Best remembered for their 1990 hit “Every Beat of the Heart,” the Railway Children also produced two somewhat forgotten and hard-to-find gems of late ’80s indie pop that deserve to be reissued.

Starting out as Factory Records wunderkinds, the Railway Children had little in common with the sound of their labelmates New Order and Happy Mondays when they signed to the iconic label soon after forming in 1984. Fronted by singer/songwriter and matinée-idol looker Gary Newby, the band were less Madchester ravers and more Smiths-influenced indie kids with a bit of a New Romantic flair that was often obscured by an inclination toward thoughtful, melancholic anthems.

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Within the last year or two, a legitimately licensed vinyl reissue of the self-titled 1972 Cobblestone Records debut from Philly jazz funk legends Catalyst has been showing up on the internet and in better independent record stores. Its price ranges from 9 to 12 dollars all over the globe. This album is merely the introduction to the group’s story — you can fill in the blanks by reading the bio here. They recorded three more albums — Perception, Unity, and After a Tear and a Smile — before disbanding in 1976.

Jump to the late ’90s: The late producer Joel Dorn had become a label entrepreneur near the beginning of the CD era; he acquired the rights to the Muse Records imprint and in 1999 released a double-disc package called The Funkiest Band You Never Heard that contained all four albums and their entire range from vanguard, spiritual soul jazz to funk and fusion. 32 Jazz eventually mutated into another label and the Muse releases all fell out of print. This one has been off the shelves for nearly a decade — the last copy we saw at auction went for over $200. Here is a copy of the original CD review and track samples from the package.

Ain’t It The Truth
East
Mail Order
A Country Song
Fifty Second Street Boogie Down
The Demon, Pt. 1
Uzuri
Ife Ife
Got to Be There

If you could time travel to any musical era, any place in the world, where would you go? NYC of the ’40s to hear Charlie Parker and the beginnings of bop? Bakersfield in the early ’50s to catch Buck Owens & His Buckaroos kicking up some serious dust? London, 1965? L.A., 1978? Me, I would pick New Zealand in the mid-’80s, and these records are the reason why. (Oh, and they all need to be reissued, as soon as possible!)

The Bats - Daddy’s Highway
The Bats, headed by Robert Scott of NZ heroes the Clean, played the cleanest, purest pop of any band anywhere. They are the definition of jangle pop but they also brought a very pleasing chug to their sound (chug pop?) that was indicative of much of the Flying Nun stable of bands. They released a ton of records (and are still very much a going concern with the release of a very good album, At the National Grid, in 2005) but the pinnacle of their sound is Daddy’s Highway. Warm, peaceful and full of pastoral soul, the album is simply magical.

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After the sublime excess of his two takes on William Blake, with Song of Innocence and Songs of Experience, David Axelrod went bonkers and issued the single weirdest record of his career that stands pretty much unparalleled more than 30 years later. Earth Rot is in effect a cantata for the planet, or, in Axe’s own words, “contemporary music with ancient yet timely words set to the theme of ecology.” Those ancient yet timely words come from the Book of Isaiah in the Bible and a Navajo legend called “Song of the Earth Spirit.” There’s a nine-piece choir singing these texts, accompanied by a 15-piece orchestra that includes Ernie Watts, Earl Palmer, Willie Green, and Jack Kelso. Capitol’s Studio B must have been humming with the mojo for these dates.

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