The Beta Band: The Three EPs (EMI)

This alarmingly good album released in late '98 -- made up from three impossible-to-find EPs by the Glaswegian quartet -- blurs the boundaries so much between pop and dub, art rock and folk that it goes well beyond convenient pigeonholing.

Just call it extraordinary. And an immediate, if late, contender in the "albums of the year" stakes, but one which hasn't had enough time to stand the longevity test.

Once when I played the generously timed 80-minute disc on permanent repeat and visitors all said the same: "Wow, what's this?" I should have got commission on the 10 I sold that Sunday alone.

It was like a weird repeat of their closest skirmish with real recognition in the 2000 movie High Fidelity when the cynical Rob (John Cusack) played the Beta Band's groovy Dry the Rain to appreciative head-nodding by customers and enquiries as to "who that was?

That opener, Dry the Rain, slips out over a delightfully lazy vocal and quasi-folk slide. I Know and B + A have the kind of leisurely groove that A Tribe Called Quest used to possess, and Dog's Got A Bone sounds like a harmonium ballad from some Appalachian shack.

Later there are loop tapes and surface noise, a sense that someone in the band grew up on their parents' pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd, bird calls-meets-Britpop, Ivor Cutler-meets-Beck ...

About five years ago this album (as it now was) came off the shelves at random for our The Album Considered pages. It was a delight all over again.

Slippery and seductive, attention-grabbing and ambient, pop and lo-fi prog.

Unfathomably sublime.