Strange Mercy aims to follow suit, but Clark's success rate is suddenly off. There are times—starting with the clattering, buzzing coda to opener “Chloe in the Afternoon”—where you half-expect her to leap up like a mad scientist from her lab and throw a curtain across the room while screaming, “Don't look at it! It's not ready yet!”

Then again, boilerplate St. Vincent can still be delightfully surprising, as is the case with “Cheerleader.” (It deflates retroactively thanks to the subsequent “Surgeon,” which is unfocused and wiggy, serving almost as chillout reprise). “Cruel” could be a dance song, kinda, sorta, maybe, if you had legs sprouting from your sides at 90-degree angles. Clark dumps out what seems to be her entire bag of tricks all at once in “Northern Lights,” and it's hard to appreciate any one of them when they're all happening simultaneously.

It's not until midway through Strange Mercy that the machinery fully kicks in. That's when Clark unleashes the gorgeous title track, which has the same deliberate, measured approach (and not a few of the sonic strategies) of Kate Bush's The Sensual World. From that point on, Clark seems like she can do no wrong, even when, for instance, her voice clunks right up against the bottom of her range before the first verse of “Champagne Year” is over. It sounds great on her, vulnerable and calming rather than unnerving and passive. If it also sounds like Jenny Lewis singing “Hallelujah,” Clark still manages to take it in new directions. The same holds true for “Dilettante,” which is like “Bennie And The Jets” with a drier one-two clomp and the closing keyboard freakout transferred to guitar and repositioned to crash through the chorus.

More than anyone, though, it's Bush that St. Vincent most resembles at this point in her career, even when Clark doesn't sound like her, or anyone else. When Strange Mercy works, it borders on stunning; when it falters, it's simply an ambitious whiff. “It's not a perfect plan,” sings Clark at one point, “but it's the one we've got.”

St. Vincent performs at the 9:30 Club on Nov. 1. $20.

The first Big Star album I ever bought was Third/Sister Lovers. This was a mistake. I'd seen the band referenced in what seemed to be every third review at the time (partly because Kurt Cobain discovered that he suddenly had control over a lot of people's eardrums), and when I decided to see what the fuss was about, the record guide I consulted rated Third/Sister Lovers as Big Star's only five-star album. And so I was introduced to what was to become my second-favorite band of all time by listening to it fall apart.

It was intensely uncomfortable, and without any context, it made practically zero sense. It was like wanting to know more about this Neil Young fellow and starting out with Tonight's the Night. I honestly can't say what made me investigate Big Star further; it could be that I had discovered the Bangles' “September Gurls” cover and figured there was more to the story than Third/Sister Lovers indicated. Whatever the reason, I got #1 Record/Radio City—the CD I should have bought in the first place and still my pick for the greatest value of any single disc ever manufactured—and my love affair with Big Star officially began.

Though I did the whole thing backwards, the conversion, when it happened, was quick and thorough. Within a year or two, I had transcribed the guitar parts for a bunch of Big Star and posted them to Usenet. “O My Soul” went up the day before I graduated from college; it felt like the last exam of my college career. They're floating around the Internet to this day. Several years ago, a band for which I was playing bass decided it wanted to cover “September Gurls.” It was my transcription that the guitarists printed out. And, as it happens, they altered it to make fun of me for spending my time on such nonsense in the first place.

I never saw Big Star live, though I did catch Alex Chilton doing a solo show at the Paradise in Boston in 2001. Normally, I'd stand in the middle of the room to get a decent sound mix, but this time, I planted myself right against the stage so I could watch him without any obstructions. He was as cantankerous as advertised, playing mostly oldies like “Volare” and the occasional nugget from his solo career.

Even so, he played two Big Star songs. Unfortunately, I don't remember what they were. What I do remember is that at one point, someone called out for “September Gurls.” He motioned to the bassist and drummer that made up his entire band and pointed out that they were one guitar player short. I don't know what prompted me to shout “I'll do it!,” but I did, and Chilton looked at me and said, “Well, come on up.”

And I froze. I had no idea if he was serious or not, and if he wasn't, I didn't want to be... well, that guy. It could have been two seconds later, it could have been 10, it could have been a minute, but the next thing I knew, Chilton had begun the next song, and I remained paralyzed right where I had been all night. To this day, I still don't know whether he was joking or not when he offered me a chance to play one of the few utterly perfect songs in the world alongside the man responsible for its existence.

