BUZZ DRAINPIPE REVIEWS AMONG THE MISSING

Some playlists announce themselves with a leather jacket, a switchblade, and a stolen motorcycle.

Among the Missing arrives through the back door carrying a damp cardboard box.

Inside: unlabeled photographs, dead batteries, a church bulletin from 1968, three guitar picks, somebody’s old address written on a matchbook, and a note in your mother’s handwriting saying:

They’re among the missing.

That phrase does everything.

It is funny in the old household way, where disappearance is treated as a minor clerical status. Somebody has wandered off, failed to call, missed dinner, or vanished from human history. No panic. No search party. They have simply joined a vague administrative category between “out somewhere” and “possibly dead.”

But placed over this music, the phrase changes temperature.

It becomes a roll call for bands who slipped through the floorboards.

Not forgotten exactly. Forgotten suggests the world knew them first. These people were often barely admitted into history at all. They released one album, one single, one scorched rehearsal, one provincial masterpiece recorded by a man whose primary business was repairing washing machines. Then the record company collapsed, the drummer enlisted, the singer found religion, the master tape got used as insulation, and forty years later some collector in Belgium discovered the acetate under a stack of Mantovani.

That is the republic this playlist governs.

A republic of the almost-heard.

I. The Seagull Has Left the Building

Love Sculpture’s “Seagull (The West Coast Oil Tragedy of ’68)” is exactly the right doorway.

It does not begin the playlist so much as pull the building out from under it.

The title already sounds like a local newspaper headline being translated into psychedelic scripture. “Seagull” should imply air, coast, freedom, a clean white shape over blue water. Then comes the parenthetical, and the bird is dragged through petroleum, industry, catastrophe, and late-sixties guilt.

That collision is the playlist’s engine.

Beauty here is always stepping in something.

The guitar does not sing. It circles the scene. The rhythm feels less like progress than inspection. We are not moving toward the future. We are surveying what the future has already poisoned.

And because this is Dave Edmunds before the clean-lined retro craftsmanship, before the rockabilly chrome was polished, the playing still has soot in it. Love Sculpture sound like musicians who have discovered virtuosity but have not yet agreed to behave responsibly with it. The notes shear off the neck. The arrangement keeps peering over the edge.

This is the first missing person.

Not a band, exactly.

A version of rock music that briefly existed before everyone received uniforms.

Before the progressive players became prog.

Before the heavy players became metal.

Before the roots players became revivalists.

Here they remain contaminated together, standing near the shoreline while the gull comes down black.

II. You Can’t Be Found

Then comes The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, whose name is either delightful, unbearable, or correct depending on your blood sugar.

“You Can’t Be Found” places the playlist’s thesis in plain language.

This is West Coast psychedelia without the mansion mythology. No Laurel Canyon immortality. No glossy photo of geniuses leaning against a fence. This is the other sunlight, the sunlight behind budget curtains, where harmony vocals bloom inside rooms nobody preserved.

The song has that peculiar late-sixties ache in which optimism and erasure coexist in the same chord.

The voices rise beautifully, but the title keeps cancelling them.

You can’t be found.

Not “you are gone.”

Not “you left.”

The line implies a search already underway. A drawer opened. A number dialed. A friend asked. A map consulted. Nothing.

The psychedelic era produced enormous amounts of music about transcendence, but this playlist understands that transcendence often looked suspiciously like losing contact with somebody.

They went east.

They joined a commune.

They moved to Arizona.

They changed their name.

They stopped playing.

They are around somewhere.

They are among the missing.

The track floats, but it does not escape. It remains tethered to absence by the title, a bright balloon tied to an empty chair.

III. Sugar Bear Enters Through the Wall

Sugar Bear’s “Let It Roll” brings in the basement electricity.

The song is not interested in memorial etiquette. It kicks the archive door open and asks whether anybody has a working amplifier.

This is one of the central pleasures of obscure rock archaeology. The music does not know it is obscure.

It is not apologizing from the margins. It is not whispering, “Perhaps someday a specialty label will reissue us with extensive liner notes.”

No.

It believes it owns Thursday night.

