Acetone is just the latest ’90s curiosity to be plucked from hushed, record-store-counter cult status (read: utter anonymity) by Seattle reissue label Light In The Attic. The trio was a prodigiously talented outfit from northeastern Los Angeles—which decades prior attracted the likes of Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Neil Young, who put Acetone’s final two albums out on his Vapor imprint—for all of its windswept melancholy.
1992-2001 functions as a perfect introduction to the band’s catalog, bundling tracks from its five albums with nine unreleased songs, beginning with the stunning “Shaker,” which plays like a swirling, tripped-out take on some long-lost soul cut, and including covers of “Midnight Cowboy” and “How Sweet I Roamed.” Theirs is a hypnotic, out-of-time tone, indebted equally to surf rock, country and R&B, nailing that elusive “high and lonesome sound” like few have since.
—Möhammad Choudhery
