Mojave 3: Spoon And Rafter - 2026 Remaster (Vinyl LP)

Mojave 3’s founding members are vocalist / guitarist Neil Halstead, bassist / vocalist Rachel Goswell, and drummer Ian McCutcheon. The band broke cover in 1995, when a six-track demo impressed 4ad sufficiently to offer them a deal, despite a then-prevailing musical climate of bumptious Britpop that seemed totally at odds with what Mojave 3 were doing.

Their incongruence was hardly surprising given that Halstead, Goswell and McCutcheon had formed as members of definitive shoegazers Slowdive, while guitarist Simon Rowe had previously served with dreampop kindred spirits Chapterhouse.

Mojave 3’s debut, Ask Me Tomorrow, was a refreshingly stripped down collection that changed little from the original demos. Halstead’s melodic, folk- and country-tinged songs drew favourable (if lazy) comparisons to Nick Drake, Cowboy Junkies and Bob Dylan. Three years later, Out Of Tune continued where the first album left off and showed a group that had grown in both confidence and cohesiveness. Third album Excuses For Travellers contained some of the most ambitious Halstead compositions yet. Spoon And Rafter followed three years later marking another shift for the band.

While still containing echoes of singer-songwriters and alt-country, the record represents a technicolour expansion of their palette that utilizes electronics, glockenspiels, melodica, and Beatlesque production. Their final album, 2006’s Puzzles Like You is a positively bright and fun record that feels right at home next to indie rock contemporaries like The Shins and Band of Horses, while sounding nearly unrecognisable next to the band they were on Ask Me Tomorrow.

Never ones to sit still, Spoon and Rafter marked another shift for the band. While still containing echoes of singer-songwriters and alt-country, the record represents a Technicolour expansion of their palette that utilizes electronics, glockenspiels, melodica, and Beatlesque production.

“It’s quite a bonkers album, really,” says Ian. “By that stage we had our own studio again on the north Cornish coast in the UK. We had time to pick up different instruments and just faff around. It was quite a process, but it’s my favourite record we did.”

“We sort of entered our Beach Boys phase of Mojave 3,” says Neil, “where we became more interested in different instrumentation and a fuller sound. Thanks to Mark [Van Hoen] it was the first time we used an early Pro Tools system to edit stuff together, so some of the tracks are much longer and more orchestrated, like ‘Bluebird of Happiness,’ which has three different sections that were all recorded separately and then chopped together.”

And while Mojave 3 had few instances of breaking into mainstream culture, album cuts “Bluebird of Happiness” and “Bill Oddity” were poppy enough to both be featured in 2003 episodes of The O.C.

Black vinyl version.

1. Bluebird Of Happiness
2. Starlite #1
3. Bill Oddity
4. Writing To St. Peter
5. Battle Of The Broken Hearts
6. Hard To Miss You
7. Tinkers Blues
8. She's All Up Above
9. Too Many Mornings
10. Between The Bars