Michael Collins is a Baltimore musician with a fondness for making pun-happy drug references in the names he assumes for his recording projects. He had to give up his last moniker, Run DMT, to a dubstep crew of the same name, so now he's trying Salvia Plath on for size. The music is suited to a new name-- Collins has shed some of the chillwave tendencies that made Run DMT sink into a gauze-y morass of bands around the time of his Bong Voyage in 2009. Instead, he's chosen to bring his 60s psych influences into sharper focus, making everything just a little leaner, although low production values and sloppy playing are still key tenets of his sound. Underneath it all is a sharpening of Collins' songwriting skills, not quite turning The Bardo Story into the parent-friendly record he hoped for in a recent interview, but certainly lending a feeling that he's getting somewhere, one bong hit at a time.
Something that's immediately apparent from listening to this album is how well versed Collins is in 60s pop, both of the psychedelic variety and beyond. Initially it's hard to hear certain songs as anything other than pastiche, as so often happens when someone is deeply immersed in a particular era. Collins is the kind of guy who probably thinks that Lenny Kaye didn't dig hard enough when researching the Nuggets compilations. But, to be fair, he's not adverse to rooting around in the mainstream, finding plenty of room for inspiration in John Lennon's Beatles songs, pinching a sigh or two from the Beach Boys, even heading into the 70s to steal a few tricks from Randy Newman. He does it so well that it's hard not to be swayed in his direction, taking an approach reminiscent of another Newman acolyte, Chicago musician Liam Hayes (aka Plush), whose songwriting is so strong that he transcends the music he's so transparently sourcing.
Of course there are flaws, too. The Bardo Story is a messy album, riddled with a looseness that's either there on purpose or happens to be the consequence of Collins' admittedly limited skills. When he gets it to work, on the sunny foot-stomper "This American Life", for example, it's extremely endearing, coming off as the work of someone with a vision far beyond the audience this record is likely to attract. Collins might not be aspirational in that way, but there's a sense here that the grainy production values are becoming a hindrance rather than a valuable part of the picture, especially as he appears to have put a great deal of thought into the overall sound he's trying to express. He covers a decent swathe of ground, but the transitions are rarely jarring, even when he passes the baton from the swirling Olivia Tremor Control moves of "House of Leaves" to the spaghetti western whistle of "Stranded".
"Bardo" is a Tibetan word meaning "intermediate state," which provides a less-than subtle nudge toward the idea that this is a transitory album for Collins. It's a new name, a refinement of his vision. The great leaps it takes sometimes feel less like an aesthetic choice and more like the work of someone figuring out where they want to go. It's a cut above most public attempts to undertake such a journey, if indeed that's what Collins is doing. In among it all is a superior songwriter trying not to be wrestled out of the frame by all the limitations imposed upon him, including some spectacularly awful sub-Dali cover art. But even that's fitting in its way, a low rent imitation of Surrealism housing a collection of scuzzy sub-psych songs, all of which probably sounded like a great idea when conceptualized through a billow of weed smoke. Fortunately, it still sounds pretty good when the fog clears.
