best when it’s instrumental; the effortless opening minutes of “You Don’t Have to Change,” the kind of track that has to soundtrack Aziz Ansari lovemaking fantasies, turn rough when a wobbly vocalist utters, “I walked / like a zombie in the night.” “Fruitman,” a proto-healthy eating anthem, sounds more Sesame Street than serious in the wake of the vegan and raw food movements. But though the Gang’s message may be a bit dated (and their singers less charismatic than Wonder or, say, What’s Going On-era Marvin Gaye), the musicianship remains revelatory. The synths get another turn in the future-soul spotlight on the upbeat “Whiting H. & G,” and the washed-out reverbs of “Here After,” meant to evoke heaven, echo all the way to, well, Washed Out. At a trim 36 minutes, the set’s as tight as the band’s rhythm section, though I’ll offer one improvement to the tracklist: “Summer Madness” sounds even better on loop.

Kool & The Gang – “Summer Madness”: mp3

(Light Of Worlds is out now)

Per Wikipedia, East Village broke up long before Dropout, their 1993 debut, was released. Alas for the pre-Bandcamp era. The song “Strawberry Window” emerged some time later, on the 2006 two-disc deluxe edition of the album, but it was worth the two-decade wait: it’s a flawless slice of New Wave pop, as shimmering and suffering as the Cure’s better-known “In Between Days” or “Friday I’m In Love.” (Via Skatterbrain)

East Village – “Strawberry Window”: mp3

More lost classics in The Canon, Examined

Given more hours in the day, I’d spend them exerting as much effort on hearing previous years’ music as I do the new stuff. Take Paul Levinson’s Twice Upon a Rhyme, as great a reason as any (and better than most) not to forget about 1972. A lost psych-folk classic that rubs elbows with Tim Hardin and the Zombies, it’s the lone effort of a songwriter who for better or worse went on to become a college professor (and father to one of America’s best young music writers). The dewy eyed melodies of “Raincheck” and “Today is Just Like You” reveal a musician full of summer sun — nearly 40 years later, with the arrival of a handsome new vinyl reissue, it sounds as bright and rich as ever.

Paul Levinson – “Today Is Just Like You”: mp3

(Twice Upon a Rhyme is available now on AmazonMP3 or as a remastered vinyl limited edition pressing.)

Mt. Egypt isn’t a mountain, or a country: It’s a man and his mourning. Travis Graves is the frontman of the mostly solo project, which on this record gets by on little more than his singing and strumming. Graves sings with the ragged glory of Neil Young; much of Battening the Hatches finds his vocals straining like Shakey in his Buffalo Springfield days. The songs are as sad or sadder than Young’s, almost pathetically so: “He better be good to you / I will never have the chance to try,” he sings in the title track.

Most of the tracks, adorned simply with piano or guitar and occasional backing vocals, are spontaneous-seeming ruminations on depression: Seeing Will Oldham’s darkness and diving into it. Graves’ sense of failure is profound. Even “New Song,” the album’s closest thing to a rock song and bearer of its most optimistic title, finds him praying “that I live a little bit longer.” The music and production has a ramshackle, broken-down quality that echoes the lyrical angst and, in 2003, would’ve placed the album alongside similar efforts by Oldham and Bright Eyes. If you’ve got loneliness rumbling, Battening the Hatches can help weather the storm.

Mt. Egypt – “Battening the Hatches”: mp3

The Canon, Examined: The best records to ever slip through the cracks.

Somehow, and by somehow, I mean, “by indiscriminately downloading indie rock albums for the last decade,” I wound up with the Logh discography. Things could be worse. North is an album I don’t quite understand not finding a devoted fanbase; its only sin comes in arriving in 2007, its emo and alternative influences suddenly (well, not suddenly) unhip. The album is a whispered delivery of the usual suspects (feelings, life changes, time, seasons, weather, more feelings) matched against gorgeous chamber-rock arrangements that recall vintage Bright Eyes and Carissa’s Weird, but with the ray of optimism those bands sorely lacked in their heyday. While their windswept midwestern sound falls closer to Saddle Creek than today’s synth-pop, they share a melodic kinship with L.A.’s Division Day — which makes it even more surprising that in writing this, I learned they’re from Sweden. As most great things are, whatever the year.

Logh – “Saturday Nightmares”: mp3

(North was released in the U.S. in 2009; the band is at work on their fifth full-length)

Space travel, to paraphrase Jon Vanderslice, is lonely. Such is the message of Anthony Rochester’s Music For Inside the Spaceship, an understated pop classic that rubs elbows with Field Music’s buttoned-up performances and Sondre Lerche’s jazz-leaning songcraft. Like Aussie countryman Guy Blackman, though, Rochester’s songs are a few martinis drier than his post-Bacharach colleagues. He sings with a coolness surely hiding heartache and long-distance longing, emotions he reveals on “She Visits Her Friends On The Moon”: “She’s always going further away,” he begins, before planting tongue firmly in cheek. “She’s visiting her friends on the moon.” But she might as well be, and the space-age metaphor works as both wry wink and sympathetic songwriting. In “Mathematics,” he sings the title subject “is all that we need/to solve the problems between you and me.” If only. Rochester’s scientific approach, however, is certainly enough to solve the problem of what album you’ll want to listen to on loop for the next month.

Anthony Rochester – “Lipscombe Larder”: mp3

(Music For Inside The Spaceship was released in 2007)