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Album Review: Six Organs Of Admittance - Shelter From The Ash

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By: Yaya | in: Music |

Six Organs Of Admittance - Shelter From The Ash (2007)

Prologue, to clean up the mess before we start

A few days ago, I mentioned Comets on Fire as one of my fav bands operating day. 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) ever made, was having Ben Chasny joining the group as a guitarist. This move led to two results:

1. They became outrageously good.

2. They got signed to Sub-Pop.

Not only did they sign to 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 yada yada yada…).

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 the album with a new label – Drag City - THE Holy Grail for people like Chasny.

The following year 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 who keeps evolvng from one album to another – which makes me automatically poorer as I understand I’ll have no choice but to buy all his albums (aka “complete the catalogue”).

So, two amazing albums in one year – Avatar and Sun Awakens. And he was just 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. Yes. Another masterpiece.

Shelter is the only thing that this album doesn’t have. The squeaking, fuzzy roars being produced by Chasny’s guitar, do not provide a shelter for anyone and you have to be a real masochist to lay in Chasny’s bed of thorny 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 (Steven R. Smith comes to mind), School Of Flower was the album where you could feel Chasny trying to up the game. 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 keep a clear structure, so you know exactly where the guitar comes in while he tries to kill your mama.

Shelter is an album that mixes a 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. On the other hand, it also expresses 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 circle around one guitar line, backed up by strange noises that give the impression that the skies are closing in on us. But in a piece like Shelter From The Ash, he skewers us all, puts us on his grill and burns the flesh – WHAT THE FUCK? I’ll have what he’s having for breakfast.

Loneliness
Without knowing him personally, I’m guessing Chasny was a shoegazer when he was a kid. Probably listened to Bloodless endlessly. The lonely feeling is apparent in every single note. His compositions are venerable and introverted like a child that comes to school every day 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 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, these kids who were neglected by their classmates or were beaten up by bullies, end up in the cafeteria, shooting other kids. The tesnion 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 on the killing, so he brought a friend to support him.

But Still
This is the kind of record where they use the old cliché of “it grows on you”. Shelter sounds impressive at 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 work 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 record. Not that Green did a bad job, but it sometimes sounds like taking a hyperactive child, denying him the Ritalin, letting him break all the radios and food-processors in the house and then finally giving him the Ritalin.

You know what? Screw it. What am I on about? It’s a new Six Organs record and even if it was produced by George Bush (Senior), it would still be amazing. This guy will always win. He beats the statistics. He’s coming to get you.

Listen : Shelter From The Ash

Jade Like Wine

Buy - Physical: Amazon

Buy - Digital : Amazon

Watch : YouTube

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Posted on April 27, 2008

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