Featured Artist: Brainville 3

CD Title: Trial By Headline

Year: 2008

Record Label: ReR USA

Style: Progressive

Musicians:

Daevid Allen (guitar, vocals), Hugh Hopper (bass), Chris Cutler (drums)

Review:

Legendary performers from legendary progressive-rock bands carve out their own little oddball niche on this live recording.  Here, vocalist/guitarist Daevid Allen (Gong & Soft Machine), bassist Hugh Hopper (Soft Machine) and drummer Chris Cutler (Gong & Soft Machine) lift some additional magic form their respective bags of tricks.  Think of pleasantly psychotic avant, pop-rock coupled with the artists’ witty and appealingly devious mode of operations. 

First off, Allen’s clever, fatalistic, humorous, and tongue-in-cheek lyricism equates to large quotient of excitement and interest amid the band’s quirky time changes.  And Allen’s quasi-psychedelic chord voicings sometimes elicit notions of a modern-day Jefferson Airplane gone awry.  All in good fun mind you.  But these folks don’t need to prove themselves, given their seemingly exhaustive discographies.  With Hopper’s deep bass and Cutler’s precision-oriented pulses, the band executes an abundance of twirling parameters along the way.

Wildly entertaining, the trio morphs free-rock with a rolling and tumbling gait.  Or in some instances they take you on a ride through a series of jagged loops where thriving metrics give way to jaunts into the cosmos.  On “Who’s Afraid,” Hopper unleashes his monster, fuzz-bass lines in support of Allen chanting “I’ve been stoned before.”  However, the band rocks out during the torrid, space-jam piece titled “The Rubiyat of Honorium Tonsilitisk.”  In essence, they proclaim a sense of appealing zaniness via semi-structured workouts while obviously having quite a bit of fun in front of the enthusiastic audience.  You can’t help but love this stuff…

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

Reviewed by: Glenn Astarita

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