The drums hit with the confidence of a regional band who have just destroyed a room containing seventy-three people and therefore consider themselves fully prepared to conquer civilization. The guitar does not seek historical importance. It seeks immediate damage.

“Let It Roll” is the moment the playlist stops being a séance and becomes a party held inside the séance.

The dead have located the beer.

This matters because Among the Missing is not maudlin. It does not arrange obscure bands in tiny coffins. It lets them live at full volume. The lost are not presented as fragile museum subjects. They are sweating, overplaying, flirting, missing cues, blowing speakers, and trying to get paid.

A proper archive must preserve arrogance.

Otherwise you are only preserving remains.

IV. The Golden Dawn Promises to Be Around

The Golden Dawn’s “I’ll Be Around” is a perfect ghost title.

It sounds reassuring until you consider it for more than five seconds.

Around where?

In what form?

Are we speaking physically, emotionally, spiritually, contractually?

The phrase becomes slightly uncanny inside this collection because the band is indeed still around, but in the strange way recorded sound allows. Not present. Not absent. Available.

Press play and a room reconstitutes itself.

The singer returns to the microphone.

The tambourine lifts its little silver weather.

The organ lights a hallway.

Everybody resumes their position.

This is the bargain records make with death. They cannot preserve people, but they can preserve a few minutes during which those people were happening.

The Golden Dawn sound suspended between folk-rock delicacy and psychedelic unease. Their music contains windows, but all the windows look into weather. The arrangement has that beautiful Texan instability found in bands orbiting the 13th Floor Elevators, where acid consciousness is not a Californian amusement but a regional haunting.

“I’ll Be Around” becomes less a romantic promise than an ontological fact.

They are around.

They have been waiting inside the track.

The needle, the laser, the stream, whatever technology summons them, merely opens the door.

V. Underground Railroad

The Weeds’ “Underground Railroad” shifts the collection from disappearance into movement.

Every missing person may be standing somewhere else.

The song carries the locomotion of garage rock but also the suspicion that the road is concealed. This is not the grand American highway of open possibility. It is a route beneath the route, an unofficial system, a corridor used by those who cannot travel in daylight.

That makes it a natural anthem for obscure music.

Canonical rock history is built around visible transportation: tours, charts, labels, television appearances, magazine covers, festival bills.

But the music in this playlist traveled differently.

Through traded tapes.

Through cousins.

Through jukeboxes.

Through old heads who remembered a band that played the VFW hall.

Through bootlegs with incorrect names.

Through reissues licensed from somebody who may or may not have owned anything.

Through record fairs where a man named Klaus silently removed an LP from a plastic sleeve and changed the course of your month.

The Weeds sound like they understand that music survives by tunneling.

Not every song enters history through the front gate.

Some crawl beneath it carrying a fuzz pedal.

VI. Try, Try, Try

The Golliwogs’ “Try Try Try” is persistence made primitive.

Before Creedence Clearwater Revival became one of the most recognizable machines in American rock, there was this earlier identity, awkwardly named, historically uncomfortable, still forming inside itself.

That knowledge adds a strange backwards voltage. We hear not merely a forgotten band but a famous band before fame reorganized the evidence.

The future is in there, but not fully assembled.

The voice already has grit. The rhythm already knows repetition can become destiny. The guitar has begun learning how little it needs.

But the song remains beautifully provisional.

Try.

Try again.

Try once more.

That is the hidden labor behind every supposedly inevitable career. Before history starts using words like “signature,” “classic,” and “timeless,” there are usually years of people hauling equipment into bad rooms and attempting to become themselves.

The Golliwogs belong among the missing because they reveal how much of identity must be discarded before the accepted version appears.

A band does not simply arrive.

It sheds names.

It sheds songs.

It sheds clothes, members, ambitions, mistakes, and entire aesthetic neighborhoods.

Success is often a carefully edited disappearance.

VII. Skullcrusher

Then Iron Claw’s “Skullcrusher” lumbers into view, and the flowers catch fire.

Here is the playlist’s great slab of prehistoric metal, still dripping swamp water.

