Swing Baby Swing

Y'all feel like a little jazz tonight? It's a beautiful Wednesday, ya know - I've got chicken and vegetables simmering in my slowcooker, textbooks sitting on my desk, and a beautiful evening fading slowly towards darknessoutside my window. Let's groove, eh?

As always, though, I'm bringing y'all some ish with a little bit of a twist to it. The Diablo Swing Orchestra isn't what y'all might call conventional. There's sure as heck some danceable beats in there - 'Balrog Boogie,' the first track on the "Butcher's Ballroom" album, starts out with basic hi-hat and upright bass on the intro - but then bursts into a full-throated electric-guitar-and-trumpet-and-cello pseudo-roar, followed moments later by singer who's obviously well-schooled in screamo, followed in turn by an operatic soprano whose voice soars and floats over the continuingly turgid pseudo-jazz undercurrents.

Diablo Swing Orchestra - Balrog Boogie


Sound complicated? A quick glance at the band's Wikipedia page is enough to make you wince... for one thing, the band is listed as "Swedish avant-garde metal." Ouch. While I can't really argue with that, there's a lot more to the Diablo Swing Orchestra than such a limiting and cliched description. The Wikipedia page also lists a long and complicated anti-establishment pseudo-backstory.

Once you get past the pretentiousness, though, there's a really fun band here; more than that, there's a really fun band here that has the potential to ascend towards the top echelons of jazz-metal greatness (wait... who else, exactly, might be in that echelon? I'm asking this kind of seriously. If any of y'all know, shoot me an email - sprawwling@hotmail.com). Anyways, I'll leave y'all with a link to DSO's Myspace and a page where they've put up the entire Butcher's Ballroom album for free listening and download. Go check it out! Worst case, your eardrums will bleed a little bit (warning: a didgeridoo is involved). Best case, you'll find a cool new band with an awesome, freely available album.

Hope y'all enjoy! I'm off to be pretentious and enjoy the Seattle evening.

There Are No Words

...and I mean that quite literally about the music I'm featuring today. No words. Instrumental. Well... sorta. Read on.

First off: a guy with a guitar. James Blackshaw. There's been a ton of hype on this guy ever since he dropped his first album, 2005's Sunshrine. He's one of the biggest rising stars in contemporary acoustic guitar, and with good reason: drawing on (according to both his Myspace and my own sadly unlearned ears) influences as wide as Alfred Schnittke (warning! dissonant violins!), Philip Glass, and Mark Rothko, Blackshaw's often-unaccompanied 12-string guitar is absolutely hypnotic at times, weaving massively intricate patterns that never lose sight of the simplicity at their cores. Amazing stuff.

James Blackshaw - Running to the Ghost


Second: a guy with a guitar, and a guy with a lute, and the guy with the guitar is the same guy who I just talked abou, so there are some similarities, but it's a different project. Brethren of the Free Spirit - a completely awesome band name, by the way, if only because of its historical context - is a collaboration between James Blackshaw (go up one paragraph to read about him) and, I kid you not, lutist Jozef van Wissem. Adding the lute to Blackshaw's guitar brings another dimension in, centering the sound while at the same time removing a layer of gloss, stripping away some of the occasionally ostentatious detail that can keep Blackshaw's music from connecting with the listener on an emotional level.



Third: a girl singing, and a guy with drums. But wait! you say. Didn't you say that you were focusing on instrumental music? I can explain. It'll make sense, I promise. Wildbirds & Peacedrums is a band from Sweden, composed of a girl, Mariam Wallentin, and her husband, Andreas Werliin. Mariam does the singing; Andreas hits things with sticks. But Mariam's singing strikes me just as much as an effect as anything conventional - for lack of a better explanation, it's almost like she's doing a breathless, pseudo-postmodern reinterpretation of scat-singing. In general, it's awesome - and leads me to classify the band's music as something approaching instrumental, rather than in any other category.

We all good, then? Cool. Take a listen - it's pretty solid stuff. Visceral. Makes you dance like an idiot.

Wildbirds & Peacedrums - There Is No Light


Awesome. Have a great weekend, everyone!