Get The Blessing:
Lope and Antilope:
Naim Jazz:
Out Now:
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
Armed with brass, electronics and a whole load of cellophane (see the sleeve of their previous album OC DC), Bristol's award-winning Get The Blessing are a unique brand. Too rocky to be just jazz, too jazzy to be funk and too funky to be anything other than being Bristolian down to their genes, the GTB boys parp the good parp with one ear towards traditional and the other out of the window.
The opening track Quiet is anything but. Delightfully atonal with half-cut sax, funky and malleable layers of electric bass and a naggingly catchy riff, Quiet is the perfect start - but the most representative one. The rest of the album is a real travelogue - that Portishead and Radiohead heritage breaks out of Little Ease with, well, considerable ease, while Luposcope mirrors the same luminescence as a David Sylvian piece of more recent years.
Yet while the ensemble might share the same stable as the explosive Sons Of Kemet and the technically pin-sharp Empirical, Get The Blessing have more in common with experimental alternatives such as Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk, Factory Record's blasters Blurt and mid-period Nils Petter Molvaer.
Whilst not all of Lope and Antilope is a delight, GTB have done enough to get themselves noticed without having to cover their faces in plastic. And that, as they say, is a wrap.
Lope and Antilope:
Naim Jazz:
Out Now:
★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
The opening track Quiet is anything but. Delightfully atonal with half-cut sax, funky and malleable layers of electric bass and a naggingly catchy riff, Quiet is the perfect start - but the most representative one. The rest of the album is a real travelogue - that Portishead and Radiohead heritage breaks out of Little Ease with, well, considerable ease, while Luposcope mirrors the same luminescence as a David Sylvian piece of more recent years.
Yet while the ensemble might share the same stable as the explosive Sons Of Kemet and the technically pin-sharp Empirical, Get The Blessing have more in common with experimental alternatives such as Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk, Factory Record's blasters Blurt and mid-period Nils Petter Molvaer.
Whilst not all of Lope and Antilope is a delight, GTB have done enough to get themselves noticed without having to cover their faces in plastic. And that, as they say, is a wrap.