Pitchfork

Rob Lowe of 90 Day Men has an interesting thing going with his Lichens project. He's working at the familiar intersection of abstract folk and drone, but he uses delays and samples to create heavily layered tracks in real time. So while he has on the one hand the Zen-like focus on tone of an Oren Ambarchi, wherein he's perfectly willing to let a plucked E-string decay without another sound for five or six seconds, he's also got his unusual approach to voice to fall back on, where his high-pitched whine can be folded in on itself, sucking up all the space as it's stretched out to the horizon. His pieces, which tend to be long, can be a bit like spinning plates, as he sets various sounds in motion and keeps them going while figuring out where the music is going next.

The DVD included with Omns, his second album for Kranky, shows how Lowe makes it happen in concert. Footage recorded live at Chicago's Empty Bottle is intercut with scenes shot in a forest; appropriate enough considering that Lichens sometimes sounds like a field recording of some Earth-worshiping pagan cult ritual, or perhaps a séance. It seems wrong to listen without a cone of incense smoldering away somewhere nearby, and it's not hard to understand why some might be put off by the overt mysticism. At one point during the film, the camera zooms in and catches Lowe closing his eyes in concentration as he wails toward the sky, bringing to mind for a moment the image of a young urban professional on a weekend Iron John retreat.

But it's easy to forget about that stuff when just listening to Omns, which is richer than the 2005 Lichens album The Psychic Nature of Being. Lowe does a nice job of varying his palette, mixing up the tone and timbre of the tracks to stay down in a certain groove while avoiding monotony. Both "Vevor Of Agassou" and "Faeries", for example, are built primarily around vocal drones. The former has Lowe massing his tones together to sound like insects trying to find each other in a pitch-black cave; the latter begins with a more a more ethereal/4AD approach and then brings in bits of piano for an acoustic contrast. But while these two are of a piece, "Bune" comes from somewhere else-- namely, the rock tradition-- as Lowe knuckles down for a slow burn, distorted, and heavily psychedelic guitar solo.

The 18-minute track with the Wheel of Fortune title "M St R Ng W Tchcr Ft L V Ng N Sp R T" is the record's obvious centerpiece, and seems to fold in bits of everything going on elsewhere. Beginning with some acoustic fingerpicking, it drifts into a synth drone, at then goes into an extended section of bird song. Eventually Lowe begins to sing along with the ornithological crew, adding his plaintive and vaguely liturgical wail to the chirps. If you're instantly turned off by anything smacking of new age this is obviously not for you, but Lowe conjures a rather uncertain mood with the track, generally favoring a slowly building tension despite the presence of the birds. Closing out the album is the two-minute electric guitar instrumental "Sighns", the aural equivalent of sunlight refracted through a bead of water, which turns out to be the right sort of coda after the record's subtle heaviness.