Nick Drake is enjoying yet another renaissance from his Tamworth-in-Arden grave. Every few years, another generation of music fans discover his small catalog of unassuming, delicate folk tunes. Usually, the interest seed is planted by new bands citing him as an inspiration, or-- as with his 1994 resurgence in popularity-- through series of reissues. This time it stemmed from a Volkswagen ad.

When the German car manufacturer featured Drake's timeless "Pink Moon" in a recent campaign, stockbrokers around the country demanded to know who sang this song and, in God's name, where could they find it? Drake's albums began to sell out everywhere, even charting for several months in the Top 100 at Amazon.com. New pressings came stickered with the announcement that his music had appeared on television, promoting a flashy convertible bug.

If it takes a corporation getting behind Drake's music to spark public interest, it says more about our culture than it does about record labels profiting from Drake's back catalog. But these are highly marketable times we're living in. And now that his music is back in the spotlight, it's time to milk it for every penny it's worth. This is not to say the Michigan-based micro-indie Elsie and Jack Records has released this album specifically for wallet-padding purposes, even if the timing is a bit suspect. What matters here is that they're finally paying tribute to a man whose tribute has rarely been paid.

Archer Prewitt opens the record with an uncanny impression of Drake on Pink Moon's "Parasite." Initially, it seems his intention is to replicate the original as closely as possible, but as the song develops, Prewitt adds subtle flourishes of orchestration lacking in the 1972 version. For the song's second verse, Prewitt backs himself with a multi-tracked vocal harmony, shuffling percussion, airy keyboards and elaborately orchestrated woodwinds. Drake's recording was wholly acoustic and somewhat more intimate. Nonetheless, this track serves as an excellent leadoff because it manages to keep the spirit of the song intact while attempting to add more depth to a skeletal arrangement.

His Name is Alive's Warn Defever contributes a slaughtered take on "Which Will," also from Pink Moon. The track begins with potential, as chopped-up female voices are rearranged, reverbed, reversed and looped. However, in a few short seconds, the song reveals its true self-- a painful experiment in lo-fi home recording. The song itself is buried under a sludge of tape hiss, and seemingly recorded straight to a 1970s Radio Shack microcassette recorder. And as for the rendition, Defever is either playing the song from distant memory or didn't have the technique to replicate Drake's basic chord progressions.

Ray Speedway is given the honor of covering "Pink Moon," here, and it's anyone's guess what possessed him to base it around a cheesy electronic backdrop. Taking into account the various vocal samples Speedway stole from British football games (including a guy yelling "Yes! Yes! Yes!"), the samples from Nick Drake's original, laser sounds, beeping Casio tones, and a pulsating hip-hop beat, the song comes across like a day's worth of drunk studio pastiche, and with all the flair of a Big Audio Dynamite II art installation. This isn't even considering that the track bears no conceivable structure, and hardly even references "Pink Moon" at all.

Northern Song Dynasty more than make up for the hell Ray Speedway has unleashed, though. The duo, which consists of Kranky Records' Jessica Bailiff and Jesse Edwards of the Dithering Effect, offer an astral version of "Place to Be." The track is slowed to a Dextromethorphan-like pace and doused liberally with reverb, shimmering, strummed guitars, and beautiful distortion.

Electroscope and Zurich also weigh in with a constellatory, 9+ minute-long take on "Things Behind the Sun," a brilliant song that not even Ray Speedway could destroy. (Well, maybe.) The collaborating space-rockers open the track with an admittedly gratuitous, but extremely pleasant, three-and-a-half minutes of pre-song effects, backwards guitars, and nebulaic organ. Upon traveling 42 astronomical units, vocalist Gayle Harrison's ethereal echo beckons, siren-like, to the heart of the song and explodes in bursts of time and space.

My primary issue with Sculpting from Drake is that seven of these ten tracks draw from Pink Moon. Yes, Pink Moon is considered the epitome of Drake's career, but let's not disregard "At the Chime of a City Clock" from Bryter Layter, one of his finest accomplishments, or other amazing moments from Time of No Reply and Five Leaves Left. Just some advice for the impending second volume.

-Ryan Schreiber