New History Warfare Vol.2: Judges
Label: Constellation
Format: CD
Country: Canada
Released: 2011
Genre: Jazz, Rock
Style: Experimental, Ambient, Minimalist
Most of you friends probably won't like this album. Yeah, this album is dark, sad and claustrophobic.
All files are MP3 320kpbs compressed from pure FLAC.
All files are MP3 320kpbs compressed from pure FLAC.
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Most solo saxophone albums I've heard have two traits in common. First, they generally pull heavily from free jazz, and, second, they usually play like a single continuous stream (at least within each track). Colin Stetson's new album, which is largely a solo saxophone album (excepting some guest vocals on a handful of tracks), has neither of these traits. It's emphasis on trance-like repetition is as far as can be from free jazz, and it's a very dense album. Every song has numerous layers (not achieved through loops or overdubs), created by Stetson tapping the keys rhythmically, singing into the saxophone, and any number of other unconventional means of playing his instrument.
On the subject of singing into the saxophone, this is responsible for many of the album's most powerful moments, most notably on The Stars in His Head, which builds to a feverish emotional intensity through Stetson's wailing (all while he maintains a steady pulse underneath).
Where guest vocals are present, they are generally quite effective. Laurie Anderson takes center stage on A Dream of Water, commanding attention with her characteristic spoken word. Her performance is tense—individual lines are hurried, but are separated by long pauses. A choice line: "There were strangers and con men." Behind her, Stetson is appropriate urgent. On Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes (a stellar cover), Stetson backs up the lyrics, beautifully sung by Shara Worden, by clearly sniffling with his saxophone. Here, as elsewhere, Stetson brings his saxophone remarkably close to sounding literally human, to riveting emotional effect.
Some people whose musical taste I respect have described this album as messy and aimless. I see it as very deliberately composed and structured, with a clear arc carrying across the album (but see my note below), so these criticisms have baffled me somewhat. However, I believe I may have found some attributes of the album that account for it. Most notably, there is a lot of sound here, doing many different things, all coming from one instrument. Probably in large part because of inherent limitations of producing all of this sound from a single saxophone, very little is neatly delineated. Sounds spill out over the sides, bleeding from one function to another. All of the boundaries are blurry—there is no point where the sounds clearly stop serving one role and start serving another. The album exists entirely in shades of grey in this respect. I find the effect quite colorful, but I can see how it would come across as sloppy or messy to some listeners.
The one flaw that I do see with this album is that, by the end (about the final third), it starts to feel a bit repetitive. The songs that end the album are not particularly of lower quality (though the highlights are congregated toward the beginning), but rather they rely on the very same tools as the earlier songs (see, for instance, how the sniffling effect reappears on the closer, in a less effective context). These songs don't detract from the album so much as they simply don't add much. By the end, an otherwise restless album has somewhat disappointingly settled into a static comfort zone.
Review by The_Irrealist
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