Valet: Naked Acid

Label: Kranky

Valet is the solo vehicle of Honey Owens, sometimes member of Jackie O Motherfucker, Atlas Sound and Nudge, and Naked Acid is her second collection of spectral, murky musings. The seven lengthy stretched-out pieces that make up the album flow more like a sound collage at times, with fragments of underwater vocals, washes of muted guitar fuzz, found sound percussion and the occasional Spacemen 3-style demented blues moment. The randomness of these skittering explorations gels at some point and creates a flow that makes the entire picture bigger than the individual parts, inextricable from each other. As a new generation of artists rediscover and mutate the space-rock genre, with varying degrees of success, Valet really nails it by warping the obvious influences and bringing a real darkness and paranoia to the sometimes too-dreamy shoegaze catalog. (Fred)