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Album Details

• Artist: Six Organs Of Admittance
• Album: School of the Flower
• Label: Drag City
• Year of Release: 2005
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: dscanland on 2005-04-22

Six Organs of Admittance is a band that has recently been brought to my attention by a colleague. I was told that Ben Chasney from Comets On Fire had this other folk style project and I was a little pessimistic at the idea. Needless to say, here I am as an advocate for Six Organs of Admittance. And then I found out that SOOA has actually been around even longer than Comet's. Ben joined Comet's in 2003 and helped out with the impressive Blue Cathedral. I digress, School of the Flower is the first album that Ben has recorded for Drag City, hopefully giving him a lot more exposure to a larger audience. Now if you come from the Comet's camp then you will be surprised by the psych-folk nature of Chasney's alter ego. He is a master at finding acoustic guitar lines that can be repeated over and over without sounding like they have been repeated over and over. For instance, take the subdued "Home", it has the same guitar line throughout it with the same lyric over and over but the distorted and yet minimal lead takes your mind off of things enough so that 4 minutes can pass in this state. The guitar playing sounds like it could easily be a John Fahey rip off or even further, back to the days of the original folk rock movement. They manage to pull of a 13 minute title track without boring. The jazz drumming has a lot to do with that but really, there are not very many people who can pull of a song this mesmerizing. A lot of the songs on School of the Flower are instrumental but they are so compelling with the impressive guitar. Chasney's true calling is this. He does add another dimension to Comets on Fire but Six Organs of Admittance is where his heart is.

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