Pitchfork

In the Year of the Wolf (Bands), Ghost of Monkshood missed it by a hair: Monkshood is another name for aconite, aka wolfsbane. Aconite's a sedative, but also a poison, and hoo boy somebody stop me before I start constructing one of those specious metaphors linking a band's music to their (probably arbitrarily chosen) name. Nothing poisonous here anyway, unless you're fatally allergic to the kind of music that tends to hover in place instead of moving. Spider Through the Fog is tranquilizer-dosed phantom folk drifting bodiless through veils of mist, medleys of cloudy ambiance marshaled into improbable pop songs. On the microphone, they came to haze and amaze you: The murkier side of Animal Collective (that would be Panda Bear) after a Donovan binge, with snatches of Four Tet coming through the wall.

Put a bunch of smarty-pantses together with a random assortment of instruments (besides the usual accoutrements, Ghost of Monkshood reached into the grab bag and found a banjo, a trumpet, a sax) and one of two things happens-- one, they subjugate craft to pretension and record an unlistenable mess that wants to be hailed as ambitious and challenging, placing the burden on the listener, like here, we recorded the thing, now you figure out how to enjoy it, and don't forget to be smart enough to get it. The other option is that the band makes sure they have actual songs and aren't just deconstructing thin air, like the aforementioned Animal Collective, Architecture in Helsinki, and yep, Ghost of Monkshood. Seventeen tracks is too many for, say, a rock album, which ultimately wants to propel you out of it and into the world, but it's just right for Ghost of Monkshood, whose music encourages staying inside it, and needs the extra time to work its gradual hypnosis.

Spider Through the Fog immediately immerses you in a rich drone ricocheting between the right and left channels, establishing the limits of the echo chamber the album will ramify within. For the duration, Ghost of Monkshood enliven pillowy analog static and acoustic guitars with flower-child vocals and flickers of vivid detail: There's the weirdly rickety guitar solo on "I Take It"; the ghost of G-funk whistling through "Traces of the Cave"; the gnarled cassette-tape-suicide on "Goddess Hand"; the sudden funk capping "In the Night"; the busted music box on "Capsized". The sweet and the sinister get equal time on Spider Through the Snow, often becoming so blurred as to be indistinguishable, and its to Ghost of Monkshood's credit that the album still comes off as an affable, pleasant surprise, not an endurance test.

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