Send "Amen Dunes " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Most of what I said about Damon McMahon's last album as Amen Dunes, 2009's DIA, can be said about his newest, Through Donkey Jaw. He's still making muffled, eerie pop akin to the private visions of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence and the homemade pop of New Zealand artisans Alastair Galbraith and Graeme Jefferies. His voice is still central, filled with downbeat subtlety, and his songs still mix classic melody and fuzzy obscurity in a way that's both focused and loosely inspired.There's something different about Through Donkey Jaw, though. Its 14 songs are sharper and fuller, with quicker access to your brain's pleasure center. The simple explanation would be that McMahon formed a band upon moving back to America from China after the release of DIA, which would iikely make his songs sound bigger. But my guess is his improvement comes from something even simpler-- just by keeping at it, McMahon naturally got better at what he already did well. Whatever the reason, Through Donkey Jaw's forward steps are apparent immediately on hypnotic opener "Baba Yaga". Over a trembling guitar line and primitive drumming, McMahon moves gradually from a solemn moan to a possessed croon. "You know that I, I lie," he howls, as if he's not so much admitting this to someone as figuring it out himself. Similar introspection recurs throughout the record. "I don't knock on no doors/ I'm quietly shared/ I'm for people who know," he chants on "Christopher", over a wash of beat and reverb that's like a tangent to the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows"....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| Back in 2009, Amen Dunes’ Dia felt like a god-damned godsend. Damon McMahon appeared seemingly out of nowhere (untrue, naturally: like any good savior, he’d been puttering along unnoticed for years with Inouk and as himself), saw the flood in that year of Merriweather Post Pavilion, and built an Ark with two of practically every creature that seemed worth keeping: blind and incoherent surf-punk that shits in the mouth of any Best Coast; lonely-as-a-dust-mite Anaasheed; spindly “Space Prophet Dogon” aping riffage 'n' ramshack; clacking wooden-clockwork drones; and, holy hell, when you least expect it, extraordinarily fine troubadour-folk. We were flushed: fractured listen though Dia may have been, it was sequenced to tickle and its osmotic changelings were swaddled in a devil-may-care gauze. The album meant a lot then, and it means more each subsequent year. To the attentive ear, Amen Dunes' first proper follow-up Through Donkey Jaw feels like the slightest jerk of the wrist, but I’m forbidding myself to sell it as any kind of a reigning-in or compromise. Because it still sounds like nothing else. McMahon is, more than ever now, doing for psych what everyone told me Dungen was doing for psych back in 2004 — but with all due respect, I’ve put some recent Dungen stuff on Mother’s Day mixtapes, and Through Donkey Jaw makes vanilla crossover sound like a flat-out logistic impossibility. How is it that, against all odds, McMahon totally owns the music that he produces? Far fewer tracks on Through Donkey Jaw complicate this question than did those on Dia: opener “Baba Yaga” alone compounds in less than five minutes a huge chunk of what we might've realized we loved about the guy. I could be talking about his guitar, reverb’d to such oblivion that his idea to multitrack it all over the place amounts to sonic fingerpainting, but no: the issue always resolves to That Voice. People hear all sorts of associations inside McMahon’s voice. I’ve already committed the crime of evoking the Middle East, a sure sign of pasty ethnocentrism if I’ve ever seen one, but one could just as easily/problematically evoke bestial oblivion, an unhelpfully broad lineage of art-pop vocalists from Bush to Björk to Buckley (erm, Tim), the Banshee or somesuch fantastical creature, ‘otherworldly,’ or Motherfucker Just Can’t Sing. The last one might actually be the most accurate — the rest a colorful array of kneejerk responses to Bocce microtones —but there’s nary a drunken escapade in the world that sees that festering, choir-evading kid sing at you with such flavor. McMahon’s got the same relationship to language as Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, who used to sing her syllables like Shaker exsufflations, and in that light his words are useless until long after they’ve had their impact. (Part of the reason it’s such a relief that he doesn’t sing words on the CD-only bonus “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which is of course therefore a delight: a 10-minute acknowledgment of legacy over melody/lyric.) Without getting into a big puffball debate about the merits of ‘outsider’ art, that gluey melody in “Not a Slave,” which seems to expand and contract like yellow wallpaper and eventually curls into thicker scrolls, could frankly not have been the product of study....full text |
| Kexp |
| As major labels continue to exist behind the times, artists and labels with little capital and lesser reputations are producing some of the most innovative, interesting, and inspiring music. Whether it’s creating a new niche in digital technology or looking to once obsolete formats, Agitated Atmosphere hopes to pull back the curtain on a wealth of sights and sound from luminaries such as Amen Dunes. Mysticism shrouds the sparse, humble arrangements of Damon McMahon’s return as Amen Dunes. The man who left behind his adopted home of Beijing is just as well known for holing up in the Catskills to pound out the confessional DIA. The hard boiled psychedelia confronted McMahon’s isolation, exposing it for an audience that may not have been prepared for such strange meditations. But the gods have been kind to McMahon in the interim, blessing him with slow-building buzz that has bubbled beneath the surface as he continued to ply his craft. The spiritual and psychedelic combine on McMahon’s latest (via Sacred Bones), Through Donkey Jaw....full text |
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