Dean McPhee’s Astral Gold Is a Must-Listen

An instrumental album has few avenues to convey its theme. There are, obviously, no lyrics to convey ideas complex or otherwise. The listener is, at best, left with album and song titles and the music itself. Rare, then, is the instrumental album which is able to explore its theme in a way that is coherent to both artist and listener.

Such an album is Dean McPhee’s Astral Gold, which was released by the Bass Ritual label February 16, and what an exemplary album it is.

Astral Gold is the music that occupies the mind of the Voyager 2 probe on its interstellar wend across the Milky Way, where it wonders when, if and where he make its landfall.

This is the music of space, in all its definitions. Yes, there are songs called “Cosmos,” “Neptune,” and “Lunar Fire.” The titles of the rest evoke similar stirrings in the imagination. Yes, the title of the album is Astral Gold.

Here’s the thing, though. The music on this record, the tones themselves, are given their own space to expand and, if not breathe, dissipate into the ether. Now that I think of it, “Ether” is the name of the second track on the album.

Bias confession: I have long been a fan of McPhee’s music. He plays a Fender Telecaster through some pedals and a pair of amps and that is his entire rig, other than a slide, an E-bow and a kick pedal. He frequently uses tunings other than E Standard. His music has always been evocative, sublime and – in a manner of speaking – spiritual. His music presumes the idea that Man has not the faculties to know or discover all that is.

This is right and just.

All of his recordings are a single take. He is a virtuoso when it comes to using a looper and layering ideas upon its contents. Though they, no doubt, require a great amount of forethought, his tunes come to the listener as whole beings, seemingly effortlessly made.

“Lunar Fire” contains an unusual-for-him-addition of including a recording of a fire made on his phone.

The above track is particularly of interest as it was one of the one third of the tracks which had not been previously released. This is remarkable given the cohesive nature and coherent theme of this album: The notion that McPhee contributed to other themed projects whilst also creating his own – and doing it so well – is baffling.

This album does not contain, in this reviewer’s mind, his crowning single tracks.

Those would be “Rule of Threes,” from 2018’s Four Stones, 

And “The Alchemist,” found on 2021’s Witch’s Ladder.

However, is this album an incredible musical statement exploring a theme of space not as a place but as an idea? Absolutely.

All of which I’ve said without mentioning how incredible the final track, “The Sediment of Creation,” is. It begins with a sparse drum and bass loop which is then layered with guitar, building to a moaning, crying climax.

I cannot recommend this, or any of McPhee’s albums, enough: It’s music for the part of your soul you lose touch with in the workaday world.

As with all of McPhee’s music, the songs on Astral Gold are meditations by way of guitar.