Susan Christie - Paint A Lady (1970)

Another groovy release from the Finders Keepers camp, this was never before properly released - apparently the label thought Christie was a liability, too experimental for their mainstream sensibilities, and only three privately pressed vinyls ended up leaking out into the world. One of those ended up being the 'mother' from which this release was procured, and listening to it today it's easy to see why the label became so worried when they heard it. The cover has a nice quote from Stones Throw man Egon who says it sounds like a dusty old folk LP as produced by Madlib, and he's not wrong - there's something deep and totally smoked out about the record which sets it apart from other folk records at the time. Delving into the murky world of psychedelia we find Christie in a drugs haze on the nine-minute 'Yesterday, Where's my Mind?' or lazy hotwired funk on 'Ghost Riders of the Sky' - it's quite simply breathtaking the foresight of the woman as she crafted a record which seems so intrinsically connected with the sounds the hip hop/crate digging world fetishises so much now. Really it shocks me that with all the current psych/folk music coming out we very rarely have anything that reaches such dizzy heights as this, we very rarely have albums that just seem to, well, get it right - here Susan Christie does exactly that, and all we have to do is lie back and take it in slowly. Beautiful!

Paint A Lady