The truce proved short-lived, but the legend of Benjy Melendez and his gang-turned-band has become one of the great shadow histories of 1970s New York. Nowhere does this shadow loom larger than Power - Fuerza, the mythic eight-song collection that's finally enjoying a long-overdue reissue courtesy of the Brooklyn-based label Truth & Soul. In the 40 years since it briefly flashed onto the streets of the BX, Power - Fuerza has become one of the all-time "lost" records, a crypto-musical phenomenon whose sheer existence it'd be easy to doubt if there didn't always seem to be someone you knew who'd heard it once, knew someone who'd heard it once, or met someone once who'd heard it once.

Such fascinating mysteries are sometimes better left unsolved, but Truth & Soul's reissue this month is such a fully realized labor of love that it's hard to imagine a more satisfying denouement. The package features 80 pages of liner materials, including a wealth of visuals and a thoroughly detailed essay by esteemed critic and journalist Jeff "Chairman" Mao. The album clocks in at just over 30 minutes, and Truth & Soul's remastering retains just enough crackle and hiss to evoke a sweltering summer night in some bygone city.

And of course there's the music itself. Power - Fuerza is an endlessly interesting album, not just in the way that we politely call something "interesting" when we're not sure what else to say about it, although surely in that way too. Benjy Melendez and his brother Victor were the primary musical architects of the band, and the album bears strong traces of the rising Latin rock genre fused into what Mao describes as "Nuyorican inner city blues." "Viva La Puerto Rico Libre," is an exuberant anthem of Puerto Rican nationalism, and we frequently hear the influence of '60s dance-soul: "Got This Happy Feeling" is one of several cuts that suggest the Melendez brothers had worn through quite a few 45s of Archie Bell and the Drells' 1968 hit "Tighten Up."

But the most obvious influence heard on Power - Fuerza is also its most charming: namely, that of the Beatles. Benjy Melendez and his brothers first started playing music as a Fab Four cover band, the wonderfully named "Los Junior Beatles," and the best moments on Power - Fuerza—the jangly "Girl From the Mountain," the rough sparkle of "There Is Something in My Heart," the startlingly pretty "I Saw a Tear"—all bear the distinct traces of young people who spent the better part of their adolescence steeped in Meet the Beatles and A Hard Day's Night. It's a quality that makes Power - Fuerza both of its time and a little timeless, a reminder of the hold that great pop music exerts on the imaginations of young people, the wonderfully iterative dimensions of a Puerto Rican kid in the South Bronx hearing four kids from Liverpool on a jukebox and saying to himself, "I want to do that."