Iron Claw do not sound as though they are anticipating heavy metal. They sound as though heavy metal has already happened somewhere underground and they have emerged carrying a damaged copy of it.

The riff is not decoration. It is local government.

Everything else must file paperwork beneath it.

This is heaviness before heaviness developed athletic discipline. No aerodynamic precision. No standardized distortion architecture. No polished mythology. The sound is thick, stubborn, and gloriously inconvenient.

“Skullcrusher” has the quality of machinery built by people who only had access to agricultural equipment.

It moves.

It works.

It may remove a hand.

The title itself is almost charming in its bluntness. Later metal would develop vast lexicons of doom, fantasy, war, Satan, madness, apocalypse, and cosmic ruin. Iron Claw simply label the function.

Skull.

Crusher.

Instructions complete.

But beneath the caveman directness lies the same melancholy that haunts the rest of the playlist. Bands like Iron Claw were creating an entire language before the market knew where to shelve it. They had the future in their amplifiers and no reliable shipping address.

The world eventually caught up.

It simply forgot to bring them along.

VIII. Voyage of the Trieste

The Chocolate Watchband’s “Voyage of the Trieste” plunges below the surface.

The Trieste was a bathyscaphe, a vessel built to descend into oceanic pressure so severe that ordinary engineering begins to resemble optimism. The track therefore provides the playlist with a perfect vehicle: a machine traveling downward into zones where light cannot follow.

That is what deep catalog listening feels like.

The mainstream tells history horizontally. One year follows another. One movement replaces the previous movement. Influences travel cleanly from source to destination.

The archive tells history vertically.

You descend.

Below the familiar psychedelic layer is another psychedelic layer.

Below the famous garage bands are the regional garage bands.

Below them are the private presses.

Below those are rehearsal tapes, acetates, local television appearances, dead links, mislabeled uploads, and somebody’s memory that the guitarist later became a dentist.

Pressure increases.

Names become unstable.

Personnel blur.

The Chocolate Watchband themselves are ideal guides because their history is already full of substitutions, session musicians, label manipulation, and identity confusion. Their recorded existence asks a basic question:

Who exactly are we hearing?

That question suits Among the Missing perfectly.

The track glides through murk with ceremonial cool. It is not merely psychedelic. It is submersible.

The song does not invite you to look back at the sixties.

It lowers you into them.

IX. Felt Builds a World

Felt’s “World” is the hinge.

The title is immense, but the band remains shadowy. That contradiction feels right. Obscure groups often made music with no sense of appropriate scale. They had little money, limited distribution, uncertain futures, and a song called “World.”

Good.

Art should occasionally behave beyond its authorization.

Felt’s track carries the inward grandeur of heavy psych, where a guitar phrase can feel less like a riff than a private cosmology. The band creates not a polished universe but a dense, handmade one. Its planets wobble. Its sky is stained. Gravity has been installed by a friend.

Yet the world holds.

This is where the playlist reveals its deepest emotional logic.

The missing are not merely absent from our world.

They built worlds of their own.

Each obscure record contains its own weather, slang, hierarchy, architecture, and laws of motion. Most of these worlds were never broadly visited. Some remained inhabited only by the musicians, their friends, a few local listeners, and the person who eventually uploaded the album with a photograph of the cover taken at an angle.

Listening becomes interplanetary travel conducted through poor metadata.

Felt’s “World” does not ask permission to be rediscovered.

It was complete before we arrived.

X. Our Fairy Tale

The Herd’s “Our Fairy Tale” introduces the prettiest lie in the collection.

The phrase “fairy tale” usually arrives with decorative expectations. Gold lettering. Forests. Princes. Transformations. But possessive language changes it.

Our fairy tale.

Not the official one.

Not the inherited one.

Ours.

This is the fairy tale made by a band in transit, carrying glamour, youth, ambition, and the knowledge that pop history was moving brutally fast. Every group in that era was trying to become permanent inside a culture designed to replace them by next Thursday.

The song’s romantic sheen therefore becomes poignant. Pop music always claims the present as eternity.

This love will last.

This feeling will last.

