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Oh don’t get me wrong. Its not a bad album. In fact, there’s quite a lot to like about it. Former Mystery bass player Richard Addison has assembled a crack group of prog and jazz musicians for his project and, quite frankly, they play like a bunch of crack studio musicians. The album oozes chops. More specifically, it oozes jazzy chops. It absolutely oozes them. I had to wipe the ooze off the tray of my CD player. How an album that is so cleanly produced could give off such ooze is beyond me. And, when you get right down to it, there really is quite a lot of good composition on the album too. The frenetic bass and hard-edged, jagged guitar lines manage to recall King Crimson and Return to Forever at the same time. Nowhere is this clearer than in “Le Grand-be (Wrath Of Chateaubriand)” on which, after setting up the bass-guitar dynamic, Philippe Lauzier’s saxophone nearly shrieks a lead line and Luc Aubry’s keyboards provide a haunting background. At its best, on the opening track “Sleepwalking” and the closing track “Controlled Freedom,” the compositions on the album are compelling and confident. At times the pieces plough well-worn Fusion Jazz territory, at times they are a bit proggier, at times a bit funkier. And yet sometimes this is the album’s weakness. It seems to smack too much of trying to be all things to all people. Is it a jazz album? Is it a prog album? Is it fusion jazz or is it Canterbury? And yet it is not exactly something new either. The basic problem is that Addison does not seem to have figured out what the goal of his project was. Perhaps that can be his next project. Aaron Jazy / Prog4u (October 2003) |
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