Six Organs Of Admittance - Shelter From The Ash (2007)
By: Yaya | in: Albums review, Artists review |
Prolog, to clean up the mess before we start
Couple of days ago, I’ve mentioned Comets on Fire as one of my fav bands operating day. They were a great band from day one, their debut was a stunning psych album and they kept getting better and better from one album to the other. But the smartest career move Ethan Miller (guitar, vocals, songwriter) did, was having Ben Chasny joining the group as a guitarist. This move led to two results:
1. They became outrageously good.
2. They were signed by Sub-Pop.
Not only they signed with SP, they kept their own spirit and didn’t become ‘a Sub Pop band’ (not that there’s anything wrong with it, some of my best friends etc. etc. etc.).
Then, they released their 2006 neo-psych masterpiece Avatar. And that was the point where Chasny crawled back to my cd-player, after a one year absence.
Ben who?
In 2005 I first paid notice to him when he released his first masterpiece (though he had several of terrific albums before) – “School Of Flower”, under his stage name “Six Organs of Admittance”. Like Comets, he released a masterpiece with a new label – Drag City - THE Holy Grail for people like Chasny.
The year after that, saw the release of the dark and mysterious “Sun Awakens” which made me understand that Chasny is not only a guitar player whom I share the same music heroes with (Jansch, Fahey, Basho, twisted krautrock), but he’s also very eclectic composer and arranger and he keeps evolvng from one album to the other – which makes me automatically poorer as I understand I’ll have no choice but to buy all his albums (aka “complete the cataloge”).
So, two amazing albums in one year – Avatar and Sun Awakens. And he just was getting started.
Ben Hur!
He almost missed 2007, but he knew there’s someone who may pick his album to be the first choice in a “best albums of the year” list (that person is me), so Drag City quickly released Shelter From The Ash, before the midnight kissing took place. Yes. Another masterpiece.
Shelter is the only thing that this album doesn’t have. The squeaking, fuzzy roars that’s being produced from Chasny’s guitar, does not provide a shelter for anyone and you gotta be a real masochist to lay in Chasny’s bed of stingy roses and find your compfort in it, but, you know, like Jim said - people ARE strange.
Ben went through a journey in his last three albums, and became a real songwriter. While his first LP’s where mostly noisy-drone-folk (brings to mind Steven R. Smith for example), School Of Flower was the album where you could feel Chasny tried to change the style a bit. Tracks became actual songs, rather than the beautiful abstract pieces he used to produce. Not the type of songs you’d put in the Deli’s jukebox, but songs that keeps a clear structure, so you know exactly where the guitar comes in and tries to kill your mama.
Shelter is an album that mixes zillion types of influences. It gives Chasny the relief he needed after no new Comets album was released, and it allows him to express his wild, psychedelic guitar. But on the other hand, it does also express his acoustic guitar skills (“Goddess Atonement”). In pieces like Final Wing, he even sounds like a proper singer/songwriter (with the eccentric and frequently bizarre style of Espers or Nick Castro). Eight repetitive minutes that circles around one guitar line, backed up with strange noises that gives the impression that the skies are closing on us. But in a piece like Shelter From The Ash itself, he skewering us all, puts us on his grill and burning the flesh – WHAT THE FUCK? I’ll have what he’s having for breakfast.
Loneliness
Without knowing him personally, I’m guessing that Chasny was a shoegazer when he was a kid. Probably listened to Bloodless endlessly. The loneliness feeling is out there in every single note. His compositions are venerable and introverted like a child that comes to school everyday with his sandwich, and the bullies abuse him, take the sandwich and beat him up.
When I first heard Shelter, I immediately thought about Richard Thompson’s soundtrack of Werner Hertzog film – Grizzly Man. The same wilderness is there. The same mountains that closing in with the same raven circling above. But Thompson kept it mostly cool throughout the soundtrack, while Chasny is boiling underneath the surface. He’s hurt.
Sometimes, this kids who were neglected by their classmates or got beaten up by bullies, ends up in the cafeteria, shooting other kids. The tense is then relieved. So in order not to shoot anyone, Chasny took Tim Green (of the Fucking Champs) to hold him back before he shoots someone. Shelter looks like an album that was about to become similar to his Dust&Chimes album, but wanted to cut down the killing, so he brought a friend to hold him.
But Still
This is the kind of records where they use the old cliché of “it grows on you”. Shelter sounds impressive on first listen, but is it really that good? Take my advice – yes, it’s THAT good.
So Shelter is ambivalent, so what? A singer/songwriter on one hand and a Faust-ish follower on the other, the two works together perfectly and I have to say that if Tim Green wasn’t there, I have a feeling that it would have been a perfect, straight A’s record. Not that Green did a bad job, but sometimes when you got a hyperactive child, don’t feed him with Ritalin, let him break all the radios and food-processors in the house and then give him the Ritalin.
You know what? Fuck it. What am I burbling about. It’s a new Six Organs record and even if it was produced by George Bush (the father), it could only be amazing or extremely good. This guy will always win. He beats the statics. He’s coming to get you.
Listen : Shelter From The Ash
Jade Like Wine
Buy - phisycal : Amazon
Buy - digital : Amazon
Watch : Youtube
Posted on April 22, 2008
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