The Morning Star

It's a gigantic leap forward for this "outsider" artist who already seemed to be several steps ahead of the norm. Granted, the primitive folk sound for which he's been known over the past few years has never really come close to any kind of mainstream, cookie-cutter sound, but here he sounds more like he's blazing his own trail that any other time before.

This is involving, immersive stuff, not for the faint-hearted, but its rewards are deep and wide.

The Morning Star is both an Exaltation of the Guitar and a magician’s vanishing act: Bachman himself, noise-man under the role of hypnotist, embracing chance and slippages and sloppiness and draperies.

Closing track “New Moon,” whose title signals the completion of a cycle and rebirth, might have come off as meandering and repetitive at the beginning of the record. But in its final moments, once you’ve adjusted your ears, Bachman’s delicate gestures sound at once extremely private and cosmically vast.

The Bachman you know is in here but submerged deep in the unfamiliar; it is not really until the two gorgeous “Song for the Setting Sun” cuts that you get an unobstructed view of the man and his guitar.