While there are plenty of records that literally rock your world, there are also those albums that seem to come from God on high, their every note and syllabic utterance coalescing into a potent mix of the visceral and cerebral to create something truly transcendental. Often times, records like this come out of nowhere, from sources heretofore unknown to you, which seems to only add to their power, as points of reference would somehow undermine their potency.

Such was the case when I heard Sweet Bird of Youth, The Rock*a*Teens’ fifth album, first released in 2000 by Merge Records, who has now reissued it digitally and on vinyl for the first time. Though the band’s name was amongst the throngs of monikers of the heard of but not heard clogging up my cerebral cortex, when the CD reverberated through my stereo system—as we still listened to music back in the 21st century’s infancy—it was a revelation. Chris Lopez and his brothers in arms had made a majestically mid-fi masterpiece that careened like Andy Capp on a bender while continuously hitting apexes of sonic and emotional fervor. Even when songs seemed to be held together only by the thinnest of semiotic streams of consciousness, there was a conviction that gave each song its gestalt. And with each repeated listen, such attributes were only further reinforced as the album revealed itself.

Seeing the band live in support of the record still looms large in my memory. There was nothing grandiose about an opening slot for Death Cab for Cutie at Columbus’ sorely missed Little Brother’s, but just hearing these songs in the flesh sent shivers down my spine. For its reissue, Merge has included a download of a recording of the band’s second to last show at the Caledonia Lounge in Athens, Georgia. Live records, by and large, are feckless documentations of moments in time, lacking the excitement of the actual event and the details and fidelity of a studio record. This one is no different, but it does show how the selections from Sweet Bird of Youth stood out in the band’s set, not that the other songs lacked merit. Still, once the curiosity is quenched, this recording can be filed away in iTunes, only to be perhaps resurrected by shuffle.

Back to the matter at hand, Sweet Bird of Youth was purportedly recorded piecemeal. Once Lopez had laid down the basic tracks on keyboards and guitars, he, guitarist Justin Hughes, and bassist Will Joiner went in without the others’ knowledge and added to the songs. Perhaps it is this methodology that lends the album its teetering, beautifully shambolic quality. Whatever the case, from the first harpsichord-like notes of “Car and Driver,” it is clear this is a very special record. As mighty as an opening as that is, though, it seems only a prelude to “If I Wanted to Be Famous (I’d Have Shot Someone),” a Spector-esque cut (in both sound and sentiment) that pins backing vocals of “do-do-do-do” and “la-la-la” to couplets like, “The setting sun reminds how far we’ve come.” Like much of the record, the song’s magic stems from squeezing big ideas into the tight spaces between the riffs and ornamentation. The carnival splendor of the piano-led third track, “Please Don’t Go Downtown Tonight,” leaves more room for big ideas, with Lopez crooning lines such as, “When we met, we never slept. There just wasn’t time… We shot like rockets in the sky.”

It would be easy to praise each track on Sweet Bird of Youth in detail, as this is a dense record celebrating life’s high and lows while, as the title indicates, lamenting the passage of time. It seems apropos, though, that it closes with “Pretty Thoughts Strike Down the Band,” a song that seemingly predicted the band’s demise to some extent. Here, Lopez could be talking to himself from a third-person vantage or describing the record’s listener when he says, “All he needs is to hear some pretty sounds.” With an album this tremendous, perhaps The Rock*a*Teens called it a day knowing they could do no better. But with their recent reunion, perhaps they’ll give it a go. Whatever the case, the great thing is that records such as this always exist in the present, their gilded sounds never tarnished by the years.