Vashti Bunyan – Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind
In the age of completism, everything recorded by anyone anywhere will eventually be released. That includes this 25-track collection of early singles and demos by Vashti Bunyan, whose return from obscurity with 2005’s Lookaftering probably made this assortment of juvenilia inevitable. Constrained by the quality of the recordings and the limits of the then-teenaged folk singer’s experience, it arrives with necessarily lowered expectations — and sometimes surpasses them. The first half of the collection, with some tracks produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, is spotty folk-pop. But the second half, from Bunyan’s first visit to a studio in 1964, yields several small pleasures and suggests that what she really needed was a MySpace page. It is easy to imagine winsome, half-finished songs such as “I Don’t Know What Love Is” and “Don’t Believe What They Say” generating at least a few weeks’ worth of indie-pop buzz.