Tuesday, August 16, 2011

P.G. Six's Starry Mind

My review of the really quite enjoyable new Starry Mind, by sometime Tower Recordings guitarist P.G. Six runs today at Dusted.

P.G. Six
Starry Mind
Drag City

Four years ago, in his review of P.G. Six’s last album Slightly Sorry, Dusted’s Bill Meyer mentioned in passing that he’d seen the artist indulge his rock side, tossing aside his customary restraint and commun[ing] with his inner Crazy Horse.” With Starry Mind, Pat Gubler commits to tape these amplified, full-band endeavors, following fellow Tower Recordings vet Matt Valentine into distorted, Neil Young-ish country rock territories. Yet where Valentine gets lost in the drift, spinning out slouching, meandering, spiritually charged, electrically enhanced ragas, Gubler is ever the craftsman. His rock gardens are carefully tended, the buzz-saw drone of amp stacks hemmed in by flowery melodies, the twining ambivalence of tremolo trained up tidy lattices. Even in his most headlong, hurtling, chaos-embracing guitar breaks – the exhilarating coda to “Palace”, the droning, feedback-blurred duel with Tara Key in “Letter,” for instance – Gubler knows exactly where he left the song, and can make his way back there, neatly, easily, without a mark on him.

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