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Dean McPhee

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Dean McPhee, “Astral Gold” (Bass Ritual, 2024)

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This fifth full-length from Yorkshire-based guitar visionary Dean McPhee is actually a compilation of sorts, bringing together the pieces from his out-of-print Cosmos / Ether lathe cut 7″ (2022) with a couple of gems from Folklore Tapes compilation appearances. Happily, however, Astral Gold is also rounded out with a pair of new pieces and one of them (“The Sediment of Creation”) easily ranks among McPhee’s finest work. Given that I was already a huge fan of one of the Folklore Tapes pieces included here, that is more than enough to make this a solid release, but it is also an unexpectedly focused and thematically compelling one given the varied origins and inspirations of these songs. It is quite an aptly named release as well, as the languorously meditative and cosmic mood of these pieces seem like they would be an ideal soundtrack for any astral traveling that one might have on the horizon.

The album opens with the two pieces from the Cosmos/Ether single on Reverb Worship, which was originally something of a divergent release for McPhee, as both songs feel more like the extremely understated work of a cosmic-minded ’70s psych band than McPhee’s usual fare (Manuel Göttsching being the obvious reference point). That said, the two pieces still sound a hell of a lot like Dean McPhee–they just happen to have unusually prominent bass lines. Of the two, I prefer “Ether,” as it plays more to McPhee’s strengths of hazy, reverbent melodies and looping chord patterns. While I love both the gently pulsing chord progress and the lingering vapor trails that hang in the wake of the lead guitar melody, McPhee’s larger achievement lies in how he seems to slow and blur the passage of time: the way his notes seem to burn off or ripple away into silence is often more significant than the notes themselves. The uncluttered clarity of his playing is similarly striking and out-of-step with the current musical landscape, as he consciously avoids any excess notes or layers that would dilute the direct/real-time beauty of his themes.

The album does not start to truly catch (lunar) fire until the following “Neptune,” however, which improves upon the “Ether” formula with underlying chords distilled to shimmering, dreamlike swells with a gently swaying pulse. Given McPhee’s working method of slowly building an architecture of loops in real-time, repetition is an unavoidable foundational element here, but “Neptune” makes that constraint seem like a gift, as the seesawing sway of the backdrop is sensuously hypnotic. Dean also ratchets up his use of vibrato and sustain on the lead melody to such a degree that it feels like his guitar is almost emulating a singing saw or theremin. It is easily one of the most beautiful pieces on the album and also features a characteristically interesting conceptual inspiration, as it is a homage to the doomed moon of Triton, which is slowly being dragged towards its parent planet as its orbit decays.

The LP’s second side kicks off with the first of the new pieces, “Lunar Fire.” For the most part, it occupies familiar stylistic terrain for McPhee (glacial kick drum, clean slow-motion arpeggios, sustain-heavy lead melody, etc.), but he tweaks the formula a bit with a synth-y sounding Ebow bass line and a coda where he plays a recording of crackling fire through guitar pick-ups for a dub-wise finale of cracks and pops.

Dean saves the best for last, however, as Astral Gold‘s final two pieces are both absolute stunners. The first is “Second Message,” a eerily ritualistic and dream-like piece inspired by the Ilkley Alien that previously appeared on Folklore Tapes’ recent UFO-themed compilation. The piece is only a mere three minutes long, but it is a perfect distillation of everything that I love about McPhee’s work and culminates in an impressively otherworldly finale that lies somewhere between a squirming alien fireworks display and a séance with another dimension. The album then winds to close with the single-take shape-shifting epic “The Sediment of Creation,” which starts off good and steadily gets better and better as more and more loops are incorporated (wah-wah, rippling chord shimmer, harmonized leads, a lingering haze of slow-burning swells, etc.). In short, it is a goddamn tour de force.

