RESTOCKED: Golden Trees is a minimalist psych-folk masterpiece. A supergroup of sorts, Helen Rush, Pat Gubler and Samara Lubelski have created seven songs characterized as much by quiet and restraint than by their acclaimed musicianship. The lyrical lines in these songs appear suspended between pregnant pauses of silence and subtle instrumental flourishes. On one side of the gap, Samara Lubelski's violin invokes the Velvets and other avant string-players. On the other side, P.G. Six layers effects and pointillist finger picking, while evoking outright weirdness from his guitar rig. At the center, Helen Rush has penned songs of delicate beauty and fragile intimacy.
With Matt Valentine, Helen and Pat formed the core nucleus of Tower Recordings. Samara also performed with later incarnations of Tower, as well as Hall of Fame, Thurston Moore's band, and as a solo-artist. Where the early Tower catalogue was characterized by schizophrenic studies in a variety of forms (folk, noise, drone, lo-fi skronk, etc), Metal Mountains' songs like "Structures in the Sun," "The Golden Trees that Shade Us" and "Turn to the East" provide us with sonic beauty in high fidelity. Though Helen gave us a sample of her post-Tower Recordings-work with "Silver Sun," which we released on the And to the Disciples that Remain compilation, she here provides us with a rearranged treatment of that song, which along with "Prisms" opens the folk idiom into a new minimalist terrain. We've been waiting more than ten years to explore this sonic space, which in music industry dog years, amounts to almost two centuries. This full-length is well worth the wait. (Amish Records)