Since high school, Elysian Fields has lived somewhere under my skin and in the warm caves in my brain. Those eight free choices from my ill-fated and wrongfully-obtained Columbia House membership couldn’t have been more fortuitous, and the inclusion of Elysian Fields in their catalogue almost made up for the sampling of pure garbage that made up the rest of their monthly fliers.

To clarify, I’m not talking about the Greek heavy metal band, but the sexy, mellow ‘noir rock’ band from NYC, headed up by Jennifer Charles and Oren Bloedow. I devour anything that either of them participate in, from backing vocals in other bands, to solo albums, to sephardic side projects. Fortunately for me, they’re a semi-local band, and they make their home in New York City. They’ve often played from the tiny, but legendary, Tonic venue, and when they play, it’s the sexiest thing you’ve ever heard. Unfortunately, Tonic went the route of CBGB and was shut down this past year, leaving their bevy of experimental, independent bands shifting to less intimate venues.

But I collect the music of Elysian Fields, because I really enjoy it. After their self-titled 5-song EP and their first full album with Radioactive & Universal Records, they went into the studio to record their second album. Creative differences between the major label and the band formed, and communications went sour. The band ultimately maintained their artistic integrity and left for another label, but all of the music that was recorded by them had to be left behind – now owned by the all-powerful record overlords. It has never been fully re-recorded or officially released, though a few odd songs have made it onto later albums in revisited formats.

(As a side note, their most recent album, ‘Bum Raps & Love Taps’, is still only available to purchase from Amazon in France, or as an iTunes download – the physical album does not have US distribution rights. That’s how awesome these guys are. So awesome that you can’t hear them.)

Anyone who’s familiar with music at all will realize that the phrase ‘official release’ means next to nothing to fans who want to get their hands on live, or rare, or obscure music. Sometime after the lost album was lost, a bootleg started to circulate from sources unknown. Maybe it came from a sympathetic employee at Universal, or maybe a backup tape was coincidentally discovered elsewhere. It’s assumed that the original recordings are still gathering dust in a closet, but there’s been no communication to confirm or deny this. I’ve made it pretty clear how much I love lost music, and the idea of unreleased recordings of anything is exciting.

The unofficial second release goes by a few names – Clinical Trial, The Albini Record (named for Steve Albini, their collaborator at the time), Black Acres, or simply ‘The Lost Second Album’. And as hard as I try, I can’t find it. It’s not often that I can’t complete a collection, or hunt down a reasonable price to satisfy anyone’s material desires, but I’m stuck. Fans suggest seeking out online downloads, though even those searches are fruitless. I can only assume that any listening of this album would cause Universal’s head to explode, since they’ve made no money off of the music due to their refusal to release it, even to a very solid fan base. Still, I’ve come up empty-handed, even after message board begging – which is the saddest, most pathetic kind of begging there is.

The music industry is peppered with lost tracks, deemed unsatisfactory by either the artist or their label. From this graveyard are usually spawned comprehensive box sets of lost music, much of it probably deserving to remain lost – but there are always a few great tracks that might connect to the listener, even if they miss the artist’s desired outcome.

Jethro Tull’s ‘Nightcap’ CD set is a great example of this, and an album that I hunted for years (in the pre-internet days) before an industrious aunt found it at a Washington, DC store for me. Among the tracks is a full album’s worth of rock opera in which the sound equipment didn’t live up to the band’s standards, and so was never released – but rewritten almost entirely into their album ‘A Passion Play’. For Tull fans, or any music fans, I don’t think that recording quality is quite as important as getting to hear more creative output from the brains and hearts that they admire while they were in their raw, youthful prime. Of course, I can very much live without a Jethro Tull song about female problems, which is midway through disc 2. What were you thinking, Ian Anderson?

DEVO’s set of two ‘Hardcore DEVO’ CD have reached prices as high as $75, but have recently quieted down to roughly $35 each, with the increasing accessibility of downloadable tracks. These albums feature recordings that the band made in the mid-to-late-70s on a 4-track recorder, before they were signed to any label and were relegated to messing around in a Dayton, Ohio basement – and a lot of it is really bizarrely great.

But ultimately, if anyone wants to share the love of Elysian Fields’ Clinical Trial, I certainly won’t object.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 1:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.