Some influential logic, reissued.

Essential Logic Fanfare in the Garden, Kill Rock Stars Essential Logic's Beat Rhythm News came out in 1979 in the UK but was never released here. It was notoriously hard to get hold of, though I heard it once 10 years ago when a friend borrowed it from a British acquaintance. Listening then and now, it's easy to see why the band's recordings were so sought after. This is music at once primitive and complex, violent and beautiful, equal parts punk and reggae, music hall and anarchic free-form experiment. The closest reference point might be X-Ray Spex (lead singer and saxophonist Lora Logic was an original member) or the Red Krayola (which Lora sometimes joined in the late 70s and early 80s). Essential Logic is at once unique and strangely familiar: You can hear the band's imprint on and kinship with a host of others from Sleater-Kinney to Erase Errata.

Lora's multitracked vocals are all over the place, one minute deep and throaty, the next wobbling high, piercing and angry. The guitar parts are much more sophisticated than X-Ray Spex, not properly punk at all, but the music's still raw in spirit; Lora sounds gleeful one minute, despairing the next, infused with a kind of rage and determination. At the same time, Beat Rhythm News was playful, filled with danceable rhythms. The news it delivered was that what was real, musically speaking, could be anything that was imaginable.

A two-CD Essential Logic reissue is out now on Kill Rock Stars. It includes Beat Rhythm News, a slew of singles and tracks from a more recent version of Essential Logic (with Gary Valentine of Blondie) that were released on the Internet in the late 90s. There are even previously unreleased songs from the mid-80s and early 90s, when Lora Logic was heavily involved with Hare Krishna and not recording commercially at all.

Fanfare in the Garden is one of my favorite releases of the year to date. All of the early stuff is excellent, even fantastic, as Greil Marcus describes it in his liner notes, inspiring a delighted and delirious reaction along the lines of "'What? Where? Who? Did that happen?'"

"The Order Form," for example, is several songs in one. First comes intricate melancholy guitar and bass with a tight, tense beat. Then Lora's saxophone sings the melody, followed by punkier, speeded-up guitar and warbling, birdlike vocals. By the end of the song a little march is building and the sax is blaring into a sprawled-out, tumbling ending, complete with fading chants. "Wake Up" starts with chanting vocals, then gets poppy and punky?it's easy to imagine a crowd pogoing until the beat turns on a dime into something more swinging, then goes back where it began until it rattles away with a little sizzle, like a lightning strike.

The late-90s version of Essential Logic is good as well, musically more sunny and poppy than what came before, with Lora singing in a lighter, almost little-girlish, sometimes world-weary tone. "Barbie Be Happy" is a poppy classic with a slight melancholy tinge. "The Beautiful and the Damned" is more outright sad. "Marika" replaces the righteous, exhilarating anger so palpable in the late-70s and early-80s songs with an almost overwhelming despair. While some tracks on Fanfare in the Garden may be of most interest to collectors and completists, kudos is due KRS and Lora Logic herself for making this long-lost music widely available at last.