Spontaneous Rex
Cataclysm
(self-released)
The virtuoso instrumentalists in Seattle quartet Spontaneous Rex hark back to the apex competitors of fusion’s peak in the 1970s. Complexity’s back, baby! Look at the success of artists such as Angine de Poitrine, DOMi & JD Beck, and Kamasi Washington. Now, I’m not saying that Spontaneous Rex will reap their commercial and critical rewards. But they do have the inventiveness and chops to demand your undivided attention, like those acts do, and I recommend that you see Spontaneous Rex perform live to witness their phenomenal fluency and chemistry.
Cataclysm is Spontaneous Rex’s first LP since 2014’s Come at the King, and it’s a lot. It takes courage to open your album with a cover of Herbie Hancock’s oft-sampled 1964 groover “Cantaloupe Island,” but SR make it their own by quickening the tempo, boosting the rhythmic torque (shout to drummer Kyle Doran), and adding Matt Williams’s metallic guitar pyrotechnics. On “Ten Miles in Any Direction,” Williams takes a serpentine, Hendrixian blues-rock solo, then Jake Sele’s piano elegantly tinkles into earshot and the group gradually eases into a beautifully wistful sundown meditation somewhere between Santana ca. Caravanserai and ECM-era Keith Jarrett.
The 11-minute “Balto” builds into an elegantly charging and complex flurry of ELP-like Sturm und Drang, with Williams’s guitar and Sele’s piano subbing for Keith Emerson’s keyboard wizardry. When the brief space-out “The Whole, or Large or Small” arrives, it’s a glowing respite from the rococo tumult happening elsewhere. Sele’s sparklingly oblique piano motifs and Tim Carey’s gorgeous, nimble bass lines animate “Eidolon,” revealing SR’s penchant for dynamics that take listeners on surprising journeys into lavishly appointed realms. The four-part “Pro Fresh Suite” climaxes Cataclysm with the instrumental excess and fleet-fingered/-footed flamboyancy that enabled Mahavishnu Orchestra to headline arenas in the ’70s. We live in diminished times, but Spontaneous Rex clearly care more about their Olympian music than fame and fortune anyway.
Matryoshka
Blasé Saint
(Sferic)
Blasé Saint came out in February, but you likely missed it, and it’s too good to ignore. The debut album by electronic-music producer/DJ Matryoshka (Jacqueline Lawson), Blasé Saint charms through stealth and understatement. For best results, don high-quality headphones and immerse yourself in Matryoshka’s enigmatic sonic universe.
“Lifelover” swims in Burial’s slipstream, with its resonant field recordings (tides, footsteps, etc.) and distant rimshots, while a mournful melody wafts in the distance as the bass murmurs like a rumor. Even better is “Surface Tension,” which combines the sublimely slack funk of Boards of Canada with the funereal ambient fog of the Caretaker. It’s a club smash, if the club is a house of worship made out of clay.
The bulk of Blasé Saint plumbs the oceanic depths of dub techno with great nuance. For example, “Silk Sheets on Concrete” may be the chillest, most ethereal specimen of the genre on Earth. Bottle this and sell it as an elixir. In the aptly titled “Lunar Tide Cycle,” low-end globules thud amid beatific wisps of synthesized sighs. It’s like drowning in bliss. Blasé Saint is the work of a young master. Can’t wait for the next one.
Seattle-area musicians can send music to NewSeattleMusic@TheStranger.com for possible coverage.
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