It’s a strange and beautiful
thing to witness a band with sixty years of history sounding not just alive,
but newly awakened. Soft Machine - the psychedelic adventurers who once shared
stages with Hendrix, the Canterbury visionaries who helped define jazz fusion
before the term even existed - return with Thirteen, an album of
thirteen new tracks that feels both deeply rooted and unexpectedly fresh.
What has always set Soft Machine apart is their willingness to inhabit contradiction: experimental yet melodic, precise yet spontaneous, cerebral yet playful. On Thirteen, those contrasts are magnified. The sound is broad and cinematic in places - widescreen, atmospheric, alive with colour - yet close, intimate and intensely personal in others. Music that can bloom with orchestral expansiveness, then fold into the quiet of four musicians breathing as one.
A special mention must go to
Theo Travis, whose flute work across the record is one of its most quietly
compelling features. Travis has always been a master of phrasing - lines shaped
with the ease of spoken language - but here he reaches a new level. His flute
becomes conversational, rising and falling like thought itself, warm with
breath, rich with nuance. At times he floats long, luminous arcs over
Etheridge’s guitar; at others he nudges the music with tiny, questioning
gestures. It’s playing that gives the album much of its emotional intimacy.
And then there is John Etheridge
- the quiet constant of the band’s modern era. On Thirteen, he sounds
revitalised - loose, fiery, affectionate in tone, almost conversational in
phrasing, yet always tethered to the band’s expansive, exploratory spirit. His
contribution reaches its peak in The Longest Night, the album’s
thirteen-minute epic. In the midst of its fluid, shifting landscape,
Etheridge’s three-minute guitar solo emerges as a genuine high point - a
passage that ebbs and flows with a storyteller’s instinct. It’s beautifully
paced, emotionally transparent, and delivered with a poise that elevates the
entire composition. This is Etheridge not merely performing within Soft
Machine’s legacy but actively advancing it.
Fred Thelonious Baker anchors
the group with muscular, inventive bass lines, while newcomer Asaf Sirkis
energises the band with drumming that is fluid, responsive and full of colour.
Robert Wyatt’s line that “there’s nothing he can’t do” feels completely
deserved.
Highlights abound: the ferocious
drive of Open Road, the elegant miniature Disappear,
the hallucinogenic swirl of Daevid’s Special Cuppa, complete with
Daevid Allen’s spectral cameo. Even the free-flowing Pens to the Foal
Mode bristles with shape and purpose.
For a band who helped invent the
language of fusion, it is heartening - almost miraculous - that Thirteen feels
so vital, unforced and forward-looking. This isn’t legacy maintenance. It’s not
nostalgia. It’s Soft Machine doing what they have always done at their best:
redrawing their own map in real time.
A bold, moving and unexpectedly modern new chapter from one of British music’s great institutions. Glenn Wright
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