Shelter from the Ash, the third Drag City release in three years from Six Organs of Admittance, plays like frontman Ben Chasny's California singer-songwriter record. Indeed, it's not hard to imagine someone being enamored by Chasny's latest, a bright collection of eight tracks that shine beneath the same layered production Tim Green recently lent to Citay's adventurous Little Kingdom. The acoustic guitars ace a Bert Jansch affinity, and the electric guitars supply sheets of sound and arcs of solos. The lyrics offer an outcast empathy, and the vocals are pretty and pensive. But that's about it: Eight songs in 42 minutes, a generally pleasant listening experience. There's nothing too surprising, too challenging, or too risky, nothing that gambles the record's generally nonplussed, if somewhat dark vibe.
This is also the first Six Organs record that doesn't feel like a summation or extension of recent work. The Six Organs catalogue has always been non-linear, skipping from austere acoustic compositions on 2003's For Octavio Paz to tonic-based acoustic cycles played beneath a loud, crackling turntable loop on 2004's "The Six Stations". Last year's The Sun Awakens amplified or accentuated such acoustic pieces, while the manipulated folk feel of 2005's School of the Flower reached back somewhere between the 1998 eponymous debut and 2003's splendid Compathia. Given the exploratory transience of Six Organs' catalogue, Shelter from the Ash feels too much like work, too much like what had to happen.
Here, Six Organs is doing for psychedelic folk what Jackson Browne and the Eagles did for pop-reared folk-rock, hybridizing polished, perfected takes on touchstones into a safe-for-anyone alloy. Shelter from the Ash doesn't sound like Hotel California, of course, but it does approach its sound with the same mannerism. The parts are exaggerated typecasts, from the loud Amazon field recordings that open "Goddess Atonement" to the ostentatious guitar solo that follows. The imperfections, subtleties, and idiosyncrasies that once lined Six Organs records are now buffed clean, replaced by precise, predictable, unimaginative flourishes. The ad hoc backing band of Green, Matt Sweeney, and Comets on Fire electronicist Noel Harmonson on drums plays it evenly. They shore up the songs without adding much interest, mostly giving Chasny space for showman solos that are only occasionally interesting. Chasny even harmonizes with his girlfriend, Magik Marker and Basalt Fingers collaborator Elisa Ambrogio, on three tracks. Sure, their best duet, "Strangled Road", is a dream, but it confirms the album-rock ease on every level.
"Coming to Get You", a seven-minute track that builds into a guitar-and-drum coda, barely burns, releasing instead a thin veil of smoke. The record's second half picks up the pieces slowly, an aggressive acoustic solo densely stacking layers of notes like a thick blot in the middle of a pointillist sketch. The action ebbs and flows toward the disc's last electric guitar solo on "Shelter from the Ash". Again, feedback cuts through consistent, clattering drums. It collapses, not having accomplished the sort of magnetism it implies. Closer "Goodnight"-- Chasny's most staid pass on the record, matched by Ambrogio's echoing vocals and Green's gentle electronics-- brings the vibe back. Every Six Organs album for Drag City has ended with lingering beauty, be it the languid wending of the 24-minute drone that ended The Sun Awakens or the plaintive, unexpectedly simple "Lisbon" that kissed School of the Flower goodbye. "Goodnight", like the album it caps, is the most obvious.
These techniques-- cacophony-to-calm conclusions, bombastic, even extraneous guitar dexterity, soothing instrumental melodies doubled in cooing harmonies-- aren't new to the Six Organs canon. But on Shelter from the Ash, they're combined with more necessity than creativity, of the design simply because they've long been in the toolkit. This doesn't mean that Chasny is looking to sell out by making pretty songs with flashy parts. Actually, this is less of a reach and more of an arrival at a foreseeable point. But Chansy, has worked on over two-dozen albums in the past decade, and he's rarely seemed short on muses or passions. Expect the mannerism here to yield to something wildly different very soon.
