I always seem to get passed over on the Six Organs of Admittance reviews which I think is a bit out of order to be quite honest. I'm a great lover of his folky raga drone guitar pickin' (since everyone's in the listing mood at the moment I'll join in and say that I'd rank Dark Noontide as one of my favourite albums of the last 10 years) and all I'm asking for is a chance to represent. It's a chance I've got with Empty the Sun, a release which accompanies a Joseph Mattson book of the same name, included in giant 12" style with the LP version and in your classic pocket paperback style with the disc stuck to the back cover with the CD version. Fuck knows what the book is like but the artwork is lovely. The sounds are generally of a lighter character than your usual Six Organs fare with precious little of the lo-fi haze of the earlier stuff, about half the LP is spent in beautiful acoustic contemplation which almost recalls the guitar work of Nick Drake (stylishly chucking in some British influences along with the usual American primitivist fare) and the other half is spent wailing away like Ben Chasny's forgotten that he's doing Six Organs rather than Comets on Fire. That's by no means a criticism though, he does both styles with premium panache. A lovely package on either format..
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Sound clips for Empty The Sun by Six Organs of Admittance: on CD at Norman Records UK. CD, Drag City, ETS001CD, £12.49.
A new novel by JOSEPH MATTSON featuring music by SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE. Available in First Trade Paperback Edition with CD soundtrack and as a limited edition vinyl LP soundtrack with Large Format Book. “Here I was, doing ninety on the Santa Monica Freeway with a quart of whiskey shoved into my crotch and my dead neighbor in the trunk. It had come time to leave Los Angeles.” Thus begins the pre-apocalyptic, cross-country race with death to bury the murdered past in Joseph Mattson’s Empty the Sun, an urgent, beautifully reckless novel of transgressive loss and hunted redemption culminating in a shotgun fight with God. Includes an open-road, open-whiskey soundtrack by enigmatic and stunning Drag City recording artist Six Organs of Admittance.
