woensdag 4 november 2015

360 records from 2000: 91. Damon & Naomi with Ghost - With Ghost

91. Damon & Naomi with Ghost: With Ghost


Country: US/Japan
Artist: Duo + trio
Career: recording since 1991
Language: English
Genre: Acoustic psychedelia


My infrequent encounters with Galaxie 500 have always ended badly. I come to this record with no baggage or expectations. It’s just beautiful.
For this list I’ve followed the simple rule that records are placed higher based on how much I like to play them. I didn’t want a list of important records, I wanted a list of my favourites. So if ‘Astral weeks’ and the first ‘Van Halen’ had been released in 2000, the second record would be much higher than the first.
With that in mind I’m about to say all the wrong things: this record is bathed in luminescent fragile beauty, it’s beauty is almost wholly transparent, disappearing before your ears. They sing like vessels of longing and wonder, who’ve never known the world but now let the pain and beauty of it all seep through. It’s an almost mystical thing.
Ghost, the Japanese psychedelic trio, are ideally suited to this atmosphere. Together they bathe the sound in acoustic guitars, droning keyboards, searching electric lead guitar, occasionally twisting and turning into a Neil Young-esque freakout (eight-minute versions of centrepieces ‘The great wall’ and ‘Tanka’). Ghost also deliver the music for my favourite track, ‘The new world’, with its Elizabethan echoes of ‘Lady Jane’. Add beautiful versions of Big Star’s ‘Blue moon’ and Tim Hardin’s ‘Eulogy to Lenny Bruce’.
Well, don’t say you didn’t know what to expect. I said ‘beautiful’ a lot, right?


At its best: The mirror phase, The new world, Blue moon, The great wall

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