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New Music Monday: The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger (The GOASTT – Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl)

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Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger Midnight Sun Artwork “The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger is Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl. Lennon, as you may know, is the only child of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Muhl is a successful fashion model and Lennon’s significant other of eight years … although it may have taken him thirty-eight years to do it, Sean Lennon may finally be moving on with his music. He has always made a fairly valiant effort to carry his legacy forward in interesting ways, to explore his very personal relationship with his near-mythical father in a very public manner. But Midnight Sun is his own musical statement, in his own voice, and one of the best recordings he’s ever made.”  – NPR First Listen

On April 29th, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger (The GOASTT) released Midnight Sun, a guided tour of bold, shape-shifting sonic murals and evocative lyrical panoramas. Plucking musical ingredients from all over the map, the album has a highly imaginative and distinct feel. It celebrates the unusual and the grandiose but fundamentally just rocks hard and feels good. Like the hero in the album’s melancholy “Don’t Look Back Orpheus” who takes a journey into a dreamlike underworld, the listener embarks on an auditory voyage of soaring whimsical keyboards and crunching space-age guitars that blends original melodies with kaleidoscopic freakouts. Midnight Sun injects a surreal landscape with colorful, classic hooks.

With an infectious sense of adventure akin to Beck and Flaming Lips, and several years of touring and recording under their belt, the GOASTT takes their creative and savvy approach to psychedelia to new extremes. The ambitious songs flow cleverly together with unexpected ease to tell a vivid and provocative story.

Familiar yet compelling, visceral and vital, Midnight Sun is at once a response to the bizarre world we’ve inherited and helped to create, and a refreshing escapist daydream that, if not hopeful, is keenly insightful. The GOASTT has given us a record that is poised to be a postmodern-psychedelic classic.

The Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger has been busy since their debut. The band toured with The Flaming Lips and Tame Impala, performed at the Hollywood Bowl with Jean-Claude Vannier and released a Record Store Day vinyl EP entitled La Carotte Bleue. Muhl released an EP with her teenage folk duo Kemp & Eden, who also performed in the film Greetings From Tim Buckley. Lennon, meanwhile, released a record by his experimental duo Mystical Weapons with Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, a film score to the indie comedy Alter Egos and produced the new album by Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band.

Purchase Midnight Sun over at iTunes, or Amazon!

www.thegoastt.com

Dave Sanford
Former Digital Trends Contributor
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