Damon & Naomi - 'with Ghost' (Sub Pop)

The post-Galaxie career of Damon & Naomi is a gentle, beautiful one - they've made some great records, though none really as memorable as More Sad Hits, which I don't have, but this collaboration with Ghost ain't too shabby.  I remember D&N as being a more mellow, downbeat, and minimal group that Galaxie 500, but the opening cut of this ('The Mirror Phase') sounds almost exactly like the song 'Tell Me' from On Fire, except with slightly more ethereal vocals and an updated production from Kramer's whole thing.  Ghost isn't really on this record - just 3 of them - but to many, Masaki Batoh and Michio Kurihara ARE the meaty part of Ghost, and they're both here.  Despite the presence of a bitingly psychedelic Japanese psych band, D & N keep things pretty genteel.  Batoh limits himself to acoustic guitar, making this resemble his Ghost in the Darkened Sea record far more then the orange one with the long name.  And Ghost's more prog-rock tendencies, which really stuck out at me the one time I saw them live, are completely absent.  This is much more a Damon & Naomi record and the Japanese presence barely warrants the title this CD gets, but it's a wonderful balance.  It's only really the penultimate track, 'Tanka', where sounds converge into a large, powerful ball of magic - but even still, it's not a particularly dissonant one, and it doesn't overstay it's welcome.  Most of the tracks exist in a folk-pop strumniverse that recalls other artists at times - for example 'The New World' has shades of the Sallyangie - and actually has two covers   'Blue Moon' is the umpteenth cover of Alex Chilton but the melancholy is cut, quite a bit actually, especially compared to the His Name is Alive version I've listened to so many times.  Tim Hardin's 'Eulogy to Lenny Bruce' closes the disc with the lowest energy, most restrained psychedelic freakout that I can think of - it's repetitive and trippy, but it's laid back to the point that when it ends - with the slightest energy from Kurihara - I barely noticed.

Curtains - 'Flybys' (Thin Wrist)

Curtains' second album continues the rampant short-attention span post-Beefheart pyrotechnics of Fast Talks, though with a bit more keyboards, a bit more space, and even some singing! ('Saga' is a weird, broken a capella plea to Spider-Man which is wonderfully off-key and distant and somehow just fits amongst all the instrumental malarkey).  Everything is brighter than before and the songs are both more deconstructed and more accessible at the same time  There's 22 of em, and it goes by pretty quickly, so the term 'song' isn't exactly a great description.  Atmospheric moments begin to appear in Curtains work now, even if they are sometimes fragmentary linking tracks.  These merge with the biting anti-rock, often transitioning from track to track quite nicely.  'Blink, Professor' is just a lumbering beast that keeps stopping as soon as it starts, and then fades into 'Asterisks by Moonlight', a great title if I've ever heard one.  'Asterisks' is brief but warm, with synthesised spacefuzz coming as a nice coda.  'Moment with Plankton', as the title suggests, could be interstitial background music for an educational science film from the 1950s - but while there's been plenty of synth bubbles documented already in these pages, it sounds unique and integrated with the more rock moments.   The guitar lines on Flybys are like a biting, attenuated version of Zoot Horn Rollo; the structured songs sometimes get into call-and-response hysterics ('Bummer with Cakes') or snake-eating-its-own-tail meanderings ('Telegraph Victories').  A few moments are actually tender, with the guitar having glimpses of bluesy pain before the unnatural setting takes over.  It's occasionally a cacophony but more often a willing, controlled holding back that seems to go against everything rock music should be.  Carducci probably hates this, but I think the rewards are vast.

Cerberus Shoal - 'Homb' (Temporary Residence Limited)

Oh, how do we even begin the Cerberus Shoal story? Like so many others, these guys began as a post-hardcore/emo sort of thing, with their early records drawing comparison to Still Life and bands like that. Now, I'm not really an expert in such matters and when it comes to the Shoal, my entry point is here on Homb, which is 1998. And even still, this sounds remarkably post-rock influenced, and somewhat, well, pedestrian compared to the total melted Americana mindfuck I saw around, hmmmm, let's say '99 or 2000. So I picked up Homb which is basically what was available at the time, and had pretty much the same core members, and found something a lot closer to the Tortoise/Slint sound (which is no shock for 1998). Now, I don't mean to come down too hard on Homb (and I say this as someone who likes Tortoise and Slint) -- the strong rhythmic underpinnings on this disc are what ties it to the post-rock tradition, and it's these strong rhythms that were phased out later, or maybe they just became more fluid. Good times are everywhere on these long jammy tunes. 'Omphalos' is like Slint's 'Washer' overlaid with pitch pipes, drones, and a nice oceanic drift. But it has a hell of a drum sound that anchors it, even when it slows down a bit and tries to open up. It's the opening track, really, 'Harvest', that is the most atmospheric, but I fear it's meant just as an introduction. Reeds and breaths are all over Homb, at times veering into Windham Hill territory (nothing wrong with that either!), and there's a ton of instruments listed in the liner notes, mostly Art Ensemble kinda shit I think, but it's too hard for me to actually read the cursive so I don't really know. The last 2/3 of the album is a 3-part suite called 'Myrrh' which is a pretty huge construction, I guess. The first part, 'waft', is where we hear lots of wooden blocks and whistles and things like that, with more deep breathy new agey wooden flutes and whatnot. Vocals eventually come in, and they're slow, deeply intoned, and nothing like you'd expect from ex-emo kids. The intervals are minor and uneven, and it has a bit of overall wow and flutter that gives it a nice instability. The production, by the way, is really, really good here - clearly the product of Maine's finest recording studios, and call me a spoilsport, but I wish it was a bit more lo-fi! It slowly melts into part two, 'loop', the loop of which seems to be a 3-note bassline which drives the tune, but not without some variation. Over this, reverb-laden flutes (or flute-like things), guttural moans, and arpeggiated guitars noodle around. It's not really spacey or exploratory (by which I mean it's nothing like Hawkwind) but seems more concerned with keeping the atmosphere burning bright. Sometimes the band kicks it up a notch, but then they pull back soon after. There is also heavy use of flanger in this track. It pounds along for ten minutes, eventually climaxing in a mess of horns, and then we're left with decaying breezes. I'm not sure where I've actually been taken to, though. And then 'Myrrh (reprise)' which is the epic instrumental piece at the end, which I just sat through and enjoyed, but I don't know if I have the ability to write much about it. There's a thick, big band sound and tons of instruments, lots of rock gestures (loud chord changes, roto toms and all that) though I wouldn't call it that. I'm tired by the end of it, and this is just the intro into a Cerberus Shoal mini-gauntlet - only 3 discs, but they feel long. Time hasn't been as kind to Homb as it should have; I think my own biases against production techniques are interfering with my appreciation of the musical construction. I think I like my weird coastal soundscapes to be lo-fi and scrappy, or maybe I just had a prejudice against people who can actually play the drums.