Revolt of the Apes

“As I see it, the stars were once nameless, and the days and the months of the year. Then they had many names, names we gave them, and forgot, and misremembered. They fell in and out of their own timing, the seasons particular to the angle of the light, the pitch of the planet – by the laws of gravity earth’s one moon decided the tides.” – Deborah Digges, “The Stardust Lounge: Stories From a Boy’s Adolescence“

Listen: Just like we stated this time last year, we love year-end “Top Ten/Best Of” music lists as much as anyone, not least because counting to ten represents the furthest extent of our mathematical abilities. At their best, these lists serve to elucidate, shining light on artists and work that might otherwise go under-appreciated or worse, unheard. A list can put a year of listening in perspective and and help stoke your sonic fires for the year to come, and this year, there are plenty of great lists waiting for you to devour.

But when it comes to the apes that revolt … we plead no contest. As previously indicated, I’m tempted to let my pompous nature take over (again!) and say something about how further attempting to compartmentalize the subjective and sacred nature of our sonic rituals to fill ill-fitting categories of “best of,” “top 10″ and “the year” only serves to fuel … something I don’t want to fuel. I’m tempted, but I will resist.

The fact is that putting together a “Top 10/Best Of” list feels like toil to me, and as our friend “Ticklish” Terrance McKenna said so memorably, “man was not put on this earth to toil in the mud.”

Rather, this year we will indulge our love of the written word, just as we did last year and the prior thirty-seven years (links currently unavailable).

We take a quick look at ten reads that made 2011 memorable – not just books, mind you, but the more encompassing “reads.” The decision to move the content of this list beyond the strict confines of printed, proper books is largely born out of necessity. I think I would be stretching to choose ten books from this past year that I can recommend without reservation, which speaks much, much more to my increasingly devolving, lackadaisical and long-in-the-tooth reading habits than it does to the quality of writing being put forth by authors around the globe. But it also says something about how our reading habits continue to evolve – and it says something about our desire to salute those strange, strange idiots who put in great time and effort into sharing original, quality reading material online. After all, I proudly count myself among those idiots.

You may say it’s a cop-out, but I’m not the only one. In no particular order, for no particular reason, please take a moment to consider interacting further with ten of the best reads these Apes revolved around in 2011.

The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, Illustrated by Josh Neufeld

Yes, I listen to NPR. What is this, a witch hunt? Psychedelic credibility now in tatters, allow me to opine that this smart, short book is both an excellent primer and a necessary refresher course for those among us who prefer to not get fully overheated each time we watch the news. Gladstone reminds us that all of the problems that make our media consumption so messy – bias, pandering and straight-up lying – were present at its very creation, while Neufeld reminds us that complex situations are often rendered less so through the magic of cartooning.

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“Bulbul Tarang” sing The Graceful Slicks at the start of a slithering musical painkiller named (luckily, thankfully) “Bulbul Tarang.”

The song – one of three the Oxford, UK-based group makes available for free download – sees it’s opening (more than a minute of vibe-setting guitar that we wouldn’t be bothered to hear go on for an hour or more) float majestically into its verse, before gliding with ease into the chorus, before drifting back to where we started before we even realize we were gone – and for how long, nobody knows. And we are gone.

Download “Bulbul Tarang” by The Graceful Slicks

The whole thing comes across as an easy classic and, truth be told, it’s both graceful and slick (“slick” as in “ace,” rather than as in “over considered”). So no wonder then that we’re compelled to keep our third eye focused on this band’s journey, whether they should move slowly or move three-fifths of a mile in ten seconds.

In fact, if there’s one area wherein we are slightly conflicted about The Graceful Slicks it’s the fact that their very name insists and demands that our minds wander to thoughts of the Queen of Contralto, the Chrome Nun herself.

But listen: we’ve not adequately prepared for a lengthy dissertation on Ms. Slick – not her life, not her art, not her psychic connection to Jack Casady’s headband. We’ve not adequately prepared for much beyond telling you that The Graceful Slicks  are well worth your time. In light of this, we’ll live to revolt another day.

But until that time, can’t we take time out to enjoy a song from an album with a naked movie star on its cover? Can’t we enjoy our absolute favorite song about cannibalism? ‘Tis the season!

Download “Silver Spoon” by Grace Slick and Paul Kantner, from the album, “Sunfighter”

“This age group that I’m now part of is a peculiarly conservative group, unwilling or unable to jump out of its own self-inflicted rigidity. We run companies, dress acceptably, and pander to our children’s concepts of who they want us to be. We’re chattel who’ve crawled back into the brittle dialectic handed down by our parents.” – Grace Slick, “Somebody to Love?”

