MV & EE with the Golden Road - 'Gettin' Gone' (Ecstatic Peace) Released 08/10/07

On first encounters, the latest offering from MV (Matt Valentine) and EE (Erika Elder) makes you go back to their previous output to check whether its brilliance was just a sweet mirage invoked by the intoxicating fumes of the rocket fuel that seemed to propel the couple’s skewered outpourings. Last year’s ‘Green Blues’ ranks as one of the highpoints of the entire ‘New Weird America’ movement; a high-octane cavalcade of weird scenes, freaky dreams and disorientating heavy-psych grooves glowing with all the eerie majesty of an UFO hovering over the duo’s Massachusetts homestead.

But whereas the compelling chaos of ‘Green Blues’ sounded fried in the best possible sense of the term, ‘Gettin’ Gone’s initially seems plain burned out, almost as if MV & EE had stalled at the ugly ambience of ‘Greendale’ when searching for inspiration from the vast output of Neil Young, the most obvious forebear for the ragged, fuzz-ridden guitar-bashing encountered on many of these thirteen tracks.

Persevere with it, though, and ‘Gettin’ Gone’ soon starts to make sense. Stripped down to a streamlined combo (featuring Dinosaur JR chief J Mascis keeping the beat) from the hallucinatory overload of thickly layered instruments of ‘Green Blues’, the album’s frazzled power riff moves (opener ‘Susquehanna’ could be Led Zeppelin’s pumped-up assault battling a battalion of fearsome peyote visions) and deliberately leaden Crazy Horse grooves (‘Mama My’ is the kind of back-to-basics gem Neil Young’s struggling to come up with these days) are a whole lot more conventional here than you’d expect from a duo famed for hovering on the outer fringes of the freak-folk carnival.

The platter’s feelgood charm, however, instantaneously counters any accusations of generic rock-isms, even if MV & EE’s default mode of wide-eyed wonder occasionally borders on the most exaggerated hippie parody since the furthest-out out trips of the Fabulous Freak Brothers. Sure, it runs out of steam a bit towards the end of its epic duration, but the spooky beauty of the sparse ‘The Burden’ and ghostly levitation of ‘I Got Caves In There’ compensate amply for any detours to aimless noodling.