It was a missed opportunity, maybe. But that was just one; Big Star's entire story plays like a parade of them. Chilton lived through his band's failure to get anybody who was there at the time to pay attention, and he shrugged it off, not without some frustration, and just kept moving. And though he died yesterday at the age of 59, he lived long enough to do a few victory laps as several generations discovered what he'd been doing for a few years at the top of the '70s. Even if they did it in the wrong order.

By all rights, Dave Grohl should have faded from public view once Nirvana ended in a final, irreversible decision by Kurt Cobain 15 years ago.

At most, he should have either squeezed out a brief, increasingly irrelevant solo career or found another group where he could pound away in the background while someone else claimed the spotlight. He was a vital member of a seminal band but ultimately a secondary one who didn’t write songs in Nirvana until it was too late to matter and never got a single vocal as prominent as even Krist Novoselic’s mocking refrain of “Get Together” at the start of “Territorial Pissings.”

For crying out loud, Grohl was the drummer. There’s a whole field of jokes devoted to drummers. (For instance: What was the last thing the drummer said before getting kicked out of the band? “Hey, guys, I wrote these songs….”) There was no reason to expect him to do much more than coast on his past association.

Things didn’t work out that way. In the wake of the sudden end of his iconic band, he formed a merely very, very good one. Unlike, say, George Harrison, Grohl didn’t chafe under the yoke of being a sideman to Nirvana’s resident genius. He simply transformed himself into a frontman, something toward which he’d previously shown no aspirations, to such a successful and odds-defying degree that there might not be any precedent for it in the history of rock ’n’ roll. In terms of Foo Fighters’ longevity and consistent popularity (though not, of course, musical style), it’s as though Mitch Mitchell had followed the Jimi Hendrix Experience by forming Queen.

Both sides of Grohl’s career are captured by the simultaneous release of Nirvana’s Live At Reading CD/DVD (Geffen) and Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits (RCA) on Nov. 3. One offers a fleeting glimpse of a generation-defining band at its impossible peak, just before the experience began to sour; the other is a survey of a more or less uninterrupted run of solid work that shows no signs of flagging after 14 years. For those keeping track, that’s three times his tenure in Nirvana. More sobering, it’s also more than half as long as Cobain’s lifespan.

Unsurprisingly, the focus of Reading is more on Cobain than Grohl (or anything else, really). It’s a stark reminder of just how much Cobain was blessed with: surfer-boy good looks, a feral intelligence, unquantifiable charisma, immeasurable talent. All he truly lacked was a way to deal with the world. Music worked for a while, but only a while. He tried family, which came too late to fully take. And he tried drugs, which would eventually backfire in the worst possible way.

On Aug. 30, 1992, though, with steam rising up from a massive festival audience, Cobain gritted his teeth, smiled (so it would appear) exactly once, spattered blood on his pickups, and solidified his band’s stature so thoroughly that he would spend the rest of his life trying to bring it back down to earth (that his efforts had the opposite effect demonstrates how complete the apotheosis was).

The piecemeal From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, released in 1996, might be a more comprehensive live album, but Reading has the advantage of being all of one piece, each song building off the energy of the last. Cobain’s raging antipathy is so entrancing that neither the camera nor the lights can seem to be bothered with Grohl, but he’s crucial to the performance: Steady and firm, he held back the chaos that Novoselic gleefully pursued and that Cobain couldn’t fight by giving them something to which they could tether themselves.

On Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits, the chaos is gone, replaced by a controlled intensity (control being necessary for a project that began as a one-man band). It confirms how sharp Grohl’s songwriting, singing, and guitar playing—all things he largely kept under wraps while in Nirvana—truly are. While none of it is quite as soul-shattering as what Cobain was capable of (the guitars, in particular, are harder and more hammer-like, as opposed to corrosively acidic), the upside is that Grohl, unlike Cobain, could walk away with his soul intact.

That doesn’t devalue a catalog that includes excellent songs like “This Is a Call,” “Monkey Wrench,” “Times Like These” and “The Pretender,” which span a decade and a half without any discernible drop in quality or ferocity. It just means that Grohl found a way to remain at the forefront of mainstream rock but at a less headlong, more manageable pace. It means that he figured out something Cobain could never handle: how to sustain a career at the top.