At one point, we were certain to crown the recent album by Gnod – “InGnodWeTrust” – as our absolute favorite of the year. Consisting of two stupefyingly brilliant, towering tracks of utter madness, “InGnodWeTrust” immediately captured our full attention and refused to give it back.

But then something unexpected happened. Gnod released “Chaudelande Volume 1” and – horror of horrors – we became even more enthralled and obsessed than we were prior.

We find it nearly impossible to express in words what makes the music of Gnod so compelling. By turns, it is punishing, dramatic, ecstatic, frenzied and – wait for it – danceable. It is rarely the same thing twice and, we have learned, works its magick perfectly well whether the listener is laying absolutely still with headphones on, or piloting a vehicle at high rates of speed, screaming all the way.

In his essential Krautrock essay, our pal Erik Davis opines:

“When we gaze up at the night sky, or when we analyze the sacred geometry seemingly carved into the planetary orbits or our astrological natal charts, we can still sniff the atmosphere of beauty and perfection that inspired the old Greeks and their craftsman cosmos … But another quality has entered our experience of the cosmos as well: a stern and sometimes self-immolating feeling of immensity and awe mixed with disorientation, loneliness, even fear. The cosmos, it seems, is no more beautiful than it is inhospitable … In the sublime dialectic of the kosmiche, titanic and inhuman struggles are mysteriously pared with a serene acceptance of an underlying unity.”

A better description of Gnod’s music you may not find … but if you prefer an alternate, we’ll co-sign the description of one Julian Cope as well: “really just one helluva fucking mind-X-panda.”

We are grateful to share this interview with two Gnod-heads, Chris Haslam (bass, guitar, and keys/synths) and Paddy Shine (guitar, vocals, drums, synths). Gnod-speed!

Is there a push-pull relationship in your mind between the desire for a repetition-driven, trance-inducing musical experience and the immediacy of unleashing a tight, simple riff? How do you balance these two forces within the music of Gnod? Is there even a balance? Should there be?

Chris: We don’t really think about it too much. We jam on riffs that we like to play and we play them for a long time because the longer you play a simple riff, the more you lock into a trance state. You find the same thing (repetition of a simple act) in many other things (e.g. meditation) that try to achieve a higher state.

Paddy: Riff + Riff= Riff.

Following through on the theme of balance, the Gnod live experience has the reputation of being a relatively unbalanced affair. Not in the sense of being mentally unbalanced (though – fair cop – that may be present as well), but rather that Gnod seem to be well in favor of tipping the scales toward the audience having an ecstatic experience, toward letting go of the ordinary performer-audience-applause narrative and truly connecting with the music. Was this a stated or understood goal of the band when first coming together, or is it a perspective that developed over time? Do you have concern for performances to slip out of your control – to the point that it’s no longer a Gnod performance but a bunch of people banging on drums, walls, pots and pans? Is it important to retain control of the music? Is it possible to do so and still have that ecstatic experience?

Chris: Again, it’s not something we intentionally set out to do. We were listening to a lot of krautrock and experimental bands such as Neu, Can, Sunburned Hand Of The Man & African Psychedelia and wanted to play music which was free of the constraints of conventional songwriting and more of a collective jam. I already had a bass stack and G (the first Gnod guitarist) had a Sound City stack, we wanted the music to sound loud and powerful.

At shows we just try to make it sound as powerful as possible and when you are playing simple riffs repetitively at loud volumes, it has a certain effect on the audience. They can hear it is a pure thing, nothing contrived. I think this makes the audience feel more connected to the band. Like punk when it first happened, it was pure energy and everyone had the feeling that it was something that they could do, too, because it was so simple and dealt in no frills primal energy.

Paddy: When we first started out it was pretty much a free for all with the emphasis on volume and madness. When we played house parties there would more than likely be pots and pans getting banged by penny whistle playing elves and the like. People properly losing it and dancing with us while we played for as long as we could take it … all that good shit. Playing “proper” venues around UK and Europe, that kinda thing doesn’t happen as much but the six or seven playing the music still put in the same energy as they would playing a party or whatever and if all goes well, heads in the crowd feel it and then we’re all in it together. I don’t think we are ever in control of the music when we play it – we just try sending it in the right direction.

