Album: Manassas, Pieces (Rhino)

Quietly slipped out towards the end of last year and now available on glorious vinyl, Pieces is a sound scrapbook filled with the bits Stephen Stills' seminal 1970s collective left on the studio floor.

Incredibly, a couple of tracks (the opening "Witching Hour", to name one) are as good as anything on the band's debut double album. Such standards are not maintained throughout, though, and, as the title suggests, without proper sequencing Stills' stylistic-hopping can, at times, sound like a genius in search of a genre.