Indie: Coming Down

Sometimes we're compelled to reach for the stars while surfing a high of indie energy, but without balance we'd just burn out too soon — which is why we've compiled these gently paced indie Essentials, each one no more hurried than a heartbeat during sleep. The Verve harnesses a full retinue of orchestral strings for "The Drugs Don't Work", and Blur finds poetry in the shipping forecast on "This Is a Low".

The downward tilt continues through Next Steps.

There's nothing quite like a dose of Bristolian trip-hop to slow the pulse to a dull, intermittent flicker, so we've lined up back-to-back tracks from genre heavyweights Massive Attack ("Teardrop") and Portishead ("Sour Times"). And sometimes the best way to come down is to look up, towards an ethereal realm that seems unearthly, like the place inhabited by Liz Fraser on her cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren".

Sink further into indie bliss with our subterranean Deep Cuts.

Jarvis Cocker's deep, rich Sheffield accent often lends itself to the task of slowing the pace to a crawl, and works as an adrenalin antidote on the solo track "I Will Kill Again". Scottish electronic duo Boards of Canada (Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin) has perfected a hands-on approach to composition that mixes the avant-garde with the traditional to stunning effect.

The frenzied pace of the headless chicken or the blue-arsed fly has its place in indie rock, but here we've constructed a space for reflection, where kinetic energy is kept to a bare minimum, and exertion takes a back seat to contemplation. Oasis drop their habitual barnstorming swagger to explore the astral expanses of "Champagne Supernova", while Ryan Adams takes "Wonderwall" down several notches by paring the already mellow material to its leanest form. There's also some vintage acoustic Smiths, a cool pocket of Air, a spackling of Sparklehorse, and much more . . .