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Meets the Mighty Flashlight
It’s always good to welcome Mike Fellows, aka Mighty Flashlight, back to the fray. Once a member of Royal Trux, Air Miami, Rites of Spring and Silver Jews, he’s recently realigned himself with the Drag City mothership, recording an album by P.G. Six, playing in Prison, and co-driving the latest album from Mike Donovan, once of Sic Alps. It’s a perfect match, frankly. Donovan’s songs are oft-surprising in their capacity to wrench melodies at once fresh and eternal out of chords that run like cars, sometimes on rust-flaked guitars, sometimes on a piano played by the third hand of Tymon Dogg; Fellows shines the mighty flashlight on Donovan’s art, surrounding it with arrangements that are rickety, yet have a strange, hallucinatory orbit around them. It’s one of Donovan’s finest moments so far, in a career that’s been pretty heavy with such things.