CORESPONDENTS
HAIRY GHOST PIPEFISH
NOISE|ORDER
WORDS: LOGAN HALLEY-WINSETT

Here’s how I see it. Corespondents got lost in the Midwest with nothing but their guitars, playing their way into hotels and motels and the crevices of canyons. Along the way they met ghosts of cowboys, fellow drifters, and a lot of new friends. From this was born the debut album Hairy Ghost Pipefish. The Seattle based group may not have been stranded in the deserts of America, but they spent nine meticulous months writing, recording, and mixing the album, which bears evidence of this attention and care. With its acoustic twangs and slide riffs, Hairy Ghost Pipefish feels like an exploration of the expansive parts of the mind. The listener visualizes Great Plains and rolling hillsides with the camera panning lazily. This album feels like a plaintive Western movie that moves slowly, but beautifully, through a series of characters and landscapes that seem unchanging but really have great depth.

“Crowning” marries blood curdling screams with a beautiful melody, granting the song a heart-breaking power and twisting the mood from swaying fields to nervous sadness. The album moves fluidly from song to song with acoustic lines drifting through reminiscent of experimental indie group The Books. Like that duo, Corespondents consists of two members, Olie Eshleman and Doug Arney, but Hairy Ghost Pipefish features a plethora of guests stars that spice things track-by-track.

Their label, noise|order records, released an accompanying DVD of short films made by the band members members and contributors on the album to be projected behind the band at shows and add another texture to their performance and to the album. However, with images of stop motion buffalo charging through the countryside and toy people sinking underwater, the videos don’t add anything to the music that we didn’t imagine already. Hairy Ghost Pipefish is a soundtrack to the old Westerns in our heads.