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Were it that we could easily describe the great pleasure of listening to Alberta, CanadiaLands’ Deadhorse, we would. We would describe their high-lonesome, open-sky, western-country space-rock-and/or-roll music as the aural manifest of finding yourself at that midpoint between Moose Lake, AB and the very brightest stars visible to the naked eye.

We’d tell you that’s the position their debut album’s opening incantation – “Interstellar Remedies” – forces our mind to consider. The song comes on like a lovely, odd and immediate cosmic paean to the incurable mystery of the sky at night, a sort of “Her Canadian Majesties Request,” replicating a similar vibe with an opening arsenal of jittery, jingle jangle mourning, with the note-perfect female voices that dwell throughout the album delivering the healing, interstellar medicine  before the entire band dissolves into the healing interstellar medicine of droning, echoing, chaotic sonic bliss.

But we can’t do that.

And it’s not just because the following number delivers us to the kookiest honky-tonk in town. Titled “Glam Central,” it’s little preparation for the later  delivery of  slow, sweet glam-pop hooks, deliberately laid over the synth of doom and siren-wail of “Paraboots,” or the fervent, Pentecostal-prog of “I’m A Lawyer,” anchored by two echoing voices, one male, one female, both voices beautiful in their balance, offering their pleas to the sky, to climbing, to red clouds and “super-hero heretics.”

But we can’t do that. Or we can … or we just did.

If nothing else, we just don’t want to tell you you’ll fall quickly for Deadhorse’s fence-jumping music, on an album that runs this way and that. Perhaps you will. Perhaps you will not. What the hell do we know?

Nothing!

Download “I’m A Lawyer” from Deadhorse by Deadhorse

We know little-to-nothing, surely, but we do feel something more. And we feel gratitude for the way the music of Deadhorse makes us feel, returning us to that mental, middle world between the the burning stars and the frozen ground. It’s a feeling captured in the smallest of details, such as the way the band sings the words “cold snap” on the fluffy and fiery “Cushion” – an indication that the weather is changing, the moon is rising, our eyes are opening wide. Moose Lake or bust.

Dead Horse 

Deadhorse – Cushion from Welcome To The West on Vimeo.

“It’s not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.” – Nikolai Gogol

FUNGAL ABYSS

Written words have little persuasive power when it comes to a band like Fungal Abyss – and there may be no other band on the planet like Fungal Abyss.

When a band caveats their debut recording (in this case, an outrageously heavy, epic, throbbing third-eye of a cassette entitled “Bardo Abgrund Temple,” available from Translinguistic Other, along with other beatific releases) with the declaration that follows, what could possibly be said to make the timid listener leap directly into the Abyss?

“‘Bardo Abgrund Temple’ was improvised in the studio under the influence of teonanacatl. There were no overdubs and no edits.”

Such a warning (promise? threat?), coupled with a glance at the song titles and lengths (opening with “Arc of the Covenant” at 20:11 and closing with the 24:06 “Fungal DeBrist,” with two trips in the middle adding up to an additional twenty-three minutes in the Abyss) should have your mind immediately made up – either you’re game for this sort of thing, or you’re not.

We certainly are and if you’ve followed this far down, odds are that you are, too. Blow your speakers, blow your mind. Let us enter this “Temple” as we’ve entered others before, “concerned with an artistic appreciation of beauty, a profound sense of connection with the cosmos, and finally, an understanding of archetypes and genetic history caused by stepping outside the regular flow of time.” Let us have drummer Ben Thomas-Kennedy lead the way.

What do you feel is the relationship between music and nature? Would you characterize the music you’ve made with Fungal Abyss to be a celebration of your relationship with the natural world, a reaction to man’s love for the synthetics which often place us in opposition to nature, a bit of both, or neither?

I think that sound is natural, but I don’t think all music is.  One can do some very unnatural things with sound, and sometimes that can be an amazing thing to do.  In Fungal Abyss however, we allow our natural minds and souls to join natural plants on a natural journey.  I don’t know if it’s a reaction to man’s love for synthetics though.  After all, we are using electric instruments.

What are the key moments in your own personal musical evolution that lead you to a pursuit of more exploratory musical endeavors? Are there particular people in your life who were instrumental in broadening your musical perspectives? What was the first band or artist who made music that you felt consumed by, and how – if at all – does that music resonate with you today?

I have always wanted to explore with music more than I ever wanted to be proficient at it.  As long as I can remember I have spent more time improvising music than learning skills or songs.  A friend of mine and I used to spend hours making noise music out in the woods and it wasn’t until high school that we realized that other people were doing this, too.  We soon got consumed by Coil.  They seemed to be the perfect execution of what we were trying to do.  They are still, twenty years later, one of the artists I listen to the most.  Very inspirational.

