"Freak folk". One of the Bay Area's most prolific musicians of the last decade returns with an album full of doom-laced stories that make for a pretty heady listening experience. Guitarist/vocalist Ben Chasny aka Six Organs is joined by Eyving Kang on viola and Hans Tueber on alto flute in this beautifully haunting record, ideally suited to night-time slots. Apart from the first song (a pleasant medieval-style instrumental piece) the rest of the album is quite slow and heavy and the subject matter of the lyrics is quite dark. Melodies have a high dose of oriental/middle-eastern influence and there's a good mix of noisy experimentalism here and there. Good stuff!

Picks: 5,4,7 *** No FCCs ***

1. nice little acoustic instrumental intro, great guitar fingerpicking. song takes it's title from the hunter Actaeon's myth, who was transformed into a stag by the goddess Artemis (after seeing her naked) and torn apart by his own hounds
2. beautiful little ballad. i love the drony background guitar that slowly brings itself into the foreground. definite Floyd influence here. maybe because Chasny kind of sounds like Waters.
3. oriental style raga, including percussion and everything. Bar-Nasha is apparently christ's name in aramaic. vocals sound weirdly new-wavey
*4. instrumental bliss-out interlude. vicodin music. brick listen up
**5. beautifully melancholic ballad, picks up towards the end. Chasny's voice fits this really well... must be the saddest song on the album
6. slow, brooding, middle-eastern influenced instrumental. awesome viola...
*7. back to folky mode, nice addition of reverby backing vocals. noisy background guitar is pretty cool too.
8. pulsating noise intro, then some sort of psalm-like singing, slowly builds up and electric guitar enters... approaches Sunn 0))) style heaviness