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Android Trio – Other Worlds – (Cuneiform Records) –

Now  this is a serious set of shots fired, this is Turner firing his shot past Constable’s ear at that Academy hang, that’s a big viridian red splay of oil paint right there, this, without even trying to, puts all those math rock wannabes right in their place. The wonderful new album from Android Trio is a thrilliant ride, Max Kutner, Eric Klerks and Andrew Niven, virtuosos all, is serious progressive rock in every sense. They have a pedigree of course, we’re talking “no-holds-barred experimentation while playing in one or both of two of the great legacy bands of progressive music: The Grandmothers of Invention, who specialize in the reinvention of the Frank Zappa/Mothers of Invention repertoire, and The Magic Band, John “Drumbo” French’s uncannily inspired tribute to the music of his mentor and monster, Don “Captain Beefheart” Van Vliet”.

“There is another legacy link here in the presence of co-producer, keyboardist, and guitarist Mike Keneally, who was Zappa’s “stunt soloist” during the late 1980s, as well as a great composer and songwriter in his own right” and once again, this being late 2021, we don’t need to write bucket loads of word soup, we just need to throw up the links, give you the sign posts and let you go explore for yourselves, you surely know by now how picky we are, we only feature the best on these fractured pages, there’s a good chunk of the album there on Bandcamp and hey, if you like what you hear, support the label and musicians, buy the beautiful thing.  And do let the chunk you can hear flow, Miscellany B will take you in a slightly different direction when you might just have thought you has it all worked out, the whole album does keep shirting sideways in a rewardingly unobvious way. Rewarding Instrumental math flavoured jazz infused progressive rock that really doesn’t need any of those labels, and let be be franks here, I find most so-called math rock, especially instrumental math rock rather cold and tediously boring, I love this, it sounds big, it thinks big, it is big…  More via the label’s Bandcamp page

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Ghost Rhythms – Spectral Music (Cuneiform Records) – Now this demands of you from the off and when that trumpet announces itself some forty seconds the band have you completely won over – not that their demanding was of a difficult nature, more something that demands you delight in paying full attention to the flow and interaction, in the fluid was it all weave as each instruments steps forward and then drops back again in such a warm inciting way.  I don’t really know where we are here and it really doesn’t matter, prog rock? Jazz fusion? it is about the fluid exchanges, about the beautiful forward movement, the flow (and he glow), the clever flow, never too clever, these are music makers too good to need to show off technique or any of that nonsence, it just flows in a gloriously natural way, an easy way, it is all very very easy on the ear, complex but easy.

“Spectral Music is Ghost Rhythms’ second release on Cuneiform Records after 2019’s Live at Yoshiwara, a live album consisting almost entirely of new material, and is their sixth full-length studio effort. After delegating much of the writing on Yoshiwara to their bandmates, the band’s leaders, drummer Xavier Gélard and pianist Camille Petit were back firmly at the helm”

Gélard had toyed with the idea of using the title Spectral Music for a while, but it only began to make sense conceptually during the writing process. However, the real theme of the album, remoteness and telepathy, came late in the process. The parallel with the current Covid crisis was of course not lost on Gélard and Petit. “This is the second album we have made remotely due to the current situation. We’ve always used overdubbing in our recordings, but never to quite that extent. The process suggested another parallel – the notion that modern technology (the Internet of course but you could argue it really began with the telephone), creates an illusion that distance is abolished. For me it’s not so much communication as a form of fake telepathy. If anything, technology actually reinforces the sense of remoteness. At least that’s the way I felt during the process of making albums that way.” .

And thankfully you don’t need to read any of this and we don’t have to spend time trying to dance around it, cut to the chase, here;s the Bandcamp page and all you need to hear, see and know, our work is done here, go treat yourself…

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Accordo dei Contrari – UR (Cuneiform Records) -A fifth studio album from Accordo dei Contrari, we’re told it ha” one simple yet ambitious goal: to make music that was “original, challenging, and beautiful at the same time”. I think they succeeded. Cuneiform are always a label worth checking out, even by their usual high standards, the long-standing  Washington DC label has been on top form recently. UR is yet another thrilling ride, a beautiful ride, id it is challenging then it is challenging in the most positive of ways, we’re talking flights of a Mahavishnu Orchestra nature, we’re talking beautiful details, undercurrents, counterbalances, we’re talking flow that flows against the flow and flows so well, we’re talking more powerful instrumental prog rock in the proper deliciously self-indulgent  sense once again go explore… 

Bandcamp

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And while we’re here, did you catch last night’s Other Rock Show?

Marina Organ presents an hour of music that uses unconventional structures and ‘other’ time signatures – gathered from the worldwide undergrounds of math rock, avant prog, weird electronica and strange pop. This episode features music from Lozenge, Android Trio, Gentle Giant, Franz Yusef, Wippy Bonstack, and Accordo DeiContrari…