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1. Alice Clark “Alice Clark”
2. Wild Pink “A Billion Little Lights”
3. Raising Holy Sparks “Search for the Vanished Heaven”

Bandcamp is an online music platform used largely by independent artists and record labels to stream songs and sell merchandise. It’s also a vibrant virtual community teeming with interesting sounds just waiting to be discovered. Each week, I’ll highlight three releases available on the site that are well worth your time and attention. If you find something you dig, please consider supporting the artist with a purchase.

Alice Clark “Alice Clark”

History is littered with artists who left the music industry after making great records that were largely ignored by listeners. Alice Clark fits the bill. Born in New York City, the little-known soul singer recorded two singles and one excellent full-length album, produced by Bob Shad for the Mainstream Records label in 1972.

Blessed with a strong and versatile voice and backed by a band of top-shelf session players (including drummer Bernard Purdie and guitarist Cornell Dupree), Clark spends these 10 tracks infusing stories of love, loss and life with the kind of authentic emotion that made other singers superstars. It didn’t work out for Clark, though, who retired after the release of her self-titled debut and died in 2004. A debt of gratitude, then, to Parisian label We Want Sounds, which unearthed this lost soul classic and reissued it in 2019, making it widely available for the first time in decades.

Wild Pink

“A Billion Little Lights”

New York-based singer-songwriter John Ross has quietly become one of indie rock’s great, underappreciated tunesmiths over the past few years.

He records under the name Wild Pink, and his new album “A Billion Little Lights” is yet another collection of softly focused songs that shimmer and sigh, beautifully and wearily.

Wild Pink’s music sits at the intersection of a number of different sounds and styles: the earnest pop-rock of Death Cab for Cutie, swooping slide guitars for a healthy dose of twang, the steady thrum of nu-classic rockers The War on Drugs, the warm nostalgia of buzzing synthesizers and so on. The songs on “A Billion Little Lights” are at once immediately likable and complex enough to reveal layers upon repeated listens.

They remind me of The National in this way, and you like The National, right? You will also like Wild Pink.

Raising Holy Sparks

“Search for the Vanished Heaven”

With a name like that and four tracks running 23 minutes long each, you can probably guess what’s happening here: Lots of weirdness, with an emphasis on the words “lots” and “weirdness,” (no offense to the word “of”). Released in 2017 on the terrific Seattle-based label Eiderdown Records, “Search for the Vanished Heaven” comprises nearly 100 minutes of, according to the Bandcamp description, “prog gnosis, lunar devotionals, ancient-future rituals & thanks & prayers to the resident spirits, who know of no borders save those liminal ones we may sometimes glimpse.” I hear strange tones and far-out drones from zones both cosmic and terrestrial, plus the occasional folk melody, synth loop, psych freakout and spoken-word passage. This one’s for the adventurous listener with patience to spare.