High Wolf - Ascension

High Wolf
Ascension
(2010, Not Not Fun)
RIYL = Stag Hare, Niagara Falls, Mountains

That old Indian drum. The dangling dream catcher. The hollow breeze drifting. It’s not an unfamiliar song at this point in the game. The fact that it can be revitalized is something of a miracle though. I mean how many blazed-to-high-heaven hippy jamdrones does one need in their personal collection? It’s a bit played I think. Still, High Wolf, being that almighty champion of the form, their silken musk pulsing, have conjured a Lamanite dreamspace of resonance and distinction. Things float dusty through to “Diego,” where the soil-gravity-lift is scissored through with electronics, beams of green and blue projected into the thick air. This is when I think to myself: yes, yes, I can handle another album extracted from the blood of this land, from its original inhabitants and their horse’s skulls. As the album progresses, the level of play is consistently elevated. In five pieces High Wolf manages the straight-forward mission statement embedded in his album title and proves himself complicit with the objects of ascension. I feel like, in listening to the album, my body is weighted down into a cross-legged slump beneath a headdress of a thousand feathers crushing me into a higher plane.

-Thistle

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