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Exotica+Fusion?

Al-Ghaieru | Wisconsin, AKA | 12/01/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"We seem to be in the midst of a full "exotica" revival these days. Popular music, having absorbed everything it can possibly absorb, chop up, and reconfigure, can now seem to try to be "everything at once" on an album. There is a lot of that going on here. Matt Chamberlain is a drummer, was one of like a billion Pearl Jam drummers (I think Mick Shrimpton was another of these drummers), but I digress. There is a lot of pounding percussion here with all sorts of instruments from this musical family, with string arrangements, and sequencer sampling for good measure. It's the inner contents of the album that are most satisfying-the fifth track has an "oriental" feel to it assisted by the ubiquitious presence of Eyvind Kang doing string arrangements and playing them as well, while the seventh track employs gamelin sounding music/percussion, and the eighth track moves in a dub reggae/trance sounding atmospheric. So with "ethnoi" hinted at but never played, and the musicianship all around implying the best fusion/progrock so apropos to our "postrocked/postandmathmetaled rock/withslabsofpunkthrowninforgoodmeasureidontknowwhatthef@#$genreitisanymore" defined decade, this should appeal to fans of Autechre, Aphex Twin, Tortoise(whom Chamberlain should probably jam with), maybe even Portishead and Tricky, definitely to fans of other bands on the "Web of Mimicry" roster, of whose ranks of session musicians Chamberlain will probably be joining."