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.
