Gomez

It's no surprise that three of Gomez's top 5 songs are ripped from their debut record. Instantly branded a classic on both sides of the Atlantic, Bring It On took a breezy, blissfully lo-fi approach to the blues that lingered in the air like smoke rings from a blazing bonfire. As for the Brits' sophomore album, Liquid Skin, it's a little less scuffed around the edges, funneling a bigger budget into a wave pool of psychedelic sound effects ("Bring It On") and buffered beats ("Rhythm & Blues Alibi"). Of course, things get even stranger in our Next Steps.

Listen to any two Gomez albums back-to-back, and they'll often reveal more layers than a six-figure wedding cake. Take the night-and-day contrasts of 2002's In Our Gun and 2004's Split the Difference, for instance. While the former ebbs and flows with experimental flourishes of subtle electronica and dub, the latter takes a sudden detour back down a well-paved alternative rock road. Barebones blues for Anglophiles this is not, as you'll soon hear echoed through our cauldron of Deep Cuts.

Go ahead: Toss a Gomez record into the air and see what side it lands on. A or B — it doesn't matter, because every one of the band's songs is the sonic equivalent of someone who can silence a room simply by stepping through the door. Five Men in a Hut harnesses this fact through an overstuffed set of singles and rarities, drifting by like a ghost one second ("Best in the Town") and dragging a song through a muddy, murky swamp the next ("Mississippi Boweevil Blues").

Here's one way to get people to notice you right off the bat: Beat Massive Attack and the Verve in the best album race of Britain's prestigious Mercury Prize, which Gomez did in 1998 with the haunting blues tapestry of Bring it On. And then there's the one surefire way of actually delivering on the promise of a dazzling debut: Changing your sound like a tire with each and every album, which Gomez has done for nearly a decade. Spacey and grounded, soulful and reserved, synthetic and wholly organic — Gomez is all or none of these things depending on which way the wind blows and how cracked their mirror is this morning.