Fantasize Your Ghost, the second album from Chicago rock duo Ohmme, contains both gentility and fearless invention. This contrast, and others like it, generate a good deal of the LP’s strength. By turns, it can sound muddy and psychedelic, yet clean and precise; anthemic but emotionally intimate.
Virtuosity and experimentation are ever-present, courtesy of bandmates Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart. Their flourishes are not self-serving—they instead serve the band’s drum-tight songwriting. It's clear that Cunningham and Stewart are both superb musicians. But they have no desire to flaunt it, no performative swagger. Less focused, and more egotistical artists swamp or obscure their work in itself. This duo’s noodling usually supplements their songs’ thundering crescendos, nestled unobtrusively in the mix. There’s too much to cover here—but some squeals and pizzicato plucking in ‘The Limit’, and gentle panning drones in ‘Some Kind of Calm’, serve to elevate the material.
Opener ‘Flood Your Gut’ is a gorgeous piece somewhere between PJ Harvey and Syd Barrett, whose elements disperse, elongate, and entangle through its second half. ‘Selling Candy’ stretches the extremities of Ohmme’s sound still farther, with sweetly-sung close harmonies in a call-and-response with overdriven guitars.
Elsewhere, ‘Some Kind of Calm’ pulls of the rare trick of pretending it’s not doing anything. Like a duck whose legs thrash underwater, it glides past seemingly without effort. But a million subtly-deployed tricks in its playing and production ensure it heavies the eyelids seductively, lulling and soothing instead of boring.
And on the total opposite end of the spectrum is ‘Sturgeon Moon’, a jagged and raucous song where Ohmme wear their sense of play most proudly. In the song’s melodic angularity, and through the John French-esque drumming of Matt Carroll, the ghost of Captain Beefheart is revived. Perhaps its sturgeon is a distant cousin to the trout of Van Vliet’s mask.
Though a glib comparison, that Ohmme recall Beefheart speaks to their greatest credit. Ohmme are rare, in that they recall the genuinely interesting facets of classic psychedelia, sustaining and surviving its spirit rather than its barest and most superficial aesthetic qualities. In the soulless and commercial world of neo-psych, beacons of artistic freedom like Fantasize Your Ghost shine even brighter.
Fantasize Your Ghost, released June 5th, is available for streaming and purchase here.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe