– How many times has Rock And Roll been pronounced dead now?
– Often, brother. Slumped on the couch, puke running out of the corners of its mouth, Strat in one hand, smouldering Camberwell Carrot in the other, pulse long gone.
– Many have tried to bury it over the years; the eulogies have been long and extensive.
– For sure. The myth lives longer, but, well, the Rolling Stones have been dead, musically, for over thirty years now. But so many still love to celebrate them. It is good their eulogies have been written in extenso, brother.
– Yeah.
– Yeah.
– But, you know every time the body is cast into the grave and the headstone is in place, a gnarled hand bursts from the soil and soon the lumbering corpse is heading straight to the local hostelry in search of Jack Daniels and a monitor to put its foot on.
– You’re so right, so damned fuckin‘ right. You know i do not like everybody’s darling of hand made, sweating, looking-for-the-next-bar-rock: The Hold Steady, boring. But I love these other motherfuckers, Deer Tick, and two of their albums, The Last Dirt Sessions and Divine Provenance. They are living inside their music. Inside a not-so-quickly dying beast called rock’n’roll’n’raw!
– Yeah.
– I see the record in your hands, the name of the band is music in my ears: Six Organs Of Admittance and this, well, bona fide guitar god Ben Chasny.
– Yep, that’s what I would call him, too. Clearly Ben Chasny has never been told of Rock And Roll’s precarious health or the truly tragic prognosis given to the guitar solo.
– Yep. He’s been knocking albums out on a yearly basis for what seems like an eternity under the moniker of Six Organs Of Admittance, and this time around he’s roped in Comets On Fire (who are apparently on a never ending hiatus) to help him out.
– From the minute Waswasa kicks in there’s no hanging about. A 5 minute guitar wrecking ball, it quickly changes from 70s riffery into self-indulgent fret-wankery of the highest order.
– Ha ha ha ha!!! Indulgent it might well be, but it is also utterly captivating.
– And Ben Chasny knows a lot o twists and turns. Things take a sudden turn, for example, for the psychedelic on Close To The Sky which initially burns slow with an insistent bassline and dreamy haze. But it’s not too long before the wah-wah pedal takes over and Chasny heads off into the heart of the sun soloing like a re-animated Hendrix.
– It never stops to surprise.
– For example, Even If You Knew possesses phenomenal sense of a menace in its bass and drums pattern and when it opens up it is an exhilarating riot of catch and release dramatics and a perfect example of how the most basic riffs can thrill and excite if deployed with such aplomb. The roaring distortion and thundering drums that bring the track to a close prove that guitar music isn’t dead at all, it still has the power to move mountains and break bones.