Posts Tagged ‘Ben Chasny’

NEW BUMS – ” Last Time I Saw Grace “

Posted: March 19, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: , , , ,
0
New Bums

Ben Chasny (Six Organs Of Admittance) and Donovan Quinn (Skygreen Leopards) return this week with their long-awaited second New Bums LP, channelling acoustic guitar rock ‘n’ roll in the vein of The Replacements or Johnny Thunders, albeit with a wee bit more of a psychedelic folk approach like their other projects. Released on the ever-reliable Drag City label, this ticks all the right boxes for us.

Seven years and a handful of lifetimes ago, New Bums came out of nowhere with their debut album, “Voices In a Rented Room” – a record the New York Times described as “feeling like it’s falling apart.” New Bums took this as a compliment and, thus emboldened, they toured relentlessly in support of the release: criss-crossing the USA in the spring of 2014, with a European run that summer. Then, silence descended, as the Bums withdrew to the place from which they’d mysteriously emerged.

Now, the New Bums are back. 2021 finds them with a new album in hand. Following a West Coast US tour in late 2019 it’s clear that the duo of Donovan Quinn (Skygreen Leopards) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, Rangda, etc) are fully reanimated, as evidenced by the songs and sounds of “Last Time I Saw Grace”.

Retaining the drunk-dog-locomotion of their debut, New Bums sprinkle a bit of fresh fancy into their signature twin guitars- and-vocals sound, with cleaner recording techniques, further developments in harmonies and a new appreciation for a song with more than two parts, making ‘Last Time I Saw Grace’ nothing less than the perfect progression from the purposefully murky mixes of their debut.

Continuing to embrace an acoustic rock ’n’ roll sound, inspired by artists such as Jacobites, Robyn Hitchcock, Johnny Thunders, Replacements and such, New Bums push the words and the stories to the front of the line, crafting tales with satiric glee on Last Time I Saw Grace. However, this world of empty perfume bottles, bodies tied to masts and moving onward to devastation (after the bottle on the table pulls out a gun) feels much more Gombrowiczian dreamscape than drunken night on the town. Yes, everything is wasted but this is an existential wasteland rather than a substance-laden one. This combination of arch Californian post-aristocratic melodrama with torn and frayed acoustic guitars opens up a new genre entirely, one those at Drag City Records are tempted to call Rent Control Romantic.

http://

Back in slagtion, New Bums, that duo nobody thought to ask for – Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny and Skygreen Leopards’ Donovan Quinn – are deeper in their nocturnal jungle where all the folly and failure in the world is like an elegant fever dream you want to have every night, and do. Dry humour and pathos pop in a collapsed acoustic vein!

“Tuned to Graffiti” is a track from “Last Time I Saw Grace,” available on March 19th, 2021 on LP from Drag City Records.

NEW BUMS – ” Last Time I Saw Grace “

Posted: February 28, 2021 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: , , , ,
0

Back in slagtion, New Bums, that duo nobody thought to ask for – Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny and Skygreen Leopards’ Donovan Quinn – are deeper in their nocturnal jungle where all the folly and failure in the world is like an elegant fever dream you want to have every night, and do. Dry humour and pathos pop in a collapsed acoustic vein!.

Does anyone remember the local bar scene? Sure, it was a lifetime ago (the longest lifetime: a year and counting…), but we still recall those unsung heroes of every local scene; musicians who put their blood, sweat and tears into trying to capture the blood, sweat and tears of somebody else’s music. Sure, almost everybody starts off performing covers before eventually finding their own original voice, leaving behind the quiet triumph ‘n tragedy of those who continue to try and draw custom via a spirited taxidermy of some key subset of history’s greatest hits….New Bums are here to tackle this frankly delicate matter with the latest single from their forthcoming “Last Time I Saw Grace”

http://

Releases March 19th, 2021

SIX ORGANS of ADMITTANCE – ” Taken By Ascent “

Posted: December 7, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
Tags: , , , , , ,
0

In preparing for the first album Six Organs Of Admittance new music since 2012’s Ascent, Ben Chasny had a think about what he’d be saying in his own tongue for the first time in a half-decade. As ever, a head-full of ideas were driving him to think and speak music as a spirituality superimposed onto a reality, with the ghosts of both whispering at each other. In the end, what sits in our listening ears is the sound of communion . Burning The Threshold brings a wealth of Six Organs-styled lightness into one of his sweetest musical meditations yet.

With a spacious acoustic sound stage, Burning the Threshold may actually more resemble 2011’s Asleep on the Floodplain or 2005’s School Of The Flower.  but our sense of what is true tells us that nobody plays acoustic music quite like Six Organs of Admittance, and that furthermore, nothing sounds so much like Burning the Threshold as Burning the Threshold.

Ben is in a particularly expansive mood this time around, singing and playing with all the thoughts affixed to a quiver of potent melodies launching forth and arcing out through dimensions, seeking infinite space. This space radiates out from the album’s first single, “Taken By Ascent,” a seven minute plus burner that engulfs the surrounding realm with empathetic waves. Featuring the thrilling vocal accompaniment of Haley Fohr, the massive drumming of Chris Corsano, and flourishing keys of Cooper Crain,

With this new music, Ben Chasny has created a potent tonic for our times. Looking at the world through clear eyes beneath a knitted brow, but with a laugh rising up from its heart, Burning the Threshold brings us a powerful draught of essence. 

http://

First single from the forthcoming Six Organs of Admittance album entitled “Burning The Threshold”, Out February 24th 2017.