This chorus will last.

This band will last.

The record lasts.

Everything else negotiates separately.

The Herd sound almost too polished for the playlist’s rougher provinces, but that elegance is useful. Disappearance is not reserved for the ragged. You can vanish beautifully. You can have arrangements, haircuts, publicity photographs, management, and a properly mixed single.

History remains capable of losing you.

XI. Second Production

Mike Stuart Span’s “Second Production” carries a title that sounds industrial, theatrical, and faintly defeated.

The first production did not settle matters.

We must mount another.

That phrase captures the afterlife of obscure music. Every reissue is a second production. Every playlist placement is a second production. Every essay written decades later is another attempt to place the scenery correctly and persuade the actors to return.

But the second production is never identical.

Context has changed.

The listeners arrive with knowledge the musicians did not possess. We know which genres formed. We know who became famous. We know which sounds became valuable. We hear prophecy where the band may have heard only Tuesday.

This can distort the music.

It can also illuminate it.

Mike Stuart Span occupy that unstable corridor where mod energy, psychedelia, and heavier structures begin exchanging contraband. The song has the excitement of a set being rebuilt while the audience is already seated.

Walls slide.

Lights flicker.

Somebody is still painting the moon.

The curtain rises anyway.

XII. Crowded

Nazz’s “Crowded” gives absence a social setting.

One can be missing in a crowd.

Perhaps especially there.

Nazz had the talent, the songs, the style, and Todd Rundgren, which is usually more future than one band should legally possess. Yet they remain perpetually adjacent to the central narrative, visible in retrospect but never entirely installed in the popular imagination.

“Crowded” sounds compressed by possibility. Voices, guitars, ideas, arrangements, youth, everything pushing into the same small room.

That crowding is not merely sonic. It describes the era.

There were too many bands.

Too many singles.

Too many local scenes.

Too many small labels.

Too many teenagers who had heard Revolver, Are You Experienced, Fresh Cream, and The Who Sell Out within a short enough interval to sustain neurological consequences.

History could not keep everyone.

The canon is partly aesthetic judgment, partly commerce, partly accident, and partly crowd control.

Somebody had to stand outside the photograph.

XIII. Rock ’n’ Roll Boogie Man

Albatross conclude the sequence with “Rock ’n’ Roll Boogie Man,” a title that appears to have been assembled from materials found behind a rehearsal studio.

Perfect.

The boogie man is threat reduced to rhythm.

The childhood monster grows sideburns, borrows an amplifier, and learns three chords. Fear becomes entertainment. Entertainment becomes local folklore. Local folklore becomes a record nobody can find for thirty years.

There is something almost triumphant about ending here. After all the disappearance, melancholy, fog, deep-sea travel, underground railroads, and absent persons, rock and roll itself remains shambling through the woods.

Not immortal.

Too disreputable for immortality.

It survives more like mold, rumor, or a bad influence.

The boogie man keeps returning because nobody ever properly confirms his death.

That may be the final definition of the music gathered here.

Not dead.

Not alive in the commercial sense.

Not canonized.

Not erased.

Among the missing.

THE DRAINPIPE VERDICT

Among the Missing is an archive with a porch light on.

Its songs come from that vast unofficial history beneath official rock history, where bands formed, mutated, recorded, dissolved, and waited decades for somebody to notice the smoke still rising from the grooves.

The playlist moves beautifully between garage snap, psychedelic drift, proto-metal weight, folk-rock perfume, and private-world melancholy. It does not treat obscurity as a genre. It treats obscurity as a condition imposed upon wildly different music.

That distinction is crucial.

These songs are not good because they were forgotten.

They were forgotten despite being alive.

And the title, inherited from your mother’s dry little phrase, gives the whole collection a human center. Suddenly these are not rare tracks arranged by a collector. They are absent neighbors, lost cousins, old friends, vanished bands, and versions of ourselves we cannot quite locate.

You ask where they went.

The room barely looks up.

Somebody gestures toward the fog.

They’re among the missing.

Then the guitar starts again.

Rating: 9½ unreturned phone calls out of 10. 📻🌒