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We assume the radio waves that carried the remarkable radio recording of The Holydrug Couple found our ears after originating in the vicinity of Santiago, Chile. We assume that their final destination is in the vicinity of Olympus Mons, Mars.

The radio recording in question is that offered for free download by The Holydrug Couple – a radio sesión grabada el Jueves 13 de Octubre del 2011 en el Estudio Master de Radio Horizonte.

There’s much to love about the music of The Holydrug Couple – theirs is the music of searching, of exploration, of  your mind moving toward signing a transcendence-truce with your body, a temporary peace sought in the endless war of of fuzzy guitar and freaky drums. Couple? Certainly this is the sound of a battalion of guitars, backed by an army of ghosts on drums.

There’s the aptly named “Slow Motion Cats,” – because theirs is the perfect music for we slow motion cats. And there’s the epic voyage of “Ancient Land” – and here again, is where we really must insist The Holydrug Couple have moved these radio waves, moved their battalion of guitars and army of drums toward a stand on mountains of Mars. Can there be any other message when a song moves so magically, effortlessly through time, space and … ?

Wait. Maybe we’re confused. We admit to being confused. Confusion is nothing new.

Download “Wonder / Wonder Reprise” by The Holydrug Couple

These are confusing days for us, but we remain open to the journey – Mars or bust! – when assisted by the good guidance we find in others who wonder and wander. “I would like to go,” declare The Holydrug Couple, inviting us to come along, regardless of origin, regardless of destination.

The Holydrug Couple

“Leave the door open to the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.” – Rebecca Solnit, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost“

ØRESUND SPACE COLLECTIVE

“Space is the place” – it’s something declared by an Alabama-bred musician born nearly one-hundred years ago, and something we’ve accepted as fact – which may be one reason we feel so immediately linked to the cosmic compositions of Øresund Space Collective.

Even without a telescope, it’s been hard to miss Øresund Space Collective. Since their formation in 2005, their name has appeared on ten full-length albums – including four in 2011 alone, highlighted by the recent release of “Sleeping With the Sunworm.” Like all of their releases, “Sleeping With the Sunworm” is the space-rock result of improvisational explorations made by a collective of musicians from Denmark and Sweden (on occasion including members of such bands as Siena Root, Causa Sui and Carpet Knights). And like all of their releases, the results are mesmerizing, given patience and the proper, vanguard state of mind – hypnotic rhythms strike across the chest while guitars and synth-lines paint the mind like a solar flare. Outer space without a map – it’s the ultimate psychedelic road trip.

Certainly the influence of the interstellar rises like a rocket throughout the music we love – from the aforementioned Sun Ra’s impact on the Motor-City Five to those space-ritual holding favorites of Johnny Rotten, the unforgettable astral adventures of Voivod, and even more recent signals sent to bend against the most distant, dying stars. Øresund Space Collective fits nicely in this universe.

For those paying attention, over the last few weeks we’ve had the pleasure of exploring earth (Hills), wind, (uhhhh … Wind) and fire (Magdalena Solis). We could not be more excited to now explore outer space, in the form of this Øresund Space Collective interview with the group’s synth-master-general, the appropriately named Dr. Space.

Where does the connection between outer space and music – two outrageously broad categories, we admit – begin for you? Can you recall when it was that you first began your fascinations with both? Who are the artists that you consider pioneers in this realm and what is it (if anything) about their music that captures your imagination?

In the late 70s I was a huge Pink Floyd fan and was collecting up all their records and bootleg vinyl records as well. This was my first interest in spacey music. I did not really get into Hawkwind until the late 80s, after my “heavy metal” phase when I was putting out a heavy metal fanzine from 1984-1988. These two bands as well as my old friend Doug Walker’s (RIP) band Alien Planetscapes set the stage for me as far as musical influences and space rock. I also got into the 80-90s UK scene with all the great bands like Mandragora, Ozric Tentacles, Omnia Opera, Paperhouse, Dead Flowers, etc. As far as space, it is only in the past 5 years or so that cosmology and the physics of the universe has become extremely fascinating for me. Perhaps it is all the discoveries we have today and the amazing telescopes that can see so far back into time and the events that happened millions of years ago, that it is all coming together. Clearly, Hawkwind with the “In Search of Space” record and fold out and booklet and “Space Ritual” – this was the first real band connecting rock music with space and sci-fi fantasy, largely due to Robert Calvert, Barney Bubbles and Nik Turner in Hawkwind. I can’t see how any young person today who picks up these records would not be pretty blown away at the details and imagination put into it. Clearly pioneers …

What do you consider your earliest musical memory? Can you recall what your first true musical obsession was, during your adolescent years? What made that music so important to your own personal musical evolution? How has your opinion of that music changed over the years?