Normally, I do not particularly care whether something was recorded in a single take, as recording killer music is not the same as a jumping a canyon on a motorcycle (if a song would be better with overdubs, I am happy to hear the better version), yet “Sediment” earns an exception to my rule, as the real-time loop manipulation makes McPhee seem like a fucking sorcerer (not a bad way to end an album). For those unfamiliar with his oeuvre, those final two pieces make one hell of an introduction to a truly unique body of work. Longtime McPhee fans will likely have heard most of this album already, but “The Sediment of Creation” is brilliant and substantial enough to make the release of Astral Gold a significant event anyway. When McPhee is at his best, there is absolutely no one else that can match his singular slow-motion magic.

Listen here.

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Dean McPhee, “Witch’s Ladder” (Hood Faire, 2021)

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At this point in his career, each new Dean McPhee release feels like a legitimate event, as he surfaces quite rarely and always hits me with at least one absolutely stunning piece when he does. Consequently, this review could probably be condensed to merely “Dean McPhee has a new album,” as that would convey everything necessary to perk up the ears of most people already familiar with his body of achingly beautiful, slow-burning guitar magic. 

Unsurprisingly, Witch’s Ladder does nothing to dash those dauntingly high expectations, as it picks up right where 2017’s Four Stones left off and that one was a very strong contender for McPhee’s finest album. And now Witch’s Ladder is a strong contender for that honor as well. Beyond that, the only salient details are that the cover art comes from visionary symbolist painter Agnes Pelton and that the album’s second half is a near-perfect two-song run of hauntingly sublime beauty.

Given his association with the Folklore Tapes milieu, McPhee’s unusual choice of cover art is not a surprise, but it is a telling detail that provides some insight into what he seems to be reaching towards with his own work. When reading The Whitney’s description of last year’s Pelton exhibition, I was repeatedly struck by phrases like “meditative stillness,” “shimmering veils of light,” and “awareness of a world that lay behind physical appearances.” All of those phrases are apt for the five songs of Witch’s Ladder as well, but McPhee admirably finds an ingenious array of ways to get there. 

That said, the pieces do all share a rough foundational aesthetic of “fingerpicked ‘folk music’ played on an electric guitar,” though each either ultimately builds into something considerably more transcendent or blossoms into quietly beautiful psychedelia in the margins. All are excellent and feature emotively smoldering or lyrically melodic solos at their core, but the most interesting twists occur in the final three pieces (in ascending order of brilliance, no less). 

In “Red Lebanese,” for example, the winding and languorously smoke-like melody fitfully evokes a trippy synth spiraling off into space, while “Eksdale Path” unexpectedly coheres into a killer “dual-guitar harmony” passage. As much as I love “Eksdale Path,” however, it is immediately eclipsed by the epic closer, as “Witch’s Ladder” is basically three songs’ worth of killer ideas seamlessly blended into one. 

In fact, I had not even finished typing “sounds like the twin-guitar attack of classic Iron Maiden just dropped by for a surprisingly tasteful cameo” before it turned into a hallucinatory duel between intertwining forwards and backwards guitar melodies (or at least a convincing illusion of it). It is a characteristically mesmerizing bit of show-stealing slow-motion sorcery, but the show already quite wonderful beforehand, as there truly is not a single wasted note on this album. Witch’s Ladder is another instant classic from Dean McPhee.

Samples can be found here.

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Dean McPhee, “Four Stones” (Hood Faire, 2018)

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Over the course of the last decade, Dean McPhee has quietly and unhurriedly established himself as one of most compelling and unique solo guitar artists around, weaving gorgeously meditative reveries with a masterful use of ghostly delay effects. This latest album, his first since 2015, compiles remastered versions of three pieces that have surfaced on several elusive Folklore Tapes collections, as well as a pair of new pieces. All are characteristically fine, but both “The Devil’s Knell” and the epic “Four Stones” rank among the most mesmerizingly sublime work that McPhee has yet recorded, making this his most essential album to date.

