The 10 greatest forgotten albums unearthed by reissues
Popularity has never been an arbiter of quality in the arts, and these once-forgotten albums prove that with bittersweet aplomb. We are now graced with more music than ever before, but sometimes that content overload can leave you wanting something that stands aside from the norm—something with a bit of true grit. This has given rise to the treasured reissue amid the current vinyl renaissance.
There are many ways a record might not make it; the truly magnificent Search for Sugar Man documentary showed that with stirring brilliance, and Rodriguez would’ve undoubtedly made this list if his re-releases had come before the movie. Some people might go into dentistry and ditch the trade, others might not be suited for the limelight, and some perhaps were never intended for release in the first place.
This invariable imbues the albums with a sense of depth. While some might argue that this assertion glamourises the mere lottery of life, the tears that have flown over these old dogeared albums, limping back into the sunshine like a lost pet returning home, shows that they are filled with humanity rather than a collectable fad.
So, below we have collated a list of the finest albums that have received a rebirth in recent years. All come with their own illuminating backstory, and all are gorgeous listens. From Donnie & Joe Emerson to the sweet Sibylle Baier, these are the ten best albums that are gladly no longer forgotten.
The 10 best albums unearthed by reissues:
Dreamin’ Wild – Donnie & Joe Emerson
The music industry is an area fraught with so many circumstantial pitfalls that some records, no matter how brilliant they may be, never stand a chance. Donnie and Joe Emerson grew up in Fruitland, Washington, a place with a population of 751. You could just about fit the entire town on the same flight; thus when it comes to gathering up the necessary organic hype to make a wider impact, the brothers were heavily handicapped from the get-go. So as far as a legitimate shot at fame is concerned, Dreamin’ Wild really was wild dreaming.
The album plays off this notion of small-town pop escapism perfectly. It couldn’t be further away from the idea of a tiresome working day toiling the land instead of serving up shady lemonade. Certain songs act as the perfect sunshine accompaniment, but others pipe summer directly into your ears, this is brimming with the latter. Anthems like ‘Baby’ schmooze up to you in a sultry fashion, dole out a dose of Vitamin D, whisk up a sweet breeze and pops an ice-cold beer in your palm.
The record sways on this theme of luscious tones. It is the sort of Valium-laden album that could subdue a riot and turn it into an orgy of spaced-out harmony in ten seconds flat with its beautiful and brilliantly opulent reverb. And quite simply, it is as sexy as music gets without coming off corny. This album was the perfect way to herald in the 1980s, and it was sadly failed by fate, until now.
Colour Green – Sibylle Baier
Technically, Sibylle Baier’s songs were not forgotten; they were merely sheltered from the gaudy light of the mainstream to preserve their pillow-propped belle in the beauteous comforts of a stowed away box of nostalgia somewhere in a dusty basement of a suburban home.
The German artist recorded the tracks on the album Colour Green using a reel-to-reel tape machine in her first apartment. The recordings themselves seem intimately wrapped in the duvet-trapped dreaminess from which they were conceived and chronicled. She handed out a few of these deeply personal tapes to friends and retired the masters to a box like old greeting cards. Thereafter, she got on with the business of living. Some 30 years later, her son discovered the tapes, and there’s simply no imagining the billowing of emotions and wonderment he experienced when he first hit that fateful play.
The album is a masterpiece wrapped up in the organic miasma of sincerity and pleasure that surrounds it. Almost impossible to replicate owing to the gentle embalming of the backstory, it resides as a piece of music that genuinely seems to have been fished from the floating firmament—entirely singular in its dainty humility. Love in the Shakespearean mainstream is all sunshine and rainbows, but for the most part, it is bills, snuggles, squabbles and cheap glasses of wine, Baier’s song proves these everyday trifles are just as romantic as we embrace the simple, glowing salvation of bonds that spare us from the dull drudgery of life.
Love is Overtaking Me – Arthur Russell
There are certain artists who seem to welcome you into their world. Sometimes that world is a weird new universe like the vast expanse that David Bowie opened for his legion of fans, and other times, an artist feels like they’re welcoming you into their bedroom as a voyeur of introspective exorcism. In all cases, this knack adds a captivating lure that makes music feel just a little more personal.
For Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, there is one outsider star who enamours you with that fly-on-the-wall feel more than most, and it inspires him by illuminating what being a musician is all about at its spiritual core. “A musician should just be making music, like playing music every day,” he told Ameoba. “If it’s feeding their soul, well, that’s what you’re doing every day, you’re playing music.” This typifies the creative ways of Arthur Russell, and when you hear his work, you get a snapshot of what Pecknold is talking about.
