Can I Get A Packet Of Camel Lights is the latest solo album from Animal Collective member Geologist or Brian Weitz to his mum. The album was recorded and written with a Hurdy Gurdy as central instrument at home and at Asheville's Drop of Sun Studio. Additional help came from Adam McDaniel, Emma Garau, Alianna Kalaba, Ryan Oslance, Shane McCord, Mikey Powers, Adam Lion, Dave "Avey Tare" Portner and Merrick Weitz.
The album opens with Oracle Road a place where droning hurdy gurdy's intertwine with shamanic drums, ethereally shimmering and shaking through mysterious forests, opening synapses to meditations, visitations from the Oracle Road, ancient travellers echo through time, bending perceptions, gamelan hooves twirling curlicues entwine your mind. Tonic is what you need to take after smoking that pack of coffin nails, repeating keyboard motif, guitar extrusions building to open energetic flows, batteries almost fully charged.
RV Envy as your RV doesn't make all the odd scraping sounds when it goes round corners like Geologist one does, the parping horn from a child’s bicycle, mis-firing engine sounds manipulated within the rhythm. Not Trad not even Trad Gras Och Stenar, yet still sounding like an old folk madrigal droned on the Hurdy Gurdy, sparse drums accompany the tune, slowing down to a haunted house ending.
Color In The B & W opens with hunting calls, pulsed beats, distant shimmers turning to sepia. Compact Mirror Last Names muttered in the darkest chill-out room, shuffled beats, somnambulant bass declensions, some more of that compact powder dabbed beneath the wind chimes, mutating into feedback induced crackling droned vortices, searching for rain inducing frequencies in the warlocks' remnants.
Government Job has squelchy trepid beats, shuffles scrapes and owl calls, never giving away if this is a Government Job in the before times, when you might have wanted one of those, or in current times when it could be total nightmare to be escaped, lest you're tarred with that brush on the snare.
Pumpkin Festival needs to be played at high volume while any trick or treaters are calling, it might get some of them running for their lives at those digeridoo like bass hurdy Gurdy notes, with the ancient folk tune fiddles, it's going to be Pumpkin pie for dinner tonight, here's hoping his cigarette ash doesn't fall into the mixture again.
Shelly Duvall has deep plucked bass notes, a ringing bell summoning you to the presence of the goddess of your dreams, ready to worship her glorious creations like gazing at a portrait of a lady and wondering what it all means to be on the 4th floor with a bolt in your neck. Slow horror movie themes emerging.
The album closes with Sonora with Arabian desert rhythmic pulsed beats, deeply resonant tones of the hurdy gurdy, drawing you into florid moves across a beatific horizon, trance induced dancers mesmerically shifting across the vista, through a deep fog created by all the dancers puffing those Camel Lights together.
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