Bird Show

Lightning Ghost

[5/5] Town And Country multi-instrumentalist Ben Vida (a.k.a. Bird Show) wants you to get your bliss on. Lightning Ghost, the follow-up to Bird Show’s masterly mystical-drone debut, 2005’s Green Inferno, bears listeners aloft on sonic Cloud Nines over freak folk’s verdant hills and dales. Where subgenre figurehead Devendra Banhart strives to emulate psych-folk popularizer Donovan and Tropicália pioneer Caetano Veloso (both admirable artists, no doubt), Bird Show delves deeper into the folkadelic well, also embracing African and Asian percussion and modal elements for added flavor. Right from Lightning Ghost’s opener, “Field On Water,” with its stoned chants, cyclical guitar riff (part Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti, part minimalist composer Terry Riley), and delicate chimes, Bird Show demonstrates his desire to transport you to a better, gentler world. The rest of the album explores the more spiritual sectors of astral jazz, pastoral psych-rock and sci-fi-flick electronics. Lightning Ghost is an exotic, beautifully hypnotic trip.
(KRANKY) Dave Segal