Album review: Six Organs Of Admittance – Asleep On The Floodplain

For more than a decade Ben Chasny has been enchanting a devoted cult audience with various projects that have included psychedelia heroes Comets On Fire and more recently trashing jammers Rangda. However it’s his work as Six Organs Of Admittance that has garnered the patronage of the likes of Devendra Banhart and Sun O))); two vastly different artists who have also become sometime collaborators. You know what you're getting with Chasny and Asleep On The Floodplain, the North Carolina native’s 12th Six Organs record in almost as many years, doesn’t represent any big stylistic leap from much of his prolific output.

Where album number 11 Luminous Night exhibited the vast array of Chasny’s talents, Asleep... focuses mainly on lightly picked guitar parts, whispered vocals and often sparse instrumentation. It’s an approach that lends the record an ethereal feel that, on first listen, makes it sound somewhat repetitive – inconsequential even – yet with repeated attention the album offers up strange, hidden melodies, bracing leaps of sound and a much more solid core. The movement between the nu-folk of ‘Light of the Light’ into the drone of ‘Brilliant Blue Sea Between Us’ for instance, is as charming a switch as that between the latter track and its Nick Drake-sounding follower ‘Saint Of Fishermen’. Elsehere The Kings Of Convenience style charm of ‘Hold But Let Go’ offers a delicate counterpoint to the insane psych of the twelve and a half minute ‘S/Word And Leviathan’ which drags, repeats, drones and staggers for it’s entire length, ending up as either an exercise in hypnosis or a cure for insomnia depending on your point of view.

Asleep On The Floodplain could not be more of an apt title for a record that sometimes seems full-bodied, sometimes dreamlike and occasionally like it’s not there at all. And while, now and again, it may remind the listener of the more indulgent moments of, say, Mark Kozelek’s back catalogue, it is a strange beast indeed – but one that holds rewards for the persistent listener.