Sometimes album reissues are little more than curios that cash in on a capitulation to taking the listener to the specific glory days of that release. I will be the first to admit It’s a Shame About Ray does indeed do that for me, but there’s much more to this record. In hindsight the melancholy balladry, sparkling sunshine pop and smirky, spikey punk here may very well make this the best record of 1992—with competition from Pavement’s Slanted & Enchanted and Dr. Dre’s The Chronic—in its compact dash, clocking in at under 30 minutes, and without a second of it wasted. In its day it was largely heralded as an understated masterpiece and was at ground zero for the brief boom of an “alternative” rock takeover, but more than 15 years on, Lemonheads rarely get their due. That Ray’s legacy has languished might not be a mystery. The band was ultimately a one-man trip and it is that creative engine—Evan Dando—who must ultimately be blamed for derailing the band’s impossibly bright future. His slide into drugs, disillusion, and general disregard took him from a gifted and pretty posterboy of his generation to “Where is he now?” fodder. Where Ray should have been the flagship of a great career, it’s more of a totem for what should have been. For too long, the real shame has been that the Dando’s underachievement has cost It’s a Shame its rightful legacy.

A new Diamanda Galás disc is always an occasion for joy and terror. Few musicians are more prodigiously gifted than Galás, who has a unique ability to transfigure any song with her three-and-a-half-octave voice and hyper-muscular piano playing, but she also possesses an equally unique ability to locate the dark matter in the recesses of any song and bring it to light. If not light, perhaps auditory perception.