Ascent, the latest Drag City album by Ben Chasny's prolific Six Organs of Admittance, opens with "Waswasa" and a full-bodied electric riff that's about as delicate as kickstarting a vintage Harley. From that first moment on, the album makes plain that Chasny has made another of his trademark directional shifts, this time affording himself a backward glance before training his eyes back to the horizon.
The album represents Chasny's semi-reunion with Comets on Fire, the much-beloved acid/noise group which has been on extended hiatus since 2008. The core of Comets on Fire-- guitarist Ethan Miller, bassist Ben Flashman, drummer Utrillo Kushner, and multi-instrumentalist Noel Von Harmonson-- are all present here, and together they help Chasny pummel some new tracks and reconfigure several from his vast back catalog. The Six Organs of Admittance concept has always been open-ended enough to include pretty much whatever and whomever Chasny wants it to at any given time, but Ascent is clearly the work of a full-fledged band. Though the results are perhaps not as heady as some of Chasny's best acoustic-based work on 2011's Asleep on the Floodplain or 2005's School of the Flower, and it is not as monumentally heavy as Comets on Fire at their peak, it is an invigorating detour and one of the most naturally fun records in Chasny's discography.
According to a recent Chasny interview with Uncut magazine, Ascent had its genesis nearly a decade ago, when Chasny was planning to record a Six Organs album with the Comets on Fire crew but decided to join their band instead. If anything, however, I think the argument could be made that this material was better served having been put on the backburner for so long. Had it come out then, it might have been swallowed up within the overall Six Organs/Comets deluge, whereas now there is a palpable sense of joy in Chasny's playing as he locks in with his old mates.
And lock in they do. The contrasts between Ascent and an actual Comets on Fire record are subtle but crucial: Chasny takes all the guitar solos, Van Harmonson switches from electronics to guitar, and Chasny's durable songs tend to allow for more open spaces and a broader array of interpretation. The original recorded version of "Closer to the Sky", released on 2003's Compathia, features acoustic strumming, hand percussion, and a luminous lo-fi glow. Here the song is converted with surprising ease into a lumbering psychedelic behemoth, with the rhythm section of Flashman and Kushner providing an unimpeachable foundation beneath Chasny's fluttering vocals and unhinged soloing. Similarly, "One Thousand Birds" gives an acid rock makeover to track from 2002's Dark Noontide, with the group's guitars layered with enough care to provide an impressive depth of field while still delivering an exhilarating live-band-in-a-room immediacy.
As with Comets on Fire, the psych-rock on Ascent can feel unabashedly retro. Chasny seldom neglects his wah-wah pedal for long, and his playing carries many of the same Eastern flourishes so prevalent in his collaborative work with Sir Richard Bishop in Rangda. Although it can hearken back to 1960s groups like Blue Cheer or Barrett-led Floyd, the over-amped squall puts me more in mind of such Terrastock-era groups as High Rise, Bardo Pond, or Major Stars. For Chasny, a musician who has spent most of his creative life in the narrow spaces between various folk and improvisational idioms, the album does run the risk of seeming just a high-spirited genre exercise. Nevertheless, the group's obvious enthusiasm for the project is contagious, and together they add another memorable benchmark to Chasny's formidable body of work, clearly having a fantastic time while doing so.
