Matador at 21

Released in tandem with the three-day Las Vegas party of the same name, Matador at 21 is a lavishly packaged 6-CD box set featuring a chronological history of one of the all-time great indie labels, from Teenage Fanclub's beautifully fuzzy "Everything Flows" to Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks' "Real Emotional Trash." The song selection is particularly canny: with most bands held to one or two tracks, there are several no-brainer selections--how could they not include Superchunk's "Slack Motherfucker," one of the greatest indie singles of all time?--but the compilers throw in a few welcome curve balls as well, picking beloved but not-overexposed tracks like Liz Phair's "Mesmerizing" or Guided By Voices' "Game of Pricks" over more obvious possibilities. Crucially, the set also includes favorites by some of the Matador bands that didn't hit the comparative big time of those artists, including Barbara Manning's side project The SF Seals, Unsane, Chavez, and the oft-underrated Helium, and the encouraging inclusion of two entire discs' worth of good-to-great current signees like Mogwai, Kurt Vile, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, The New Pornographers, Times New Viking and the late Jay Reatard shows that unlike most of their early '90s indie compatriots, Matador is still thriving. Longtime fans will also appreciate the set's only real rarities, a disc of never-before-released live tracks recorded at a 1999 10th-anniversary concert, starring Pavement, Cat Power, Bardo Pond, Come and Mogwai. Bonus points for the high-quality Matador-logo poker chips as well.