n 1974, blue-eyed soul chanteuse Evie Sands released her sophomore LP Estate of Mind to the adoring approbation of pale sirens like Dusty Springfield and Barbara Streisand and, to judge by Estate’s sales, absolutely nobody else on the planet. Of course, this was hardly virgin territory for Sands, who by 1974 had seen three of her songs (“Take Me for a Little While,” “I Can’t Let Go,” and “Angel of the Morning,” co-written with James Taylor) hijacked by other artists and driven straight up the charts while she languished in relative obscurity. Still, it’s hard to think the blow didn’t smart just a little bit; Estate was—is—one of those rare albums which see the left hand of accomplished craft and the right hand of plain-dealing accessibility lock fingers and club the listener into submission, and it’s symptomatic of the marketplace’s unfairness that it went so criminally ignored by a consumer group Hoovering up every copy of Tapestry on the shelves.

Before we go any further, let’s get this out of the way: Estate of Mind is not an all-timer. Evaluating the reissue of a record, especially one which slipped as far under the radar as Sands’, is always a tricky proposition; music criticism is littered with the failed attempts of credit-seeking dorks valiantly attempting to spearhead the canonization efforts for a long-forgotten record, utterly oblivious to the possibility that maybe if the record were as good as they claim, it might have actually, y’know, caught on a little bit. (Artists like Scott Walker and Vashti Bunyan are the exceptions, not the rule.)

But just because Sands isn’t an exception doesn’t mean she didn’t manage to make an occasionally exceptional record. Granted, your ability to enjoy it hinges in large part on your capacity to appreciate the sultrier aspects of life; one might quite reasonably describe Estate as a forty-minute vacillation between torchy poses and post-coital cooing. Sands is every bit as handily artless with a double entendre as the Scissor Sisters’ Ana Matronic, albeit with a charmingly anachronistic prurience by comparison (yes, kids, once upon a time singers had to employ obliquity for subjects as basic as cunnilingus!).

True, Sands owes her army of studio hands and session musicians (Michael Omartian! Ernie Watts!) an enormous debt for the unmitigated sultriness of Estate’s sound, but let’s not overlook how admirably she throws herself into the psychosexual sturm und drang of its songs; less wistful come-hither coos than the one she breaks out for “Love in the Afternoon” have culminated in ships dashed against rocks. And when all the elements come together—arrangements, melody, Sands’ performance, the whole magilla—the results are simply breathtaking; one listen to “I Love Makin’ Love to You,” with its devastatingly slinky bassline and howling climax, leaves few options other than ruminating on just what the record-buying public might have been listening to in 1974 instead.

But then again, that’s the story of Estate in a nutshell: criminally overlooked by a population which may have known better but, as hindsight points out, certainly didn’t know best. Fortunately, thirty years and a heroic remastering attempt by Cherry Red (did I mention how effortlessly Estate can fill up a room with sound? Be prepared to keep the volume pretty low when you’re sountracking your attempts to put the wood to some beguiling young thing) have given us all a second chance, Sands first among us. Estate of Mind may not be a Tapestry or even a No Secrets, but it’s worth checking to make sure that we’re not making the same mistake again.