This new release from Matthew Tavares and Leland Whitty, two members of the pioneering Canadian jazz-hip hop outfit Bad Bad Not Good, is a fascinating listen. It’s as wild and changeable as the weather, full of striking shifts in texture, mood and intensity. The opener, ‘Through The Looking Glass’, eases you in with gentle bass and acoustic guitar, soft soprano saxophone and an ethereal choir of voices that become increasingly strained, discordant and unsettling as the track gathers pace. They’re like a murmur of despair that makes you wonder if the radiant beauty is all just a facade. Those tensions continue throughout the album as the group charge into swing grooves and set the music free, with Whitty wailing on tenor and Tavares playing the piano like it’s a game of whack-a-mole. The blustery ‘Visions Of You’, with Whitty on flute, takes a sidestep towards hip hop (the closest we get to Bad Bad Not Good territory) before calm is restored with passages of lilting classical piano, bowed bass, fluttering strings and more acoustic guitar, which lends a wonderful softness and a folky homespun quality to some of the tracks. Those voices keep returning as well though, and with them the feeling of unease. The suspended dissonances in the final tune, ‘Living Water Assembly’, hammer home the impression of troubled beauty, of darkness beneath the surface.