Ted Leo & The Pharmacists

While he isn't exactly belting out hardcore or leading the Kinks-y mod-punk revival anymore (see our Next Steps for a shot or two of that), Ted Leo remains one of indie rock's most potent Molotov cocktails. A scheming politician's worst nightmare, Leo reels listeners in with the face-slapping hooks of songs like "The Sons of Cain," "Me and Mia," and "The Angels' Share" — cuts that challenge the Man to a duel through lyrics that burn like a bottle of bourbon.

About that mod-punk-by-way-of-Washington, D.C. thing, Ted Leo was the singer/primary songwriter for Chisel during its brief cult-favorite run in the mid-'90s. With rhythms as ragged as the Clash's and melodies cut from the same cloth as the Kinks', the group's influence on other Anglophiles past their 1997 breakup has been incredibly understated, not to mention overshadowed by Leo's fulltime job with the Pharmacists. But, hey, that's to be expected so long as Leo keeps cranking out joyous, jagged, falsetto-cracking jams like "Tell Balgeary, Balgury Is Dead," "Bomb Repeat Bomb," and "The Great Communicator."

So Billy Bragg, Joe Strummer, and Ray Davies decide to have a kid together. Don't ask how or why; just know that his name happens to be Ted Leo, a New York City hardcore hero who moved to D.C. at the start of the '90s and turned his discovery of old LPs from the Who and Kinks into pop songs with the bench-clearing brawl bent of punk. Not just that, either. While Leo's solo debut, Tej Leo (?), Rx/Pharmacists, snaps, crackles, and samples with the spirit of a lo-fi college-rock record, the rest of his post-Chisel catalog dips into everything from echo-chamber balladry ("The Toro and the Toreador") to stout-pounding Irish-pub material ("A Bottle of Buckie").