I love the idea of January 1st releases. I woke up to a new year and three essential new albums ready to download on Bandcamp. This one really raised my eyebrows as I’ve listened to a lot of Old Million Eye these last two years but never seen them live or heard a live recording before.
As I suspected, it’s a whole new angle on the project. There’s still that whole psychedelic drone meets deconstructed sing thing that I associate with the project but instead of the multi-layered sound voids, it’s totally stripped down. There’s clearly no backing tapes just a man, his tools and his creativity let loose on a very lucky audience.
Whats impressive to me is I can hear what sounds like an audience, the shuffle of feet and the snap of a ringpull but I dont hear any yapping. Which is how it should be. This might sound like an odd thing to say about a live album but this is really one to listen to on headphones (unless you happen to have a high quality P.A. system at home) so you can absorb all the details and ambience.
I always thought of Old Million Eye as being such a studio thing but now it’s on the record that this extraordinary sonic alchemy can be caught in the wild and on the strength of this album, I’m putting that on my bucket list.