Old Million Eye

The Air's Chrysalis Chime is the second LP from Old Million Eye, primarily a solo project of Brian Lucas. This beautifully transcendent and deeply explorational album sees Lucas widening his spectral and woozy palette to include musical contributions from Gayle Brogan (Pefkin/Burd Ellen), Steven R. Smith, Sheila Bosco (Dire Wolves), and Jeff Jefferson (3 Moons/The Lodestones). The album's darker more drifting songs, "Ruby River" and "Tales from Copperopolis" feature the vibrational voice of Georgia Carbone, erstwhile vocalist of Dire Wolves. Lucas and Carbone's eerie vocal duet on the lengthy "Ruby River" is stunningly haunting and unexpected. This mysteriously anomalous album utilizes such elements as tape collage, improv jazz type drumming, clarinet, Brogan's melodica, intertwining basses, piano, treated violin, and Lucas's Scenes from the South Island-like plaintive skeletal guitar playing that is sure to tickle the ear into quiet hysterics, if not downright rearranging the ear to accommodate a new form of hearing. The listener should expect the usually oddly crafted and layered sound combinations as evidenced on previous OME releases. These sonic elements are a vehicle for Lucas's softly placid tenor, but with added dimensions his purely solo work only alludes to. This album isn't "psychedelic" in the sense of spacey, wah-wah riffs: it's far more subtle, detailed, and delicate in terms of its transcendent properties, but the invitation is there to climb into the chrysalis and be transformed.