Various - Black Rain

Following the release of America Dream Reserve a couple of years back, Charles Bals submits a second collection of private press obscurities to the Smiling C label. We've seen a lot of these kind of compilations over the last few years - Sky Girl, Down & Out, Ghost Riders et al - which does make you wonder just how much unknown music from the forgotten past there is still out there that's worth hearing? Well, the world is a big place, the past even more so, and you can never underestimate the desire certain people possess for music no-one else has heard of... Why I'm interested in collections like Black Rain might or might not be that common, but it persists nonetheless: the appeal in hearing the lost songs of people who would have once harboured their own ill-fated dreams of fame, fortune, or at least recognition. As such, it's music that's often touched with a strange, occasionally unintentional melancholy, a time capsule of misspent endeavour and roads travelled alone, which is ironic given just how many people were out there on that same path unaware of the presence of others. Black Rain is, broadly speaking, psychedelic, whimsical and lonesome, and imagines a world where punk never happened, its players enamoured with the idea of the mythical troubadour up there on the stage singing their truth. You might argue that the private press recording is a folk music of sorts, these songs part of a grand tradition of close-to-the-soil communication, not part of the songbook, but instead part of the fabric of the people, a 20th century American ethnography in its way, perhaps.