The Nels Cline Singers - Share the Wealth Music Album Reviews

The Nels Cline Singers - Share the Wealth Music Album Reviews
After two relatively tame records for Blue Note, the fearless guitar innovator renews his focus on the atonal and edgy with an ambitious, astonishing work. 

Although the veteran jazz and rock guitarist has long been celebrated for his fearless exploration, Nels Cline has a traditionalist streak, too. Perhaps it was the weight of the label’s history, but his first two records for Blue Note were two of the most conventional of his long career. His take on a romantic standards album, 2016’s Lovers, found him channeling his inner Bill Evans and Jim Hall, while 2018’s Currents, Constellations, with his dual-guitar quartet Nels Cline 4, offered more freeform improvisations yet eased off on the pedals and electronics that enable Cline’s more hallucinatory vamps.
Both were skillful records, the work of a prodigy living up to his reputation. But depending on what you seek out a Nels Cline record for, they were also both a little tame. For his third album for Blue Note, Share The Wealth, Cline offers a more comprehensive summation of his tastes, with renewed emphasis on the atonal and edgy. Cline has always saved some of his wildest fusions for the Nels Cline Singers, an ensemble he’s led since before he joined Wilco and earned the adoration of a wider pool of indie rock fans, and for these sessions he doubled the size of that trio, welcoming keyboardist Brian Marsella, percussionist Cyro Baptista and saxophonist Skerik — all assertive players who aren’t shy about redirecting these pieces.

Cline's reverence for Blue Note’s history remains, and at its most lyrical, the set conjures echoes of the label’s ’60s post-bop releases, thanks in good part to the addition of Skerik’s tenor sax. But mostly the ensemble is interested in coloring outside the lines, and they play for impact as often as they do for grace. “Spiral” opens the record with a heady raga, bruised purple by Skerik’s convulsive sax. Cline's coppery guitars take on a tinge of post-rock on “Beam/Spiral,” and that piece crescendos like a post-rock song, too, breaking open to reveal the album's most jubilant refrain. “Princess Phone” and “The Pleather Patrol” recall the thick, shambolic grooves of Cline’s sometimes collaborators Medeski, Martin and Wood.

Cline had never gigged with this six-piece iteration of the Singers before, and his original plans for these sessions were to splice them into an experimental collage. It turns out there was no need: The players built in so many dramatic pivots, twists and breaks that they didn’t have to pipe them in after the fact. The 17-minute centerpiece “Stump The Panel” plays out as a series of skronky, off-balance movements that approximate the kind of sharp edits that Teo Macero patched into On The Corner. It peaks halfway through with a spacey, trip-hop drum breakdown, then closes with a naked metal riff, a jagged edge at odds with Cline's usually meticulously tuned guitars.

Even for a Cline record, Share The Wealth’s scope is astonishing. Like many of his albums, it’s a big work, running 80 minutes, but it’s long because it needs to be—packed any tighter, these songs would be too busy, the flood of ideas too harried. For all their audacity and hunger to dazzle and surprise, Cline’s ensemble never forgets to let even the album’s showiest pieces breathe.
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About Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera

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The Nels Cline Singers - Share the Wealth Music Album Reviews The Nels Cline Singers - Share the Wealth Music Album Reviews Reviewed by Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera on November 20, 2020 Rating: 5

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