Hello dear reader, and welcome back to the land of great sounds that I want to share, my old music review blog where, as you may know, I use to spread the world about releases that deserve to be discovered.
Today, we'll talk about Comfort Food's "Waffle Frolic" which was just released today. That's a lucky strike that it is this album, especially, that reached my ears just on time, because I play since a few days ago at the game of setting up multiple loudspeakers and amps carefully placed at various places in the flat, to achieve, when I'm located at the crossing of each speaker's field, a near-to-perfect listening experience, with each instrument in the mix clearly distinguishing and placed in the three-dimensional space. I must confess that I had very good time listening to some classics in my music library... And now it's time to see how a new album, that I had never listened to before, will render on this setup. I say this is a lucky strike because, and that's a great thing, it happens that the album I'm talking about today is at the crossroad of noise-rock and jazz... Especially the kind of music whose richness and sharpness can reveal its full potential on a demanding playback system... And, you may know so since I'm writing now, the album didn't deceived me.
It just starts quietly, with jazzy brass samples looping, drums and guitar developing slowly harmonically an rhythmically rich patterns as the song goes on... At the beginning I just though, well, it's a nice blend to hear, it's pleasant and well done... But I had rapidly to admit that it was going far beyond that. Because, Comfort Food's songwriting got a very special trick that drive them way further most of bands of alike style : they don't bury their music under tons of unnecessary breaks and movements. Instead of that, they surely develop sharp and efficient melodic and rhythmic lines in an hypnotic way, talking to the most primal part of the listener's soul, and driving the evolution of each track until it culminates to incredible heights and unknown territories. This is not some cold music computed by meticulous musician just following some style's guidelines and composing music just like a developer would write efficient software. No, definitively. This album is emotionally rich and actually makes you feel the music and its full expressiveness.
It also is really coherent, the band has, for sure, found a style and you can really guess the pleasure they probably have when exploring the paths through its possibilities. As I said, I rapidly got enthusiast when the layers of the first track were adding to each other and culminating in a great, definitive apotheosis ; at this time, I thought to myself "man, it's just like a 21th's century vision of what makes Messe pour le temps présent's second movement an all-time classic". And, while the album was playing, I enjoyed the fact that the success in composing and performing achieved with this first track is not due to chance, but actually belong to the personality and style of a musical project that has a clear and well-thought aesthetic.
But do not think that the album lacks of nuances ; each track has something special, they are all very different, but the track order has been, I think, carefully chosen to draw a progressive evolution, and while the initial track was reminding me Henry, I also would like to say that, once the record has reached its end, what I had in mind was much more MC5 when they were approaching free jazz and experimenting mixing it with the electric, rock sound. Still a 60's reference, just like if the spirit of what people used to call "pop" at this time (and this was definitively not nowadays' sense) was resonating loudly in our mid 2010's, the spirit of 60's high-end music, but with the addition of the freedom that noise rock or noisy pop, with all their ancestors up to 70's punk, have added to the way a conscious musician may want to play music today. That's a noticeable point that I tend to spot in most of the releases I love enough to write about here, a commonality that maybe someday will be clearly identified by musicologists and labeled, defined, named... But for now all I can say is that it's music for today, and music that I love today.
I think I quite clearly expressed my ideas now, and if you follow my advice you'll take the time to listen to this very interesting record. I just want to add, to end this review, that the two most important remaining points I noticed about it were, first off, the quality of the production, with a warm but still very sharp and powerful, clear sound that meets the musical excellence of the songwriting... And also, that the performing, talking about guitars and drums, is also at the same high level of excellence, never cold or too technical but actually imaginative and straightforward, and it's, to sum up, definitively a pleasure to listen to such a blowing band.
Available as pure download or as limited edition of 100 tape cassette+download at Already Dead tapes
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