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Six Organs Of Admittance-Shelter From The Ash

Six Organs Of Admittance-Shelter From The Ash

Psych meltdowns and intimate folk introspection from Ben Chasny and pals. Sometime Comets On Fire guitarist Chasny's Six Organs franchise is becoming а hardy perennial, issuing intense, ambitious albums on an annual basis. 5helrer From The Ash follows last year's sun Awakens and 2005's School0f The Flower - another impressive cocktail of Easterninflected drones, mantra-like vocals and thick slabs of empyrean noise guitar. Opener Alone With The A1one's solitary Е minor chord comes laced with e-bow hums, Robbie Basho-like raga extemporisations and, later, molten lava floes of electric guitar, while the less feral but equally potent strangled Road finds Chasny rummaging in the psychic backwoods while rainy acoustic guitars thrum and fiancёe E1isa Ambroglio (of noiseniks the Magik Markers) lends sensual vocal counterpoint. The darkly contagious title track, meanwhile, sounds like а dreamy psych-folk makeover of Blue Oyster Cult's Don't Fear The Reaper, and everywhere а subtly numinous quality pervades. David Sheppard

Eddie Vedder-Music For The Motion Picture Into The Wild

Eddie Vedder-Music For The Motion Picture Into The Wild

Pearl Jam swnger goes solo for soundtrack. Who better to provide the musical backdrop to the true story of а young man disappearing into the wilderness and his subsequent doom than the husky, forlornsounding Eddie Vedder? Collaborating with his friend and the film's director, Sean Penn, Vedder has put together а collection of folk songs built on acoustic guitar and banjo that showcase his tremulous baritone. Не does а grand job of colouring in the grey Alaskan skies and captures the loneliness of Christopher McCandless's freefall from society to freedom in the wilderness and down towards his ultimate fate. Lyrically, he may occasionally jar but it's hard not to be uplifted when he lets rip on the opener setting Forth or when he and 5leater-Kinney's Corin Tucker chime on Hard Sun.

Philip Wilding

Daft Punk-Alive 2007

Daft Punk-Alive 2007

VIRGIN

Live album from enduring Gallic dance stars. Their robot heads might prevent anyone seeing how much their faces might have aged, but on the evidence of this live album, Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo could have an alternative career advertising moisturiser. Recorded at an excitable hometown show at Palais Omnisports de Paris Bercy in June this year, Alive 2007 reveals that the duo still know how to target their electroweaponry straight at the adrenalin gland. The live setting fasts away the carapace of over-familiarity that has hardened round such tracks as One More Time and Da Funk, while the vocodered perfection of Around The World/Harder Faster Better stronger shows just what Kanye West sees in them. An alternative greatest hits compilation, it proves that the old sound of tomorrow can still make the grade today.

Victoria Segal

Eagles-Long Road Out Of Eden

Eagles-Long Road Out Of Eden

Quintessential California band's first new studio album in 28 yeas, In the US you can oniy get it at ,Wal-Mart, It's not surprising that, after аll the tours and best-ofs, the Eagles have finally made an album of all-new material. What is а surprise is the size: an unniggardly 20 songs on two CDs, two of them epics, and аll (bar the few available on-line or as DVD bonus tracks) previously unreleased. Despite reports of exploring new musical directions, it sounds very late-era Eagles, apart from No More Walks In The Wood, whose harmonies and reflectiveness might have fallen off а David Crosby solo album, l Dreamed There Was No War, а pensive intrumental, Fast Company, sounding like bad Hall & Oates, and Long Road Out Of Eden, а 10minute horror on love and the 'war on terror' with а Middle Eastern intro and outro, Hotel California guitar heroics and unfortunate lyrics. There are some very bad lyrics on this album; first single How Long, one of the catchiest tracks, could have been another Take 1t Easy if the words weren't а collage of cliches. Best track: Timothy В. Schmit's unaffected Do something.

Sylvie Simmons