Russell was originally a cellist who went from studying Indian music to playing alongside Allen Ginsberg poetry recitals before moving to New York to work with the likes of David Byrne and Peter Zummo, then inventing disco cello and playing various club nights to forming his own Sleeping Bag label and on and on, all while humbly crafting his own folky home recordings and secretly writing some of the greatest confessional music ever to decidedly not grace the radio. Diary-like in its tenets, but maestro-like in its composition, when Russell croons, “I couldn’t say it to your face, but I won’t be around anymore,“ over a luscious melody, it induces more chills than a walk-in freezer in a haunted house.
Parallelograms – Linda Perhacs
There are underrated songs, then there are songs so underrated that the perfection achieved goes so unnoticed that the songwriter has to return to being a dental nurse and depart the industry. Fortunately, for everyone’s sake, Linda Perhacs was rediscovered by reissue enthusiasts in 1998, and she’s back making music after years in the wilderness with her 2014 release The Soul of All Natural Things.
The title of that 2014 album offers a great insight into the sort of psychedelic folk that she writes. There is a poignancy to her music that the narrative of her life only imbues further, twisted by a sense of the uncanny. That aura of mystery is embellished even further by the flourishes of the musically unexpected that bounce into the track potholes and windfalls.
This compositional ingenuity has also been part of her, as she once revealed when she was five, she “spontaneously started to create pieces of music that, in retrospect, were pretty complex and pretty sophisticated. It just kind of came out”. However, she sought ”quiet” over rock concerts. And then she made music and became ”very convinced now that this is not my only physical life, I’m sure that I’ve had other lives, because music exploded too fast and it exploded in too definitive a way, and it was just too well done”. That sounds like hippie-dippie-wackadoodle to us sceptics… that is, until you listen to her strange, swirling record.
In My Own Time – Karen Dalton
Karen Dalton is one of those unique musicians whereby you recognise in an instant who you’re listening to. Her style is inimitable, with abrasively soulful vocals and 12-string rhythms skirting around soaring violin sections. This sense of timeless authenticity ensured that she was a firm favourite in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Bob Dylan and Fred Neil. But she struggled to escape the congested insular world of folk’s underground—trapped by the fact she was perhaps too timeless for the mainstream.
‘Something on Your Mind’ is her most accessible piece, taken from her ’71 record In My Own Time. It is a song that provides perhaps the greatest testimony to her work, too: Nick Cave recalls hearing it for the first time on the radio and having to pull over to the side of the road to weep. The song worms its way through a medley of instrumentation to a state of bold deliverance from the tricky flippancy of the many potholes that the future throws up and makes a folly of the all-too-quickly forgotten past.
Dalton might be crass in some of her more coarse stylings, but rather than feeling prickly, they give a more earnest sense of the life behind the music, like the rougher notes arise out of pain. In My Own Time now seems like an album that stands as a personal statement.
Time of the Last Persecution – Bill Fay
Bill Fay is another paradigm of why this list exists. His work is now revered for its wholesome and wholehearted brilliance, but in a rounded encapsulation of life, he also has the wherewithal to temper his spiritualism with a smile. Fay is a wise old friend whose charm prompted the band, Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard, to chant, “And Bill Fay is my J.C Bose, Village fair hermit hair he’s my English rose”.
Routinely, this hermit happens upon lines that cause silence and calm to descend as a snippet of astonishing beauty renders time still and distractions nullified as the music takes over the here and now like a swell of conscious sleep. In the modern age, when music can so often become background noise as we take in endless hours of it each day, Fay’s whispering attention grabs are a force to behold.
With his crooked hands and shaggy hair, he might deliver a piano ditty that pry at the whys and wherefores of the unchanging world, but there is far too much beauty to his Baroque pieces to be maudlin as he blesses listeners with a rhapsodic balm of catharsis that makes you almost gladdened that life is tragic after all. As an overlooked artist of the past, his melodies seem to have sweetened all the more now that we know he is also gladdened to have finally found a larger audience. It’s hard to see why he didn’t have one in the first place, with his ear for melody akin to Brian Wilson’s.
Visions of the Country – Robbie Basho
Robbie Basho’s work has always seemed so beautiful and reverent that I always feel afeared writing about it. There is a Spanish word called duende, which Frederico Garcia Lorca defined, as exalted emotion unearthed from within, “a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained. The roots that cling to the mire from which comes the very substance of art.” To some, that might sound highfalutin, but Basho has a peculiar knack of enveloping you in that mire in a way that is pretty much unrivalled.
