Glittering junk from the trash heap of pop history. The album of the year, maybe of the century. It contains multitudes.

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Elvis the songwriter brings forth a whole songbook's worth of modern pop standards-to-be; Elvis the singer lays them down so definitively, future singers will back away from them in awe. Not exactly smart in terms of future royalty checks, but what the hell — for Costello and his fans, it was a very good year.

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Gary Numan's cruising travelogue becomes, with a twiddle of the frequency, a UFO believer's rant redolent of men in black, Cancer Man's second-hand smoke and the cold-clammy touch of the alien's bony fingers on the back of your neck.

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The word on Garbage focal point Shirley Manson was that she was an awkward and tentative performer. So who was this woman prowling the stage with the confident stealth of a panther, her musky voice boring into the song's flamboyant bitterness like a laserbeam, her lip curled in a sneer she must have learned from watching her mom's old videos of the Pretenders on "Top of the Pops"?

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The soundtrack to Frank Pembleton's post-stroke self-pity. Pour your misery down, indeed.

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Country-pop for moms (and dads) who remember how to rock.

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Kurt Cobain posthumously bares his sweet and troubled soul in music too beautiful to live and too tough to die.

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It's the quiet ones you have to watch out for. Dumped by a lover and left for dead by a record company, Mann bounces back from personal and professional betrayal with an album of elegant pop laced with cutting wit. Mann's blood is on the tracks and she's earned the right to flaunt it.

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The episode about the inbred, motherlovin' Peacock brothers was too sick for its own good — this song was about the only thing in it that worked. Johnny Mathis's giddily romantic hit played on the car radio while the nuclear family of genetic mutants murdered, copulated and multiplied under the starry purple sky. The best ironic use of a drippy love oldie since David Lynch first did it in "Blue Velvet."

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This career-spanning anthology answers the question, "What do you get when you cross Jim Thompson, Hunter Thompson and Richard Thompson?" When Zevon's being literary-tough-guy cocky, he can whup any pretty-boy singer-songwriter's ass. When he's gently weeping into his beer and cocaine, filled with remorse for falling off the wagon and wrecking yet another marriage, he can still whup any pretty-boy singer-songwriter's ass — and break your heart, too.