we know of a certain fjord in norway

Lots of madness, trying to end the semester. Paper writing, storage space finding, sublease hassling, insomnia, etc.
Last Friday's bi-weekly Amoeba trip earned me Talk Talk's Laughing Stock and Six Organs of Admittance's new album, School of the Flower. The latter somehow got missed in my freak-folk freakout from earlier in the semester, but perhaps appropriately, as it doesn't really fit into that same vein. Where my homies Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom exist in some psychedelic never-happened revisionist Americana tradition (like if the Carter Family had intermarried with the Manson Family), 6OA inhabits more sphere of influences from the other side of the Atlantic, say, Bert Jansch or Fairport Convention styleyz. The comparison is especially apt as the album is mostly instrumental, though 6OA freaks out a fair bit more than those drug-addled Brit folksters ever thought to do. The excellent (and excellently long, at 13 minutes) title track is a good example: the circular Richard Thompson-esque guitar slowly gets overshadowed by reaaally drony shit and some almost free jazz type noise.
Talk Talk, on the other hand, is bizarre. Remember that super poppy No Doubt cover of "It's My Life"? Yeah, that's not what this is. I almost wrote "echoes of Slint," until I realized that Slint is really "echoes of Talk Talk;" Mark Hollis sounds like Will Oldham after an Ian Curtis overdose. I really hate when critics call an album "indescribable" or "unclassifiable," but I really can't make any good comparisons, so I'll just throw out some abusively overused, and particularly undescriptive adjectives: atmospheric, ambient, spacious, evocative, understated, natural, cinematic, epic, and blah blah woop woop. Oh, and I realized how much I dug this CD upon having a song like "Ascension Day" remind me of the trippier parts of Frances The Mute. When you can find a retroactive Volta reference, all is well in the world.