Geologist
Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?
DRAG CITY
With his usual bag of tricks (i.e. his beloved sampledelic electro-manipulations) relatively tamped down, yet another member of the Animal Collective’s collective gets the solo itch, scratching it until bloodied. Better known as Geologist, Brian Ross Weitz’s solo debut Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights? has, at its highly stylized center, the sound of a hurdy-gurdy—the ancient, hand-cranked string instrument with its keyboard for changing pitch—producing the whine of a beat-up, wheezing accordion. On a track such as “Oracle,” its rasp-and-pant is stuck atop what sounds like an old album’s time-ending crackle, its aptly titled dead wax trail-off, that grows lively and literally jiggy before its run is up.
The panicked aggression and salty shanty-making of lead single “Tonic” come across like second-album Psychedelic Furs’ “Into You Like a Train”—saxophone and all. On “Not Trad,” the hurdy-gurdy’s panting cough grows phlegmy and becomes a funeral-drone dirge that magnifies its huffing, puffing breadth, weightily, until the track’s tattered finale. If the instrument is there at all within “Shelley Duvall” and “Compact Mirror/Last Names,” it’s hidden safely beneath the din and quiet drive, the whistles and bells, and—on the latter—within the ambient shadows of Weitz’s softly struck, four-on-the-floor rhythms.
All the while, gurdy-ed, gilded, or otherwise, Geologist’s solo vision for Camel Lights is a genuinely humble and doubly entrancing one. Can’t ask for much better than that for a smart start.
