Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 10/23/2007
Run Time: 37:31
As his
post-punk band
Lungfish slides further and further into being an occasional hobby, Washington D.C. eccentric
Daniel Higgs has been paying more and more attention to his solo career. 2007's
Metempsychotic Melodies,
Higgs' fourth solo release under his own name (not counting two earlier solo releases under the names
Cone of Light and
the Pupils), is triangulated somewhere between the
Sun City Girls' fractured takes on various forms of world music,
John Fahey's idiosyncratic reworking of traditional American
folk music, and
Jandek's oddly tuned weirdness for its own sake.
"Leontocephaline Rhapsody," a lengthy
psychedelic freak-out featuring a repeated loop of a main riff, over which
Higgs lets fly with a heavily processed, bagpipe-sounding solo that's a remarkable exploration of just how varied a piece of music can be while technically remaining a drone. Elsewhere, on
"All Cherished Things," Higgs sings in a sort of affected back-country whine over a hypnotic repeated guitar figure, while the nearly 15-minute epic
"Love Abides" features
Higgs as his most impressionistic and
Fahey-like in his slowly unfolding
psych-folk melodies. Opening track
"Universal Saturation," for overdubbed and amplified banjo, buzzes and rings like one of those psychedelic-era attempts at a
rock & roll raga. It's all a bit precious, and slightly too aware of its own put-on strangeness, but overall,
Metempsychotic Melodies is an enjoyable bit of
acid folk nostalgia.
~Stewart Mason, All Music Guide
;)
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