There’s a lot to be said for the charisma of premature death. And the manner of his particular dying?turning blue on a motel floor at the age of 26, his heart fatally faltering, ice cubes being stuffed up his ass in a pathetic attempt to bring him back from the brink after one binge too many?booked Gram Parsons an automatic place of honour in a rock’n’roll Valhalla already overcrowded with dead young heroes, Jimi, Janis, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and more already among its spectral population.

And then, of course, there is the bonfire they made of his body, the macabre drunken ritual of his Joshua Tree cremation, his friend and roadie, Phil Kaufman, fulfilling a pact he made with Gram at the funeral of former Byrds guitarist Clarence White. Which was basically that if either checked out while the other was still living, the one still standing would take the other, now dead, and burn the corpse out there in the Mojave desert?where Gram had dropped LSD, partied, died. Kaufman may have thought he was merely honouring a boozy promise. He was actually creating a legend.

If Gram’s early exit ensured a notorious immortality, it has also to some extent unintentionally overshadowed the music he left behind, which is his true legacy. People who’ve never heard him, however, may wonder whether the myth looms larger than the music, about whose merit they may be somewhat suspicious. After all, an image has grown since his death of Gram as something of a playboy, a rich southern kid living off a substantial trust fund who was more interested in narcotic debauchery and reckless living than the nurturing of a sublime talent. In the circumstances, can his music really be as good as his fans say it is?

The answer, provided emphatically by this handsome two-disc compilation, is a deafening fucking yes.

On his way to the grave, Gram produced some of the most moving music ever made. He was a true visionary, inspired from an early age by something he called “Cosmic American Music”?a heady mix of rock’n’roll, gospel, southern soul, R&B and, most unfashionably at the time, country. Astonishingly, the year The Beatles released Sgt Pepper and the Velvets and Jimi Hendrix released their mind-blowing debuts, Gram was rediscovering Hank Williams, Buck Owens, George Jones and Merle Haggard with The International Submarine Band, who in 1967 recorded their debut, Safe At Home, arguably the first “country rock” album.

Sacred Hearts & Fallen Angels takes the ISB as its starting point (there’s nothing here from The Shilos, Parsons’ previous band, which unfortunately means no “Zah’s Blues”) and follows a chronological narrative arc, with the occasional rarity strongly bolstered by representative cuts from the groundbreaking albums he went on to make with The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Bros, the live album he recorded with his touring band, The Fallen Angels, and the two immaculate solo albums he made with Emmylou Harris as his vocal partner?which according to Elvis Costello’s sleevenotes for the 1982 compilation Gram Parsons “featured some of the finest duet singing ever put on record”.

For Costello, Parsons?especially on songs as “mysterious, almost philosophical” as the Burritos’ “Sin City” and later solo recordings like “Return Of The Grievous Angel”, “$1000 Wedding” and “In My Hour Of Darkness”?was the legitimate heir to Hank Williams, a view often endorsed by his friend Keith Richards, with whom he enjoyed such a close relationship during the making of Exile On Main St, an album partially shaped by his influence.

Gram’s back catalogue, so brilliantly reflected here, consists of?what??only six complete albums, and a couple of collections of outtakes and rehearsal tapes. But when those albums include masterpieces like The Byrds’ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, the Burritos’ immortal The Gilded Palace Of Sin, and the solo GP and Grievous Angel, you begin to realise the extent to which this fated young man changed the face of American music. None of these records sold during Gram’s lifetime, but their influence has been widespread. Thirty years after his death, the music he made has lost none of its magic?these honky tonk laments, country death songs and heartbreaking ballads remain uniquely unforgettable, forever haunting, eternally beautiful.

It’s justice of a kind. Almost 25 years after its initial release, The Gun Club’s debut album?all but ignored in America at the time and reaching only a cult audience in Britain and Europe?is vivified by the success of those very bands whose music it helped inspire. The White Stripes, Soledad Brothers, The Von Bondies et al acknowledge their debt to Son House, Robert Johnson and Howlin’Wolf, but it’s this LA quartet’s inspired welding of punk to blues, country and rockabilly that really showed them the way.

