I’ve been meaning to do a little Rose Melberg retrospective for a while; an idea for a theme week, alongside “most covered songs” and the like. But for whatever reason, I never seem to get around to it. So we’ll try the easier route instead and fit some of it into one post. Ladies and gents, this is Rose Melberg. You might know her from the Softies, a lovely twee band from Portland and arguably her biggest band to date. Or you might remember her from past glories such as Go Sailor and Tiger Trap, which were much more upbeat and uptempo; the general rule with Melberg is the further back in time you go, the closer her music comes to garage rock. Then there’s her stint with Gaze, a K Records band that’s often mentioned by fawning bios but has otherwise been mostly forgotten. This is sort of unfortunate; one of my favourite tracks ever is off Gaze’s Mitsumeru, “Shiny.” (But I guess that’ll have to wait for the full retrospective.)

A couple of years ago, Melberg put out a solo album, filled with Tiger Trap leftovers, a couple of covers, and new songs she’d written while with the Softies. Portola was a minor success, especially considering its partsbin heritage. It also helped that the Softies were a going concern at the time; their last album to date, Holiday in Rhode Island, came out two years after Portola. So probably more people caught wind of and wanted to hear a Rose Melberg album back then. Fast forward to today, though, and the era in which she was making music is distant enough that Pitchfork has seen fit to memorialize it. And Rose Melberg had all but disappeared, as far as the world was concerned.

See, one of two things happen after a revered bandleader puts out their first solo album: they either leave the band (if it still exists) and become successful in their own right, or they disappear from the face of the earth. It has been this way for decades, and it will be this way for many more. Until recently, I figured Melberg had fallen into the latter category, and the evidence was overwhelming: an album pieced together from several years’ worth of backlog; the subsequent disappearance of the Softies; fellow Softie Jen Sbragia’s new duties in All-Girl Summer Fun Band. But she’s resurfaced recently, playing some gigs in and around the Pacific Northwest, and she’s put out a new track. Originally the title track from an Anne Briggs album, “The Time Has Come” is a minor folk gem, and oddly fitting for Melberg; Briggs is credited with “as pure and breathtakingly beautiful a voice as one could hope to have,” and one could easily say the same for Melberg.