Ascent

Mysterious and enfolding, Ascent seduces. [Oct 2012, p.90]

The group's obvious enthusiasm for the project is contagious, and together they add another memorable benchmark to Chasny's formidable body of work, clearly having a fantastic time while doing so.

Chasny reveals himself to be a guitarist capable of an admirable level of intensity, if not pure technical virtuosity.

After listening to Ascent, you'll be hard-pressed to locate a better batch of mesmerising mind-expanding jams this year. [25 Aug 2012, p.54]

This is a solid set of space rock that will melt plenty of faces, even though it doesn't seek nirvana in Six Organs of Admittance's usual ways.

While it sounds less like a single-minded effort from Chasney than it does a high-spirited collective freakout from a reconfigured Comets on Fire, Chasney is still at the core of all the songs, transmitting his freaky visions in the guise of one face-melting power jam after another.

He [Chasney] may have made a misstep by not allowing the album to have that singularly defining moment but after his last few records, Ascent is a step up in terms of direction and execution.

Despite a sharp shift in direction, the spirit of Ascent floats--sometimes upwards, at times skittish and swooping underneath clouds--but nonetheless rising.

If the last album, Asleep on the Floodplain, looked back at his more acoustic records, Ascent does indeed rise above, leaving behind all but the best bits of past successes, and (hopefully) setting a fruitful and surprising path for a band that was already pretty unpredictable to begin with.

Ascent is an album that manages to find the perfect harmony between the normal and the weird, the dirty and the clean, the psychedelic and the straight. Put it in your psych-rock emergency kit. [No.90, p.60]

An unequivocally rocking set on which Chasny is backed by his former group Comets on Fire. [Aug 2012, p.56]

Everything works and there's really nothing more a fan of either Organs or Comets could ask for.

Closer to his work with Comets On fire, here Chasny plunges headlong into psych-rock, and he breaks a real sweat when he's not reaching for the next dimension (and sometimes during). [Aug/Sep 2012, p.113]

A quite astonishing record then, and one which establishes Chasny as a bona fide guitar god, proves that Comets On Fire are much missed, and knocks the notion of guitar music being dead into a cocked hat.

This is an album for frenziedly colouring outside the lines. But there is calm, too.

His extended solos during one or two-chord vamps - particularly on "Close to the Sky," "Waswasa" and "Even if You Knew," in that order of quality - are scrabbling, circular, slightly heroic, pulmonary with wah-wah and squalid with distortion. They're exciting, but they're also good for the head: they shove you into long-form listening mode.

There's no doubt Chasny and his cohorts know all about dynamic underpinning, making Ascent a trip worth taking. [Sep 2012, p.111]

If you're tempted to go for a heavy dose of head nodding psychedelia any time soon, you probably won't find a better example released this year.

Mostly, it reminds you of what you liked about both Comets and Six Organs, and takes that good stuff a few steps further.

Ascent is still recognizably Six Organs of Admittance, but it's often hazier, heavier and trippier.

Ascent sounds like Chasny channeling a great band's alchemical powers to his own ends, in the process making what may turn out to be a highpoint in his already rich and complex career. [Sep 2012, p.78]

Now that the former [Comets on Fire] has been on hiatus for about four years, Ascent proves that he [Ben Chasny] can fit those electric riffs in seamlessly with the latter's [Six Organs of Admittance] ritual depth.

Get lost in the haze.