Dume (Vinyl)

Dume is ostensibly a radical expansion of 1975’s Zuma, Point Dume being the headland next to Zuma Beach near producer David Briggs’ house in Malibu, where much of the album was recorded. Dume ditches the incongruous CSNY collab Through My Sails from the original Zuma tracklisting and replaces it with eight blazing cuts from the sessions.

The idea behind Dume was to weave songs from the Zuma album with unreleased tracks and mixes from that period; to use the Zuma album as a starting point and expand it into a brand-new entity, with unreleased tracks and alternate mixes. Eight out of Zuma’s nine tracks are included in exactly the same versions (‘Through My Sails’ is the only one omitted) everything else is unreleased, or was until 2020, when the Archives Vol. 2 CD box came out. This is the first time they’ve been released on vinyl.

All the songs have now surfaced elsewhere, but often in very different and arguably inferior versions: Ride My Llama and Pocahontas are spectacular electric stomps compared with the acoustic takes on Rust Never Sleeps. Reconfigured, Dume becomes less about Young’s break-up with Carrie Snodgress and leans harder into his phantasmagorial visions of Aztecs and Incas, prompting a heretical thought: it might actually be better than Zuma. Which, if you're a fan of that masterpiece, is high praise indeed.