Four albums of Baby Bird's effortless, lo-fi confections — keyed to childhood, adolescence, middle age and old age, came out in less than a year. The first, I Was Born A Man was breathlessly reviewed (as many albums are) in the NME and Melody Maker. Subsequent albums Bad Shave, Fatherhood and The Happiest Man Alive met similar praise, though their commercial impact was muted by their scarcity. But on the strength of Jones' sudden popularity, a band was formed, and the band played gigs and cut a real album, Ugly Beautiful (which is still fairly easy to find). Its first single, "You're Gorgeous" went to No. 3 on the UK pop charts, selling 500,000 copies right around the same time The Happiest Man Alive was released in an edition of a couple thousand. In the wake of the success of Babybird the band, all albums by Baby Bird the man became impossible to find, selling on eBay to the tune of $50 a pop.

Those who were quick enough to snap up those four albums, which came out between the summer of 1995 and the spring of 1996, belonged to a secret club whose members alone knew the power of the pop song formula. The rest of us had to make do with Greatest Hits, an ironically titled compilation of tracks from those four albums as well as Dying Happy, a fifth lo-fi album of soundtrack music that came out in 1997. In a weird play on the double album's title, "You're Gorgeous" was not included, even in its original four-track form. Every Christmas, we dashed off a list to Santa and at the top of the list were reissues of the four elusive Baby Bird albums.

Someone must have been good because it's 2002 and Santa, in the form of Sanctuary Records Group, has heard our pleas. In November, the label released The Original Lo-Fi, which compiles the original four albums, Dying Happy, two songs included only on Greatest Hits and a whole new CD of 16 untitled, home-recorded songs called The Black Album. What's more, the boxed set's cheap. I bought mine at Mod Lang for $40, and amazon.co.uk's got it for 23.99 pounds (they ship to the United States, too).

Like the teenager in Golf Manor, Mich., who developed his own breeder reactor, Jones comes across as somewhat oblivious of his songwriting superpowers. "Lemonade Baby," the third song on I Was Born A Man sounds like the kind of nonsense song you'd sing to a baby or a kitten or to yourself when you thought no one was listening. The lyrics are pure nonsense ("You were an angel/ I'd shoot you out of the sky/ with a tear made of sugar/ shot from the apple of my eye"). The keyboards sound like a hokey game-show interlude and the chorus lays on the doo-doo-doos. Yet Jones' overdubbed, off-kilter vocal harmonies turn the silly ditty into warm, dreamy pop divinity. It's a trick Jones pulls off repeatedly.

The next track, "C.F.C.," has Jones falling back on a time-saving, lyric-writing trick he uses often — the juxtaposition of short, easily rhymed phrases: "Have you ever seen the Golden Mile?/ Have you ever driven someone wild?/ Have you ever wanted to kill a screaming child?/ Have you ever taken the mean out of meanwhile?" The phrases make no sense together, just reading them. But hearing Jones sing them, everything clicks. On "C.F.C.," as on several tracks, Jones sounds as if he's singing and playing whatever comes to mind. In most people's cases, that stream-of-consciousness approach would make things sound sloppy and careless. But Jones seems only to cough, and out come devastating pop hooks and clever turns of phrase. The sheer instinctiveness with which Jones does this is a key part of his appeal.

As far as reference points go, Jones is everywhere. He can be viewed, as one friend put it, as something of a precursor to Badly Drawn Boy. Or maybe a modern-day, sane Syd Barrett. There are echoes of psychedelia, of punk, of new wave, of techno, of weird little instrumentals you hear in the supermarket, of the kind of stuff that made a cult hero of Dr. Demento. The boxed set's liner notes, 20 pages in all, quote British music critic Ben Thompson's book, "Seven Years of Plenty": "In an era where most bands are too eager to wear their record collections on their sleeves, the impossibility of pinning down where this music comes from only adds to its allure."

Part of what separates Jones from anyone else one might compare him to is what does with his voice, which ranges from a low baritone to a high falsetto. But Jones' range extends beyond the world of notes — his falsetto sounds dreamily sweet on "Homesick Satallites" and the aforementioned "Lemonade Baby." But on Dying Happy's "Losing My Hair," when he asks "And will you still love me if I lose all my hair?" and then sings of his own funeral, the same falsetto takes on a desperate, pitiable tone.

If it's not already clear, listening to Baby Bird's records is like belonging to a cult. Similarly, trying to capture what it is that makes the majority of the 98 songs included on the six discs of The Original Lo-Fi so special can be a bit like whipping yourself into a Shaker-like frenzy — it's easy to get carried away.

Like anyone, Jones occasionally misses the mark. The thoughtless, easy rhymes that make "C.F.C." so much fun become irritating on Bad Shave's "Valerie." But for every "Valerie," there are four or five songs like "KW Jesus TV Roof Appeal," in which Jones adopts the persona of a televangelist huckster soliciting money to rebuild his church's roof: "The name's Dave Christ, brother that Jesus forgot ... Pawn your TV if you have to, buy a cheaper one and use the difference to build this roof and keep the rain off of your devotion."

The Original Lo-Fi isn't some kind of Holy Grail. It won't save anyone's life, bring your puppy back, make it stop raining or even find your keys. But for $40 — less than the cost of one of the original albums on eBay — it'll give you 98 songs on six CDs. And it'll give you a peek inside a special cult, and a glimpse at a secret formula.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)