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Six Organs of Admittance — The Veiled Sea (Three Lobed Recordings)

Photo by Elisa Ambrogio

The Veiled Sea by Six Organs of Admittance

Twenty-some-odd years into a career spent challenging his listeners, Ben Chasny has, with The Veiled Sea, released one of the most beguiling and rewarding Six Organ of Admittance albums — 39-minutes of synth ballads, cracked space-glam and 1980s-glossed guitar overload. 

Though debuting a new sound and releasing on Three Lobed Recordings instead of Six Organs’ typical home of Drag City, Chasny has made it clear he views The Veiled Sea as a proper record, not a collection of genre experiments or pandemic noodlings. And the listening experience fits this take. Chasny has always asked his audience for a touch of trust, and has consistently rewarded those willing to undertake the journey with open ears.

Synthesizers abound on The Veiled Sea — opener “Local Clocks” wouldn’t sound out of place on an Autechre album — yet the record resists a lazy categorization of “Six Organs goes electronic.” As is typical with Chasny, the truth is both more complicated and infinitely richer. For while there are more electronic elements here than on previous albums, TVS also features some of Chasny’s wildest guitar worship. The key shift being that instead of mossy finger picking or deep-psych riffage, here he primarily opts for an at times deliciously unhip style of playing-into-a-storm-from-an-oceanside-promontory Big Guitar soloing. 

“Somewhere in the Hexagon of Saturn” is the exemplar this approach. The bedrock of the track is a progression of synthesizer and pointillistic guitar with a decidedly krautrock-ish feel — a color further explored by the album-ending cover of Faust’s “J’ai Mal Aux Dents.” After 40 or so seconds, Chasny kicks off a loud, maximalist solo — more "Archangel Thunderbird" than “First Communication” — which goes, and goes, and goes… spiraling out for the remainder of the song’s eight minutes. 

It’s soloing for the sake of soloing, untethered from verse/chorus progressions or hooks, simply thrusting forward in a spray of fretboard acrobatics. 

The alien splatter of “All That They Left You” actually sounds like a classic Six Organs tune, particularly once the vocals cut in. It’s just one remixed by a mad alchemist whose only knowledge of rock music comes from the soundtracks found on a pile of decomposing VHS tapes dug from the mound of an abandoned landfill.   

“Last Station, Veiled Sea,” the album’s most deeply transportive moment, is a blue-morning ballad, two beautiful chords cycling forth, accompanied by Chasny’s delicate vocals. Here, the solo offsets the calm by stinging like a faceful of sleet, building slowly into a storm which sounds like someone smashing a piñata with a Stratocaster. 

The magic of The Veiled Sea is that we get to hear Chasny throwing his creative energies into this strange, multitudinous brew: an ambient synth album, a Rock God guitar album, all scuzzed with a can full of hairspray. 

Ethan Covey