One of my favorite things to do with friends in college was to sit around and tell either first or secondhand accounts of experiences with the paranormal. Another, more silly pastime, involved us actually setting off in search of some haunted sites in an attempt to have some supernatural experiences of our own. Seeing as we lived fifteen minutes outside of Philadelphia, one of the most reportedly haunted cities in the United States, we had no shortage of places to inspect. Whether it was taking guided tours through the abandoned halls of Eastern State Penitentiary, hopping the gates at St. Peter’s Cemetery at midnight in hopes of catching a glimpse of the ghost carriage, or crossing the bridge into Jersey to sit in the dreaded Witch’s Chair, we loved it and did it all. I remember one particular time a group of my friends went to check out to a local Crybaby Bridge (for whatever reason I stayed behind). Whatever happened to them out there remains unknown. They came back on the verge of tears and to this day they still refuse to talk about it. Personally, I never heard or saw anything ghostly on these adventures, but really I never expected to. I just loved being in these old places, forgotten by time. The cold in the air mixed with the smell of dust and decay had an allure for me just as much as the prospect of hearing a disembodied voice.
Forgetting that his album is titled something as sunny as Island Records, stepping into the debut album of Ernest Gibson was a lot like those times spent snooping around old churches and graveyards. If there were a physical manifestation of this album, like of the actual music, you’d have to pick it up and blow a thick layer of dust off of it before digging in. It creaks and moans under the weight of the past, and Ernest Gibson wallows in every aged corner of it. Looking to genres like exotica, folk, and maybe even touches of doo-wop, Island Records is an album that is deeply entrenched in musty old tricks and spells of time gone by, but uses that platform as a way of twisting and re-imagining the sounds of the past, assembling them into a completely new form. Something nearly unrecognized by the elements that went into it. Think of the way that Daughn Gibson stretches, samples, and loops his music to give it a time-worn vibe or perhaps the way that Dirty Beaches recreates older styles with thick, heavy layers of lo-fi modernism and you’ll be getting a vague idea of what Ernest Gibson is up to on this album. It’s sort of a cratedigger’s wet dream. A lot of the time Island Records feels like, perhaps in another life, it could easily be packed away in a box with other lost gems down in a dank basement somewhere, waiting for the day when that box falls down on some adventurous listener’s head.
Having spent time as one-half of the experimental psych duo Net Shaker, Ernest is no stranger to mining strange and disparate sounds and lassoing pieces of them down into something new, but on Island Records he makes the experimentation of Net Shaker look downright conventional. Heavily obscured vocals show up on less than half of the album’s tracks, and even then they are less employed as a way of communicating lyrics or a message and more as another layer of droning musicality in some already dense tracks. Ernest moans and hisses and whispers and elevates the already ghostly music to the realm of downright haunting. Like the disembodied voices that I’d hoped to hear in those haunted graveyards, Ernest has broken away from the trappings of this world and floats along in an entirely different realm. Content to be completely on his own, he is guided only by his most basic creative impulses and as a result, Island Records is an album that gazes upon many styles at once and yet confines itself to none of them. The sounds had a life of their own in the past, but their time is gone now and they have now been re-appropriated into this new ghostly figure.
There is certainly a lot to digest on Island Records, and Ernest Gibson isn’t the sort of artist to make things easy for his listeners. With its nearly 40-minute runtime, this is the sort of album that dispels casual listens and instead demands that those who venture into its cavernous insides be focused and maybe at least a little adventurous. Nothing about it is conventional, and even in those brisk moments when certain tracks feel like they are conforming to some sort of standard, they suddenly burst apart as if it were a bubble you brushed with your fingertip. Rather than reaching out and trying to wrap your hands (and mind) around it, it’s best left to just be what it is and have its dark and haunting beauty be observed and remain unspoiled. Fortunately, for something that is as endlessly creative as this, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Island Records is out now via Skrot Up! Records.
