If reissue labels are to be believed, then a staggering amount of top-shelf singer/songwriter and psychedelia albums has been slipping through the cracks for decades. In the last several years, we've seen a daunting uptick in "lost classics," freshly unearthed, which begins to generate a sort of uncanny "How-can-this-be?" tingle that you might recall from the deluge of posthumous 2Pac releases. There’s a fine line between "rescued from history" and "dredged from oblivion," and with each new rarity and oddity, we’re given a chance to suss out where that line sits.
In Michael Angelo Nigro’s case, what we're being given is an interesting artifact, a pleasant record, and probably something that sounded both a little weirder and more interesting around the time it was recorded, in 1977. Nigro was a session player in Kansas City then, and he tracked the album at night and at off-hours at Liberty Recording, the studio where he worked. He was interested in the Beatles and the Byrds, and Cream, and Greek mythology, and he played everything on the album except the drums. He was very clearly in his own headspace, and the record has a dreamy, unhurried feel. The label didn’t want the thing when it was done, so off he went, to a smaller studio called Big-K, which mixed and released 500 copies. The end.
Except now Anthology, the offshoot of Mexican Summer devoted to reissues, has tracked down a sealed original copy and remastered it with Nigro's blessing, presenting it to us as the latest in a line of lost psych classics. It has some scruffy bonafides in this realm; it was included on the late Acid Archives author Patrick Lundborg’s list of his favorite private-issue albums, and 7”s of "Sorcerer’s Delight" can still fetch good prices on Discogs. But today, Nigro's gentle, warbly psychedelia has to fight for attention amongst similarly themed stuff being made today, on labels like Drag City and Captured Tracks. Nigro's record might have technically been first, but since it’s being heard in context, it’s gotta wait in line, just like all the rest of us.
Michael Angelo Nigro’s voice is a sweet instrument, and filtered through synths and ringing open guitars on "Flight of Pegasus" he sounds like a romantic, unabashed in his visions of "a sea of dreams and love" and "Grapes of Atlantis/ Falling from celestial vines." The chord progressions feel bent backwards by acid, which Nigro swore he never took in a recent interview with Aquarium Drunkard, and the guitar leads alternate between reminding you forcefully of George Harrison and Arthur Lee. On "Journey (to Find Who We Are)", his voice sounds uncannily like early Paul Simon, and the verse melody that feels like it could be mapped onto Simon & Garfunkel's "Patterns" without too much deviation.
These comparisons mount over the short album’s 10 tracks, and register like little pinpricks in its aura. You might find yourself enjoying it while wondering: What is here, exactly, that can’t be found in the ocean of similar material, stretching back decades, and all of it gobbled up and apprised by thousands of psych-pop aficionados? For Nigro, who has seen his album bootlegged persistently over the decades, having it back in print with his blessing probably closes an important internal circle. But for us, it might be more a curio than an essential document.
