Six Organs of Admittance - 'Luminous Night' (Drag City) Released 17/08/09

Fed up with the warm weather? Looking for a drop of frosty shade to protect your pearly skin from the blazing rays? Six Organs of Admittance (the solo project of Seattle-based Ben Chasny) gallop to the rescue with the least summery offering this side of Santa Claus, although it’s debatable whether that famed benchmark for jolliness would warm to these cuts which ooze with pitch black permafrost and spookiness.

It’s not just the season that the permanently nocturnal Six Organs appear far removed from. ‘Luminous Night’ sounds positively anti-modern, as if it were catapulted from some distant, bleak past of myths and horror stories brought to life, its stern sounds suggesting hooded figures traipsing through enchanted woods because supernatural illuminations told them to do so, or desperately awaiting rescue that’s always, inevitably doomed to arrive too late in the ruins of some destroyed fortress.

Musically, too, Chasny treks down a solitary path. Although habitually lobbed in with the US freak/odd/weird/beard-folk scene, his domain’s too gloomy, too down, too devoid of light and too damn HEAVY – after all, this is the guy who contributed all that paint-stripping guitar to Comets on Fire albums – to sit easily alongside the heavy-lidded hippie-era throwbacks and middle earth trekking mystics that populate the genre, even if Chasny’s chosen weapon under the Six Organs guise is an acoustic guitar.

The almost medieval, flute- and viola-enhanced airiness of ‘Actaeon’s Fall (Against the Hounds)’ and the sleepy ‘Anesthesia’, the slow-paced thud of which can’t conjure the menace of the lyrics (“I’m a vengeful man”), provide a muted start, but it’s all uphill from there. The tabla-powered foreboding of ‘Bar-Nasha’ and the steadily escalating intensity of ‘The Ballad of Charley Harper’ prove the hypnotic potential of relentless repetition, whilst the desolate, possibly ‘The Road’-inspired ‘Ursa Minor’ nods towards the apocalyptic moods of 2007’s masterful ‘Shelter from the Ash’.

The inevitable comparisons to the album’s mighty predecessor prove the album’s weak spot. The unusually rich arrangements – flute and viola feature prominently – and Chasny’s more prominent interest in drone (the Sunn O)))-hued slab of sludge that’s ‘Enemies Before the Light’ is particularly bruising stuff) – can’t quite match the majestic prowess of ‘Shelter from the Ash’, which generated bone-shattering force from simple yet potent combination of bleak balladry and squealing solo guitar. 

But then, a merely solid effort from Six Organs is still better than most people’s best shots.