Earth Recordings Vinilo y CD

Review: This welcome reissue is a wonderful blend of poetic storytelling and intricate guitar work infused with haunting and deeply personal melodies. Anne Briggs is known primarily as a ballad singer but explores the human condition here through a mix of original compositions and carefully chosen covers. Originally released in 1971, The Time Has Come marked a shift from her unaccompanied vocal style and introduced guitar and bouzouki. Rather than overshadowing her voice, the instrumentation enhances its crystalline beauty as her delicate yet commanding fingerpicking means Biggs crafts an intimate and emotionally rich sound that makes this one an underrated folk delight.

Review: The long lost 1968 debut album by singer-songwriter Scott Fagan, South Atlantic Blues, comes reissued for the first time in its original artwork, with an iconic portrait of Fagan by famed rock photographer Joel Brodsky, following a widely celebrated 2015 release. Revisiting his mystical, mythical, and deeply soulful masterpiece, this psych-folk gem doffs a Tropicalia hat direct from downtown New York. Fagan's story is worthy of a movie in itself. A swinging hipster who landed in 60s Greenwich folk scene, escaping the abject poverty of his U.S. Virgin Islands upbringing, Fagan found himself mentored by the Brill Building's Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, and feted as the next big thing. "Forget Rodriguez, forget Searching for Sugar Man," says Sharyn Felder, daughter of the late Doc Pomus, the legendary songwriter who signed Fagan to management in 1964. "Scott was so much more. He was cut from a different cloth." South Atlantic Blues is the perfect soundtrack to this tale, an epic song cycle wrapped around an impassioned love story, driven by Fagan's dense, allusive lyrics, and production by Elmer Jared Gordon (Pearls Before Swine) and rich arrangements by Horace Ott (Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, The Shirelles).