Frisell's contribution to American music, especially over the last decade, cannot be doubted. So here's the heresy: Floratone just don't cut it. OK, so Floratone is principally a band, not a Frisell vehicle. Yes, the core music remains Frisell's grooves and elusive and allusive melodies. But the soul is how Martine and Townsend chop and affect what they're given. Sometimes it can be swirlingly seductive, as on the fably titled ‘More Pluck’, but it can equally disappear up its own droogy groove (‘Snake Rattle’). It's curious to compare, say, ‘Parade’, from Floratone II with ‘Procissao’. Both are marches of a kind, but the former dribbles away while the latter spirals to an epic groove. There are moments of course, like the melancholy of Kang on ‘The Time, The Place’, but, ace collaborator as Frisell remains, within Floratone his voice is muted and disguised.