Jazz-fusion and Krautrock are known for occasionally coalescing into brilliant crossover bands and projects when the stars are right, but Sυиbiяds's uncanny craft with flute/guitar emphasis at the height of the early 70's is the kind of reckoning you need to hear to believe. Remember to pick your jaw up off the floor before you go!
Sweden is no stranger to great metal from a variety of disciplines, but this is a sheer dose of layered magnificence from a band nobody saw coming. Think Devin Townsend circa Ocean Machine: Biomech with a heavy dose of classic early 90's Dream Theater and you've got nigh-quantum perfection in the fabled year of 2012. Eat 'er up while she's hot!
The music industry has screwed over many a fine band for the last couple of decades, but in the case of late-90's power pop/alternative mega-act Veяtical Hoяizon it was downright pathetic. Despite 1999's Everything You Want going double platinum, RCA Records ended up restructuring and lost these guys in the shuffle, pushing the band into uncharted independent territory...
Nine years and one record later, Burning The Days validates frontman Matt Scannell as one helluva force to be reckoned with in the fickle world of radio rock, and the fact that 80's AOR star Richard Marx and Rush drummer Neil Peart got involved here in various ways makes the package even more awesome. 'Save Me From Myself' and electrified opening number 'All Is Said And Done' bring the bacon mightily as far as VH's classic high-wired take on alternative tinged-power pop goes, but even the mid-tempo cuts like 'Afterglow' pack a real wallop once you cross the bridge.
It's funny really: my own tastes musically have diversified to the point of insanity over the last 10-15 years, but this band remains, for me, the kind of childhood remnant you just can't shake because your very ears seem attuned to their special brand of jangly sunshine. Can't wait to hear what they do next!
One of the most promising artists associated with Windham Hill Records, Jεff Ostεя is a fantastically forward thinking trumpeter and flugelhorn player who dabbles in deep electronic texturing and experimentation to give his horn-led compositions an almost supernatural edge that most traditional cats in the greater jazz stratosphere are missing out on.
On that note, his latest release Surrender was perhaps the best jazz-anything to come out last year, giving folks such as Nils Petter Molvaer and The Submotion Orchestra a real run for their money in sheer sumptuousness. Cruise-perfect cuts like the danceable 'The Theology Of Success', Trip-hop friendly title track and even 70's-feelin' fanfare of 'Essence Of Herb' turned my afternoon jog into a golden, harmonious dreamscape where shadows wither and writhe under still light. One can only imagine what something this killer could do for a mind at rest!
I won't be the first to say this, but the good voodoo doctor has proven to be a fine musical cure to many a folk's musical malaise over the decades: got a taste for some jazzy Happy Hour blues? 1978's City Lights cleans your clock all nice and spiffy-like. Feeling strange and swamped? '71's The Sun, Moon & Herbs will haunt you long after the thunder stops a'rollin'.
That being said, The Night Tripper really outdid himself here. A fresh, young ensemble cast brings the spookier elements out into the open against a plethora of bone-tight grooves and plenty of other meaty embellishments that, if nothing else, will take you out of your head and deep into the bayou where you belong. Monstrously good!
After singlehandedly redefining the violin for all jazz-fusion heads everywhere back in the 70's as part of Mahavishnu Orchestra and via some classic solo records of his own, Monsieur Ponτy steered his ship to new waters in the advent of the 80's, pushing the boundaries of just how far one could take experimental synth-violin in an era where, surprisingly....nobody had really tried yet.
The title track on this late-80's gem of his should be indicative enough at just how monstrously successful some of these experiments were, but I digress: if you be a'lookin' for smooth jazz that bores you out of your skull and doesn't hypnotize and amaze in equal measure, you are looking in the wrong freakin' place.
Vintage dub from a different time and place than today. John Peel was pretty nuts about this record, which doesn't surprise much: the beats and samples are chosen and contextualized to a peerless degree, unrivaled in the realms of 90's synthesisia until the arrival DJ Shadow and his ilk nearly half a decade down the line, with some of the downtempo cuts such as the sublime 'Out Of Heaven' and the cooly skitterish 'Cave Of Angels' coming off as downright prophetic in retrospect.
Finland's top rock band export since 2003, an unarguable point at this stage in the their career. Ever since tracks like 'The Last Goodbye' became a thematic focal point for Max Payne 2 way back when, this bunch has been releasing great album after great album of lofty, electronic-tinged modern rock, and this year's newest addition is no exception to that tradition. It's got a bit of everything: ballads with a sense of place and time (title track), mid tempo gems that burn the highway ('The Distance', 'The Lie Eternal') and even some groomed for radio showstoppers ('Running Out Of Time', 'Kamikaze Love') to seal the deal. Absolutely stellar!
Prime time early 80's Westcoast, and perhaps one of the best in the whole genre when taken from beginning to end. Hi-fi power pop along the lines of 'She's Still Mine' kicks things off toward the atmospheric snazzfest 'Midnight Rendezvous' and Toto-ish 'Wrong Side Of The Tracks', two immortal cuts which cook Side B into a feast for the senses...with the added bonus of making this a must-have for the pop aficionado.
London's resident monarch of mellow has a prodigiously large discography of slick masterpieces at hand for any intrepid explorer in the regions of smooth, jazz and electronica, but this 2010 release from his Jazzmasters project is about as fine a gateway as you'll stumble across in such a search. My nods cutwise go to 'Solar Sky' and 'Touch And Go', which serve as suave and stupidly cool soundtrack material to an ocean sunset watch circa 1998.
A cool night wind from Europe's reigning despot of dark, trumpeting improvisations. His horn is the high beam of a transcontinental locomotive, and your ears are like the clouded murk that hides the rails in the wake of its passing.
Some of the musical world's more brilliant musical gems can be uncovered, it seems, after watching too many dubbed Dragon Ball Z films as a kid. This, my chums, is a prime example of such: one of those early 2000's post-grunge debuts which actually delivers something quite listenable without coming off as half-assed like most of its ilk.
The pros? Rough-round-the-edges production, great hooks, the absence of your usual cringeworthy lyrics and a refreshing lack of pretension. It's the sort of modern rock you could see yourself making AMVs around on Adobe Flash for the hell of it and not feel like a tool doing so. Shit, songs like 'Phoenix' and the title track almost make you want to believe there was hope for post-grunge a decade ago, that maybe a whole bunch of bands would take a cue from Breaking Point here and do something engaging with the established formula.
No such luck for the most part, but Coмing Of Agε gets points for trying quite hard to set the right precedent. For a couple of songs, at least, the potential of something more becomes a self contained reality.
