A lot of the songs are about long-term love or regret, but Wagner’s lyrics will often throw you: In the song Mr. Met, a couplet like “Fear makes us critical/knowledge is difficult” is soon followed by “Sleep made you possible/‘Dude’ made this laughable,” whatever that means.
Slow and easeful, its songs built episodically, Mr. M — dedicated to Vic Chesnutt, the Georgia singer-songwriter who died in 2009, a friend of the band’s — depends on the studio. The producer is Mark Nevers, who’s worked on most Lambchop records, and on Mr. M is as much a part of the band as anyone. Among other things, he is an intuitive wizard of reverb: he makes all sorts of tones, identifiable to a particular instrument or not, resonate and burn away as if in a very different atmosphere — underwater, or in deep space.
Lambchop has a vestigial, almost metaphorical relationship with the sound and atmosphere of 1970s country music. Sometimes that comes closer to the surface; The Good Life (Is Wasted), one of this album’s best songs, couldn’t have grown out of any other tradition. Otherwise, when the strings take over, it can sound like Nelson Riddle through the looking glass, or in the case of the album’s two instrumentals, Gar and Betty’s Overture, incidental music for a 1970s film.
This isn’t a bellwether band, or one that starts controversy. It’s out there on its own, without anxiety, and it’s created its own space. The harder it works, the more it invests in that strange space, the better it becomes; of all its records, Mr. M sounds like its least mannered, most mysterious, and probably its best.
By Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
Matthew Shipp Trio, Elastic aspects, Thirsty Ear
Stubbornness comes easily to the pianist Matthew Shipp, who long ago established his base camp in the rough hinterland of jazz’s post-1960s avant-garde. But he isn’t an inflexible stylist, or the sort of artist who seems insulated from collaborative influence.
Last year, to commemorate his 50th birthday, he released an archetypal double album called The Art of the Improviser, half of which documented a performance by his working trio. (The other half was a solo recital.) He also released Cosmic Lieder, a scintillating duo album with the saxophonist Darius Jones; and Knives From Heaven, with the bassist William Parker and members of Antipop Consortium, the alternative hip-hop crew.
The diversity of those albums says as much about Shipp’s restlessness as it does about his relationship with Thirsty Ear Recordings, which put out all three (and for which he serves as part-time curator).
Elastic Aspects, his new release, once again features his trio with the bassist Michael Bisio and the drummer Whit Dickey. And once again it’s a study in turbulent flow, with small-scale compositions that break open to enable exploration. What sets the album apart is focus: Shipp conceived this music as a suite, and the band brings a dynamic flair to its execution. There’s also the effect of a recording studio, which yields a calmer, more cloistered feeling than the trio pursues in concert.
Shipp has his jazz-piano roots, and there are moments here — like most of Psychic Counterpart, early in the going — that suggest a prickly triangulation of Andrew Hill, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Explosive Aspects, an atonal exercise, suggests a more severe strain of free jazz, hammering and dense. More intriguingly, Stage 10 finds Shipp engaging with nonstandard piano techniques, plucking and damping its strings by hand, while his rhythm section swings four to the bar, in an obliquely cheerful cadence.
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