Jarboe presents The Sweet Meat Love And Holy Cult - "Mystagogue" 2xCD

Though it's semi-billed as a Jarboe album, this double-set is actually a selection of 28 psychedelic and freak-folk songs that only sometimes include the participation of the legendary chanteuse herself. "Mystagogue" features, for the most part, a revolving door of artists and personalities, Jarboe being just one of many.

Opening with a re-recording of Jarboe's own "Ode To V", there's also a curiously straight-forward cover of Donovan's "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" (also sung by J. herself). "First Utterance" is a realistic audio portrait of a smoky opium den, both intoxicating and mysterious. Other standouts include Antic Clay's lovely and anthemic "Take This Tongue", which in my world would be a radio "hit". Henry Derek's "The Big Mouth" is cool and charismatic haunted blues. Derek's "Ballad For Blind Joe Death" refers to, and is most certainly an homage to, legendary guitar master John Fahey, and it all closes out with the voodoo blues-folk of "The Clasping Of Hands". A solid and trippy set of tunes for end times and new world awakenings alike.

(Atavistic)

Jarboe's personal website

Plastic Crimewave Sound - "No Wonderland" CD

Reissued from an apparently quite rare mammoth double-LP, this well-stuffed CD revisits a wild and woolly psychedelische-kraut monsterpiece from this Chicago collective. Gathering their farthest out-there guitar drones, noisy garage riffs, and freak-space-punk jams, PCS harvest a rich and deeply visceral strain of darkly-lit stoner head music. If names like Can, Acid Mothers Temple, Amon Duul, or Hawkwind mean anything to you, then this groovy set of tunes will easily satisfy. Guest appearances by new-jack hippie-folksters like Devendra Banhart or Josephine Foster are token, but the real meat and potatoes here are the long, enveloping motorik fuzz-jams that demand head-nodding and suggest some rather wicked altered states. Primal, powerful, and trance-inducing, 'No Wonderland' is a real triumph for you "heads". (Prophase Music)

Six Organs Of Admittance - "Shelter From The Ash" CD

Six Organs' Ben Chasny is a very busy fellow indeed. In between his gigs as guitarist in psychedelic-rock-mavens Comets On Fire, and his work with such folksters as Current 93, he records solo under the nom-de-plume Six Organs Of Admittance. Taking elements from 60's hippie psyche-folk, avante-garde guitarists like John Fahey, and freeform noise, this project sums up Chasny's headspace better than any of his other involvements. 'Shelter From The Ash' is his 10th studio LP, and it seems to inch a mite closer to actual songs than his past, more experimental offerings. Tracks like 'Strangled Road' or 'Jade Like Wine' are very accessable pop/folk songs with sinister/spooky twists, whereas 'Coming To Get You' is a focused and dynamic assault that grinds and churns with restrained animosity. Overall, this may be Chasny's most satisfying recording to date, and it's already gotten multiple spins on my CD player. So far, one of my top picks of the last year. (Drag City)