Now That's What We Call Seattle Music 2003!

Unless you're taking a shower, waiting at the DMV, or watching a Kevin Smith movie, two and a half hours is not a long time. But you can cram quite a lot into that spacean entire year's worth of great local music, for example. That's what we've attempted to do here. Our reasoning is simple: A musically diverse city deserves to be represented with as much range as it offers. So the Weekly music staff selected our favorite local tracks from 2003 (local, not regional sorry, Olympia). We figured we'd get a decent CD out of it. We got two: 150-plus minutes of blissfully, head-snappingly, all-over-the-place selections that simultaneously serve as a mash note, beginner's guide, r鳵m鬠and travelogue, not to mention a convincing argument for anyone looking for evidence of the city's continuing musical vibrancy. (Proof positive will come in the form of your letters telling us what we missedhint, hint.) And no, the discs aren't for salejust don't try taking them off our iPod. MICHAELANGELO MATOS

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DISC ONE (78:56)

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1. The Postal Service, "Such Great Heights" (Give Up, Sub Pop) Hipster record shops in New York couldn't keep it in stock, every college party in the United States hammered the thing into the ground, and still we're not sick of the Postal Service's Give Up, the uncontested local album of the year even if half of it did originate in L.A. That means Angeleno beats-and-boinks-meister Jimmy Tamborello and moonlighting Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard did something right, over and over. And the consensus is that they did it no righter than on "Such Great Heights," the disc's first single. The frisky, almost drum and bass-ish beat establishes an urgent tone early, but even the ping-ponging little figure that anchors the song's background sounds relaxed after a while. Tension + serenity = bliss, especially if you + hooks like this one. M.M.

2. United State of Electronica, "Emerald City" (U.S.E., B-side) OK, gotta face the hard truth on this particular entry: If Candlebox had risen from the dead to break out a call-and-response party anthem about how fun it is to gallop around this silly city and its silly neighborhoods, their post-flannel asses would be all over this mix. Luckily, USE resurrected Daft Punk's rump-shaking methodology, not Pearl Jam's, to accomplish something genuinely unforeseeable (and necessary): getting a lion's share of Seattle's notoriously too-cool-to-groove indie brats to uncross their arms, unlock their hips, and gyrate with stupid abandon. If "Emerald City" is their thesis, I can't wait to scour the subpoints. ANDREW BONAZELLI

3. Codebase, "Seek and Destroy" (Style Encoding, Force Inc.) Tonight, Tom Butcher is gonna party like it's 1982. Sleek, laid-back, in no hurry at all, "Seek and Destroy," like the rest of Style Encoding, is travelogue music for a compression chamber lounge circling Jupiter, a neat splicing of Giorgio Moroder's early '80s proto-electro with Detroit techno's more contemplative side. Butcher is a classicist, but there's nothing dated about his approachor at the very least, the chunky, analog-leaning sounds he generates have dated better than most people would have imagined. M.M.

4. Anna Oxygen, "Spectacle" (All Your Faded Things, Cold Crush) A fit of archaic disco clatter. Overlapping, rope- skippin', lady-robo vocals spitting riddles riddled with random equations. An abrupt smash cut into New Order-remix caliber synth bumps. A too-smooth, airy vocal line gently taunting someone about doing the "pom-pom" in front of everyone. This is Ms. Oxygen's "Spectacle," all right. Almost every track on All Your Faded Things unfolds with similar, fragmented energy, employing only a keytar and drum machine to tease your body, and icy melodies, playful, carnivalesque imagery, and a healthy dose of political wherewithal to tease your mind. West Coast 'clash with big-ass brains. A.B.

5. The Blood Brothers, "Cecilia and the Silhouette Saloon" (Burn Piano Island, Burn, ArtistDirect) Our finest, barely legal, skin-and-bones (the over/under on any member is 130 pounds), art-punk quintet unleashed the most visceral primal scream of their still infant career in March. Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney's beat(down) poetry about sex, violence, and social retardation was impressively manic, and "Cecilia" was the apex. Launching with a belch of haunted house keys, it's a giant unlike anything the boys have wrought so far, decomposing into a math-core nightmare, lurching into an unforgettable, black-eye, wail-along bridge ("Where is love now? Ba ba ba ba ba ba!") then erupting into a white noise hissy fit all over again. A.B.

6. A Frames, "Futureworld" (A Frames 2, S-S) "I can see a future world," Erin Sullivan intones (yep, that's the word) midway through the A Frames' brilliant second album. Then, on the bridge, his robo-punk riffs are joined by a skronky free-blowing freak-outa rare moment of chaos on a tightly controlled disc, and one that helps open the song (and album) up a bit. Not that the A Frames need it: They have their sound, sensibility, and sense of humor down cold (yep, that's the word), and monster drummer Lars Finberg completes the group's transformation of clatter into antimatter. "The best rock band in America," raves Slate's Sasha Frere-Jones, and he may be right. M.M.