August 11, 2009

Album review: Six Organs Of Admittance - Luminous Night

Eerie folk with a weight on its soul

7 / 10 There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of heavy. There’s the heavy that pounds you around the temples with pugilistic riffs, the sort that metal bands sweat long nights tweaking mixing desks in order to perfect. Ben Chasny knows that heavy – lord, you must have seen just how he treated that fretboard in san francisco jam monsters Comets On Fire. But Chasny’s new album as Six Organs Of Admittance is the other heavy. A set of sombre fingerpicked fables, ‘Luminous Night’ is heavy in spirit. It is cold to the core, as if it’s being played in the long shadow of a tombstone. Violins cry like the recently widowed. Electronics breeze in like cold gusts. “i’m a vengeful man” sings Chasny on ‘Anesthesia’. You wouldn’t doubt him.

Louis Pattison

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