Released in 1981, Fire Of Love was recorded in just two days, with guitarist Ward Dotson replacing Kid Congo Powers, who’d recently been poached by The Cramps (although he rejoined the band three years later). Notoriously volatile singer-songwriter and guitarist Jeffrey Lee Pierce (who died of a brain haemorrhage in 1996) was a big fan of both Marty Robbins and Ornette Coleman, which helps explain his band’s thrillingly mutant sound.

Fire Of Love is their finest work, a dark and dangerous stew of roughly hammered blues, gothic country, souped-up rockabilly and jazzy punk. Its sleazy, disaffected cool has a parallel in Lou Reed’s Transformer, an impression underlined by the fact that Pierce often sounds uncannily like Reed. Opening track “Sex Beat” sets out The Gun Club’s stall both thematically (“We can fuck forever, but you will never get my soul”) and sonically, suggesting a possessed Bo Diddley hanging out on LA’s punk scene. References to “Creole boys lying dead” (in “Jack On Fire”) and “looking for niggers down in the dark” (on “For The Love Of Ivy”, co-written with Kid Congo) raise questions about Pierce’s politics, but the part-Mexican singer is very likely adopting a redneck persona to make his point. Robert Johnson’s “Preaching The Blues” is reinvented as a slide guitar-strafed hoodoo, set at full gallop and steered by Pierce’s wail, but “Fire Spirit” shifts into British R&B territory, and co-producer Tito Larriva’s violin work lends “Promise Me” a noirish, B-movie quality. Fire Of Love prefigures the sounds of the young garage-blues gunslingers by a good quarter-century. It’s never sounded better.

In their current incarnation as a Krautrock-influenced psychedelic drum circle, Osaka’s Boredoms are one of the planet’s most transcendent live bands. Originally, though, they were one of the most splenetic, as these three reissues from the their labyrinthine catalogue prove. Onanie Bomb (1986), their Western debut, is a hilarious endurance test involving gibbering hardcore, no-wave skronk and?unusual for the avant-garde?an extended burping sequence. By 1992’s fine Pop Tatari, Yamatsuka Eye and his charges are incorporating funk into the exuberant, increasingly musicianly chaos. Chocolate Synthesizer (1994) is, if anything, better still, with elements of the trance-riffing that would come to the fore on 1998’s Super

The original Charlatans pretty much mapped out the psychedelic ballroom scene with their 1965 residency in Virginia City, Nevada, but never capitalised on their innovation, left behind in the dust of the Deads and Airplanes they inspired. Dan Hicks quit and original members Mike Ferguson and George Hunter had been ousted by the time of this flat effort. The version of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” is limp and indifferent, and the band’s trad staple “Alabama Bound” is way better on Ace’s ’96 comp The Amazing Charlatans.

Originally issued in 1970 on the innovative Mushroom label, this uncategorisable minor classic defies expectations at every turn. If it sounds at times like a promising young singer-songwriter wilfully subjecting his material to an experimentalist makeover from burgeoning avant-garders David Toop and Paul Burwell, well that’s precisely what it is.

Toop’s frantically hammered dulcimer and Ornette Coleman-esque violin intro to “Very Close Friend” might lull you into thinking that you’re about to hear psych-folk’s very own Free Jazz or Ascension (which would be no bad thing.) Instead, the song simply drifts in and out again, a wispy fragment that leaves no trace. Next up, the rambling narcoleptic drawl of “The Courtyard” is just one of several tracks that evoke what a Steve Took-led Tyrannosaurus Rex might have sounded like. Again, no bad thing. Nothing, though, prepares you for the standout track, “Jerusalem”, which provides the missing evolutionary link between Barry McGuire’s “Eve Of Destruction” and Nick Cave in best biblical mode. This raw-nerved subway-prophet depiction of a drop-out Jesus?”who would still be crucified today”?descends into strangulated, anguished howls at the song’s climax. This startling, if incoherent d

First issued in 1999 (the same year as Sahm’s death), this updated Prime Of… augments the original’s 15 cuts with a further 26, beginning with 1964’s “Sugar Bee” and jumping off somewhere around the late ’70s. It’s a patch-up of sorts, but nevertheless reaffirms Sahm as a unique country/blues/Tex-Mex/soul filter, be it via anguished balladry (“Dallas Alice”), Bayou swing (“Beginning Of The End”), strutting two-step (“She’s About A Mover”) or frisky barrio (“Please Just Say So”). A fitting companion piece to last year’s near-definitive Sahm round-up, The Genuine Texas Groover.

