It's clear from the very first moment of Alone with the Alone, the opening track from Six Organs of Admittance's Shelter from the Ash, that this is a Ben Chasny record. The open-tuned drone -- the layers of acoustic guitar wash creating an enormous backdrop of pure "sound" before the half-sung, half-chanted vocal -- is a signature of sorts. It began happening on 2005's School of the Flower and came to fruition on 2006's Sun Awakens, but on Shelter from the Ash it's there from the jump -- that sense of complete "otherness" that inhabits the best of Chasny's solo music. Loneliness and tension are never answered on this record, only expressed into the void without self-pity. Chasny is a guitarist first and foremost, but he's become a songwriter. These eight songs may not be able to be covered by anybody else, but they are wonderfully constructed, beautifully textured, and exquisitely played. Alone with the Alone has that tension in it that threatens to burst at the seams at any moment, especially when the electric guitar solos by Chas and Tim Green cut glass through the mix, screaming into the whirlwind. But they are answered by the sleight of hand that is Strangled Road. His acoustic guitar and voice elegiacally intone: "The belief in life is a belief in love/A strangled road on the mountain/Will swallow your flimsy faith/The trinkets that you keep/Are just made of dirt/And colored gold/By the very men that you hate...." It's heady and dark, even aside from the sense of warning and menace held effortlessly within the poetry of the lyric. Elisa Ambroglio is on backing vocals, and Matt Sweeney playing blues licks on an acoustic solo puts the beautiful melody at odds with the intense and foreboding nature of the words. The spiritual warning here -- about not becoming attached and being honest with oneself -- is accented in the second refrain by the singers as Chasny's electric guitar reaches to break through his own thoughts. And on these first two tracks the beauty of this set is brought into full aural view.

1		Alone With the Alone
2		Strangled Road
3		Jade Like Wine
4		Coming to Get You
5		Goddess Atonement
6		Final Wing
7		Shelter from the Ash
8		Goodnight

	Like us on Facebook
	@SoundHound	Follow