Three Numero Group releases with not very much in common...

...beyond having been deemed worthy of curation. OR: in which a record enthusiast who doesn't qualify as a collector struggles with his own credibility while purchasing curated obscurities.

Details:

Tied Down - Joyce Street

A ’70s homemaker stuck between the studio and getting dinner on the table, Joyce Street eked out an arresting countrypolitan discography in the margins of an otherwise traditional American life. With lyrics drawn from the pages of her diary, Street’s stirring Mississippi warble led her into the fly-by-night world of custom studios, cutting tracks for upstart country concerns like Reena, Sonobeat, Revelation, and Arc. Channeling the honky tonk angel energy of Bobbie Gentry, Lorretta Lynn, and Jeannie C. Riley, Tied Down compiles a decade’s worth of melodies disguised as lottery tickets.

Frustration - The Mystic Tide

A raw-nerved hybrid of elemental Merseybeat, lugubrious surf-noir and sheer sonic assault, the remarkable legacy of Long Island’s Mystic Tide has long been venerated within the ’60s garage rock pantheon, even if their existential racket only slipped out on a series of painfully rare 45s. Now, the fruit of Joe Docko Jr and friends’ cottage industry has been refurbished in best-ever sound, along with fresh insights as to how this singular brand of noise came to be.

If There’s Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go - V/A

The spiritual sequel to Dante Carfagna's landmark Black rock mix tape Chains and Black Exhaust, this 13 track compilation exhumes forgotten brilliance from the Afroamerican underground of the 1970s. Awash in fuzzed-out guitars, wah-wah pedals, lysergic-soaked grooves, and enough inflation depression to fill the tank of a shag wagon, If There’s Hell Below imagines a world where Hendrix lived and Funkadelic never crawled out of the garage.

I don't know how actual collectors of rare vinyl feel about Numero Group, a label that concerns itself with re-releasing obscure or marginal albums or compilations, usually in lavish packaging. On the one hand, there has to be respect for the mission, concentrating as it does on researching and bringing to light the geographically and/or thematically specific just so long as the artist or artists in question lacked commercial success. But I suppose there’s also an argument to be made that there's something antithetical to archivists making the obscure accessible in order to celebrate the specialness informed, at least in part, by its obscurity. It feels good to feel as if you've joined a small and exclusive club, bonded by having done the research and the work. And then Numero comes along and releases all of this interesting stuff to the gen pop, giving them a workaround to the research and the bin-diving that defines being a collector, perhaps just one more step in the direction of the fetishistic than firing up an Apple Music playlist, if that’s not totally unfair to say.

Come to think of it, there’s probably something about the term “Numero Group Collector” that is definitionally offensive to the sensibilities of the collector. Can you be a collector if what you collect is the work of people who have done all the hard work of collecting for you?

Maybe that's the thing: respect Numero Group for doing the work, hate the Numero Group collector for avoiding it.

Anyway, I'm a Numero Group collector. Like most who appreciate the label’s work, I started with the Eccentric Soul series, was attracted by the familiar sounds of R&B and the possibility of not having to listen to the same R&B songs I'd heard a million times before. And it never hurts that the packaging is, indeed, beautiful, and the liner notes detailed. Even if the music didn't always hit, you had in your possession a beautiful object, and the Eccentric Soul series turned people on to the fact that music came out of all kinds of cities that weren't always associated with a scene that broke through. You’d flip through the booklets and learn about some tragic or comic figure who founded a label that would perhaps only survive for a couple of years, stumble onto something mercurial and memorable, maybe even chart a single toward the bottom of the local radio station's request lists before they would once again meld into the background or disappear completely.

That’s perhaps the spirit that binds these three distinct recordings. Presented today are three Numero Group records that have nothing much in common beyond that they appear on the Numero Label, there isn't a commercially successful musician among them, and that when they’re presented alongside one another they may constitute a diasporic antidote to the commercial monoculture in which I’m told we all live. Look at those descriptions at the top of the post. Improbably, all of these people live in the same country? To the extent that Long Island and Mississippi consider themselves siblings.

While Joyce Street and The Mystic Tide couldn’t be further apart stylistically, there is something endearingly noodly about musicians in the studio for limited periods of time, usually performing live off the floor with no overdubs. You’re reminded, listening to these albums, that studio time was a limited resource, priced by scarcity. It feels staged, rehearsed, and yet, improbably, accidental. These are rough recordings. Though that roughness, maybe because of it, there’s an intact sense of discovery, even epiphany.

If There’s Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go (or ITHBWAGTG for short) lives somewhere downstream of the success of Eccentric Soul, following Eccentric Disco, Eccentric Funk, Eccentric Boogie, and other releases capitalizing on Soul’s success. It’s the sort of effortlessly listenable, aesthetically perfect record that somehow can only be produced by digging up difficult, jammy songs recorded on shitty equipment, decades ago. To hear it on the speakers at the local record store would be to immediately inquire what it is, albeit with the knowledge that your local record store would probably never play a Numero Group release over the speakers because to do so would be to negate their own stated function as a curator of records, and they’d have to tear the shrink wrap off that beautiful packaging.

It can feel like leaving a record store with a Numero Group album under your arm is something of a white flag. “I couldn’t find anything myself. I need training wheels.”

Whatever. The status, though I have to speculate because I’ve never had that status, doesn’t seem all that rewarding. The thrill of discovery Numero Group provides, though it might be deemed false or illegitimate, is authentic enough to mine own ears.