Idealism corroded by tragedy and greed, mind-expansion dulled by hard drugs and, musically speaking, we’re-all-in-it-together communal spirit giving way to the navel-gazing of singer-songwriters: by the early 70′s, the hippie era’s bright shining promises had soured for many.

Yet some refused to give up hope. Whether bleary-eyed, terminally stoned dropouts or genuinely talented people determined to build a new kind of life free of 9-to-5 conventions, these true believers proved remarkably productive in the field of acoustically orientated music-making.

New buried treasures from this era, often recorded far from professional studios and issued in miniscule private pressings, keep popping up at regular intervals, providing fresh points of reference for the ever-burgeoning psych-folk underground. This sole album from a loose collective centred on singer Margaret Morgan – reminiscent of Joanna Newsom at times – and guitarist Patrick Cockett, originally issued in the musicians’ native Hawaii in 1973 to very few ripples, subsequently becoming a much sought-after collector’s item, is the latest in this ongoing series of discoveries.

Is These Trails worth its formidable reputation as a lost odd-folk gem? Yes and no. There are moments (the slightly smug natural vibes ode ‘Our House in Hanalei’) when you can’t help wondering whether rarity’s taking over from quality as a basis for raving comments at this time when a significant portion of all music ever created – popular or otherwise – is only as far away as the nearest computer with an Internet connection.

At which points the duo – assisted by Dave Choy’s ARP synth and Carlos Pardeiro on various stringed instruments and percussion – slap down one of their aces, instantly muffling any sceptical thoughts and proving that Drag City – reissuers of Gary Higgins’ seminal Red Hash – still have their ears finely tuned. The gentle glide of ‘El Rey Pescador’ and the spirited hop of the title track are very appealing in their somewhat baked mellowness, subtly influenced by traditional Hawaiian folk music. As with most hippie business-related works, though (think of the unbridgeable anti-ageing gap between, say, Neil Young’s stark On The Beach and the peace sign waving reveries of Crosby, Stills and Nash), the album becomes truly compelling once proceedings take a turn towards the strange and the spooky. ‘Psyche I’ & ‘Share Your Water’ combines a pretty instrumental with hazy disorientation with striking results, whilst the way the slightly naive high times of ‘Rusty’s House’ blend into the downbeat ‘Lost in Space’ seems to hint at the dark heart lurking beneath the blissful exterior of the hippie dream. Best of all is ‘Hello Lou’, the track’s soaring synth strings and hypnotically snaking melody gradually gaining intense beauty worthy of Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms, probably the high point of the private pressing reissues from this era.