As a teenager, Hinton was employed by Alabama’s Muscle Shoals studios to play guitar and write songs for such rising soul stars as Percy Sledge and Joe Tex. Subsequently, everyone from Dusty Springfield to UB40 recorded his songs. Hinton seemed destined for stardom, yet prolonged substance abuse and mental health problems found Eddie celebrated only as a cult figure before his death in 1995. The fabulous Dear Y’ All (2002) focused on Eddie’s demos of songs that would become soul classics. This CD mops up the rest-garage band demos, Muscle Shoals scribbles and three 1980 tracks as he attempted to relaunch himself. There are no new gems, but for aficionados of southern soul, this offers much joy.

Ramshackle peers of Suicide and Throbbing Gristle, Metal Boys’claim to fame is that, as previous incarnation Metal Urbain, they released the first single on Rough Trade, “Paris Maquis”, in 1978. Recorded on a shoestring in 1980 while the core duo of Eric Debris and Charlie H squatted in London, Tokio Airport is a viciously prescient mix of industrial rockabilly, pulsing minimal electronics and processed punk noise. Their fuzz-flange aesthetic would later be ransacked by The Jesus & Mary Chain.

Appended by nine unreleased tracks, including Debris’ startling dub-disco odyssey “Outer Space”, it’d make an excellent addition to any post-punk collection.

Evan Parker ought to be knighted for re-mastering and reissuing this, one of the great British orchestral jazz records. Utilising stalwart British jazzers alongside wildcard improvisers like saxophonist Parker, guitarist Derek Bailey and percussionist Tony Oxley, Wheeler brilliantly fuses gorgeously limpid melodies (“Ballad Two”) with free-form interludes. Great cliffs of brass echo Gil Evans, but note the subtle nod to electric Miles (those two electric pianos) and the inspired use of Norma Winstone’s voice as an instrument. The highlight is the 15-minute “The Good Doctor”, its wan lyricism simultaneously underlined and derailed by the explosive and still shocking climactic freak-out from Parker, Bailey and Oxley. Forget Matthew Herbert’s big band; this still sounds like the future.

In the autumn of 1969, two unknown English singer-songwriters released debut albums a month apart. One was by Nick Drake. The other was by Keith Christmas. Both were greeted with almost total indifference, although Christmas was considered the more likely to succeed and won tour support slots with The Who and King Crimson. Timeless & Strange compiles material from his first three albums and its release is welcome, for the original records now trade at around 50 quid apiece. With the benefit of hindsight, he has more in common with the less enduring Al Stewart than with Drake. He’d also clearly been listening to Tim Buckley in his baroque phase. His best songs possess an undeniable period charm, but that’s not the same as being timeless.

Jimmy Webb nuts will know all about 5th Dimension: others should. In the late ’60s and early ’70s they enjoyed enormous hits with Webb’s “Up, Up And Away” and Laura Nyro’s “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Wedding Bell Blues”, peaking with “Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In” from Hair. If roots R&B fans deemed them too sweetly, sunnily harmonious to be ‘soulful’, they sobbed all the way to the bank. The young Webb gave them curiously brave lyrics, as on “Paper Cup”; Ashford/Simpson and Bacharach/David happily provided further nuggets like “California Soul” and “Last Night”. Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr married, broke away as a duo in ’72, and history has sneered at their ‘sell-out’ vanilla cuteness ever since. But didn’t folk similarly scoff at The Carpenters? Gorgeous.

They were indeed both “Chi” (from Chicago) and “Lite”, if by that word we mean lushly uptown ’70s soul with a sweet tooth. Eugene Record was a terrifically gifted writer/producer/falsetto lead singer, who hit his stride with such gorgeous, ever so slightly kitsch hits as “Have You Seen Her” (’71), “Oh Girl” and the crushingly sad “Coldest Days of My Life (Pt 1)” (both ’72). But The Chi-Lites could also do ghetto-funk (“Give More Power To The People”, “We Are Neighbors”) with cred and panache. If you need to economise, most of the classics are on Volume One.