“Each step is moving me up.”

Arthur Russell strikes me as the kind of guy who didn’t sleep very much. By day a disco, dance, and art pop producer, by night a crafter of haunting, ethereal, skeletal cello-and-vocal sketches. Where Dinosaur L’s 24→24 Music contains his most joyful and looselimbed output and World of Echo his most nocturnal, Another Thought is where you’ll find the most cohesive synthesis of this prolific artist’s multifaceted persona. Songs range in style and state of completion, from the sparse intimacy of ‘A Little Lost’ to the catchy alt-pop of ‘This Is How We Walk On the Moon’ to the muted blues-rock of ‘See Through Love’ to the meditative disco of ‘In the Light of the Miracle’.

The album’s cover, which depicts the musician wearing a pirate hat made out of newspaper, captures the playful, rough draft texture of the music. Indeed, none of the songs feels grandiose in the least, as Russell’s percussive cello and emotive voice create a sense of excruciating vulnerability even when his compositions are at their most unconventional. While one eventually becomes accustomed to the broad boundaries of Russell’s eclectic sonic palette (a cross-disciplinary genre unto itself)—plucked cello, strummed cello, bowed cello, drum machines mixed with exotic hand percussion, propulsive disco rhythms set against fragile, elegiac solo pieces set against post-punk structural experiments, a minimalist ethos applied to dance music, club beats and light orchestral accompaniment, distorted vocals, occasional horns and keys, dynamic shifts and one-off tonal experiments (the title track from the 2008 compilation Love Is Overtaking Me even suggests he could have been an alt-country balladeer)—even then his seemingly simple pieces reveal subtle complexities and delightful little flourishes on the umpteenth listen. The centerpiece is ‘This Is How We Walk On the Moon’, an improbable groove that is so entrancing that one sometimes forgets that trumpets and congas eventually flesh out Russell’s voice and instrument. However, one never forgets the alien vocoder voice that begins singing the song’s title when the music shifts partway through.

It’s a bit ironic, and even more tragic, that (what I for one consider) the man’s masterpiece wasn’t released during his lifetime and that it debatably isn’t even an album at all. Rather, it’s a curated selection from his cache of unreleased tapes pieced together by producer Don Christensen from the decade out of output preceding the artist’s death from AIDS at the age of 40. One is tempted to read into these emotive tracks some of the man’s ordeal. Like Warren Zevon and J Dilla and David Bowie, Russell created some of his finest music while withering away and ravaged by disease, leaving behind an album that sounds unfinished, but almost perfectly so. In a poetic sense, it’s almost as if he simply dematerialized into his music, which was a source of comfort as he contemplated what comes next and worked out his thoughts and fears in musical form.

And, of course, how could you not read into it, with music that sounds as thoroughly personal and vulnerable as this, as if it were made for no one else? Indeed, though Russell never went to the lengths of Kafka by requesting that his closetful of tapes be destroyed upon his death, neither does it seem like he necessarily intended his expansive archives to be consumed by the general public. How could he have, when he toiled away in obscurity for all those years? It’s only in the wake of his untimely death that he’s become an outsider legend.

Another Thought, his first posthumous release, remains the most thoughtfully put together compilation of his unreleased work and the songwriter’s most coherent artistic statement, which is a minor miracle for an artist as stylistically diverse and unpigeonholeable as Arthur Russell.

Favorite Tracks: A Little Lost; Home Away From Home; This Is How We Walk On the Moon; In the Light of the Miracle; My Tiger, My Timing.