Adult Jazz are pleased to announce that their album is out on the 4th of August. It’s called ‘Gist Is’ and they’re proud as punch. For the past three years, the band has written and self-recorded their debut full-length at various locations around the beautiful Scottish Borders and in Leeds, where the band first took shape.
The band creates progressive song structures with complex compositions intended to explore the tensions between friendly pop sensibility and other, less common, features.
‘Spooks’ has now been released from the ‘Gist Is’ album. We had a listen:
Spooks starts tenderly – with a sense of unease about it … in no hurry at all.
Uncanny chimes combine together with sung notes, as the voice tippytoes around a forbidden room of sounds. The accompaniment grows furtively – cunning as a fox entering a prohibited area.
Soon the pace picks up and rhythms start to plastically expand – fillling the landscape with joyful patterings. Trumpets provide vivid orange rockets – and the angelic voice burnishes.
At about halfway the listener begins to realize that he/she is being directly spoken to. At this point, you will devote your full attention to the piece. But it still has far to go…
Later, a glandular guitar begins to weave around the sounds. The pace becomes a little more ‘poppy’ – but this is balanced by a counterweight of (what sounds like) a toucan-squeaking! A pounding drum emerges – and this goads the melody & the accompanying textures together. The ascending vocal overflows into spirituality – helped by the glittering peaks of guitar.
The final moments of this beautiful song are immensely satisfying – as the song becomes an extraordinary, colourful rally … with driving beats and African sounding supplications.
This is an unusually delicious and a fully absorbing piece of work. It demands continual re-listens (and full concentration) to assume all the nuances and to get into the complex plots.
@neilmach © 2014
Link:
https://www.facebook.com/adultjazz
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