Throat
Throat
表演者: Little Women
流派: 摇滚
专辑类型: Import
介质: Audio CD
发行时间: 2010-04-13
唱片数: 1
出版者: AUM Fidelity
条形码: 0642623306123
专辑简介
Little Women is back with "Throat", an album that continues the direction set three years ago with their debut EP, "Teeth", with an interesting mix of hard guitars, interesting sound explorations on sax, and updating the jazz tradition by driving it headfirst into rock and noise. The label describes the music as a "brutally precise sonic assault and ascendant melodies, attacking written and improvised material with equal ferocity", which says it pretty well. Little Women is Travis Laplante on tenor sax, Darius Jones on alto, Andrew Smiley on guitar, and Jason Nazary on drums.
From the very first notes, you are pulled into high tempo power play, with blaring saxes, shrill guitar chords and shifting rhythms, with no real room for soloing. The third piece is even more violent and noisy, with Smiley's guitar screeching relentlessly, with the saxes keeping up the same high note throughout, and Nazary banging away, but then you get a clever mood shift towards the end, kind of introducing the more Ayleresque "Throat IV", revolving around a beautiful gospel-like melody, played by the two saxes, with one shifting from unison to dissonance and back, getting a full rock backing when guitar and drums join, driving the piece to an even higher level of exaltation, but when that's achieved, the piece is deconstructed into more dissonant and rebellious territory, before picking up again.
You get the picture: raw delivery, with subtlety present the whole time, even in the roughest parts, with a quite good balance between noise and gentleness, between anger and sensitivity, between rock and jazz.
The album ends like their debut album, without instruments, but with shouts by the four band members, crazy, mad, ferocious, animal-like, orgasmic (?), painful, whatever you hear into it, but listen carefully, and you will identify rhythm and structure.
Little Women spans the divide between the primitive and the sophisticated in a manner that's true of so few. For this, its second release, it's useful to offer pointers such as Albert Ayler and Peter Brotzmann (whose "Machine Gun" is particularly pertinent in terms of sonic assault), but they serve merely to place what this quartet does. This is, in short, statically visceral music with an agenda of its own.
In view of the band's assertion that this is a program designed to be listened to in one sitting, it seems a little impertinent to discuss highlights. The seven tracks that make up "Throat" seem a little arbitrary in view of the overall discontinuity of the release, but in as much as this is music which has no time for a lot of preconceptions, that might be an inherent part of the band's intentions. The opening is where the Brotzmann reference comes into its own, but before the piece is over, the music's headlong rush is reminiscent of a band called Truman's Water, whose take on guitar rock is as singular as anything here.
The third part is shot through with off-the-wall humour, with the music's headlong momentum simultaneously in thrall to the moment even while the sonic assault goes on. Jason Nazary's drumming, buried in a mix which serves above all else to depersonalise individual contributions, monkeys around with meter while Andrew Smiley on guitar shows himself to be a shredder of the type for whom the riff is something to be avoided at all costs, perhaps because it signifies only an established order that has long since outlived its capacity to shock.
"Throat IV" is as close as the music gets to reflective. The wired nobility of Darius Jones' alto sax and the tenor sax of Travis Laplante seems entirely at odds with the group's aesthetic but when the exposition evolves to take in the whole group, the level of interplay is such that the mood is maintained even while Smiley and Nazary get relatively hyperactive. By the time the track closes out however the effect is of static music purged of any meaning outside of the primal.
In view of what's preceded it, the vocal noises of "Throat VII" are a little anomalous. The collective gives 'throat' more to feral utterance than primal scream but this serves the purpose of taking down the density of the rest of the program, as if the band appreciates how difficult it is to get reconciled with dull reality.
曲目
Throat VII
关键词：Throat