It’s Memorial Day here in the U.S., a day when most people have off work due to the sacrifices made by our military, and thus spend much of the day incinerating and then consuming animal flesh.

It’s kind of an odd holiday when you think of it that way.

Anyway, I’m not really going to be around today, so I thought I’d open the floor for discussion. The topic is “memorials.” Tell us your favorite defunct band or deceased musician. What did they mean to you? What did they mean to music?

I’m not sure if they’re my all-time favorite, but I have to put Jawbox up near the top of the list. Even though they recently reunited to play a song on Jimmy Fallon, as far as I know the band has no plans to really get back together. And while singer J. Robbins’ later bands have shared a lot in common with Jawbox’s sound, they were never quite the same.

The thing about Jawbox is that they took this very serious post-punk, indie style (think Fugazi) and managed to make it astonishingly listenable. And as the band progressed and evolved, their music became more complex — almost symphonic near the end — while still maintaining that accessibility. There are moments on their last album, 1996′s Jawbox (Amazon), that are just staggering in their beauty and innovative songwriting. Moments where big, thick, weird chords match with drum beats that really should not work with the song but somehow absolutely do. Snippets of lyrics that are closer to poetry — I mean, real poetry — than you hear in at least 90 percent of other music.

This was by far my favorite album of theirs…so of course they broke up shortly after releasing it. I’ll never forget seeing that they had a show in Chicago while I was living there, but deciding not to go because I had friends in town, reasoning that I’d catch them the next time around. There was no next time.

(Now, to be fair, I also have a soft spot in my heart for the band members themselves, since my old band got the opportunity to open for them a few times, and they were some of the kindest people I’d ever met. Bassist Kim Coletta actually pulled rank on a local promoter because he wanted to knock us off one of their shows — this while I was still in college and our guitarist was still in high school. How nice is that?)

Anyway, the band is still virtually unknown, but so many indie and post-punk bands owe them a huge debt, whether they realize it or not. And I still hold a small hope deep in my heart that they’ll get together for just one more tour so I can make up for that missed opportunity.

You know what, I’ll put a playlist after the break so you can share in my adoration. Meanwhile, who do you love that’s now gone, but not forgotten? Share with us all in comments. And hey: Have a happy Memorial Day.

These songs are in reverse chronological order: One from each of their studio albums, plus one (“68″) from their B-side-and-rarities retrospective My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidents.