The sleepy college town of Portland, Maine may not be widely considered a viable locale for groundbreaking new music, but it’s actually been a hot spot for a burgeoning cadre of electronic neo-folk acts in the vein of tree-huggers like MV/EE and Wooden Wand for some time now. Veterans Cerberus Shoal have been almost clandestinely eking out wondrous neo-psych albums since well before you even heard the term “New Weird America,” while newer groups like Visitations and Big Blood (who share members with Shoal) forge a new blood pact in shaping the future of American music.
Joining those ranks is Matt Lajoie, who now almost exclusively performs and releases material as Cursillistas. Earlier Cursillistas recordings have tended to sound more polished and feature Lajoie as a less abstract crooner, singing more in the style of Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny than the airy, barely-there moaning so prevalent on his new album, Wasp Stings the Last Bitter Flavor. Coming into contact with the early tape recordings of Devendra Banhart, Lajoie set out to enshroud his formerly clean production in a hovering tarp of analog squall, and with the help of Nemo Birdstrup (Time-Lag Records) and MV/EE collaborator Sparrow Wildchild, this mission is successfully accomplished.
The album opens with “Drone/Groan,” which unfurls your standard airy, feminized singing into tribal Apache drums, then into Fahey-ish guitar line structures before segueing into "Caves Carved in Golden Light." With sparse swarms of insects seemingly buzzing around the studio, faint pan pipes echo down the valley. Gentle percussion, light tappings, and breathy chanting effectively give the music a sense of removal, perhaps to a dream world or behind a hidden portal to some other elf-ruled dimension.
On the downside, Lajoie has a tendency to dwell on vocal “om”s, repeating mantras over and over in a hypnotic, trance-inducing way (see “Happened in the Sun”). Unfortunately, sometimes the line between trance and boredom is crossed, as some passages suffer from lengthiness. “Moccasin Tramp” is one of the more celestial and less swampy of the tracks on Wasps and has the uplifting, mechanical motion of Panda Bear’s 2007 breakout Person Pitch -- but it lacks the same punch.
Many musicians have returned to this primal American essence bringing modern technology with, but even when drenched in effects and hiss, one can clearly see that the newfound primitivism on Wasp Stings the Last Bitter Flavor is just a modern take on the blues. Taken as a whole, fans of neo-psych and the new backwoods DIY scene will find plenty of branch-breaking and howling wind on Wasp Stings, while the less meditative may not find their navels (or this album) quite as awe-inspiring. Free-folk, freak-folk, nature-psych: call it what you will, but it’s a style we'll see with increasing frequency as we head deeper into the 21st century.
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