Herbcraft has come a long way in the two years since their
first album,
Herbcraft Discovers the
Bitter Water of Agartha. That one was a gem of the DIY psychedelic scene, a
terrific concept – a portrait of an imaginary long-lost concept album from
1973. Matt LaJoie, the man behind Herbcraft, recorded it in his bedroom in
Portland, Maine, over the course of a snowy weekend. It was one of those great
ideas that catches your attention and is executed well enough to hold it
through both sides. It’s a little thin and wobbly, sure, but that’s part of its
charm. But now, with Herbcraft’s third LP release,
The Astral Body Electric, LaJoie is playing with a full band, and
the sound is nicely muscled and steady. It’s a major advance down the path to
psychedelic godliness. The most dramatic improvement comes with the addition of
drums, which were the most conspicuous missing element from the first two
records. There’s also some flute and organ mixed in to give it a
60s-Renaissance-
Star Trek sort of feel here and there, and LaJoie’s
voice is fuller, more confident. Together these new dimensions make this album
feel less like a third album and more like a stunning debut. But it’s still
Herbcraft. If you liked space-jet-around-the-roomiverse guitar sound of
Ashram to the Stars you should be happy
here because this record’s full of weird noises. And if you like the
plodding-spiritual-pilgrim plot of
Agartha,
you’ll be happy, too.
The Astral Body
Electric has that same Third-World-in-outer-space sound. It pulses with a
vaguely Middle-Eastern rhythm that would’ve worked well as the soundtrack for
just about any scene in
The Last
Temptation of Christ, and these beats pull the record together like a loop
of thread. The structure’s not constricting - quite the opposite - it allows
Herbcraft to roam further than they ever have.
The other
thing about
The Astral Body Electric
is that it was mastered by Matt Valentine of MV+EE, and this factors hugely
into its quantum-leap-ness. Valentine uses a technique called Spectrasound. It
makes the music sound like it’s coming from all corners of the room. For
instance, if you’ve listened to MV+EE’s 2012 release
Space Homestead on a good system, you probably noticed that there’s
this part where it sounds like someone’s knocking on the walls, outside,
across from where your speakers are.
That’s Spectrasound. It finds spaces beyond the reaches of the balance knob and
fills them with sound. At one point while listening to the new Herbcraft album
I got up to see if the washing machine was going berserk way off in the laundry
room, but it was just something I was hearing in the music and the
Spectrasound. I have no idea how Spectrasound works. I’ve emailed Valentine and
asked him. I told him about the wall knocking. All he said was, “it's in the
walls alright, heh heh...crackin' me up.” And on the internet the only
explanation I could find was this: “MV’s production technique places tones
dancing all around the stereo sound field.” Whatever it is, it’s psych-O-delic.
Especially on MV+EE’s newest,
Fuzzweed.
It’s like being in the wormhole Jodi Foster went through at the end of
Contact, except it’s low-gravity and
slower than the speed of light, and it’ll only get you as far as the sofa and
the fridge and back, 40 minutes, round-trip. It’s all good, but side two is the
masterpiece: a 20-minute three-parter that starts off as a ghostly folk tune
and then just goes off, everywhere, into spiral galaxies ruled by Iron Man and
inner spaces made of slide-guitar plumes, and so on, and so forth. I’ve tried to
describe it at another site and failed. The best I can do here is to say that
if you’ve listened to the last track on
Space
Homestead, “Porchlight>Leaves,” and dug it, you’ll dig this. That track,
the trippiest highlight of that record, is but a road report from the journey
to this freaktastic Spectrasymphony.
No comments:
Post a Comment