The Music were one of the cornerstone Brit-pop bands of the first half of the 2000s, but with the announcement of their breakup in 2010, this collection of their non-album tracks -- released just after the split -- was immediately cast in a rather loaded context. Suddenly the band's story was a closed book, whose first few chapters were imbued w...

The Music were one of the cornerstone Brit-pop bands of the first half of the 2000s, but with the announcement of their breakup in 2010, this collection of their non-album tracks -- released just after the split -- was immediately cast in a rather loaded context. Suddenly the band's story was a closed book, whose first few chapters were imbued with a newly sentimentalized glow. Of course, the Leeds quartet's first flush of popularity in the U.K. came as something of a grassroots groundswell, too, so there's also the "back when they were our kids" syndrome attaching itself to the first couple of EPs -- at least for the hardcore fans who were on board from the beginning. Singer Robert Harvey's soaring voice and guitarist Adam Nutter's slashing six-string fervor were the band's trademarks from the get-go. You can discern a fair bit of the Jeff Buckley-influenced end of the Brit-pop spectrum (à la Muse et al.) in some of the Music's earliest tracks, including "Take the Long Road and Walk It," the one that got the ball rolling for the band. Of course, that basically just means they're once removed from the combo platter of wailing, Robert Plant-like vocals and crunching, Jimmy Page-esque riffs that were so crucial to Buckley's own recordings. But the chronological arrangement of the tracks on this two-disc collection makes it easy to chart the Music's rapid evolution, and it quickly becomes clear that they had other things on their agenda as well. By the time of "Getaway" in late 2002, they were working dance beats into their sound, and "The Truth Is No Words" revolves around some seriously syncopated funk grooves -- in fact, it veers dangerously close to a bit of a late-‘80s "baggy" feel, but 2004's "Freedom Fighters" found the Music still laying down plenty of crushingly heavy, Led Zep-derived guitar riffs, even though the same song's John Digweed remix was unassailable dancefloor fodder. Given Harvey's well-publicized struggles with substance abuse, and his repeated attempts to conquer his addictions and focus on the Music, it's especially unfortunate that the bandmembers -- who were still teens when they started playing together -- couldn't stick it out longer, but this anthology makes a fitting elegy. ~ J. Allen, Rovi