Music Banter - View Single Post - Anteater's 30 (ish) Favorite Albums Of 2014

Anteater · 12-29-2014, 10:56 PM

5. Seven Impale - City Of The Sun

Put On A Playlist With: John Coltrane, MuteMath, old school Krautrock, Jaga Jazzist, Motorpsycho

My favorite jazz-related album of the year, and an impressive example of what happens when the right people decide to accommodate old school fusion elements into the context of a contemporary rock band ensemble. To put it another way, they're a jazzy Swedish bunch of classicists locked into a dirty Krautrock groove from the turn of the 70's, and it's goddamn glorious to hear these guys jump back and forth between order and chaos and still manage to hold the whole thing down through sheer discipline and variety.

And when I mean variety, you will be surprised: there's a shadow of '69 King Crimson hovering menacingly around 'Oh, My Gravity!', but then we go into a headon collision between Tool and early Soft Machine in 'Windshears'. Aren't jazz-rock records normally a bit more one-note or random in pacing? If I didn't know better, I'd say these guys actually know how to write songs! Some tasty and very noisy space rock bass runs show up in 'Extraction', along with some xylophone and Hammond organ, but my favorite song also comes with the best title I've seen this year - the 14 minute 'God Left Us For A Black-Dressed Woman', which starts off as a doomy folk dirge before leaping headfirst into more psychedelic territory. Couldn't ask for a better finish really.

The biggest star of the show, however, may in fact be vocalist Stian Økland. His performance throughout these tunes lies somewhere between Steven Wilson and Radiohead's Thom Yorke in tonality and range, but he's a perfect fit for this strange, sun-soaked ode to the cosmic jazz of a bygone time.

Great jazz-rock groups with equally compelling frontmen or women are hard to find in any given era...hopefully Seven Impale will stick around!