Featured Artist: The Wrong Object

CD Title: Stories From The Shed

Year: 2008

Record Label: Moonjune Records

Style: Progressive

Musicians:

Michel Delville (electric and synth guitar, electronics), Fred Delplancq (tenor sax), Jean-Paul Estiévenart (trumpet), Damien Polard (bass guitar, electronics), Laurent Delchambre (drums, assorted percussion, samples, electronics)

Review:

This young Belgian quintet does indeed intimate inferences from jazz/prog-rock heavyweights Soft Machine, King Crimson and other seminal bands.  Unlike many other entities of this ilk, these young men hone in on solid and cohesive compositional aspects that serve as a foundation for their often-torrid soloing escapades.  Moreover, the ensemble’s distinct sound and soaring mode of operations all stacks up to a fun-filled jamboree, where revved-up progressive-rock movements are counterbalanced by the ever-present jazz element.

It’s a high-impact outing, enamored with memorable hooks, and a certain coolness that permeates throughout.  With sonorous horns, teeming with an overriding sense of triumph, this unit also sparks remembrances of Britain’s fabled Canterbury rock scene amid a contempo stance.  But the music is also characterized by mood-evoking passages as notions of loneliness attain a happy co-existence with bravura and rocking song-structures shaded with knotty time signatures.

The piece titled “Lifting Belly,” features Damien Polard’s monstrous fuzz-bass licks that perhaps pay homage to Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper’s now patented methodology.  Yet the musicians also fuse a prophet-of-doom gait via slash and burn type, EFX, horns and guitar patterns, occasionally tempered with darting free-jazz lines, psycho guitar riffs and ethereal backwashes.  And of course, a prominent, forward-moving attack rounds out the entire program.  In sum, this release looms as an early top-10 contender for 2008.  Don’t let it pass you by…

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

Listen or Buy: Abstract Logix

Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita

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