The hyphenated word ‘boundary-breaking’ is often thrown around so casually as a description of a band’s music these days that the term seems to have lost all its significance. If in reality very little music is actually deserving of the term, one of this year’s contenders has to be the saxophonist-composer Donny McCaslin quartet’s exhilarating new album release I Want More, their third recording since their inspired partnership with rock icon David Bowie on his swansong album Blackstar. The enormous, long-lasting inspiration that Bowie had on the band doesn’t stop at this recording, but McCaslin on I Want More perhaps comes closest to discovering a new world of sound that’s distinct from the one he helped create on Blackstar. It’s a uniquely hard-hitting, direct, studio-driven recording that organically joins together elements from electronica, post-rock, jazz and improv more persuasively than perhaps anything before it.

McCaslin’s tenor sax boldly contrasts surging, undulating phrases with soaring, dreamy melody lines and a microtonal post-Ornette otherworldliness, and is boosted rather than diluted by various electronic and studio effects and treatments. But it’s a real ‘band’ effort, and there’s never a dull moment. On the ‘Bodyblow’, the tenorist’s persistent jabs and feral howls, alongside influential drummer Guiliana’s meter-switching breakbeats, chime with its pugilistic title; ‘Landsdown’ pits Lefebvre’s inventive throbbing effects-driven bass against McCaslin’s mournful long-tones, and no clarity is lost when a guest string quartet intervenes to signal a sudden change of scene. Credit is also due to alt-rock producer David Fridmann and the ultra-imaginative synth/wurlitzer colourist Jason Lindner who both contribute to making the recording as weighty a piece of contemporary electronica as it is jazz and improv.