When a band like Celebration releases music for free, they trust their audience to engage in other ways: going to shows, buying merch, and talking the band up to friends. If this is to be a sustainable business model in any way, the band had better be sure they can stand behind their material. Abandoning 4AD for their latest release and then coyly dropping free downloads and videos around the internet in advance of Hello Paradise, Celebration have taken that massive leap of faith. Fortunately, between the nine stuffed-to-the-gills tracks and all that the corresponding tarot cards signify, rarely does an album contain so much to chew on.
These nine tracks are the first wave of the Electric Tarot project, a set of songs for which each corresponds to one of the 22 major arcana tarot cards. I used to get annoyed when all my arty friends would talk about their latest musical “projects.” The word seemed awfully pretentious for what would invariably turn out to be five minutes of fuzzy noise or some retro throwback. But given the nine tracks’ scattered release and the fact that they constitute the first wave of a unified idea, “project” is maybe the only formal moniker that fits. We’ve come a long way from rigid definitions of artistic form — sonata it ain’t — and the idea of collecting each track from where it’s been deposited online almost adds to the experience like… well, card collecting.
Celebration have always been masters of grandiloquent textural shifts. On The Modern Tribe, that skill (not to mention singer Katrina Ford’s anxious wailing) kept their undeniable love of psychedelia from seeming stale or quaint. Here, it allows them to explore several different interpretations of each tarot character within each song; eye of newt, hock of sitar, gammon of bass. “What’s This Magical,” an homage to “The Shaman” card, moves along mysteriously, underpinned by Bollywood-esque strings, swelling with the titular line on a major 6th chord, the one comfortably major sonority in the song. With those salients, the sitar introduction and other detailing is less bewildering — their bigger ambitions are enabled largely by very careful compositional craft.
“Junky” disappears into self-negation, appropriate for its associated card, “The Hermit,” and also shows Celebration’s attention to communicating meaning through song. Punishing, distorted guitar textures relive old memories, to the lines “All systems fail/ Cool cool summer, there’s no other,” before replacing solipsism with despair in the second half: “Seasons come and go/ So long/ Alone.” All the strutting glory of “Great Pyramid” befits its card, “The Emperor,” though Celebration isn’t above the Stevie Wonder reference implicit in the syncopated clavichord that drives the song forward. It’s a balls-out masculine barnstormer; “See one of the wonders of the world/ May make you/ May make you a man,” Ford sings.
On “Open Your Heart,” Celebration tackles the tensions of the “Judgment” card by shambling through their take on a 50s I-vi-IV-V ballad. It pairs very well with the track that follows, “Shelter,” both of them pulling back slightly from the density of the earlier half of the album. Its corresponding card, “The Lovers,” is a tall order to communicate in song, and Ford chooses to depict love’s most destructive side: “Our light shatters the rainbows sometimes/ Pick up the pieces, ignite/ For some fortune.” On both “Honeysuckle” and “Battles,” Celebration show that they can be just as loud and overstuffed as any psychedelic band. Both are king-hell acid jams, but, true to form, later in the song each morphs away from the typical straight-ahead beats that usually characterize the genre.
At no point while listening to Hello Paradise does one feel like Celebration are anything less than a full band. They’re either the tightest psychedelic band that can be wrangled — it’s hard to imagine the Brian Jonestown Massacre winding through all these tempo changes — or the most stoned set of session whizzes ever. While some listeners might wish for a little more intimate sound on some tracks, the broader conception of the Electric Tarot project begs a full treatment of each character. Without abandoning the song form, Celebration drive it to its most ambitious outer limits. Maybe the best things in life are free.
(Vinyl-philes take heed: Hello Paradise’s gatefold art alone is awesome enough to warrant its purchase — a rendering of each card in that hipster-geometric style, each laid on a table covered in other esoterica — but who knows what other mysteries lie buried in the grooves of the not-free physical release?)
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