Two notable sidemen collaborate on an elusive instrumental album inspired by funk, West African, and Cuban music. The melodies are fleeting and the arrangements ever-shifting.
Contradictory as it sounds, Pino Palladino is possibly the most famous working session bassist. The 63-year-old Welshman is known for his glissando tone and melodic fills, and he has built a four-decade career as the ultimate supporting player: providing a Stravinsky-inspired fretless performance on Paul Young’s 1983 U.K. number No. 1 Marvin Gaye cover “Wherever I Lay My Head,” contributing to neo-soul landmarks Mama’s Gun and Voodoo, joining The Who after the death of original bassist John Entwhistle in 2002, and much more.
Notes With Attachments is the first album released under Palladino’s own name, co-headlining with producer and instrumentalist Blake Mills. The 34-year-old Mills has a similar history as a supporting player, producing for artists like Perfume Genius and Alabama Shakes and facilitating Fiona Apple’s playing on Bob Dylan’s 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways. After first collaborating on John Legend’s 2016 album Darkness and Light, the pair developed songs from Palladino’s archive of musical sketches, recording with a small group of players at famed Los Angeles studio Sound City in a series of sessions spanning two and a half years.
Notes With Attachments is an elusive instrumental album, subtle despite the pun in its title. The songs are based around repeating chord changes inspired by funk, West African, and Cuban music, but the continuously shifting arrangements mean that no one instrument carries the melody for long. It’s the sound of consummate collaborators imagining a world where there’s no such thing as a lead performer.
On “Ekuté,” Palladino’s bass and guitar lines bounce off each other in a syncopated rhythm. As fuzzy, distorted yawns of guitar give way to squealing saxophone and bass clarinet, the players match intensities so that they sound almost like the same instrument at different ends of its range. The song started out as a Fela Kuti-inspired one-chord jam. “We were trying to figure out all the different places that one beat or bassline could take you,” Mills said in a statement.
Many songs here seem as if they were already in the air, just waiting to be captured in final form: “Man From Molise” began as a Palladino composition inspired by Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal and recorded with a New York ensemble. Mills played it at half-speed, and from there the duo created an entirely new song—though a sluggish feeling lingers, exacerbated by the lopsided 7/8 time signature. “Soundwalk” was written around a horn arrangement extracted from a fully mixed demo that Palladino and saxophonist Jacques Schwartz-Bart recorded while snowed in at a Chicago hotel during D’Angelo’s 2000 Voodoo tour; its lurching rhythm is reminiscent of another D’Angelo collaborator, J Dilla. The percussion drops in and out while the saxophones drag the music ahead, as if the players were exchanging glances, unsure whether to keep playing but carrying on anyway.
For listeners expecting a more conventionally groovy project from Palladino, the album’s restless rhythms may be unsettling. Compared to neo-soul or blues-rock, the melodies are fleeting, the grooves more intricate and less dependent on the downbeat. Running contrary to expectations is part of Mills’ M.O.; “My favorite musicians are people who have a certain dissatisfaction with the sound of their own instrument,” he told Pitchfork in 2018. The few exceptions are hard to miss: a monster riff played in unison by bass, sax, and drums midway through “Djurkel” looms over the entire album. A sax solo on the title track briefly glitters with sentimentality before the song shifts to something more dissonant.
Like cornetist Rob Mazurek’s recent album Dimensional Stardust, Notes With Attachments was stitched together in the studio from multiple performances, yet effectively mimics the chemistry of a live ensemble. On Stardust, Damon Locks’ recitations burst from a bullhorn to be heard through the noise, but here the shifting arrangements don’t even bother to make space for vocals. (A human voice would only diminish the majestic unfurling of “Just Wrong,” or the eerie atmosphere that Sam Gendel generates with sampled saxophone on closer “Off the Cuff.”) Without a lead melody to hone in on, the album’s ever-shifting arrangements can sometimes feel uncertain, like carrying on with a scavenger hunt after forgetting the hiding places. But heard in full, Notes With Attachments’ restlessness sounds more like determination: an insistence on fitting as many ideas into as short a time as possible.
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