Sixteen years between albums is Guns N’ Roses territory. But that’s how long Masters Of Reality frontman and psychedelic desert-blues swami Chris Goss has spent holed up in his California bunker, like a mystical Axl Rose, making The Archer, only the seventh Masters Of Reality album in a career that stretches back to the beginning of the 80s. A gestation that lengthy can result in a corpulent blowout, but The Archer is anything but. Instead, it’s lean, graceful and magnificent.
It drifts in like a cloud with the title track, Goss’s clear and high voice floating gently on top of it as guitars and gentle percussion stir the strangeness. There’s a sense of uneasy dislocation amid its beauty, a Masters Of Reality hallmark that reappears on the haunted cowboy ballad Powder Man, where he sounds like a singer echoing down from decades ago.
Goss is a master shape-shifter, to the point where it makes his music impossible to pin down. The see-sawing Chicken Little has the same dizzying effect as staring up at a wide-open sky for a little too long; an electrical charge of guitar cuts through the malevolence of Mr Tap’N’Go; It All Comes Back To You drapes gypsy guitar around an effortlessly mighty chorus.
There’s a whiff of the lysergic to it all, or maybe it’s Goss’s fondness for astral travelling – or so he insists – that make these songs start in one place and end up somewhere completely different.
The Archer is an old-school album timewise, just nine tracks and 39 minutes. Experienced producer that he is (clients and compadres include Kyuss and Queens Of The Stone Age), Goss has resisted the temptation to turn on the firehose and let everything he’s recorded gush out brainlessly. It feels like these songs have been nurtured and crafted, carefully sculptured by the hand of a man who knows exactly what he wants them to be. Maybe more bands should try it.
Anyone who has followed Masters Of Reality’s stop-start career since the late 80s, when they were briefly and unhappily Rick Rubin’s pet blues-rock magicians, knows what to expect, which is Chris Goss sounding like no one else but Chris Goss. The Archer doesn’t step out of line with regard to their own albums, but it’s at a right angle to everyone else’s. Long may he continue to confound.
