Featured Artist: NeBeLNest

Jazz CD cover CD Title: Zepto

Year: 2006

Record Label: Cunieform Records

Style: Progressive

Review:

This French progressive-rock band transmits an amenable stride here.  The unit’s third release bears a multidimensional communiqué, where the thrusting rhythmic ideologies of King Crimson merge with classic ‘70s British rock, and avant-garde electronica.  The core, keys-bass-drums unit is augmented with guest guitarists; Sebastien Carmona and Cyril Malderez, performing on selected works.  With a synth/keys-heavy line of attack amid rippling guitar lines, the group’s pleasantly-in-your-face gait is engineered upon supple time signatures, colorific sound-shaping themes and ballsy, firepower. 

The musicians hit it hard throughout!  Think of an ongoing musical transformation where dream-like motifs blossom into blitzing polyrhythmic choruses, energized by off-kilter shifts in strategy.  More importantly, the band pursues cinematic like overtures via its hammering prog-rock stylizations and harrowing backwash treatments.  But on the piece titled “Station 9,” Olivier Tejedor’s oscillating synth choruses foretell an ominous sequence of events, counterbalanced by bizarre EFX-drenched free-rock mania. 

They periodically mitigate the hyper-mode like aerial assault with childlike innocence, marked by ethereally arranged bridges and simply designed ostinatos.  No doubt about it, this consortium has attained a higher degree of maturity with the advent of this recently issued production.  Nicely orchestrated but ferociously executed, this trio has spiraled to a loftier musical plane.   



Record Label Website: http://www.cuneiformrecords.com

Artist's Website: http://www.nebelnest.com

Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita



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