Six Organs + Comets on Fire = Ascent

This is a really good one, maybe top ten. (I really need to redo my top ten at some point.)

Six Organs of Admittance
Ascent
Drag City

Ascent picks up on a project that has been shelved for a decade, ever since Ben Chasny toured with Comets on Fire, with Ethan Miller, Ben Flashman, Noel von Harmonson and Utrillo Kushner backing him up in a wholly louder, more electrified way than most people would have expected from Six Organs of Admittance. There was talk of an album, but instead Chasny joined Comets on Fire. Over the next decade, Chasny continued his droney, dreamy, forays into tripped-out, six-stringed folk, sometimes acoustically, sometimes plugged in, but the idea of a molten, pedal-screaming, psychedelically overdriven Six Organs was put away. Comets on Fire itself went on hiatus. Miller focused on Howlin’ Rain. Von Harmonson toured with Sic Alps. Kushner put out a couple of solo records. Chasny joined Rangda, and while he played a few of his Comets/Six Organs songs on tour, but it seemed unlikely that anything else would ever happen with them.

More

Howlin' Rain please stop

By the time Otis asked me if I'd review the new Howlin' Rain album Russian Wilds, I had already listened to it 3-4 times and pretty definitively decided that I didn't want to listen to it anymore. But I did, and it really didn't grow on me at all. It's too long. The tracks are too long. The solos are too long. The lyrics make no sense at all. It's a loving recreation of a kind of music that I hope never resurfaces...my (really pretty mean) review...

Howlin Rain
The Russian Wilds
(American)

The guitar solo is alive and well on Ethan Miller’s third album as Howlin’ Rain, a virtual reference book on classic rock styles of the 1970s, from Black Sabbath to Jimi Hendrix to Santana to Deep Purple and well beyond. If you hanker after the days when bands flew around in their own private jets, trailed by groupies and hangers on and A&R guys on the make, then The Russian Wilds is your kind of album. Beautifully played, immaculately recorded and bloated to the gills with 1970s album rock pretensions, it’s a throwback to a time that most people don’t remember very well (and few of those have any desire to revisit).

More