That said, I'm not about to get rid of my turntable, because there are too many crucial pieces of music in my life that are not yet available on disc, and probably never will be. But I have declared my vinyl collection to now be of fixed size, which means that on the rare occasion when I find some old 12" single I'd been looking for, or the like, I require myself to replace some remaining LP with a CD to make room. It's extremely rare that I buy an actual whole album on vinyl. If I didn't have it already, and it's not on CD, I can probably live without it. The four albums in this issue constitute most of the exceptions to this rule from the past year, and are my most recent additions to the list of things whose exclusion from the digital realm seems most lamentable to me.

This album wears its goofy pretensions right on its cover, in the silly monochromatic suits the four members are wearing, and the music more than backs up the image. Quick, crisp, square beats and light, steady bass, competent (but not particularly soulful) guitar work, and cheery, burbling keyboards, with ordinary-guy-with-studio-processing-to-make-him-sound-better vocals and simple harmonies. The lyrics are irrepressibly shallow and sheltered ("Life of Crime" features the narrator stealing "a Japanese car" for a covetous girlfriend), with a wholesome good-naturedness to them that makes the Knack sound like Liz Phair.

Why is it, with so little to isolate as remarkable about this album, that I find it so completely endearing? I think most of it stems from a gleeful lack of self-consciousness that seems almost impossible from the vantage point of 1995. I mean, if you're in a band and about to have your album-cover photo shot, wanting to dress up for it is a reasonable impulse. These people aren't consumed with "I must express myself" intensity, they're just thinking "Hey, we could wear cool suits!" The music doesn't address anything meaningful, doesn't press against any particular boundaries, doesn't try to shock you or educate you. It doesn't even seem intent upon making tons of money. Instead, the Producers seem to have set out to write some catchy songs, and arrange them in such a way as to make them as catchy and enjoyable as they could possibly be. Walk into the studio while this record was being recorded, and my bet is that instead of finding an unshaven guitarist practicing his power riffs, you'd find the whole band clustered around a Poly800 or something, trying to decide which "Floot" patch sounds perkier.

The effort shows. This is a positively effervescent album, brimming with enthusiastic pop charm. Does anybody make records with this little concern for "artistic credibility" anymore? Roxette, perhaps, and maybe Boston every decade or two, but this approach to music, as entertainment more than as art, is thoroughly out of fashion. (Ironic that superficiality would go out of fashion.) And, honestly, I think it's a good overall trend: I'll take Nirvana over A Flock of Seagulls any day, Tori Amos over ABBA, Nine Inch Nails over Howard Jones. But don't fool yourself into thinking that nothing has been lost. The recent raft of 80's compilations is driven by the usual shallow mass-nostalgic consumer forces, but it may have the side effect of unearthing some genuinely worthwhile music that would otherwise linger in sad obscurity. The Producers would be deserving beneficiaries. Well, CBS?

Myrick and his band are both deeper and more gimmicky than the Producers, as odd as that combination sounds. The added depth is due to the fact that Myrick is actually a talented guitarist, and the arrangements here make the most of this advantage. Having the guitar to anchor the arrangement around, however, gives the rest of the band more room to experiment, with the result that this album plays a lot more musical tricks than the Producers were probably capable of. There are shifting rhythms, fast keyboard strafings, bass gymnastics and much less-straightforward songwriting. Myrick's voice has more obvious personality than the Producers' singer, by which I guess I mean that he takes fewer pains to disguise its limitations.

The resulting album is a little harder to get into than The Producers. It's too clearly New Wave to not have those filters applied to it, but it's more angular and musically challenging than the likes of the Knack and Shoes. And while on one hand I like it more for its musical accomplishments, on the other hand it's not quite as sweet and innocent as The Producers, and thus satisfies that urge in me less well.

