Audio By Carbonatix
You’d have a hard time finding a link between the abrasively lysergic Comets on Fire and the sinisterly ambient Current 93. But over the last year, Ben Chasny has joined both bands — and that makes a weird sort of sense, seeing as how his main gig, Six Organs of Admittance, lurks somewhere between the two. School of the Flower is Six Organs’ seventh release, and it drowns Chasny’s droning, modal folk in a lunging undertow of mantra-like feedback and splashes of elfin vocals. Which has the potential to render the disc a totally self-absorbed waste of plastic — but instead, School stands exquisitely poised between crystalline delicacy and the dark, Stonehenge-shaped brain stems of Donovan and Bert Jansch. Acts like Faun Fables and Devendra Banhart are, with varying degrees of credibility, milking the acoustic-creep gimmick for all it’s worth, but School of the Flower firmly fixes Chasny as a true adept of six-string sorcery. New-age music for the bright, satanic dawn.
