Labels: Thrill Jockey
Review by: Sean Haughton
Lungfish were a perfect artistic statement as a band. Every motion and
note necessity, a band cut to the bare essentials. Not a single record
in the band’s output contains fat or filler and each carves its own
niche within a singular vision. The band came as close to purity as
they possibly could, and if 2005’s ‘Feral Hymns’ is infact their final
release (save recent outtakes record ‘ACR 1999’ ) the band leave a
legacy completely untarnished. So what happens when this unit
fragments? As with any project birthed from a divide, the individual
components become more clear.
Without Lungfish’s taut and succinct vision, band leader/space prophet
Daniel Higgs has since continued his interdimensional journey into The
Beyond with multiple solo releases and a brief stint with Sweden’s
Skull Defekts. We’ve seen where it goes once the reins are cut.
Guitarist Asa Osborne, meanwhile, distilled the group’s trance-like
meditative repetition even further, crafting it into vocal-less solo
keyboard project Zomes.
After a few years of lo-fi cassette experimentation and improvisation,
Zomes choose to debut as a duo (vocal collaborator Hanna now in tow)
in a studio setting, with tighter songcraft at the fore of ‘Time Was’.
At 8 songs in length, this appears to be Osborne beginning to shake
his previous ambiguity and applying the blueprint he used within
Lungfish more heavily. Hanna’s often-hypnotic vocals float over heavy,
chordal organ riffs that often have that same mixture of beauty and
unease so prevalent in the work of Baltimore’s finest. At times Zomes
almost hit on something resembling pop structure, the hymnal vocals of
title-track and ‘Cave Mountain Hymn’ bringing their droning
projections into the same field as the slower moments of ‘Indivisible’
or ‘Artificial Horizon’.
As ever with Osborne’s output, he remains impossible to pigeonhole
into a gutter of genre and thus it remains a challenge to successfully
explain why what he does works so well. There is a reason Lungfish
continue to be one of Dischord’s more under-appreciated (and due to
this, feverishly-loved and defended) bands. Osborne’s artistic output
continues to be (on paper at least) a hard sell, but one well worth
diving into headfirst. Here, Zomes’ sound is more expansive than ever
before but the vision remains singular. A sparse idea, blooming in
technicolour.