Ted Leo and his band of Pharmacists are coming to NU for Dillo Day, which is good because although his records are fun to listen to, they’re nothing compared to his live act where he crackles like a live wire, jumping across the stage like a modern-day Joe Strummer. He’s the closest thing indie rock has to a punk icon (hipsters would like to forget the Ramones ever existed). But punk rock is only one of a handful of original American music forms; Ted Leo stands out by spiking power pop with punk energy and DIY spirit. His songs are filled with falsetto yelps and harmonizing, and his voice is high-pitched but as nasal as so many other indie rock frontmen.

When Leo takes that Lakefill stage and jerks his head back so hard that he leaves a trail of sweat swinging through the air, you’ll thank Mayfest for bringing him because he both rocks and stands for shit. But in case you wanna know some of his lyrics so you can belt them out with the rest of the crowd, here’s some stuff he’s done.

The Tyranny of Distance (2001)

This is the album that started it all. It doesn’t have the same energy as the later albums, moving at a slower pace, with Leo playing around in longer songs Neil Young-style. Though he wouldn’t write songs as long as the eight-minute “Stove By a Whale” again for seven years, the rest are not tightly focused — they sound like Leo and his band just playing around in the studio until they found something that sounded good. But the lack of vision doesn’t make this album any less good, just less coherent. The near-solo “Timorous Me” is held by some as his finest song to date, a modern update of Elvis Costello’s “Alison,” Leo twisting his voice in every direction as he narrates a love song to a girl named, oddly enough, Timory. This album has great reviews, and some critics think it’s his best. Personally, I think he would go on to do better. It’s like how some people think the first Beatles album is the best. It’s not. It just got them started, and for that, we listen to it. Albums like these are entry-level positions at a Fortune 500 company.

Key tracks: Timorous Me, Dial Up, St. John the Divine

Hearts of Oak (2003)

Hey, you remember ska? Yeah, I know you haven’t listened to it since sophomore year of high school, but Ted Leo offers the best homage to ska that’s ever been put down in “Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?” by writing a song that isn’t ska at all. It’s official: Ska could have given up as an idea or art form in 2003, and no one would have cared because Leo sings about it all here — about how people turn to ska when the world just doesn’t make sense (i.e. high school) and how it’s just more fun to dance everything away. Anyone trying to convince anyone that ska didn’t suck could just play this song, and the doubter might even be half-convinced. But then they’d listen to another shitty Five Iron Frenzy song and forget they even tried.

Key Tracks: Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?, The High Party

Shake the Sheets (2004)

Forget the songs for a moment — look at that cover art! It’s so bright! So vivid! So artistic! This album was all the rage in my junior year of high school and I didn’t even know why, except that there were some pretty impressive primary colors going on and Ted Leo might be a communist with the way he was using streamlined imagery and all of that crap. It’s a cover that makes you buy an album and I was so intrigued that I went out and borrowed it from one of my friends. Man, did those jams knock my socks off, with the crunchy chords and riffs, no guitar solos, and dense wordplay — nothing boring, just melodic singing that you could barely understand until you looked up the lyrics on the Internet. And even then, what the hell is he singing about? “Me and Mia,” which is probably the best song here, is energetic and full of fist-pounding lyrics in the midst of instrumental breakdowns, but it’s about eating disorders or something — you’re going to want to check this one out, because he’s going to play it, maybe as the third or fourth song like he’s done the last few times I’ve seen him. But really, every song here is a winner or at least listenable, whether it’s the bouncy folk-punk of “Counting Down the Hours” or the locale-dropping “Walking to Do” (he will change a lyric at the end of the song to include Northwestern or Evanston or Chicago as a place he’s walking to, I guarantee it). If I thought of a record I’d remember from 2004, a record that captured where I was at that point, this would be it.

