Love by Amen Dunes (review)

 Back in 2014, I wrote about a dozen record reviews for a website called Buzz and Howl. It was later hacked and disappeared into the ether. This is the final post in a series intended to preserve that work, unedited. 

Amen Dunes, Love

In a way, all of the work that Damon McMahon has released under the name Amen Dunes is pretty similar sounding. But looked at another way, you could weigh each song down with as many micro-genre descriptions as ornaments hanging on a Christmas tree. This is largely a trait of the idiom in which he’s working: modern psychedelia. Having cross-pollinated with almost every genre of rock and subsumed them into a larger idea--an idea more about feeling and headspace than specifics of sound--“psychedelic” music has come to a mean everything from poppy garage-stompers to blissed-out drones to folky weirdos with acoustic guitars. Amen Dunes doesn’t really do garage stomp; all of its output falls somewhere between freaky folk and drone-out. And the newest release, Love, is ever-so-slightly less weird than what came before.

There’s a certain straight-forward prettiness to the tracks on Love that make its emotions easier to access than was possible on Amen Dunes’ previous releases. But while some of the earlier work may have been weirder and noisier and this is prettier in a more straight-forward way, it also doesn’t evoke the type of intimacy those earlier, lo-fi and often improvised, tracks did. This stuff is wide open--and “openness” is another form of intimacy. The vocals sometimes approach the epic, ‘verbed-out sweep of My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, but with just the right tinge of sourness to keep everybody honest--that old Neil Young device of reaching for a note just beyond your natural range, implying something about artistic struggle and authenticity with only the tone of your voice.

Love’s thoughtful album sequencing lets each track build on the one before it, especially useful being that these are the type of simple arrangements that make every element count. Acoustic guitar dominates “White Child,” the first track, until the last minute when a haunting organ is allowed to come to the fore. “Lonely Richard” includes some ringing electric guitar playing and the album’s most sing-along-able part: “Have yourself a good time.” But then track three is where the electric lead parts approach the cinematic. “Splits are Parted” is maybe the album’s standout track. It’s the one I’ve returned to the most often. Here the singing veers towards the parts of Marc Bolan’s early vibrato-heavy style that Devendra Banhart resurrected and made his own--without ever being quite as fey and mannered as either of those forerunners.

McMahon continues to add small touches throughout the album: “Sixteen” has a piano track and vocal that are both double-tracked with one of the takes slightly behind the other. On headphones, it has a trippy, disorienting effect; you can feel yourself getting dizzy. “I Can’t Dig It” is the track that sounds the most unlike anything else on the album. The track kicks off with a scratchy and distorted electric guitar, fast-strummed. It’s the sort of rhythm guitar track a punk band could build an anthem around, but McMahon doesn’t make that mistake; this isn’t a stylistic left-turn. It’s only a slight change of angle or perception on the types of riffs he has built the whole album on--only those were all played acoustically, with the electric reserved for leads like clear bells, each distinct note played slowly and deliberately. And soon this novel sound is dragged even further into the sound-world established through Love’s first nine tracks as he lets the riff deteriorate into a drone that gets pushed further and further back in the mix (and thus our consciousness), buried beneath that distinct vocal effect and a plinking/plonking rhythm part.

This is not a case of an artist cleaning up his act to try to make more accessible work. Instead, it’s an artist opening up and letting the listener into his world a little more, to share in the emotions informing the work. And so again the keyword is “open.” Vast expanses of desert, winding mountain roads at dusk, these are the types of images Love evokes, and these are the physical places where you could really crank it up and appreciate it.