The Comsat Angels' early music is as spare, haunting and atmospheric as The Producers' is slick, danceable and cheerful. In many of these songs, heavily reverbed drums (often used more like orchestral timpani than the usual rock kit's kick/snare/hi-hat interplay) and slow bass form a song's infrastructure, with the guitar and keyboards contributing only isolated nudges to guide it in one direction or another. Stephen Fellows' somber singing is enigmatic and guarded, and the songs, like "Dark Parade", "The Eye Dance", "Goat of the West" and "Diagram", offer few obvious points of entry. For many people, no doubt, this album will simply be too slow, and too empty, too few notes filling too much time, and indeed I think it is the band's most austere and oblique album. Personally, I find it hypnotic and its grasp inexorable, nearly oppressive in its coherence and control. The level of faith needed to make music this devoid of superficial attractions is amazing, which makes the band's later buckling to their second label's synth-pop aspirations that much more understandable, and their continued existence in the face of so much structural adversity doubly amazing. On the other hand, listening to Sleep No More, it seems so clear that the band knows what it is doing, and understands what is special about it, that it's hard to imagine anything derailing them.

I'm also fascinated by how much later music is prefigured here. Fellows jokes in the liner notes to the BBC Sessions album that the Comsat Angels invented Gothic, and the claim isn't obviously wrong. The careful attention to ambient noise here also makes me think ahead quizzically to U2's The Unforgettable Fire, though one could probably make the case that U2 and the Comsat Angels experienced parallel Brian Eno influences, rather than one having influenced the other. And, in a louder interpretation of the aesthetic, the atmospheric surge found in Curve, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and various other related bands (two of my recent favorites being The Rose Chronicles and Mistle Thrush) can be derived musically from this origin (though again whether there is any literal influence, I can't say).

My only complaint about this darkly splendid album is that if there were ever a rock record that would benefit from the clarity of a CD remastering, this is it. The large quiet spaces in this album make the inherent crackle of vinyl painfully apparent.

I can see, from looking at it, why crates of copies might remain. There is almost no way, from looking at the packaging of this album, that you would ever guess what sort of music it contains. What few clues you get are that the two principal players have Scandinavian names (Mots Roden and Leif Bondarenko), and one is credited with accordion. From this evidence it would be natural to expect some sort of bizarre Laplander folk music, boasting English lyrics only through the involvement of non-playing lyricist Stephanie Truelove Wright. Only if you read through the smudge that partially obscures the "Guest personnel artists" list on my copy do you run across a single name, Tim Lee, that might lead you to associate this album with the Mitch Easter network (Tim was in another Easter-produced band, the Windbreakers, and if my memory serves me played guitar on tour with ex-dB Chris Stamey when I saw him open a triple bill with the dB's themselves and Mitch's own band, Let's Active).

Once you get the album on, though, it becomes instantly clear what sort of music this is. Despite Mitch's absence, this album is even more gloriously melodic and upbeat than the Primitons' first EP. Mots' driving guitar, Leif's sturdy drumming, and the spotless vocal harmonies between Roden and new bassist Don Tinsley produce a pop as steeped in lush North Carolina bluegrass as the Producers were bathed in LA studio glaze. The difference in attitude between this power-pop and the LA sort, however, is never more evident than on my favorite track here, the slashing "Pope". A complicated mock-naive homage to the Pope (the chorus is, literally, "That's why I forgive the Pope / for everything he's done"), it's lyrically both seditious ("I sometimes dream of him at night / in a forbidden place. / He kisses me for every child / that's born into this mess") and plaintive ("If he could come and live with us / I know he would. / All those jewels in his crown, / he'd throw them to us if he could."), with enough ambiguity that I can't be completely sure it isn't serious, after all. These are not problems one has with "My Sharona" or the Producers' "I Love Lucy" or "Boys Say When, Girls Say Why". Neither would they be likely to end on as mournful and elegant a note as the sad, stately "Little Wail", which closes this album.

Released in 1987, this album seems to have just missed the CD age, which is definitely too bad. I'd trade everything REM has done since Document for it, without a moment's hesitation. Major labels interested in this offer, please email me.