Key Tracks: Me and Mia, Counting Down the Hours, Criminal Piece

Living with the Living (2007)

This album wasn’t received as well as the others, which is strange because it’s another distinctively Ted Leo album. Not to say all of his albums blend together like Death Cab for Cutie’s, but he hasn’t made any major changes in sound during his career, he’s just continued to write the same kind of songs he always has. So it’s still catchy, it’s still political, it’s still up-tempo, but it’s nothing you hadn’t heard before, which means it’s still a fine record. I’m also a little biased because some of the duller songs here (“The Unwanted Things,” “Colleen,” “Bomb. Repeat. Bomb.”) are transformed in concert when Leo imbues each song with energy, making them interesting by sheer will. But then there’s “La Costa Brava,” a six-minute coastal jaunt about taking a vacation. It’s like the sound of a speedboat cruising on a hot summer day, the kind of song you put on in the middle of August and just sit back to relax to, which is why I’m hoping he busts it out at Dillo Day. Also, “The Sons of Cain” might be the most energetic song he’s ever done, with a stomping kicker of a drum beat that will get the Dillo Day crowd pumped despite their alcohol-fueled stupor.

Key Tracks: La Costa Brava, The Sons of Cain, Army Bound

Leo did a cover of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” combined with “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It was down totally stripped with an acoustic guitar, but not in that annoying indie-rock way where turning a popular song into a haunting ballad is supposed to be interesting (it happened with “Crazy,” it happened with “Umbrella”). Leo has the perfect falsetto for the song and the right attitude: He’s not being ironic, he just thinks it’s a great song. Stuff like this is why I love Ted Leo even if I don’t know all of his music by heart — because he gives a damn and is so unpretentiously serious about it that I can’t help but admire him. I don’t try to make heroes out of my favorite musicians, but it’s easy to look up to Leo not just because of his music, but because of his ideals. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go try to memorize the lyrics to “Me and Mia” — even though I can barely make out what he’s saying.

You’re a kid in the ‘80s. You’ve just come home from a shitty day at school, gotten yelled at by your mom because you got caught smoking dope under the bleachers at school, and you think your girl might be cheating on you with your best friend. Everything, to put it politely, is fucked.

But you’re listening to a band, and jeez, these guys are great because they get exactly what you’re going through, singing about every fucked up notion of career, love, friendship, family, anger and longing you ever had, and they’re not pretentious like any of the other underground rock bands that the douches at your school are into. But your friends don’t care and the Internet doesn’t exist, so you don’t know anyone else who cares about these guys. And so you sit alone in your room, lying on your bed, listening to these guys play and for a moment, at least someone understands you.

Fans of The Replacements, one of the most influential, before-their-time-but-not-really bands from the ‘80s, are in love with the band, not in a way that people say to posture themselves as having good taste, but for reasons like the ones described above. They played songs that obviously weren’t written for you but still sounded like it, and a generation of misunderstood youth, punk rockers, intellectuals and college kids fell in love. They amassed a giant college fan base even though mainstream audiences didn’t care, and didn’t have a hit until they were churning out atypical soft-rock stuff for a major label that still sounded decent but was nothing like their earlier albums put out on an indie label — the ones everyone would hoist up as examples of perfection if they came out today. The Replacements can be remembered for taking the pretension out of underground music, being honest and crude, and having the best songs of any band from that era.

Lucky for us, those first four albums have just been re-mastered and re-released in order to make some money off trendy revival fetishists as washed-up bands tend to do these days, so that everyone can get their panties in a bunch and wonder whether or not they’re going to play Coachella. The Replacements will play another show when they feel like it, so we can just turn our attention to the albums.

Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981)

Some people might say this album sounds muddled, noisy, and crappy. Those people are idiots, or at the very least, not into punk rock. This album’s a real screamer, fifteen tracks clocking in at just under thirty-two minutes and burstin’ at the seams with vitriol and fire. It’s The Replacements like they’d never sound again because they got older, learned how to play better, hired better producers, etc., but it’s got a certain charm to it like the other records don’t, ripping songs like “I Hate Music” (about hating music, natch) and “Somethin’ to Du” (about pissing off Hüsker Dü, a hardcore band also from Minnesota) in just over a half hour. Lead guitarist and professional fuck-up Bob Stinson’s a blowtorch here, his solos sandwiched in between the typical punk rock chugging that fills up most of the songs. But The Replacements don’t play to formula: Check “Johnny’s Gonna Die,” the first instance of lead singer/song-writer Paul Westerberg’s anti-pop genius, a song that slows down when everyone was expecting fast and loud, with Stinson even whipping out a soulful solo, a soul-o if you will (I am so sorry for that). Rock critic Lester Bangs once wrote something about how the Replacements sounded like every other hardcore band out there, probably from hearing this record. That might have been true at the time, had the ‘Mats just stayed the band they were here. But they didn’t, getting sick of the hardcore scene and moving onto a larger spectrum of influences, and in its proper context, Sorry Ma is a punk-rock stepping stone to real greatness.
Key tracks: Takin’ A Ride, Customer, Johnny’s Gonna Die, I’m In Trouble, If Only You Were Lonely (reissue)

Stink (1982)

Alright, I lied a little when I said the ‘Mats (as they were affectionately referred to) got tired of punk rock after their first record, as they kicked out this eight-song EP just fifteen minutes long before they started branching out. Still, it’s one of the best throw-away records ever made, a group of songs that song like they were recorded off-the-cuff and slapped together (the album title does nothing but support that idea). It’s real cerebral punk/hardcore stuff — either it hits you in the head when you’re trying to study and makes you yell out loud, or it doesn’t, and you go back to listening to Sufjan Stevens. All the songs here should have been anthems for alienated Midwesterners (making this album all the more relevant for Northwestern students) but with its low production quality and limited release, it never caught on like The Ramones had five years before. The reissue adds one of the first Westerberg solo gems, the sweet ballad “You’re Getting Married,” which was rejected by the rest of the Replacements when Westerberg played it to them, as Bob Stinson said, “Save that for your solo album — that ain’t the Replacements.” It’s great.
Key tracks: Kids Don’t Follow,
God Damn Job, Stuck in the Middle, You’re Getting Married (reissue)

Hootenanny (1983)

This record throws everything and the kitchen sink in — it’s a hootenanny! The album’s really not that great: There’s not that much cohesion, but the best songs are downright amazing, among the finest stuff they ever recorded. The almost-solo “Within Your Reach” showed that Westerberg was beginning to shove his creativity into the spotlight, recording this song just with drummer Chris Mars, and it’s really great/sad, about wanting someone but settling just to know them, the sound of longing crystallized in Westerberg’s final strained yelling of “I could live without your touch / If I could die within your reach.” A lot of the record is this weird attempt at a jazz/country/blues/punk hybrid that’s catchy and good but nothing really transcendent.
Key tracks: Within Your Reach, Color Me Impressed, Raised in the City

Let It Be (1984)

This is the “breakthrough” album, the one rock critics namedrop when the lists get made about best indie albums or just best albums, period. It’s a matured album, the best songs being the sad ones: the piano-tinkling gender dissection of “Androgynous” (about doubting your sexuality), the painful “Sixteen Blue” (written for sixteen-year old bassist Tommy Stinson by Westerberg) about being unsure of everything at that age, and the gut-wrenching “Answering Machine” about wanting someone who just won’t pick up the phone. But the majesty of this album is all in the first song, “I Will Dare,” full of optimism and spring with a bass line that hops along the floor and into your head, a solo from R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and a lovely little mandolin riff that would have been out of the question on Sorry Ma. The ‘Mats are still fucking around on this record with great song names like “Gary’s Got A Boner” and “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out”, but this is a grown-up record, or at least a record about wanting to grow up when no one else you know wants to. Classic.
Key tracks: I Will Dare, Unsatisfied, Answering Machine, Androgynous, 20th Century Boy (reissue)