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In mid-February a label called Star Apple Kingdom gave the “deluxe edition” reissue treatment to Cotton Mather‘s Kontiki. “Cotton who?” you may ask. Cotton Mather the band (as opposed to Cotton Mather the Puritan minister) were a trio from Austin, Texas, that released one of the sharpest guitar-pop albums of the past 20 years. Kontiki, which came out in 1997 on the tiny Copper Records, is precise, superhooky, inventively produced, and heavily Beatlesque (I’ve never heard their 1994 debut, Cotton Is King). It barely made a ripple in the U.S., but it attracted a bunch of press in the UK—and this was years before the Internet was able to help a regional band catch on like wildfire. Apparently both Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis loved it, though admittedly that doesn’t seem like a good reason for anyone to care about Cotton Mather at this point.
