R Stevie Moore: Lo Fi High Fives – review

Despite being, in a sense, born into the US music industry – his father Bob was one of 50s/60s Nashville's top-tier session bass players – R Stevie Moore has spent his strange and rather wonderful career firmly outside it. Since 1968 – and to this day – he has been busy in his basement home-taping an endless stream of eccentric, off-brand pop, apparently trying to copy the hits he heard on the radio and getting it all just a tiny, lovely little bit wrong. Much of it is utterly lo-fi and wildly, kaleidoscopically elaborate at once, and this terrific compilation herds together some highlights of his unknowably vast discography (by some counts more than 400 albums strong). And there are real treasures here, from the thrumming, Neil Youngish The Winner to oddball power-pop gem Why Should I Love You? (recently covered by the Vaccines). An outsider hero whose cult seems to keep growing with each generation, Moore could hardly be a better advert for going your own way.