No Ghost [Audio CD] Acorn

The Acorn's long-awaited follow-up to 2007's wildly successful Glory Hope Mountain. In the summer of 2009 the band isolated themselves at a cottage in Northern Quebec to begin work on what was to become No Ghost. Although unplanned, this album represents the closing of a trilogy that began with their debut album, The Pink Ghosts (2004), and their Blankets & Tin Fist EPs in 2005 and 2006, respectively. Songs took shape at all hours, crafted from hazy late-night improvisations and early morning melodies pulled from the thinning threads of sleep. Modernity clashed with the bucolic via exploratory percussion, feedback, acoustic textures and the natural surrounding sounds. The band then traded trees for telephone poles to finish recording in a sweltering heatwave at Montreal's Treatment Room Studios (Plants & Animals, Angela Desveaux). There, the breezy ease of rural surrounds was buried under sweat-caked skin and cracked asphalt, birdsong drowned out by thick air and engine hum. The end result is a recording swaddled in dichotomy: togetherness and isolation, acoustic and electric, destruction and restoration.