Calling Valet constant Honey Owens a Portland musician is a simplification: Aside from two LPs in two years as the spectral Valet, Owens has contributed to Jackie O-Motherfucker and Dark Yoga. She's a member of broken funk trio Nudge and the touring bassist for Kranky labelmate Atlas Sound. She also co-owns Rad Summer, a hand-me-down and homemade clothing store that sells local music, hangs local art, repurposes used bikes, and, of course, hosts shows. Owens also co-founded and booked Dunes, a music club that the Portland Mercury calls the city's "hippest dark hallway/dance club," and she runs the tiny Yarnlazer label with her longtime boyfriend, White Rainbow's Adam Forkner. Owens, if anything, is a Portland mixed-media outlet and conduit.
Naked Acid, the follow-up to 2007's Valet debut Blood is Clean, functions with the same parts-into-a-whole synergy as its creator. The first five songs work almost exclusively through distended sounds, creeping up through patient drones, manipulated vocals, and echo-in-canyon drums to slow payoffs. The sixth song, "Fire", is a lovesick ballad, an elliptical guitar/voice/tape-hiss first-take that Owens admits is about giving up drugs. The final song explodes the sounds of the first five beneath a noisy, throbbing beat, like Neil Campbell's Astral Social Club ripping Valet apart and spinning everything back on the faster reel. On first listen, such a sequence may seem like a ruse or even an apology: After 35 minutes of long-form washes and only slightly comprehensible vocals, "Fire", the shortest thing here and the most straightforward Valet song released to date, could be an attempt at relief or a stab at a single (which it was, in 2007, as a 7" for Burnt Brown Sounds). The same goes for beat-and-synth closer "Streets", a track that could give attention-deficient mp3 bloggers a toe-tap inlet into a record they'd otherwise ignore. Or perhaps Owens is offering herself an outlet for how future Valet records may sound.
But keep listening, and it seems that the album-length incorporation of three distinct Valet styles is more a reflection of individual tracks themselves than an attempt to find common ground with a new lot of Kranky converts (see also: Deerhunter/Atlas Sound patrons). The "ambient" songs aren't ambient at all. Nothing is played too straight on those first five, their textures teeming with variety: Over a matrix of manipulated chimes and bowls, Owens and Adrian Orange combine for a ghastly duet on opener "We Went There". Her acid guitar tone slowly spills over the singing before an enormous electronic wash supplants it, too, sustaining the mood but slowly fading away. "Kehaar" sounds like Delta blues choking on lithium pills, a direct beat pulsing behind one chord and Owens' wounded whisper. Over five minutes, sheets of noise appear from beneath, slowly drowning Owens. They're all that matter as the song peaks, as with album highlight "Fuck It": In five minutes, it goes from a dramatic poetry reading backed by ragged, glorious guitar into a restrained Magik Markers noize + drumz berating.
Thing is, these layers aren't immediately apparent: Naked Acid is a well-conceived and executed album, all its variety sewn into a single quilt that's strangely comforting and surprisingly sensible. The advance of Naked Acid is substantial if subtle, as with most everything Owens has committed to tape. Owens has finally incorporated her varied musical interests into one record, something she implies with the first five tracks but explains with the last two. After all, she says these songs-- elliptical but elegant, woven from phrases like "trees susurration, influential lake" and "warm kept my future cat"-- were written about specific people and events in Portland. These are things she's seen and lived. Blood is Clean was a fine series of snapshots connected by poetic vagaries, warped tones, and low-lying dynamics. Naked Acid is that, too, but here, Owens' different ideas finally feel like one long thought from one highly engaged person.
