T. Rex - Sky Church Music (1973)

With the many, many retrospective and archive recordings that have appeared since Marc Bolan's tragic death in 1977, I think we all know that he was a prolific songwriter, and recorded demos or rehearsals of a lot of his songs, most of which never eventually made it to a finished take. A recent 8 CD box set has gathered up over 200 of these recordings from 1972 to 1977, and for the rabid fan it's a treasure-trove of delights. However, for the casual observer like me there did seem to be a lot of substandard material on there, with one disc containing just similar-sounding acoustic demos, and a lot of the others being a mixture of full band recordings and snippets of half-formed ideas. I've trawled through every single track on there and have decided that there are just enough well-recorded full-band songs to make up two 40-minute T. Rex albums, which both come from the 1973-1975 period of the band's career. This is the first of them, with all of the songs being recorded during sessions for the 'Tanx' album, which is why I've used an unused photo from that cover shoot for the sleeve of this one. It's a surprisingly cohesive album, with the quality of the recordings all being of a high standard, apart from one song that I had to drop as I just couldn't get it to match the quality of the rest of the album. 

Track listing

01 All My Love
02 Dance In The Midnight
03 Hope You Enjoy The Show
04 Saturday Night
05 Down Home Lady
06 Yesterday (Everyday)
07 Plateau Skull
08 Saturation Syncopation
09 Jet Tambourine
10 Mr. Motion
11 Metropolis Incarnate
12 You Move Like A Dog
13 Sky Church Music