So as my Mojave 3 reissue box set winds its way to me in the gentle collective embrace of the United States Postal Service and Canada Post, I have come to terms with the fact that the band, formerly on hiatus, have formally flipped that switch to disbanded and that there will be no more new music from one of my favourite bands ever. But what about… unheard old music?

While digging around the band’s Discogs page in that time between news of the reissues leaking and officially being announced, I saw an entry on their page I’d not seen before. Demos ’97 was listed as a cassette promo and the image even had what appeared to be a 4AD bar code or catalog number, but its authenticity as an official release seemed dubious. And while the idea of hearing demos of those songs was interesting, given that the album versions were so spare, I didn’t expect any revelations. And then I looked at the track listing.

There are 18 tracks listed, and of them six would appear on 1998’s Out Of Tune – “Baby’s Coming Home”, “You Keep It All Hid”, “Some Kinda Angel”, “This Road I’m Travellin'”, and “To Whom Should I Write”. The unnamed track on side A was an embryonic version of “Give What You Take” and “Throw Against The Wall” would become “Yer Feet”. Furthermore, two others – “Go Lady Go” and “All I Want” – would appear as a b-side on the “Some Kinda Angel” single and “Between Us” on the “Who Do You Love” single. So, doing the math, that’s ten songs previously released in some version. Meaning there’s EIGHT more that never saw the light of day. That’s almost a whole album’s worth of unheard songs from the Out Of Tune era.

While some sound very much like Out Of Tune outtakes, a few stand out because they don’t. There’s “Ride The Wheel”, which is a grungy number channels Neil Young via Crazy Horse, but the biggest outliers are “This Is Goodbye”, “Teenage Country Star”, “Lost For Reason”, “Regret”, and “December” and that’s because they feature Rachel Goswell on lead vocals, something we got very little of post-Ask Me Tomorrow. One has to wonder if that was a conscious choice on the part of the band, and for that reason, the songs were excised? In any case, it’s marvellous to be able to hear them through the magic of the internet.

Again, I don’t know if this release was ever actually authorized, but it is real and also exists as the resolutely unofficial Out Of Tune Demos CD-R bootleg, with the “Who Do You Love” demo from the aforementioned “Who Do You Love” official single added for completeness sake. Maybe, in lieu of new music, we can at least get an official release of this old stuff alongside their b-sides?