Review

Spiritual seekers numbered among the founding fathers of the Takoma school of guitar playing. In addition to recording several albums of sacred and holiday music, one of which was the best-selling thing he ever did, John Fahey ended plenty of his records with a Christian hymn. He also dedicated one LP to a Hindu teacher, although he subsequently took it back, claiming that he was really just sweet on the guru’s secretary. Robbie Basho’s fantasias were infused with exoticism, mysticism and nature worship. Joseph Allred’s spent time with the music of both, and also pursued graduate level studies in theology and philosophy. When they invoke The Old Gods, they’re not being flip.

That seriousness of intent powers the four generously dimensioned instrumentals on this LP. Each is a solo performance that feels like a manifestation of a winding journey, played on a single instrument. The title track opens side A with some heraldic strums, each as radiant a mass of harmonics as can be tugged out of twelve guitar strings. Then the strumming blurs, initiating a cascade of sound whose turbulent surface is periodically broken by stern and sturdy melodies. The A side’s other piece, “Lonely Mount Koya,” is another twelve-string instrumental. It is named for a complex of Shingon Buddhist temples and graves, and it projects a Basho-like air of exaltation.

Flip the record over and you’re back in Tennessee. “Murmurations” is named for the complex maneuvers made by flocks of starlings, which sounds like just the sort of thing one might want to represent with a twelve-string guitar. Nope. Instead, Allred patiently plucks out patterns on a banjo, coaxing multiple voices out of the instrument’s relatively hurried string decay. They switch instruments once more on “Cumberland Yab-Yum,” to six-string guitar, whose starker output might be a metaphor for the title’s invocation of Tantric unity.

Allred’s notes on the album’s Bandcamp page frames the pursuit for old gods within boundaries of mind-blowing complexity and excessive simplicity. One is present to overwhelming reality and the other leads to comforting falsehoods. The dense swirl of these performances makes clear which side Allred trusts.