The title Find Shelter gives a good feeling for the music on Noah Georgeson's solo debut. The sense of a mountain man wilderness is abound in the songs, fueled by Georgeson's preeminent vocals and the lo-fi acoustics. On the two tracks that Georgeson does not sing, the orchestrations are a humbled sort of epic, with classical orchestrations in lo-fi recording. At times, these orchestrations back Georgeson's bear-like voice that gives the impression of a musical interlude in the midst of a lumberjack's grueling labor, wherein said lumberjack finds the time to sing his ode to the nature surrounding him, "Oh! Wilderness!"

This music sounds like a jam session, rhythms slower and taking their time, maybe watching their step, and there aren't many "rock-out" areas in the album characterized by a high energy chorus or a superbly harmonized polyrhythms. This is not music that should be appreciated like a drug, manufactured in a studio to hook people to a memorable riff and baseline and devoured enthusiatically to fuel the addiction pulsing and reverberating a tune in the listener's head until a tolerance is built up to the song that has gotten old. This is music that's to be appreciated like cuisine without chemicals and processes, but simple food that challenges the tongue with subtle tastes that aren't taken to the extreme of sweet or spicy or salty because there's enough of that in the cookie-cutter cookies wrapped in matte finish plastic sleeves and attractive blue logos. Find Shelter exists for the people tired of the usual, an alternative in a truest sense, for the present.

Once someone steps beyond the usual, they're in unknown territory. Nothing can be judged based upon previous notions that were accepted as true for whatever reason beforehand. Music is not only another form of sex thrusting with rhymes and base or a vehicle for moans of woe set to verse. It is something that can only be defined by playing with it in the present by playing the instruments and figuring out what it is by trying out rarely explored realms. Find Shelter is finding its own definition, not one prescribed to it.

Similar Albums:
Devendra Banhart - Niņo Rojo
Vetiver - Vetiver
Bert Jansch - The Black Swan

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Paul Bozzo
01.16.2007