Album Review: Photos of Photos by Carlton Melton

For this reviewer’s unpopular money, Pink Floyd only made two truly great; transcendental songs. But the fact remains that 'Careful With That Axe, Eugene' and 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' are two of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard. So it’s somewhat mystifying that so much of the rest of their catalogue does so very little for me by way of comparison.

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On their third album, Carlton Melton stake out their own space in the drone/stoner/psych/zoneout wing of things ever more clearly -- if the field is at this point a very familiar and full one, they actually make the effort to show why they're worth paying attention to across six often lengthy tracks. At points their approach is more like providing catnip to well-inclined fans, admittedly, as the nice noodling of "Wingspan" demonstrates, and the fact that they can demonstrate their abilities on shorter and gentler tracks is also worth noting. The title song is if anything about shimmering guitar bliss rather than skullcrushing riffs while steering away from immediate rhythms.

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Indulgence is an oft and unfairly maligned tendency in rock. Should a song dare to break the four minute barrier, or contain too many notes (or not enough), or in any way break from the blueprint, you’ll hear those mardy, unimaginative voices rise in disgust, their dull knives cutting always in the same direction. “Self-indulgent!” they cry, like they cried when 'Sister Ray' chugged so long the engineer quit the studio before anyone got to suck on any ding-dongs, like they cried when Rhys Chatham got those two gongs a-ringing like they’d never stop, like they cried when Sonic Youth’s 'The Diamond Sea' morphed with leisurely grace from Neil Young vamp into super-cosmische space-rock epic.

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