Musée Mécanique - Hold This Ghost
Review by Jack Foley
HAILING from the hubbub of Portland, Oregon, Musée Mécanique offer warm, subtle and elegant folk-pop to ease away the stresses of everyday life.
First conceived in a museum of antique arcade machines and later actualized in a small Victorian home on the banks of the Willamette River, Musée Mécanique’s Hold This Ghost began its journey in a high school literature class.
Sean Ogilvie and Micah Rabwin met, started their first band together, played their first shows and wrote their first jointly-penned songs before either of them could legally drive a car.
Their early friendship fostered a creative partnership that has endured distance, estrangement and more than a decade of their lives.
While living in the Bay Area of California, the two songwriters developed an affinity for the collection of vintage coin-operated games, player pianos and novelties housed at the Musée Mécanique (Mechanical Museum) located on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.
Much like the recordings of Hold This Ghost, the machines within the museum are a hybrid of technology and humanity: mechanical by nature, but animated via a dedicated craftsmanship that reveals the unique flaws and personality of each.
Their Portland, Oregon home studio, itself a collection of interesting instruments and antiques, is peppered with tack pianos, trumpets, musical saws and garage sale Casio keyboards, while their neighbourhood – an integral source of the album’s inspiration – is flanked by giant Redwoods that overlook the scenic Willamette River.
The result is an album of tranquil beauty, rich with the inspirations that inspired them (both musical and lyrical) and which take the listener off on some truly lush journies.
Rabwin’s hush-hush style vocals provide the perfect platform to lull you into this state, seldom overdoing things or arriving at the expense of the instrumentation, which is rich, varied and often beautifully layered.
Hence, traditional elements such as guitars and keyboards jostle for position with lapsteels, glockenspiels, melodicas, musical saws and accordians to offer a sound that’s both historic and contemporary.
Album opener and former single Like Home, for instance, has a folksy intro before drawing on the sound of handclaps for its subtle rhythmns and melodicas and glockenspiels as well. It’s an enchanting opening and an early highlight.
Two Friends Like Us, an ode to the long-term friendship that provides the bedrock of the band, is laidback and acoustic in the same way as Joshua Radin and Simon & Garfunkel, while Fits & Starts contains one of the most achingly romantic starts to a song I’ve heard in a long time. It’s just a really, really nice musical intro that doesn’t disappoint vocally.
Just occasionally, the album seems to follow the same formula a little too comfortably (or routinely), but there’s always a song to re-affirm your faith in the band, such as Sleeping In Our Clothes or final offering Our Changing Skins to confirm the suspicion that this is a class act just waiting to be discovered and more widely appreciated.
Download picks: Like Home, The Things That I Know, Fits And Starts, Sleeping In Our Clothes, Our Changing Skins
Track listing: