Tools
w/Climax Golden Twins, Sir Richard Bishop
Sun May 15, Sunset, 9 pm, $8, 21+.
Folk music is a bad term. Any time I hear that phrase I think of Joan Baez strumming an acoustic guitar and wearing a goddamn toga or something. I don't care if Judas Priest covered one of her songs ("Diamonds and Rust"), that chick is annoying. Other annoying folk singers are pretty much anyone alive in either Boston or Greenwich Village in the early '60s that wasn't Fred Neil. But like anything that sucks, there's some good to be found if you wait around for things to get weird. Folk music (and everything else) got weird with the insertion of psychedelic drugs in the mid '60s, with groups like the Incredible String Band and nut jobs like Tim Buckley doing interesting things with acoustic instruments. Spirit guide guitarist Ben Chasny, the brain behind Six Organs of Admittance, is the modern-day equivalent of those people, taking folk music away from the gimmick-mongers and bringing it to the weirdoes.
Stranger Personals
Chasny is really a rocker underneath (he also plays with Comets on Fire); all you need to do is go see him live to get that. But his records (and there are a lot of them) are made with acoustic instruments, featuring very meditative states of consciousness, and, to me, sound folky. He is also based in San Francisco, and for the last few years that city has seen a number of folk-centric groups and artists emerge. People are going nuts for them. There's Devendra Banhart--whose name is on everyone's lips because he was smart enough to combine Charles Manson's record with this foul-mouthed homeless guy on Valencia Street named Omer. People are eating the shit up. Then there's that Joanna Newsom lady--I heard one of her records and her voice made me want to gouge my own eyes out. But people love this stuff. This is what you hear about when people talk about San Francisco these days. You should ignore them.
The good stuff that is happening has nothing to do with gimmicky-voiced elfin crap. There are psychedelic warriors in S.F. picking up where the masters of the '60s left off. There are the Gris Gris, who play a little more garage rock than straight folk, ranging from floating cloudiness to the surf-y space rock of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and there is OCS, the latest and most potentially disastrous project of resident S.F. superhipster John Dwyer (the Coachwhips, Pink & Brown). OCS, however, with singing saw backing, "sensitive" lyrics, and Dwyer's odd, high-pitched vocal style, has more in common with Banhart than with the more psychedelic angle both the Gris Gris and Six Organs are taking.
The latest Six Organs record, School of the Flower, takes Chasny's previous preoccupations with British folk guitarist Bert Jansch and monastic chant tribalism and marries them to elements of free improv á la Tim Buckley's freaky Lorca record--sans the far out vocal shit Buckley was obsessed with at that time. Chasny worked with lauded New England drummer Chris Corsano on the record, making for a collaboration of two highly interesting minds that works for the most part. This isn't some airy, retro-folk revivalism, or even acid-folk psychedelia. There are still elements of both psychedelia and an expanded definition of folk music here, the guy can't help it. But School of the Flower is more of a situation where Chasny is stepping into new territory for both himself and his fans.
Regardless of Chasny's predilection for experimentation, which is somewhat antithetical to the staid revivalism of so much folk music, and even despite what he says of his music himself, Six Organs is rooted in the folk aesthetic. It's just that Chasny's version of folk is totally different from what normally rises to the mainstream. There's a reason Lorca bummed people out when it was released--namely, weird shit freaks people out. And Six Organs of Admittance, along with a handful of other Bay Area bands, are making folk music weird shit again, which is good for us all.
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