Valet - Naked Acid [Kranky 2008]

As the first low murmurs began to arise from Valet's second album, I half-jokingly told my friend that Naked Acid was to be my favorite album of the year (having never heard it). With bare- skinned, unmasked passion I can now confirm my suspicions and admit to having fallen deeply and amorously in love with this record.

In three quarters of an hour, Honey Owens the architect behind Valet, walks through slow hypnotizing changes in sound and exploration. From fuzzing to murmuring, finger harp kalimba sprinklings to distorted underwater guitar, collaborator with Jackie-O-Motherfucker, Nudge, and Dark Yoga, Owens never wavers. At times, like those sleep machines stale rich people buy their siblings with sleep apnea (unaware of their distaste for anything but white noise), the album sweeps over like an electronic ocean. Never purely organic, orchestral or electronic, it becomes a crystal sea shell held to one's ear—as you turn it in your hand, the sounds and tracks creep in from all around, grow and give color, trickle out, buzz, sting and shine.

On songs like “Kehar” and the opening piece “We Went There”, which exemplify the little use of structured vocals, Owens with Adrian Orange draw the rotting out of Portland, to the growing of fresh lichen on a time-lapse video while collecting electricity bouncing from dirtied silver pools. Never purely dreary or stoned or sexy, Valet, halfway through the album, merges into the song "Fuck It” with bluesy, exhausted twang and whispers that are surprising and strangely essential. Just imagine burying your face in the neck of a graying stranger, only to smell cigarettes on your own hands that you shouldn't have smoked only then to flash suddenly to a Naked Acid trip sunrise, and finally seeing through the eyes of Bowie in the Man Who Fell To Earth.... finally questioning if maybe it all began from looking at leaves as the sun shines behind them, wincing while trying to see the veins of each illuminated leaf.

Whether texturally lending wrinkled sepia tones, the crawling of electric screeching bugs, a bag of shaking tiddlywinks and the distant turning of a jack in the box—there is a cinematic wailing and a guitar flossing with harp strings, back-bending over the sea and a distinct set of blurred memories which each listener will face. I feel that Valet resonates frighteningly well with the late Francesca Woodman, and, had I the abilities, I would contact the self-slain photographer (via Ouija) for a discussion on these parallels. In either case, like Woodman's work wherein the artist herself is often hiding in the streaks, creaks and shadows of the desolate, decaying rooms in which she photographs, Valet's Naked Acid is exceptional and mystifying.

Talitha Cum