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Damon & Naomi with Ghost
It may have seemed an unlikely pairing at first blush, but Damon & Naomi’s acid-folk song writing is a perfect fit for the eloquent musicianship of Japanese psych outfit Ghost. If the first three Damon & Naomi albums were fragile things, the sound of a duo, newly adrift from their first group (Galaxie 500) and finding their footing, Damon & Naomi With Ghost is the fulcrum of the duo’s artistic development – their songs are blossoming here into profound vessels for intersubjective communication, with melody, lyric and structure folding together perfectly into origami forms. Ghost do what they do best, which is to elevate song to near-hallucinatory levels of profundity through sensitive, artful playing that knows when to play it poised, and when to let things loose. That they tend toward the former here tells us much about the way Damon & Naomi write songs, with consideration, but Ghost also understand the emotional twists and turns of beautiful melodies like “Judah & the Maccabees” and “Tanka.”