My earliest musical memories are my dad playing Chuck Berry. He told me when he was in college before I was born, he saw Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis in concert. When I was about 9 I bought one of my first records, when my grandfather took me to the military base where he could buy food discounted because he was a war veteran, and I bought Chuck Berry’s “Live in London” and my grandmother made us return the record when she heard him play the song “My Ding-a-Ling” (she was very religious). In the 70s I was really into Aerosmith, CCR, Ted Nugent, and Chuck Berry. I for sure became obsessed with music in the late 70s and we had this great record store in New Mexico called Merlin’s Record Workshop and we would go there and buy records every week when we got paid from our jobs. I met one guy named John, a older guy who was into live bootlegs and he turned me on to live recordings and soon I was getting some recordings from him, recording concerts myself and buying some from a guy in Arizona named Sam, who illegally sold live recordings but it was a way to build up a collection. In a few years I had 200-300 cassettes and eventually through 20 years of tape trading I ended up with over 5000 tapes!

I still really love most all of the music that I have liked over the years. I never really liked death and thrash metal that much but I ended up with a lot of it over the years (mostly 80s stuff) from writing about music, so that is probably the only music that I am not so fond of today that I may have liked a lot more back then. But I still love Chuck berry, CCR, Aerosmith (old), Pink Floyd and most all of the music I collected. I have broad tastes in music. I just don’t like mainstream commercial music. I prefer instrumental music in some way and this is also maybe one reason why my band plays instrumental music.

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HILLS

If Hills didn’t already exist, we’d be well on our way toward inventing them in our minds-eye … and our minds-ear, too. Theirs is an epic, larger-than-life mix of punishing, trance-inducing Halleluhwah-wah-worship and brainstorming astral amplifier assaults, baked inside a crispy crust that forms only atop those who spent their formative years sampling the most grotesque of extreme Swedish riffery.

The second album from the trio is “Master Sleeps,” released earlier this year on Transubstans Records and now, swiftly, sadly, nearly out of print (though you can still find it for just a few spare krona). Befitting the album name, the six-song, thirty-five minute affair displays a mastery of sonic sorcery – if there’s a heavier, better use of flange and gain than on opener “Rise Again,” there’s little doubt that our head would do a very credible Scanners impression should we ever hear it.

And what of the sleep in the album title? As revealed below, the album does feature what is essentially a lullaby … but one suspects there’s more to the “Master Sleeps” story, and Hills are staying tight-lipped. Hills have eyes, but they also have amps, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to feature this interview with the bassist/vocalist/guitarist/organist/flutist and keyboard-king of these Hills, our friend Kalle.

Can you recall what the first riff was that truly captured your attention in your adolescence? What was it about that riff that made such an impression on you? Are you able to pinpoint a moment in your own personal musical evolution where the realization occurred to you that music can be something beyond “just” riffs?

The first thought that occurred to me here was the closing riff in “Suffer the children” by Napalm Death which is kind of strange since I really haven’t listened to that one in a really long time. But that riff is a total killer and combined with the lyrics: “…Who shall it be? Who is the one? Not those who pass on but those dictators divine weaving their deceitful wands” … it still sticks. I was about 13 at the time and that was just the coolest and heaviest thing I had ever heard. I remember being totally shocked when I first heard the album. I did not understand shit. Like, a what-the-fuck-is-going-on feeling, like being overrun by a train or something. I guess the hardest stuff I had heard up to that point must have been some kind of heavy metal or punk like Sex Pistols or whatever … I also remember buying the album because of a guy who went to the same school as me and had his locker next to mine. He had this Napalm Death sticker on his locker and was a really cool guy. He told me his older brother played in a death metal band which was very impressive and seemed kind of dangerous back then. So I bought the album just from seeing that sticker. I ordered the LP directly from Earache and my mother ( ! ) helped out with formulating the letter. Since she taught English in school and my English wasn’t too good back then, I thought it was the appropriate thing to do. I remember we had an argument about the opening of the letter which started out with “Dear Sir …” I remember thinking it sounded too cheesy and not as cool as I would have wanted to present myself at 13. I would have preferred something more like, “Hey man/dude” or, in retrospect, maybe just “Hi” … she won in the end though, mum.

