Six Organs of Admittance – Luminous Night

Six Organs of Admittance, essentially a solo project for Comets on Fire guitarist Ben Chasney, make their return with this LP release, Luminous Night.

While Comets’ provide psychedelic rock, complete with noisy breakdowns and spacey effects, Six Organs’ provide an acoustic and chilled out alternative, while maintaining the experimentation and spacey vocals employed by Comets’.

At times Luminous Night can become somewhat samey, sounding like all of the acoustic parts from Opeth records put together, often leaving me waiting for some growling vocals, but that’s probably just me.

The airy and sometimes droning acoustic sounds suit this dark folk record perfectly; however Chasney’s vocals are often drowned out in a sea of echoes and reverb, though this might be intentional to give the record a more ‘psychedelic’ feel, it causes the vocals and potentially great lyrics to be almost entirely lost in the mix.

Though the album is relatively light on percussion this contributes to the airy and floating feel of the tracks, not being tied down to a specific rhythm the songs glide along, timing changing without ever feeling disorganized.

This album could be great, if only the vocals were a bit more audible and there was some variation, unfortunately after a lot of playing it feels like one long acoustic folk jam, which might get a bit much for some.