Valet
Issue #35
Naked Acid (Kranky)
By Claire Evans
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 2:57pm
Honey Owens is a figurehead of the Portland, Oregon, experimental scene, lending her blonde elegance and burnout guitar riffs to projects as seminal as the legendary drone outfit Jackie-O Motherfucker — not to mention World, Nudge, Dark Yoga (yes, that's a real band), and the newly formed Atlas Sound. So when her first solo album under the glib pseudonym Valet, Blood Is Clean, hit the psychedelic CD-R underground last April, stoners and delay-pedal enthusiasts everywhere were understandably pumped, and rightly so. Blood is Clean was pretty much a masterpiece, a deceptively simple, spare trip through a lysergic guitar dreamscape of near-menacing intensity.
Her follow-up, the impressively-titled Naked Acid, has a similarly trance-like quality. The difference, however, is in the density. Where Blood is Clean was haunting and minimal, Naked Acid is heavy, lush, and echoing with a narcotic array of liminal fuzzes and feedbacks. Collaborations with Portland luminaries Adrian Orange (Thanksgiving) and Mark Evan Burden (Silentist) fill out the landscape, certainly, but the ramping fever of tracks like "Fuck It" and the album's distorted closer, the surprisingly rhythmic "Streets," are all Owens: the snakelike guitar work; the seemingly endless layers of delay-laced chanting; and the semi-conscious, gauzy tonality of her voice.
Owens' tracks are so nebulous as to barely warrant being called songs, which isn't a bad thing at all; in fact, the meandering formlessness of Naked Acid is breathtaking, like a beach changing form and color with every ebb of the tide. At times, the analog warmth of Owens' dreamy vocals are swept away beyond recognition, into a watery cave of fuzzy, pulsing guitar drones and hallucinatory feedback waves; then, out of nothing, they rise again, clear as castles in the sand.
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