Review Summary: Without being predictably choppy and gimmicky, Nels Cline's most powerful epic is a unique exploration of free jazz, noise and post rock.
You'll hear about all these albums that mix heavy music with jazz, forming strange and interesting combinations of two seemingly unmixable genres of music. But it takes a work of authenticity and vision to truly be able to organically achieve this. Bands like Unexpect and "jazz metal" like Cynic and Athiest might sound interesting at first, but in the end, these goofy assemblies of opposite musical extremes become a novelty, something you can chuckle at and say, "that's weird" and forget all about.
Nels Cline is a well-established and adventurous guitarist. His freakout style has landed him in several projects, from collaborations with jazz musicians like Charlie Haden and Gregg Bendian, to the more down-to-earth rock act Wilco, to his self-led solo material and his current group the Nels Cline Singers. In 1999, Cline teamed up with the afore-mentioned drummer Gregg Bendian to re-invent John Coltrane's masterpiece
Interstellar Space.
Cline understood the spiritual journey that was Coltrane's work, an understanding that is reflected in Cline's own material. Melodically unsound and adventurous, Cline merely uses jazz as a launching pad for his own ideas, seamlessly creating works that are contemporarily important and yet aware of the past. He is forward-thinking but not totally inaccessible. He uses jazz but then turns it inside out, experimenting with sounds and the possibilities of free improvisation and dissonance. Cline explores the same sort of non-diatonic, uncomfortable realms of melody and harmony as Coltrane.
One of Cline's most abstract pieces of work,
Destroy All Nels Cline seems nihilistic without being obsessively so. It doesn't drown in its own absurdity like a lot of avant garde music does, but at the same time it retains a tongue-in-cheek edge that prevents it it from being too claustrophobic.
In fact, the closest thing I can relate this music to is post rock--that is, if post rock weren't so melodically sound and musically uninteresting and predictable. It's similar to post rock in ideals, but far away from it in execution. Cline's release is extremely organic for one that mixes heavy rock music with free jazz sensibilities; it is refreshing in its complete negligence of genres and rules while managing to stay away from gimmicks and cheap cut 'n' paste jobs of different genres.
Crescendos that create their intensity out of a noisy embrace of musical anarchy--something Cline seems to make no attempt to tame, but only explore with a primal curiosity and caution-be-damned attitude that makes for an exciting, spontaneous sound.
Opening with a free, noisy improvisational track blending quirky percussion and jazzy runs from all five (yes, five) guitarists involved with outbursts of chaos and bizarre noises, the intensity is set right from the start. The idiosyncratic playing styles of the musicians involved are on display for the free-er parts of the album, but songs like The Ringing Hand incorporate a more traditional rock aesthetic before opening the structure up to some free jazz improv and proceeding to implode on themselves. After Armenia has a fairly petulant, ambient opening that builds with a peculiar choir to a state of nice, dark solemnity and vast amounts of feedback. Progression is more stable post rock fare, surrounding a bleak chord progression and solid drums with outside squealing noises and strange sounds. As In Life starts with a squawl of aggravated guitars in anarchic mode before moving into soft, textural jazz and building to a post rock climax of ambience and moving percussion.
Through all these dynamic shifts and variety, the music never really seems to
shift genres or styles, but instead incorporate all these sounds and techniques into one unifying, holistic and unique style.
This is one of those releases that stands as a testament against what music normally stands for. It rejects normal aesthetics of beauty in favor of honest sonic exploration, improvisation, and freedom. Cline is true guitar hero, clearly maintaining a deep understanding of his musical roots, learning the rules only so he can stomp on and destroy them.
