Here’s another set of worthwhile reissues I missed along the way in 2019. (Not included: The Beatles’ brilliant valedictory Abbey Road and Aretha Franklin’s sublimely beautiful and awesomely powerful Amazing Grace.)
Akofa Akoussah
Akofa Akoussah (Mr. Bongo)
Togolese singer Akofa Akoussah is known to aficionados of vintage African pop, but her lone album has been out of print since 1976, so props to Mr. Bongo for this reissue. The songs cover a lot of ground in under half an hour, from psychedelic funk (“Tango”) to highlife (“G Blem Di”) to haunting chanson (“Ramer sans Rame”) to the Miriam Makeba tribute “Mitso Aseye.” The recording is raw and live-sounding, with splatty, echoey drums, buzzy peals of guitar, and rumbling congas huddled close in the mix. Meantime, Akoussah’s angelic voice soars overhead, at once majestic and intimate. [9.1]
John Renbourn
Unpentangled (Cherry Red)
This six-CD collection should really be called Pre-Pentangled, as the run of records that comprises the set ends in 1968, the year of Pentangle’s debut. There are Renbourn’s first three solo albums; the Bert and John album with fellow Pentangle guitarist Bert Jansch; plus two albums with somewhat strident singer Dorris Henderson, an American folkie who had moved from Greenwich Village to the U.K. in the mid-’60s. Cherry Red hasn’t provided anything new (even the bonus tracks have shown up elsewhere), but they’ve pulled together a handsome showcase for Renbourn’s remarkable mélange of British folk, blues, Appalachian music, jazz, and homey psychedelia. [9.0]
Ernest Hood
Neighborhoods (RVNG Intl)
Portland’s Ernest Hood was a post-
WWII jazz guitarist before a case of polio left him unable to play. He began collecting the sounds of his world—people talking at stores, insects chirping at dusk, kids playing night games. Eventually, he added tracks of keyboards and zither—wistful childlike snippets that function mostly as curtains, parting and closing on either side of the ambient recordings. With the 1975 private pressing of Neighborhoods, Hood intended to spark a sense of recog-
nition for whomever was listening, to “bring joy in reminiscence” and a sense of respite from “plastic novelty music.” The prosaic results are a wonder to contemplate, precisely because they’re so prosaic; they subtly urge us to tend to our own sonic and social worlds. [8.3]
Fernando Falcao
Memória das Águas (Selva)
During Brazil’s student uprising of 1968, Fernando Falcao planted a bomb at a school associated with the military regime, and wisely bolted. Landing in France, he ran with the bohemian avant-garde, including the experimental theater troupe Grand Magic Circus, and in 1979, he released this fearless, visionary musical debut. Each song is a meticulous construction partaking of varied combinations of found sounds; homemade berimbaus; tender string passages; barked vocables; rubbery fretless bass; virtuosic whistling;
new age piano; uptown soul horn charts; tubular bells; rumbling percussion; etc. Unearthed after 40 years, Memória das Águas still
stuns, full of vitality and moments of
heart-rending beauty. [9.2]
Everything But the Girl
Walking Wounded (Chrysalis)
This first-ever vinyl reissue is a welcome reason to revisit Walking Wounded, a landmark of British dance pop and the 1996 breakout album for Everything But the Girl. Tracey Thorn was charmingly impish in the wonderfully lo-fi Marine Girls, but in EBTG her voice bloomed into something simultaneously grand and, well, wounded. Here, she stretches her gorgeous melodies over Ben Watt’s bumping, trip-hop-to-jungle frameworks. It’s a surprising but effective combination, and the album is of a piece, an urbane nightscape journey where the kids feel like grownups, and vice-versa. [8.8]
