Album Review: Okkoto, Climb the Antlers & Reach the Stars
The Hudson River Valley has inspired centuries’ worth of poets, painters and other artists, so it is of little surprise that the rolling, sleepy hillsides, lush, sun-reflecting waters and serenity of the New York region should spark an attempt to preserve some part of it in sound as well. Based in New Paltz, about an hour north of the (former) Tappan Zee Bridge, Michael Lutomski is best known as drummer in psych instrumentalists It’s Not Night: It’s Space, whose last album, 2016’s Our Birth is But a Sleep and a Forgetting (review here) came out through Small Stone and took a more cosmic pastoralia, but in and as the meditative psych unit Okkoto, Lutomski seems more purely fueled by the experience of being in the world, in nature, even looking out a window at trees while playing guitar, whatever it might be.
Climb the Antlers and Reach the Stars is the second Okkoto full-length — the project taking its name from a boar god character in Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke — behind 2019’s Fear the Veil Not the Void, and while that album brought forth exploratory drones and noises cast entirely at Lutomski‘s behest, setting the course for an experimentalist bent that very much continues on the second record, Climb the Antlers and Reach the Stars is an altogether more soothing, less isolated-feeling offering, more directly in communion with its surroundings and more coherent in its approach to how its songs are built.
Note the two titles. The anchor verbs for the 2019 album are “fear” and “[fear] not,” where the follow-up has “climb” and “reach,” resulting in an overarching aspirational feel that’s all more resonant in the psychedelic post-rock morning fog of “First Drops in the Cup of Dawn” (8:56) or the echoing shimmer of electric guitar on the subsequent “Wind at the Gated Grove” (7:41) which opens drone first in smooth, entrancing layers before the arrival of drums acts as so much of a grounding effect.
That is the case as an intended side A wraps with “Mother Moon and Father Sun” (5:31) before the final pairing of “Window Onto the Hidden Place and the Other Time” (10:13) and the closer “Where the Meadows Dream Beside the Sea” (11:46) cap the 44-minute runtime with an album’s depth unto themselves. And in comparison to the first Okkoto as well — which also used drums, but more sparsely and not on every track — Lutomski‘s drumming gives these pieces a sense of completion and allows the listener to be all the more subsumed by the peacefulness surrounding for the bit of motion coinciding.
They sound live but could just as easily be programmed, it doesn’t really matter, and the progressions are relatively simple in the grand scheme of what a band might feature — the beginning of “Where the Meadows Dream Beside the Sea” reminds distinctly of Om‘s Advaitic Songs, about which none should complain — but their purpose is clear and they serve it well in turning “Wind at the Gated Grove” into more of a realized song, and particularly with their relatively late arrival there, establishing a dynamic wherein Lutomski is able to evoke different emotions and experiences through their interplay with the guitar effects, synth, etc. surrounding.
And for all the foot-on-earth feel they add, Lutomski is still free to manipulate the birds singing on “First Drops in the Cup of Dawn” until they become the beat, and to push them back in the mix of “Window Onto the Hidden Place and the Other Time” until they feel like a distant rhythmic echo behind the central melody six-plus minutes in, a moment of manifestation for Okkoto as a whole and perhaps a telling example of where and toward what the project’s ongoing progression might lead. These songs are longer, generally, than those on Fear the Veil Not the Void, and seem to be the result of a conscious decision on Lutomski‘s part for what they should be.
That is, the drums, like the guitar, like the guest fiddle of Rick Birmingham (who also mastered) and the good-luck-finding-them vocals of Laura McLaughlin that are reportedly included in “Where the Meadows Dream Beside the Sea,” feel entirely purposeful, and they do a fair amount of work as one would expect and hope on an outing that at least by some crazy standard might be considered minimalist. I’d argue Climb the Antlers and Reach the Stars is not that, however.
To make the case, one hardly needs anything more than the centerpiece, “Mother Moon and Father Sun,” which is the shortest of the five inclusions and by the time it’s 40 seconds in is unfolding gracefully its melodic guitar foundation and synthesizer accompaniment, not so much aiming to be cinematic — there’s an awful lot of pretend-soundtracking going on these days — as letting the sounds be their own thing, letting the guitar find its path from night to day. If this is to be the moment on the record wherein the sunrise of “First Drops in the Cup of Dawn” comes to fruition, it’s a quiet morning and the manner in which the synth fades out after four minutes feels duly transitional, leaving the guitar and drums to go at their own pace.
In terms of overall impact, “Window Onto the Hidden Place and the Other Time” might be the most active of the songs, building to a marching wholeness around the aforementioned guitar melody before finishing with what sounds like nighttime animal noises, and its effect leading into “Where the Meadows Dream Beside the Sea” isn’t lost, the final track ending with a whistling sound that’s either more birds or a twisting guitar note echoed out or who knows what. One more thing passing by.
But it works, and the Climb the Antlers and Reach the Stars seems to feel out these spaces even as it creates them, resulting in a listening experience that’s genuinely hypnotic but satisfying to any and all levels of attention paid. You can get lost in it, to be sure, but if you follow along the trail Lutomski sets, you’ll come out of the woods just fine and arrive, perhaps, at the water’s edge.
