• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Jun 09, 2015 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

With his thick baritone, the Pennsylvania native paints a new gallery of grim, lyrical portraits of lonely outsiders and anomalous weirdos. Where Carnation—his third LP—sidesteps its predecessors is in its production: the trippy digitalism of the more sample-driven Me Moan has been sidelined in favor of a sound that’s richer and more organic, to somewhat mixed results.

Carnation is at its best when Gibson unabashedly embraces his eccentricities. (The less straight-forward the song, the less it just sounds like a slightly off-center Dave Gahan side project.) “For Every Bite” is one such standout, with Gibson’s voice run through an eerie electronic filter that’s dynamically at odds with the song’s dark country vibe. Elsewhere, Gibson and co-producer Randall Dunn go full Eno, such as with the wet-sounding synths in “A Rope Ain’t Enough,” which has all the sensuousness of a lost Roxy Music ballad but with an unmistakably more perverse bent. (www.facebook.com/daughngibson)

Author rating: 6.5/10