Six Organs Of Admittance – Time Is Glass

Drag City

For decades, and across an extensive discography, Six Organs Of Admittance / Ben Chasny have split the difference between delicate folk and brooding drone, usually by placing them next to each other in successive tracks. Along the way, Chasny has dipped into many musical currents, deploying middle eastern sounds, psychedelic builds, more and less extreme drones, gossamer vocals, and a long list of collaborators.

Not substantially different from his recent output, Time Is Glass is by and large delicate and wistful. Although releasing during a fierce summer, it seems to evoke the fading of the hot season and the possibilities of anamnesis in the quiet, cold parts of the year.

Mainly focused on crystalline vocal tracks buoyed on acoustic guitar and shimmery synth and drone the album meets itself in the middle between the acoustic “Slip Away”, “Pilar”, and “Theophany Song”. Folk can be at its most brooding and fraught when least freighted with heavy musical baggage. Chasny seems to exemplify this quality here, as the soft midsection contains the more questing songs. Drone elements extend the runtime of some of the back half of the album, and on the whole the agenda is an eclogue rather than a requiem.

Time Is Glass doesn’t jump out as a Six Organs Of Admittance highlight. It’s a credible addition to a large body of work. There’s a certain economy that comes close to parsimony of ideas at times, but the beauties of the album are all in the details – the little ornaments and washes of background colour. It is time, through a clear glass, not unlike the one in which Jean Sibelius once offered us cold spring water.

-Jayaprakash Satyamurthy-