Pitchfork

Debuts don't come much more singular yet unassuming than Our Bed Is Green, the first album from improvising Texan stalwarts Charalambides. Initially released on cassette in 1992, and later reissued on CD on the group's own Wholly Other imprint, this home-recorded collection finds the duo of Tom and Christina Carter tentatively marking their sonic territory at some distant nexus of loner folk, ghostly blues-based improv, and psych-guitar space rock. Now, as part of Kranky's ongoing Charalambides archival series, the album has been generously reissued in double-CD format, allowing listeners the best vantage yet to witness these formative, endearingly unpolished recordings.

Thanks to its humble birth-- a couple of these tracks are so lo-fi that you can hear someone pushing the stop button on the tape recorder- and widely varying sound Our Bed Is Green often resembles a loose assemblage of demos rather than a cohesive whole. This disunity is rather accentuated by the new version's running order, which recreates the track listing of the original cassette but is an extensive rearrangement of Wholly Other's initial CD pressing.

Despite this uneven playing field, however, the record remains loaded with gems, and this package also restores several tracks from the cassette, including a snappy version of the traditional tune (and long-time Grateful Dead live staple) "Bid You Goodnight", which had not previously appeared on CD. Unlike the longer, more fully distilled improvisations that populate Charalambides' recent albums like 2004's Joy Shapes, most of the tracks here are short and decidedly more song-oriented, placing much of Our Bed Is Green among the group's most accessible works.

At the time of these recordings Tom Carter was also playing with the semi-legendary Houston psych combo The Mike Gunn, and on tracks like "Pasé El Agora" his electric guitar work conforms more closely to heavy-psych orthodoxy than on subsequent releases, while "The Core" finds him dabbling in bluesy slide guitar traditions. Despite their drumless nature, tracks like "I Don't Know You" and "The Bottle" feature what are otherwise quite conventional rock structures, and the moody, Christina-sung "20 Hours" is likely the closest the group have ever come to K-records style indie-acoustics.

Delightful as these nuggets are, even more impressive are pieces like the crackling instrumental "Take the Pointing Finger for the Moon", on which the duo's guitars coil and rise like fragrant smoke, providing tantalizing glimpses of further excursions to come. Throughout the album, Charalambides perform their various wonders with the same natural, unselfconscious ease with which oak trees drop acorns. And though they sound as if they couldn't care less whether or not anyone is listening, the rest of us should be thankful to have such an available opportunity to do so.

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