Which band's vinyl catalog is consistently great?

XTC is also uniformly great.

Shellac. Steve Albini is dedicated to good recorded sound quality, in the service of great music. He has been this way since the days of Big Black, but it has only been since his most recent project, and the big paydays attendant to working with big-name performers, that he has been able to afford the electronics and studio quality to make his dream a reality.

From Shellac's 45 rpm singles to its first disc, "At Action Park," the recording quality is absolutely spectacular. Albini manages to get the best recorded drum sound on record, bar none.

Discs from Shellac even come out on vinyl first, before any digital formats, and Albini was using 180-gram virgin vinyl long before it became the rage. It's worth looking them up.

Note also that when he gets a chance to work with performers at his Electrical Audio, the subsequent release also sounds extraordinary. He's worked his magic on Nirvana ("In Utero"), PJ Harvey ("Rid of Me") and my favorite Albini recording of all time (even worth getting on CD, since as far as I know, vinyl never existed), "Things Are About to Get Weird," by Pinebender. You will not hear better guitar and drum sound on a recording, period.

To boot, none of these are audiophile recordings, yet all sound spectacular.

And speaking of the Pinebender recording that I mentioned, their label, Lovitt Records, still has some double-LP sets of it in stock. Not sure how many they have, but it's worth a pickup if you have a spare $25 lying around.

I should say that Pinebender is big, heavy rock, sort of like Nirvana at 16 1/2, rather than 33 rpm. It's magnificent, if that's your thing.

Pinebender!!! A criminally underrecognized Chicago band. Sort of a lumbering drum sound, but I dig it. Major props to Kevvwill for invoking them.