A great album is like a great painting, a great wine, a great
\nmovie or a great kiss. It takes your breath away, tickles your
\nsenses, steals time and leaves you changed — maybe sad, maybe
\nsmiling, anything but indifferent.<\/p>\n
\nNothing Is Cohesive<\/i> is a great album.<\/p>\n
It is also one of the most aptly titled discs to cross my desk
\nin many a moon. If you’re looking for 12 variations on the same
\nbasic theme, go buy a Nickelback album or something. This is art
\nhere, folks — diverse, challenging, reckless, brilliant.<\/p>\n
So after that build-up, what does Transcendence — Ed Hale
\n(vocals, guitars, piano, keys), Fernando Perdomo (guitars, drums,
\nvocals, sitar, keys), Roger Houdaille (bass, vocals, guitar), Jon
\nRose (piano, keys, vocals), Bill Sommer & Ben Belin (drums) —
\nactually sound like? Imagine Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Frank
\nZappa, Roger Waters, Jeff Tweedy (Wilco), Dan Wilson (Semisonic)
\nand Bono partying all night and then cutting an album with Beatles
\nproducer George Martin manning the boards, and you might be in the
\nneighborhood. It’s an erratic, ecstatic kaleidoscope of tones,
\ntextures, voices and attitudes that takes all the right lessons
\nfrom ’70s rock and employs them with imagination and flair, and it
\nadds up to utter shambling magnificence.<\/p>\n
We open with a brief, mood-setting snippet of ambient
\nelectronics before the band cranks up the engine and dives into the
\npostmodern space-rock of “Somebody Kill The DJ,” full of dreamy
\nvocals, dirty riffs and cheeky electronic accents. Its sequel “I
\nWanna Know Ya” is an early highlight that gives you 2:30 of raunchy
\nGlimmer Twins swagger before flying off the hinges at the solo in
\nfavor of a raucous outro\/breakdown.<\/p>\n
Next up is Mr. & Mrs. McCartney’s “Tomorrow” … and
\n“Tomorrow”… and “Tomorrow.” First you get a silly 53-second sound
\nbite of the chorus sung as if it was a ’40s Broadway ballad. Then
\nyou get a full-out version that feels like the steaming wreckage of
\na head-on collision between Supertramp and Queen, the electric
\npiano propelling the bouncy melody along under swelling,
\nmulti-tracked choruses… at least until two minutes in, when the
\ntempo shifts completely and you get a third, ecstatic, “Hey
\nJude”-like vision of the song\u2026!<\/p>\n
Stay with me now, I haven’t even gotten to the best stuff
\nyet.<\/p>\n
“Caetano” starts out like a U2 ballad, with some of Hale’s most
\nBono-esque, laconically melodramatic vocals. Then as it swells and
\nbuilds with layers of bright guitars and “la-la” background vocals
\nuntil you recognize the song as the devastatingly accurate parody
\nof an egomaniacal frontman’s number one fan: “The people can’t wait
\nto be near you \/ Fall to their knees when they hear your voice \/
\nMan you’re a God \/ The power to heal from just your singing.”
\nFinishing up the first half of the disc, “Come On” sounds like
\n1974-ish David Bowie on a caffeine bender, guitars squealing in
\nglorious pain toward the end as the frenetic beat finally collapses
\nin on itself.<\/p>\n
Kicking off the second half of this disc, the sweet, wistful
\nballad “All This Is Beginning To Feel Like An Ending” builds from
\njust piano and voice to a crescendoing guitar-drum duet that feels
\nborrowed from
\nWho’s Next<\/i>. Simply gorgeous rock and roll, and it’s followed
\nby one of the most dynamic pieces here. “Revolution In Me” comes
\noff like Bono singing Hendrix, soaring vocals over psychedelic
\nchords, with a sunny little pop bridge stuck in the middle and a
\nWilco-style freakout\/train wreck at the finish.<\/p>\n
“Cleopatra Ecstacy” brings back the Bowie vibe before segueing
\ninto the unnamed track 11, a sound-collage experiment that features
\nthose time-honored standards, the truck-backing-up noise, swirling
\nguitar feedback and the mysterious woman speaking French. (I half
\nexpected the finish to be her saying “yankee hotel foxtrot” in a
\nParisian accent\u2026) “Softening,” which didn’t make much of a
\nmark with me the first couple of listens to this album, may
\nactually sum it up best — an introspective,
\nAbbey Road<\/i>-ish piano ballad that gradually piles on fresh
\naccents and elements and twists until it builds into a veering,
\noverwrought bridge that segues into an ecstatic outro that finally
\nbreaks down completely. Four minutes, four movements\u2026!<\/p>\n
And then there’s “Bored,” easily the least boring song I’ve
\nheard in 2005.<\/p>\n
Opening with a quiet chorus of vaguely Eastern-sounding chords,
\nthe band suddenly hits the gas 30 seconds in and has a hyperactive
\nmusical epiphany that sounds like Dick Dale and Ravi Shankar
\nsharing a fatty — before segueing back to the opening chords and
\nbuilding them again into a completely different jam. You could call
\nit prog, but how many prog bands write songs whose lyrics open —
\nthree minutes into the song — with “I’m so fucking bored \/ I just
\ncan’t believe I’m stuck in this hell that I live in \/ I’m such a
\nfucking whore \/ Prostituting my integrity to secure this false
\ncelebrity.” (The lyric sounds, in fact, like an inversion of
\n“Caetano,” taking the singer’s perspective instead of the fan’s.)
\nAnd then the song builds some more, and changes some more, and
\nrevisits and embellishes previous themes, and feels at the end of
\nits seven minutes like one of those magical rooms that is much
\nbigger on the inside than the outside.<\/p>\n
After that epic musical moment, the rest is denouement, and
\nrightly so. “If Your Baby Could” is a disarmingly pretty acoustic
\nlove song, and the title track closes things out with an
\nalternately jittery and spacey dueling-electric-pianos
\ninstrumental.<\/p>\n
Indeed,
\nNothing Is Cohesive<\/i>, but that’s what makes it special. It’s
\nlike an episode of
\nLost<\/i>, where you think you finally know something, and then
\nthey find another way to turn your expectations inside out. It’s
\nmusical anarchy, beautiful chaos. It’s art. It’s Transcendence. Do
\nnot miss it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":26987,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7139],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-38304","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-transcendence","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/38304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=38304"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=38304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}