Six Organs of Admittance
Shelter from the Ash
(Drag City, 2007)

If last year’s The Sun Awakens was a creative plateau, then Shelter from the Ash is Six Organs’ first step beyond. We might also consider it the proper follow up to 2005’s School of the Flower, which was the first Six Organs LP to introduce (if only for a second) the kind of assertive electric guitar that plays so dominantly on this, the latest from one of modern psych-folk’s greatest—Ben Chasny. Chasny’s war-torn, aural meditations on Shelter are harnessed into the more accessible song structures we’ve come to expect, including studio treatment that downplays the rustic stomp of old in favor of something heavier and more studied, this time sparing no expense of wattage for some serious, frenetic electrics. It might leave sticklers in the lurch for a bygone era of lower-fi, more purely bucolic Six Organs, though Shelter is no less an inspired, folk-forward, and guitar-centric piece of the apocalypse.

Six Organs has always been a shape-shifting kind of apparition, unfurling at times in dark ragas and at others in leaf-rustling campfire invocations. With the guitar always at his center of gravity, Chasny fiddled with variables of instrumentation, percussion, and other sound sources early on, allowing for plenty of wiggle room within what listeners could come to appreciate as the essential realm of Six Organs. Over the years, Chasny’s eerie, lo-fi brand of Fahey-lovin’ witchcraft evolved into a delicate cosmic depth charge of expansive psych-folk that resounds seemingly for miles, whether drenched in gaping drones or plucked from a single quiet acoustic guitar. The high water mark turned out to be School of the Flower, an achingly beautiful chasm of brook-like melodies that may have been less percussive than earlier, rawer ventures, but achieved new heights in the studio. Flower struck a balance between accessibility and mystery that let some light into the musty cabin of Six Organs without necessarily tearing down the walls. The Sun Awakens unfortunately followed up on the access idea but with little regard for mystery. Decent by relative standards, it felt like a bland sort of Six Organs primer, amalgamating aspects of earlier works under hearty studio varnish while adding nothing to the depth or the folk-poetic haze.

Shelter does well to remind us that, at the core of this man called Chasny, there lies some kind of stargate-like conduit between our boring, complicated, violent environments and the far more interesting pools of reflection beyond. What once were Chasny’s salty, sage-banked tide pools now seem more like rusted, post-industrial vats; a subjective evolution that reminds me of the photography of Edward Burtynsky whose large-scale images of nature transformed by industry are as tragic as they are beautiful. Chasny drives us to this threshold for his tenth Six Organs LP in nine years, opening with a familiarly dexterous acoustic web until about two minutes in, when out blasts enough brazen electricity to make Marnie Stern blush.

This bleeds into “Strangled Road”, which features vocal accompaniment from Magik Markers’ Elisa Ambrogio that falls somewhere between the classical folk splendor of last year’s loftier Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy/Dawn McCarthy pair-up, and the more recently straightforward Thurston Moore/Christina Carter business. The Chasny-gone-electric aspect reaches its pinnacle in the all-electric “Coming To Get You”, which intimidates with steady, deliberate chugs, and rocks out almost belligerently at the end. It’s a new beast with a world of war on its shoulders, a burly yet transparent one that assures us that whether you have faith or not, whatever you call the thing that’s coming—the day of reckoning, our total destruction—there’s a beauty to it.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]