Inhabitants - A Vacant Lot (Drip Audio, 2010) ****

This is the third album of this young Canadian band, a very rich and very welcoming one. Working on the boundaries of post-jazz and post-rock, the four musicians create instrumental music with lots of electronics and loops, while maintaining a strong rhythmic and melodic base. All the rest is improvisation, floating over the solid background, creating sonic textures and interactions. The band consists of Skye Brooks on drums and JP Carter on trumpet - both playing together in Fond Of Tigers, Pete Schmitt on bass and Dave Sikula on guitar. Rhythmically and harmonically, the music is closer to rock than to jazz, with a great emphasis on the total sound, rather than on the soloist's expressivity. That creates some emotional distance, but it makes the music not less inviting. The instrumental approach and the line-up is of course closer to jazz. The band finds a right balance between uptempo and slower, more meditative pieces, between composed elements, improvisations and creative inventions of the moment, between raw abrasiveness and subtle gentleness, developing a quite coherent and unique musical vision. Recommended to all but the hard-core free jazz fanatics.

I attach this Youtube clip for reference of the kind of music they play, but the quality is not by a long stretch comparable to the album (luckily!).



© stef