New album from The Thing, their 20th. Mats Gustafsson already showed up in my ear earlier this month with Chaos Echoes, here's his punk/jazz trio. This record features three tracks, the 21-minute "Sur Face" (written by Gustafsson), Frank Rowe's "Decision in Paradise" (featuring Joe McPhee) and "Vicky Di", written by bassist Ingebrigt HÃ¥ker Flaten. Paal Nilssen-Love rounds out the trio on drums. "Sur Face" is the meat of this record and it's a gem of a composition - it starts slow and builds with plenty of ebbs and flows to a crashing climax, with lengthy passages for Nilssen-Love and Flaten to stretch out. Flaten's solo in particular is a memorable, groove-y near call-and-response thing before Nilssen-Love takes over and eventually rains down armageddon. I wasn't too cazy about their take on "Decision in Paradise", a stretched, tense affair, and "Vicky Di" features Gustafsson on soprano sax skronking away and Flaten on electric bass. It's a good track but can't touch the pure rock fury of "Sur Face".
I keep up with Sunburned only intermittently these days, they seem to be taking a more rock-ist approach lately. Like this one. Each track is about 4-5 minutes of pretty ramshackle, jammy, funky, boogie rock...almost spoiled by the throaty, beery vocals shouted over the top of each one of these tunes with nonsensical platitudes. I almost shut it off after a couple tracks but I stuck it out and kinda came around on some level. I was oddly reminded of My War era Black Flag sludge punk. The band sez "these Holy Grail fueled recordings are a mix of iphone and zoom recordings run through garageband, reaper and some plug-ins. We're still working on the much more listener-friendly Black Dirt session..." and point taken, listener friendly this ain't.
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