If you’ve been searching for the missing link between rap, sprechsang, muscular European free jazz and Nancy Sinatra singing You Only Live Twice congratulations, you’ve found it in Thomas Backman’s new album. To say that it demands attention is the understatement of 2025; there’s a lot packed into a short space of time. An internet search reveals terms such as ”crime jazz” and ”slow burn yearning widescreen chamber pop”, artpop and hip-hop, shoegaze and free jazz all applied to Thomas Backman’s work. With a menu like that, the question has to be whether it is possible to present beauty, elegance and brutality within a single coherent album?
A sawing cello,
scratching drums and occasional dropping bombs open I Shall But Drink the More, a reading of Emily Dickinson’s I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed, the first
3 verses of which are delivered as a rap by Eze Jackson over a late period Tom
Waits junkyard deconstruction backing. We suddenly move to something more
angelic for the third verse sung by Lindstrand and friends before we switch
back to a scene of drunken revelry with Jackson in staggering pomp as the
master of the revels. Succinctly, the Bandcamp page for the piece describes it as
“rap/spoken word/orchestral/jazz/whatever.” I wonder if Backman debated whether
he should swing between the two extremes in one song or if the idea of the song
structure arrived fully formed in one thought. Second track, Scherzo Demoniac, is as you would expect,
Devo producing the soundtrack to a seventies Eastern European horror film.
Cellos provide the context for Backman’s flying sax with the momentum forced
and maintained by pummelling drums and discordant cymbal cracks and crashes.
Har vi Lämnat is contrast again as Lindstrom’s vocals float over increasingly discordant strings and those pummelling drums again. What starts as an ethereal ECM type piece, all bleak winter landscapes veers into rage and then ebbs again to its becalmed opening mood. For Nothing Backman stitches together threads of voice strings and reeds and a bubbling bass to hold it all together. A clarinet solo is comforting in its relative mainstream familiarity compared with what has gone before.
State of Day sees us still
becalmed; a clarinet and strings float over a simple chordal piano motif. It’s
a stately, balletic moment for low light and a single dancer. After Threads floats out of the darkness and
away, closer, These Cowards, is a
more solid construction. Harking back to the heft of the opening tracks, it
opens with a scene setting bass line, sparse rattling drums and those floating
voices but about two and a half minutes in Backman puts boots on the ground
with a bold, robust baritone solo that changes the complexion of the tune
completely. The volume of the rest of the musicians rises up to challenge. It’s
not as discomforting as the opening tracks but it still stands out after the
gentler tunes in the central parts of the album. Backman then chooses to
subvert it all again with a closing, driving section of Kraftwerk-ian machine
music to accompany his closing sax solo, through which Eze Jackson struggles to
make his voice heard.
This is a fascinating, witty, defiant album. Its parts, separately, take the listener in all sorts of different directions, but that means that no single identity emerges but, ultimately, it’s less than the sum of those aforementioned parts. Dave Sayer
No comments :
Post a Comment