New - Donovan, Mike - Meets The Mighty Flashlight - LP

Since 2011, Mike Donovan has been a Drag City stalwart, first with Sic Alps, then as a solo and with The Peacers — but Mike “The Mighty Flashlight” Fellows has been a behind-the-scenes figure at Drag City since the early early days, playing live and on record with Royal Trux, Silver Jews and Will Oldham. A multi-hyphenate, Fellows has also contributed to releases from Endless Boogie, Pigeons, Weeping Bong Band and Prison in recent years. So when these two rambling musicians found themselves in adjacent communities in upstate New York, Mike D brought Mike F into the process of his new solo album.

The two-Mike combination makes this fourth Donovan solo album hit all kinds of high-watermarks! Playing in the cracked kingdom of sound and the garden of verse, the Mighty Flashlight alternately accents and balances Mike’s eccentricities with his playing and knob-spinning. With the Flashlight shining bright upon him, Donovan’s serpentine path becomes ever so much more elastic, heightened from line to line, change to change, its motility creating different shapes in our ears. The Mighty Flashlight's own kind of stereo imagining informs Donovan’s smoky subterranean haze with additional depth of field, while still allowing all the wayward details within the arrangement to diverge as one.

On the lead single "Planet Metley", Mike and the Mighty Flashlight draw bonus color out of the sooty stomp that has typified Mike D’s music. Donovan’s acid tongue guides us through a hard-stereo maze of glammy, garagy psych-rock, his falsetto vocals floating dreamily, then cutting like diamond on glass. Mike and Mighty wind it up all together!