Some songs are so moving, so imagistic, that they beg to be put in films. Such is the case with almost every tune on Hold This Ghost, the stirring debut from Portland, Oregon’s Musée Mécanique. Listeners can’t help but close their eyes and imagine rainy city streets or parting lovers. Always beautiful and often gloomy, this album recalls the very best of Elliott Smith, but with more experimental instrumentation.
Inspiration for the band’s name and much of the music came from a San Francisco museum of mechanical musical instruments and antique arcade games. A fascination with the intersection of old and new seems to drive the music. Songs blend unexpected instruments such as a glockenspiel, oboe and pedal steel with the modernity of synthesizers, a welcome cocktail of moody folk that follows the path less traveled, thanks to the album’s mixer, Tucker Martine. (The producer and composer also mixed records for Sufjan Stevens and The Decemberists.)
Each track is truly unique. “Under Glass” is the most Elliott Smith-esque, with lovely arpeggiated acoustic guitar and just the right amount of soft reverb. The lyrics are as gray as the sound: “I’d already gone/she was all the way home/Never should have said, ‘Take what I can get’ ”.
“Nothing Glorious” is a mythical delight. It begins with the haunting vibrations of a synthesizer and builds with an airy glockenspiel that floats above the warm blend of cello and violin. “Like Home” wouldn’t be the same without Brian Perez on glockenspiel. Musée Mécanique’s core members, Sean Ogilvie and Micah Rabwin, harmonize as beautifully as Simon and Garfunkle on tracks such as “Somehow Bound.”
Hold This Ghost is an album for those of us who revel in brooding postmodern novels – the kind that when finished leave you wondering whether to hold the book to your chest and sob or just stare and the ceiling and think. You’ll feel soothed, then uneasy. Romanced, then abandoned. But never, ever bored.
– Karie Meltzer
Musée Mécanique 