Vashti Bunyan - Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind Review

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you'll know, ad nauseam, that after an unsuccessful career in late '60s folk-pop and despite being championed by everyone from Andrew Loog Oldham to Robert Kirby and the Incredible String Band, Vashti Bunyan retired from the music industry in 1970....full text Vashti Bunyan has only released two proper records in nearly 40 years, which affords listeners at least two minutes to consider their titles: Just Another Diamond Day and Lookaftering. The first is a statement about blissful passivity-- reasonably vogue in 1970 for singers with acoustic guitars-- but it's also about time as circular or never-changing. There's a pun in 2005's Lookaftering: To care, to look after, but also to consider in retrospect, to look at something later. She makes nostalgia and rumination sound like a limitless process; in a Vashti Bunyan song, imagining what the past would look like from the future is the closest you get to a description of the present....full text Vashti Bunyan never regarded herself as a folk singer, and the release of Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind provides clear evidence for her case. This remarkably consistent two-disc set collects her early singles and demos, rare home recordings, and her first-ever recording session, (the tapes of which were recently discovered after 40 years in her brother’s shed and attic). Several of the songs here should have been massive pop hits, and there’s even a duet that could be mistaken for that extremely rare beast: a half-decent winner of the Eurovision Song Contest....full text