The Jazz EP, comprised of three tracks came out in July, and it's a slight departure from what we've come to know from the greatest duo to ever pick up acoustic guitars.
Lingus, which features slides in the early part of the song that gives it a deep-fried country-blues sound feels jarring, and while this review is after the first pass on the album, I don't know if I'll ever get into it. Incorporating this sound could be interesting, but somehow they manage to make these slides overproduced and more like a pop-gimmick than a fusion between genres.
Track 2, Oblivion, which features Spanish composer Vicente Amigo is traditional RyG and if you liked their 2006 debut, this will feel like home. If anything, this track was the only one I had to go back and listen to - it was so unremarkable (relative to the rest of their catalog) that I wanted to see if I'd missed anything. This is not to say it's a bad song, but on an EP with such strong departures from style, you almost imagine they threw this is in there for their fans who don't like change.
Street Fighter Mas is the EPs final track, and easily my favorite on here. What starts as a sort of video-game soundtrack, brings in choral chanting fronted by a guitar that you'd be forgiven for thinking belonged to Carlos Santana (also because it's electric). This track walks a tightrope of being a bit too traditional on one side, and a bit too contrived on the other, but somehow the sustained notes from the acoustic guitar on the interludes between the electric choir refrains give it a sort of Suspense-film anxiety that makes the grand narrative of the movie you're investing in your head more palatable.
This track also ends with a sort of wah-pedal outro that sounds more 70's porn flick than Kirk Hammet but it's so small it doesn't alter the song to a large degree.
In the end, I'm glad they're experimenting. If Street Fighter Mas ends up being the dominant design direction, I expect great things going forward.