Six Organs Of Admittance
Ascent

It's written Six Organs of Admittance but read as Comets On Fire.

No, I'm neither crazy nor do I have serious vision problems, but the latest effort by Ben Chasny aka SOOA, is practically not his album.

Let me explain: it’s not in the way one would expect. There's almost nothing from what typically makes up an album under the SOOA title: no drones, no acoustic fingerpicking, no Indian scales, no psychedelic songwriting.

The reason is simple: good old Ben has decided to give vent to his noisy and almost brash guitar vein, and has called back his old friends, the fellow Comets On Fire, to play with him. For those who missed them, we are talking about one of the most missed heavy psychedelic bands that California kindly gave us at the beginning of the millennium, in forced hibernation since 2006.

The leader Ethan Miller was already a friend of Ben Chasny, and between 2002 and 2006, the two exchanged favors and guitar riffs on each other’s albums of that time. Is this record a reunion, then, “Ascent”? Yes and no, for several reasons. While some tracks seem like a tacky poor copy of the noise psych fury that fueled albums in which Miller and Chasny crossed six strings (specifically “Field Recordings From The Sun” and “Blue Cathedral” by Comets On Fire and “Compathia” by SOOA), as in the case of the opening “Waswasa”, on the other hand, and after careful listening, it becomes clear that the class and fury of the former Comets is still alive and well. Something I thought impossible, given the poor path taken by Miller's new creature, Howlin Rain, now devoted to a kind of American FM Rock that is unpalatable.

And yet, whether it’s due to the reunion with Chasny, or the choice to revisit some of his originally acoustic tracks in a rock key, “Ascent” deserves some attention. On the self-cover front, a “Close To The Sky” stands out, which transforms from an Indian-tinged folk song into a cosmic blues with an ultrasonic crescendo, as well as “A Thousand Birds” transformed from folk noise to heavy psych gallop. Interesting is the “robotic” development, almost QOTSA, of “Even If You Knew”, the Floydian tail of “Visions (From Io)”, with the placid interludes of “Solar Ascent” and “Your Ghost” and the rarefied and beautiful “They Called You Near”.

For once a dispensable album in the long discography of Ben Chasny, but certainly not a bad album. Because, as I always say, Chasny is one of the few recent artists without a bad album to his name. Excuse me, if that’s little.