Andy Nowak Trio: Reset

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Steve Davis (b)
Andy Nowak (p)
Spencer Brown (b)

Label:

www.andynowaktrio.com

April/2018

RecordDate:

date not stated

The spare, cyclical grooves popularised by GoGo Penguin and Mammal Hands have their equivalent at rock music's more refined end, where sometimes anaemic understatement is endemic. Bristol's Andy Nowak Trio (sometimes styled as one word) also play this minimalist game. Nowak's piano phrases hitch and halt in subtle variants, like a sculptor finessing his line. The prancing, bass-led acceleration of ‘Syrinx’ and the relative tension of ‘Fracture’, which keeps rising towards unreached peaks on the back of drummer Davis's most urgently stoked head of steam, are oases of energy. Blues standard ‘Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor’ is the lone, intriguing cover. Like Kit Downes' fiery take on ‘Skip James’ at his early gigs, it refers to polar opposite antecedents, its sombre gloom relieved by Nowak's final assertion of still funereally slow honkytonk style. Elsewhere, the sort of soul-jazz which 1990s jazz-hop sampled and spliced splashes sunlight on an otherwise introspective album. Like so much of this decade's music, it's accomplished, but rarely raises the pulse.

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