Joe Chester - She Darks Me (2019)

There is something very romantic about the notion of a “lost” album. Smile by the Beach Boys is probably the most mysterious and revered, but just about every artist worth their salt has an unreleased or abandoned work of some description gathering dust. Joe Chester made She Darks Me back in the early 2000s, in between stints collaborating with Gemma Hayes in Los Angeles and touring with The Waterboys. Chester has enjoyed a very accomplished career since then, as a producer to virtually every Irish artist of note in the past 15 years and an acclaimed solo artist.

She Darks Me is as good as anything he has done over the years, which makes it all the stranger that it is taken until now to see the light the day. The single Anything in the Long Run is as good a place as any for the uninitiated to start; an impressive and propulsive pop folk tune that is impeccably crafted and played. Chester knows his way around a studio with his eyes closed. She Darks Me received the remastering treatment, complete with a very pleasant sonic buff and sheen, in Chester’s studio in the south of France.