Charalambides

I’ve mentioned previously that Charalambides exist in a kind of ephemeral limbo between psych, folk, drone and experimental songform. Their music often conjures visions of rites and rituals more than concerts proper. There’s something elemental about what Tom and Christina Carter are invoking. Their songs are scarred by stone and smudged by the ashes of ceremonial fires. In the same way a camera can’t actually trap your soul, the ½ inch tape can’t hope to truly soak up their smolder and infect the listener the way a dusty basement gig can, but Charalambides: Tom and Christina Carter comes as close as any to achieving the impossible. The couple have been scraping at the raw nerves of folk for long enough that they’ve achieved elder statemen status and their latest proves exactly why they’ve remained vital for so many years.

The band itself has existed, even when relegated to hiatus, for well over twenty-five years. Often Charalmabides recedes to the background while Tom and Christina Carter have pursued solo ventures, external pairings and guest spots on the works of others. Amidst all this tangential activity, though, the idea of Charalambides still burns bright. So, it is fitting that the album is subtitled Tom and Christina Carter. It is momentous when those two halves unite, like an alignment of planets that can’t help but throw elements into disarray. The record doesn’t pride itself on brevity. Most songs stretch beyond the nine and ten-minute marks with ease, never in a hurry to halt the ceremony the duo sets in motion. Songs tend to fill up a space like firelight, warm and flickering, alive, aloof and perhaps a little dangerous. There are those that go to lengths to find their conduit to the thrum of nature, but they’d be wiser than most to seek out the Carter’s gospel.

The record sees Tom Carter ruminating on midnight guitar rituals – haunted and heavy as Loren Connors and intricate as contemporaries like Chasney and Bachman. Christina is no less an indelible presence on the record, her voice reaching for the upper registers like Linda Perhacs and Vashti Bunyan before her, imbuing their folk with a spiritual wonder that’s vibrating on the same harmonic hum as the nature around them. Its easy to tumble down the darkened paths of the Carters and get lost in the overgrowth and the dense earthen humidity, but there’s a light at the end that pulls the listener out of the dank. While that light offered escape, there are no promises about the changes that Charalambides inflict along the way. In a time ruled by wires and windows and incremental spikes in dopamine, the duo unleash an album to help it all crumble away – a dirt bath for the soul, an ego molt for the cult of culture.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.