You might not like his work, it’s not for everyone, but I do believe that you will remember the first time you heard it. I also believe that you won’t have heard anything quite like it. And lastly, I can guarantee that some of you will fall into its snare as though you have been waiting to hear it all of your life. And that is just about the highest praise you can give a piece of music. This is someone reaching for the ether with absolute integrity, and the songs he cast down from that lofty height are like fishing hooks hoping to drag us up his exalted perch.
Lesser known than his friend and contemporary John Fahey, Basho is an American primitive folk guitar hero who died tragically in 1986 at the age of 45. At that time, his music tapped into something that made American primitive seem less like a genre label and more like a channelled soul. With a voice that harks back through eternities in a howling wolf-like fashion, the swelling brilliance of his sheer 12-string mastery conjures up more than a man and his guitar should be able to contain. It’s as though he could stop his fingers and shut his mouth, and the song would go on playing. (NB album not available on Spotify).
Africa – Amanaz
On October 24th, 1964, Zambia announced its independence from the United Kingdom. The very fact that amidst the oppressive rule that had gone before, rock ‘n’ roll had snuck its way over like a big creeping benevolent beast is testimony not only to what is good about music but what is good about man. Within the paternalistic and authoritarian forces that Europe heavy-handed on the continent, the gift of rock clung like a barnacle of good intention to its malevolent host. So, when freedom arrived, Zambia set about collating its own new identity, and a large part of that was a sort of proto-psychedelic indie. A cultural revolution was born, and a small group of miners and former colonial freedom fighters formed a band called Amanaz.
The glowing brilliance of emergent Zamrock would come to an abrupt end, curtailing its chance to reach the global masses. Zambia would be ravaged by HIV in the 1980s, and nearly all the bands would die. In a country new to records, much of the music would die with it. Nevertheless, that ever-determined barnacle would still cling on and about five years ago, the master tapes for Amanaz would be rediscovered and reissued, to be heard by the vast majority of the world for the very first time.
The melodies jangle away in the background. Instruments harmonise then pull apart like the best poetry where every word is somehow inevitable yet deeply confounding. And over this sweet sweeping serenity comes a voice that sounds so lived-in, so caring and considerate, singing “the world is full of misery”, and yet with the next line delivers a hushed “my friend” and “I’m gonna miss you” with such truth and such soul-bearing vulnerability, that it not only reminds the listener of what friendship, platonic or otherwise, can be, but it celebrates companionship with a splendour that rises above the malaise of the previous line towards buoyant euphoria—the world might be full of misery, but it’s full of beauty too.
How Sad, How Lovely – Connie Converse
Connie Converse arrived on the music scene in the 1950s, long before the Greenwich Village guys got all introspective. Revered for her brilliance, it is a sign of both the times and her disinterest in showbiz that she never actually formally recorded any of her music. What we are left with is mere demos. And that is, indeed, all we are left with. Connie disappeared in 1974, cutting all contact with her friends and family. To this day, no one knows what happened to her and for how long she lived.
Her songs could haunt an empty house. She is not the most accomplished singer or guitarist, but that doesn’t seem to bother her much, either. She seems to simply be reconciling the world. Just as she wrote in a parting letter to her family: “Let me go. Let me be if I can. Let me not be if I can’t. […] Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.”
Thanks to the tireless work of her old friends, many of the humble recordings that she did make have now been polished up and brought to the masses, preserving her legacy as a progenitor of folk who many think eclipses some of the heroes that came after her.
Just Another Diamond Day – Vashti Bunyan
After being kicked out of university for spending too much time writing songs, Vashti Bunyan travelled to New York City to try and figure out what to do with her life. It was there that she became enamoured by Bob Dylan and suddenly realised that she was, in essence, already a musician; she now just had to become a professional one.
So, back in London, she set about acquiring some contacts and soon met Andrew Loog Oldham and he accurately equated her to the English Françoise Hardy, which typifies her sound. Just Another Diamond Day truly has a Mediterranean aura to it, lilting around loose melodies as though swayed by a sea breeze or passing fancy as Jacques Dutronc walks by.
However, after releasing the record, she moved to Ireland and settled into family life. It wasn’t until 2000 that she would be rediscovered, and the masses suddenly began to relish her snapshot of the ’60s. Filled with a sense of fun and frivolity among the solemn beauty that she gently croons, her tracks remind you those moments where you happily drift off somewhere pleasant while waiting for the kettle to boil. It is easy to see why this drifted into the shadows, and on this occasion, that is actually profound praise.