And if I can pinpoint a moment when I realized that music can be something beyond just riffs, it occurred some years later when another friend played me “Hallo Gallo” on his tape recorder on a very late after-party, from a mixtape a guy had made him. He wasn’t exactly sure what he name of the artist was since he just had the cassette left. We sorted it out in the end though. I think he called him up in the middle of the night and played him the song on the phone.

Did you have any general ambitions for the type of band that you wanted Hills to be when you first started playing together? How have those expectations changed since the beginning, if at all? Did you have experience playing in other bands before Hills, and how did those experiences color the forming of Hills?

To incorporate all the things I love listening to myself and add something of my own on top of all that. I guess this goes for the lot of us as well and apart from that the usual ones: having a good time, maybe do a couple of live shows, making music you would want to listen to yourself and maybe release an LP sometime. I don’t think our expectations have changed either; at least they have not for me. I mean, obviously we have released two albums now and done some shows and all that but that is also what we want to continue doing. Recording stuff, releasing it, then do some shows … We’ve been getting loads of love from all around and people supporting what we do through booking us for shows, buying our LPs, t-shirts and CDs and so on, which really is more than I could ever imagine expectation-wise. That a song that I have made means something to someone else, that is just so cool but so very hard to grasp.

As far as playing in bands goes, I have done it since about the above mentioned purchase of “Harmony Corruption” – everything from death metal to garage outfits. The last band I played in before Hills was also what led me to want to form Hills. I got tired of just playing the same “plain old songs” with no room for improvisation anywhere. The last thing I wanted was another “job,” so to speak, and that´s what it felt like in the end, performing the same set list over and over again like an idiot. Don’t get me wrong: I really like to listen to conventional (conventional meaning predefined/tight songs all the time, verse/bridge/refrain – you know what I’m getting at) music – I just did not want to play it myself anymore.  I wanted to find a platform where I could incorporate everything that was interesting to me somehow and of course meet like-minded people and do just anything. It was never about the shows but always about the music, the rehearsing/meditative part of it and recording for me, and that still is the most important part. Then if people like what we do, that is just great but we would be doing it anyhow. I think the current constellation of Hills is great. A quartet consisting of friends that sometimes (lately, very seldom) lend a helping hand to other friends for live shows.

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Tempting as it may be to pull focus on the more incongruous elements found in the songs and sounds of Quilt – as presented on their exceptional, boundlessly beautiful debut album – to do so would be ill-considered, in a way that their music never is.

We would expect a band called Quilt to compose and construct songs containing multiple layers – in the case of the Massachusetts trio currently under discussion, those layers include inspired two and three-part harmonies, massive choral-pop-psych hooks mixed with rhythmic diversity, and a neo-folk sensibility that resists the conventional and never shies away from the ceremonial. What we might not expect is for those layers to work quite so magically when stitched together.

That magic/magick is there from the album’s start, finding Quilt in full-flower on opener “Young Gold,” which builds from a plaintive, two-note intro to a dizzying devotional in just minutes, finding its end in a repeating maelstrom of mantra-like vocals, guitars chiming along happily. Listening initially, we flashed on one of our favorite zodiac signs and you, who I still love. Yet this is no band looking to the past, longingly. Like other current bands who hold us spellbound via their ability to triangulate the acoustic, the gorgeous and the gothic, Quilt would appear to hold too many questions about the future to be much more than haunted by the past.

Download “Cowboys In the Void” by Quilt

And if Quilt isn’t haunted by the past (and who isn’t, really?), we’re comfortable accusing them of being haunted by something.

We hear it in the space the separates the tentative opening notes of “Cowboys In the Void” from the effortless, liquid flow of the songs later sections, culminating in a muscular, mystical march.

We hear it in the tight reverberations of the spectacular earth drone of “Children of Light,” who, we are told, “sleep in darkness, too.”

And we hear it in the intoxicating “Penobska Oakwalk,” a song that connects by exploring our inability to connect, as Quilt themselves are unable to complete a thought (“How did we get so …” goes its open-ended plea), ultimately declaring that “language deflated the zeppelin of the consciousness.” We’re confident you’ll hear no words so Paris Review-ready sung with such clarity, character and ardor this year.

This Quilt is comfortable, without question. But its comfort is born of its confusion, splitting the musical difference between patient paranoia and cosmic confidence, righteously considering its contradictions. We’ll undoubtedly be under its spell for some time to come.

UPDATE: Read our interview with Quilt here.

“In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.” – Ursula K. Le Guin