|
today's listening
the skygreen leopards one thousand bird ceremony (on soft abuse)
the ivytree winged leaves (on catsup plate)
The Skygreen Leopards (Donovan Quinn & Glenn Donaldson) and the Ivytree (Donaldson solo) both march under the dreamy unfurling banner of the Jewelled Antler collective, but these discs are more song-grounded than previous releases from that camp. Last year's Blithe Sons release We Walk the Young Earth flirted promisingly with vocals, mixing them occasionally into its structures of meadow ambience, but it's only on these two discs that we get to see the result of a full marriage of the capital-S Song to Antler's trademark Californian mossiness. And the results are very pleasing indeed, two of the finest discs I've heard in recent months.
The Leopards disc, One Thousand Bird Ceremony, is the more upbeat of the two, whereas Winged Leaves is a more introspective affair: if the Leopards disc sounds like the music a group of slightly grass-tinged friends might make when sitting around a campfire out in the woods, the Ivytree disc sounds a little bit like the music someone might hear playing from the other room while staring dazedly at a design in their apartment's carpet. It drifts from melancholy Drakean folk to bleak Eraserhead-style industrial hum and back again, evoking a rainy autumn morning the way no album has managed since Richard Youngs' devastating Sapphie (1998).
Both Thousand Bird and Winged Leaves feature Donaldson's fine collage art, which reveals a psychedelic space existing somewhere between the gentle naturalistic universe of a Golden Guide and the scary apocalyptic one of a Jehovah's Witness book. |
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
1:05 PM
|