The opening “The Blood of St. John” dates back to Folklore Tapes’ 2016 homage to midsummer traditions, Crown of Light. In many ways, it is a quintessential Dean McPhee piece, as it feels like a kind of transcendent, slow-motion blues that unfolds over a bleary haze of shimmering delay. Even that description is exasperatingly reductionist though, as McPhee’s crystalline cascades of serpentine melodies seamlessly pull in shades of more exotic influences from Mali and Morocco to reach towards something far more ecstatic than a mere guitar solo. 

The following “Devil’s Knell” also originates from one of Folklore Tapes’ seasonal collections (Midwinter Rites and Revelries), but takes a more languorous and drone-influenced approach, capturing McPhee’s work at its most achingly gorgeous. It initially takes shape as a lovely, glimmering fog of shivering chord swells before unexpectedly blossoming into a tumbling descending melody evanescently trailed by a ghostly afterimage. That tactic has sparingly surfaced before on other Dean McPhee records and it remains his most dazzling trick, as the overlapping and out-of-phase doppelganger melody is beautifully disorienting and creates a wonderfully dreamlike wake of hanging overtones. 

The album’s first side draws to a close with yet another Folklore contribution, “Rule of Threes,” borrowed from their 2012 collection devoted to the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. While it is unmistakably a Dean McPhee song due to its chiming clarity and dreamily time-stretched pacing, it also clearly harkens back to an earlier phase in his evolution, as it is much more structured and conventionally melodic than his recent work. It is neither better nor worse for that, yet it feels more like a fantasia on an existing piece of traditional music than something that is spontaneously and intuitively conjured into being.

That said, the newer “Danse Macabre” is also quite structured, as it is built from an obsessively looping and rippling minor key arpeggio. I doubt anyone could ever mistake it for an appropriated piece of traditional music, however, as that one chord endlessly loops in hypnotic stasis and gives the piece a strangely lagging and off-kilter pulse that creates a disorienting sense of unreality. Over the top of that unusual backdrop, however, McPhee unfurls a sleepily lovely and melancholy glissando-heavy melody. The odd, frozen-in-time looping structure of “Danse Macabre” makes it feel more like an interlude than one of the album’s more substantial pieces, but it is certainly a beguiling one. 

McPhee saves his best and most ambitious work for last though, as the title piece is a slow-burning and gently pulsing epic that transforms from one gently simmering motif to another as it builds towards its climactic final theme. Notably, “Four Stones” makes prominent use of a new element in McPhee’s palette: a bass drum. It is used so subtly that it is easy to forget that it is even there, but it sneakily gives the piece a somewhat more muscular pulse than he would have gotten solely from looping bass notes. 

Overall, it is quite an impressive work both compositionally and performance-wise, given that everything is performed live with no overdubbing: McPhee nimbly alternates between different textures (clean melodies, feedback-swathed sustained tones, and ringing harmonics) while simultaneously maintaining a strong central thread, sneaking in occasional chord changes, and keeping a steady kick drum pulse with one of his feet. It is quite a juggling act. Nevertheless, all of that is merely the pleasantly absorbing prelude to the quietly dazzling final movement, as a glacially descending cascade of harmonized tones coheres into a spectral and eerily beautiful dance.

That last bit nicely illustrates why I have been enraptured by Dean McPhee’s work for so long (and also why he fits so seamlessly into the Folklore Tapes milieu): at any given time, there are always a handful of visionary guitarists who carve out their own compelling and distinctive niche, as well as many more who exhibit virtuosic technique or write consistently great songs. McPhee’s work checks off all three of those boxes, but his greatest moments reach another plane altogether where it feels like he is channeling something much deeper, more timeless, and almost supernatural. 

It is amusing to imagine some kind of ancient sorcery emerging from such modern gear as a Telecaster and some echo and delay pedals, but it is also easy to imagine McPhee being tried as a witch if he had gotten these sounds out of a stringed instrument in Pendle circa 1612—there is a layer beyond mere melody and harmony here that feels like time itself is blurring and the veil of reality has partially dissolved to offer a glimpse of something more mysterious. Needless to say, that sublime feat of illusion appeals to me immensely. This album is wonderful.

Listen here.