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Now reaching their sixth studio effort, Six Organs of Admittance is fundamentally the creation of Ben Chasny, this time accompanied by jazz drummer Chris Corsano. Ben Chasny is an atypical character, both the furious and hallucinated guitarist of the ultrasonic Comets on Fire and a bucolic psychedelic folk songwriter in these Six Organs.
It is precisely this musical duality, almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, that has fascinated me and brought me closer to the work of Six Organs, and, somewhat belatedly, to folk music in general, both present and past.
And indeed, unless my auditory system has made a monumental blunder, the Six Organs do folk. But beware, apart from the profusion of fingerpicking, there isn’t much canonical folk to be found here, and when traces of it do appear, it's often buried under layers of feedback and percussion bordering on noise. Good Ben seems to snub singing, sparse across few tracks, preferring vocal interventions akin to hypnotic mantras.
Illustrative in this sense is Saint Cloud, a song embellished by a slide guitar in the intro, then interrupted by organ feedback and led by a hypnotic-obsessive whisper. The entire album follows this pattern: Procession of Cherry Blossom Spirits, an instrumental track with guitar feedback in the background, the initial Eight Cognition/All You've Left, introduced by almost two minutes of crazy percussion, or the ecstatic Home, with distorted guitar and dreamy voice.
But the peak and primary reason to listen to the album remains the title track, a massive 13-minute instrumental folk piece, with a slow and mesmerizing progression, featuring a looping arpeggio, gradually infiltrated by jazz-like drum improvisations and distorted guitar reminiscent of Comets on Fire.
Having reached the peak, with masterful calm, everything is reduced back to the sparse initial arpeggio, leaving the hypnotized listener to wander in an otherworldly and alien part of the mind.
Fortunately, the new folk isn't just Devendra Banhart.
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By nes
A skewed, crooked, scratched, improvised, noisy record, no denying it: annoying.
The most "I've got a big dick" record of Ben's entire career, there's little to say, there's little to do, the evidence travels between anvil and hammer.
