GEOLOGIST - Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights?

After the recent collaboration with Doug Shaw (“A Shaw Deal” dates back to 2025), Geologist finally puts his name to his first proper solo album. “Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights?” isn't a debut in the classic sense, but rather the result of a long sedimentation: decades of underground work, side contributions, and sonic explorations carried out at the margins of one of the most influential bands in contemporary experimental indie. Brian Weitz, long a low-key presence within Animal Collective, chooses here to take center stage without giving up his elusive nature, crafting a record that rejects song form, immediate hooks, and any hint of pop accessibility.

The sonic heart of the album is the hurdy gurdy - an ancient, stubbornly anti-modern instrument - which Weitz uses not as a mere tonal curiosity but as a true compositional engine. Its continuous drones, by turns abrasive or hypnotic, become the foundation onto which processed electronics, irregular percussion, and instrumental interventions are grafted, oscillating between oblique jazz, deformed post-punk, ritual minimalism, and desert psychedelia. More than a collection of songs, "Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights?" presents itself as an open mental map, a flow of states and images that follow one another without ever seeking traditional narrative coherence.

The opener "Oracle Road" immediately makes the intentions clear: sounds accumulating through friction, rhythms slowly emerging from an indistinct magma, a constant sense of instability. From here on, each track seems to explore a different possibility within the same base material. "Tonic" pushes the hurdy gurdy toward almost rock territory, treating it like a distorted guitar, while "Not Trad" emphasizes its more ceremonial, spectral side, letting the drone expand until it becomes an overwhelming presence. On "RV Envy" the album reaches one of its peaks of tension, with a nervous interweaving of corroded synths and rhythms that brush against the most hallucinated jazz-funk.

There's no shortage, however, of moments of apparent suspension. The lengthy "Compact Mirror/Last Names" stretches time until it edges into ambient territory, proceeding through slow layering and subtle timbral shifts, while "Color In The B&W" works by subtraction, letting minimal details emerge over an almost motionless structure. It's in these passages that the record risks coming across more as a soundtrack in search of images than as a self-sufficient work, but it's also here that the idea of music as a mental space to traverse manifests itself most clearly.

"Government Job" represents a significant anomaly: the entrance of acoustic guitar, played by Weitz's son, introduces a human, imperfect, deliberately unfinished element that breaks through the dominant abstraction. It's an intimate gesture, one that reinforces the album's personal dimension without turning it into explicit confession. The record closes with "Sonora", a track that synthesizes many of the preceding tensions and returns them in a more compact form, where kraut-rock and medieval drone coexist in a surprisingly natural way.

Overall, "Can I Get A Pack Of Camel Lights?" is a work that demands time and attention. It doesn't try to please, nor to impress with radical gestures: its strength lies rather in the coherence of a vision that embraces discontinuity, indecision, even a certain structural roughness. It's an album that can be tough going, at times unfocused, but one that rewards patient listening with a rare sense of creative freedom. More than a debut, it's a belated but necessary statement: proof that sonic exploration, when authentic, needs no justification and no compromise.

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12/02/2026