Since the demise of their seminal trio Galaxie 500, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang have rather quietly cut a broad and illustrious path through the subterranean cultural underbrush, complementing their musical activities with a variety of creative projects in addition to running their astonishing publishing company, Exact Change, through which they've issued works by such writers as Franz Kafka, Alfred Jarry, and Antonin Artaud.
And now with The Earth Is Blue, released on their new 20/20/20 imprint, they can also scratch "start record label" off their shrinking to-do list, and their timing couldn't be better. Thanks to the recent explosion of variously mutating forms of psych-folk, the duo's literate, atmospheric music is sounding more prescient than ever, and they operate at top form on this, their first album of new material in five years.
Damon and Naomi have always had the spot-on taste, working with such first-rate collaborators as Dean Wareham in Galaxie 500, Wayne Rogers in the short-lived combo Magic Hour, and acid-folk pioneer Tom Rapp. These partnerships have often seemed unduly crucial to the success of their music, since their technical limitations as vocalists (both have gentle, unassuming voices that qualify more as pretty than powerful) and players have sometimes made their purely duo work seem constrained and repetitive.
Particularly fruitful has been the pair's recent coalition with the members of Japanese psych leviathan Ghost, beginning with the ambitious, elegiac Damon and Naomi With Ghost. Although that 2000 album contained several peaks of sublime grace, there were also points where Ghost's expansive arrangements had an unbalanced, grafted-on quality, likely due to the fact that the musicians were composing their ideas on two separate continents. On The Earth Is Blue, however, Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara appears as a virtual third group member, and his impeccable electric guitar contributions are here fully integrated into the immovable foundation of Damon and Naomi's earthy, intimate folk, creating the most satisfying and sheerly transfixing work of the twosome's career.
Also helping to fill out these songs are trumpeter Greg Kelley and saxophonist Bhob Rainey, and it's their effusive playing that allows tracks like the opening "Beautiful Close Double" or the evocative "Malibran" to truly achieve liftoff. Throughout the album Kurihara's playing is the model of tasteful restraint, best illustrated by his subtle, jazzy riffing on Naomi's wistfully sung cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", an invitation for overwrought fretboard histrionics if ever there was one. Instead, he contents himself by laying back in the wildflowers, examining every note carefully as though it were an exotic leaf in his hands, such as on utterly gorgeous coda of the title track which closes the album with a worldly, passionate whisper. As Naomi sings on the perfectly crafted Mellow Candle-like folk-rock of "Sometimes", "Not everything need be in doubt. Sometimes the right thing comes along."
