Album Review

Passage

Pocahaunted
Passage

[Troubleman Unlimited; 2009]

6.1

Find it at: Insound | eMusic | Lala

Pocahaunted churn out psychedelic ambient jams aligned with freak folk as much as the crude Native American-isms their name suggests. The beaded intersection wherein the former began cannibalizing the latter has always been particularly fertile for outsider art: peyote trips, sweat lodge bliss-outs, pastoral time travel, spirit animal petting zoos, and oh yeah, seeking out reservations both psychic and very real. So while copping so much more in pursuit of an aesthetic makes great ammo for eye-rolls, it doesn't take away from the fact that Pocahaunted have synthesized something here every bit as affected as it is affecting.

Four tracks and just short of 40 minutes, Passage is passive listening defined. Hooks don't exist and melodic texture appears only if you're willing to wait on it. If that sounds like some fifth dimension, Magic Eye-type shit, it's because it is. Previous cassettes and vinyl releases contained detours through dub waters, but this, the Eagle Rock "sisterhood"'s latest, feels like the most focused expression of the clouded atmospherics they've been attempting to live in on tape.

Drippy guitars lope, drone, and dance around Amber Brown and Bethany Cosentino's creepy kiva moans, the mallet-on-drums percussion loose and insistent enough to strongly reinforce the ceremonial/ritual vibes this music lives and dies by. The oddly circular relationship between guitar and vocals here is actually a potential dealbreaker. Passage's first half in particular catches the tail it chases, the twin crescendos of "Palm" and "Salt" locked-in and momentous enough to make it through the blankets of smoke and murk in which they germinate. Not the case with Act II. "Dusk" sits inert, neither the organ nor intermittent bursts of cymbal and dank guitar connect with Brown and Cosentino's vocal droning. The result, just as it is in the I-swear-I-just-saw-my-future-and-it-was-too-gnarly stoner vortex of "Veil", is claustrophobic to an upsetting degree, leaving the listener feeling more trapped than lost within its sound.

— David Bevan, June 18, 2009


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