The challenge for most instrumental CDs is the same — can you tell a story without words?\u00a0 If the answer is yes, you\u2019ve got an album worth listening to.\u00a0 The challenge is doubled, though, when an otherwise instrumental album includes a handful of tracks with vocals.\u00a0 All too often in these situations, the vocals overshadow the music and the instrumental tracks end up feeling like they\u2019re missing something.<\/p>\n
The way you overcome the latter issue is by infusing the instrumentals with truly distinctive and memorable music.\u00a0 And that is exactly what the adroitly-named Euphoria accomplishes with Precious Time<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Euphoria is not so much a group as the nom du guerre of a loose musical collective masterminded by guitarist\/songwriter\/producer Ken Ramm.\u00a0 Mixing blues-inflected electric and acoustic slide guitar with all manner of ambient synthesizer tones, beats, blips and flourishes, Ramm and his team create exotic soundscapes that fire your imagination with a dizzying meld of raw country-blues and lush electronica.\u00a0 It\u2019s been tagged as \u201cguitaronica,\u201d \u201celectro-blues\u201d and a host of other handy labels that don\u2019t really capture its unqiue juxtaposition of the organic and the electric.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t take long to get a flavor for this musical hybrid, though.\u00a0 Lead track and single \u201cBack Against The Wall\u201d feels like Muddy Waters falling into a thumping house-music ass-shaker, at least until Howard Levy blasts through the electronic debris with harmonica that\u2019s half-blues and half-breakbeat.\u00a0 Turn this one up loud and it will set your hips to \u201cchurn\u201d and your neck to \u201cswivel\u201d in no time at all.<\/p>\n
In a gusty gambit, Ramm moves right into the vocal tracks with \u201cBlue,\u201d the first of two collaborations with Danish electronica singer-songwriter Tina Dico (Zero 7).\u00a0 Nimble, precise acoustic guitar picking rides high over a bed of percussive electronic effects as Dico\u2019s arresting voice steers right down the middle, bridging the musical gap beautifully.\u00a0 The other Ramm\/Dico collaboration \u201cSinners And Saints\u201d has a more continental Euro-pop feel, albeit with distorted electric slide shading the music at fresh new angles.<\/p>\n
The other two vocal tracks feature Ramm working with Grammy-winner Tracy Bonham, who oversings a bit for my tastes, but with music this assertively larger-than-life, maybe it makes more sense than my ears are able to give it credit for.\u00a0 \u201cPrecious Time\u201d sounds like bluesy lounge-jazz from Mars; \u201cAnyone Can Lose\u201d has kind of a Kate Bush-Peter Gabriel feel, which would be more of a compliment if the end result felt more like it was in that class.<\/p>\n
The instrumental numbers more than make up for any missteps on the vocal tracks, though.\u00a0 \u201cForever Dust\u201d throbs and pulses under distorted blues riffs and spoken-word hypnotic suggestions, at least until the slamming acoustic drums cut through the fog.\u00a0 Yowza!\u00a0 \u201cThe Getaway\u201d is an acoustic-electronic acid trip lush and bizarre enough to send the most grounded listener reeling into the stratosphere.\u00a0 The opening segment of \u201cKolkata\u201d locates the magic musical space between This particular Euphoria disc also features drummer\/programmer\/co-composer Steve Sidelnyk and keyboardist Sean Spuehler, who co-produce.\u00a0 The production credits in fact suggest that each cut here was pieced together and mixed from individual instrumental tracks cut by each of the players in their own studios, which is a feat considering how thoroughly cohesive the finished product is.<\/p>\n Precious Time<\/i> is a moody, evocative mindtrip, the kind of sound-painting that draws you into new worlds the same way a good book or screenplay does.\u00a0 The fact that Ramm and co.\u2019s work has been featured in a variety of TV shows and movie trailers — CSI,<\/i> Roswell, Vanilla Sky, Hidalgo<\/i> — is no surprise at all.\u00a0 This is music to stir the imagination, an exhilarating ride for anyone with a sense of musical adventure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":28475,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[7803],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-39928","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-euphoria","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/39928","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=39928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/39928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39928"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=39928"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=39928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}