Bleep

Few British folk artists come as legendary and unsung as Vashti Bunyan, and Just Another Diamond Day is doubtlessly her greatest achievement — for 35 years, it was her only documented musical achievement. Released in 1970 to little fanfare, Bunyan’s debut has since gained the critical and commercial stature it deserves, leaving deep impressions on modern folk and psychedelic music. In its own quiet way, Just Another Diamond Day is a mind-expanding record; an intimate collection of songs sung from a position of world-weariness beyond Bunyan’s years at the time, replete with pastoral imagery and a trippy bent akin to Fairport Convention or later celebrants like Joanna Newsom.

In many ways a missing aural link between the stark minimalism of the earliest folk songs, and the more expansive repertoire of its many offshoots to come, the songs on Just Another Day contain a wide-eyed, almost childlike sense of wonder that does indeed border on the psychedelic. Tracks like the sing-song-y ‘Lily Pond’ (which reinterprets the melody from ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’) and ‘Where I Like To Stand’ ask deep questions about whimsy when the POV comes from an adult, while the more subdued ‘Trawlerman’s Song’ rings deep pathos out of the loneliness of a life at sea. This reissue from Branch Music Ltd. rightfully places Vashti Bunyan within the continuum of the grand folk music tradition, a place she has always belonged.