When I first fell into my lifelong obsession with music as a child, it was a portal for my overactive imagination to run rampant, wild, boundaryless in its aimless meandering and exploration. An endless feast for our infinite minds to wander, and indeed wonder, without restriction. Limitless indulgence in feelings of euphoria, nostalgia, giddy exhilaration, rage, fantasy, ecstatic laughter / ecstatic peace, and above all else, imagination. I speak for myself, of course, but needless to say, music, when it truly hits, is an explosion in my mind, in my body, in the essence of my being, eliciting feelings and emotions hitherto unfelt, and taking me to places that no story, however fantastic, has taken me. Eternal Current has immersed me once again in this wide-eyed, boundless universe of imaginative abandon. The Modern Folk, true and fearless explorers of the art of manipulating frequency, sound, tape and binary code to venture the sonic seas of our musical past, future, and the endless possibilities of our imagination, are here presented in a fidelity befitting of such auditory marauders. God bless Rob "secretly wants to be famous" Vaughn, who has captured and engineered this mutinous crew of democratically cobbled troubadours, tricksters, and tummlers, and massaged out what is undoubtedly the finest sounding Modern Folk record to date. But man... the songs on this thing... you're not gonna believe them (this is what the people are saying, not me mind you, the experts, who know more than you or I do about these things, although no one knows more about these things than me, as you know). The joyful buoyancy, the ramshackle eddies, and the feeling of sailing an unexplored sea to find lands and pleasures unbeknownst to the most discerning of tongues (and, of course, ears). It opens with the glorious nylon-string picking of goddamn guitar god, William DeLee, who buggers it up and sends the listener careening into the queasy glory of Harvest Song. And whatever the harvest in question may be, it sounds well fermented, and even weller consumed. Antietam Creek sounds as eternal as the current for which the album is named; a melody worthy of the Smithsonian canon of American music exhumed from the brown earth, mud and rivers of the USA in its most Mark Twainian of incarnations. Apple Frickers zwings and twings with some killer sounds for the audiophiles who love themselves a weird goddamn noise (that in this case, somewhat spectacularly serves the song). Soldier's Joy resuscitates another melody that sounds as authentically American as your local newsreader hitting you with notice of yet another fuel price increase due to some unwarranted (and almost certainly illegal) interference in the middle east. Jitterdickin is called Jitterdickin. Lewis River is a personal favourite track of glorious, introspective noodling, expanding the mind and really pushing that imagination out to deeper waters. Followed by the similarly gloriously ramshackle canoodlings of the aptly titled Stargazing, which descends into chaos, and brings the album to its majestic closer of (actual canonical song) Amazing Grace. And the grace is as amazing as it comes. Flip that vinyl disc over and venture out to sea again, my friend. I'll see you on the cosmic current of eternity. - Duncan Park