Tommy Flanagan - Smells Funny - Import CD

Credits:

Tommy Flanagan

Description:

Since 2011, Norwegian guitarist Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen and her trio have released six albums of high-energy music that smashes together elements of prog, metal, fusion, psych, and free jazz in a provocative mix relying on the power of the riff as much as it does improvisational acumen. Smells Funny is the band's first outing in nearly three years, and extends the musical argument from 2016's Black Stabat Mater considerably. Mollestad has honed her guitar-playing skills by being obsessed with '60s and '70s music. One can hear everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Jeff Beck, from Ritchie Blackmore to Jimmy Page, from Sonny Sharrock to Ray Russell in her playing -- to name a few. The way she's assimilated her influences and expressed them with her amazing trio is visceral and original. Like its predecessors, Smells Funny was cut live in studio to capture the band's dynamism in real time. It opens with "Beastie, Beastie" that delivers the band at full throttle in its first few moments. The backbone-slipping riff comes right out of Ted Nugent's "Strangehold" but is transformed into a silvery, distorted journey through bluesy yet heavy improvisation driven by Ivar Joe Bjornstad's snare and cymbal crashing drumming, and paced by Ellen Brekken's whomping bassline. "First Thing to Pop Is the Eye" traverses sonic terrain that recalls familiarity with side two of King Crimson's Starless and Bible Black, Jeff Beck's Blow by Blow, and Hendrix's "Third Stone from the Sun." The riff is a gateway for the rhythm section to engage one another in varying tensions and Mollestad to get her labyrinthine soloing on amid feedback, distortion pedals, and a fluid sense of time. "Jurasek" is the set outlier. It offers a nuanced and detailed piece of harmonically detailed, melodically rich electric jazz. Brekken uses the double bass and Bjornstad plays his ride cymbals and snare, framing Mollestad in the soloist's role. It's a successful stylistic departure that reveals the trio's savvy and creative depth. "Sugar Rush Mountain" sounds exactly like its title: with shifting time signatures and climbing riffs amid prog metal pyrotechnics, its intensity moves from strength to strength. "Bewitched, Dwarfed and Defeathered," is a riff orgy in punishing, thick, sludgy hard rock until she starts to take it apart, filling the spaces between with angular, shard-like lead lines while Brekken and Bjornstad take her on directly and push the jam into fleet, forceful, manic jazz improv. While the solo borders on skronk, the band never loses its footing. Closer "Lucidness" is the most spontaneous track here. A structured improvisation, it begins speculatively. When the tension and volume gradually increase, the group take off yet continue to listen to one another as the complexity of their journey grows. The music on Smells Funny explores both margins and interiors; this band keeps reaching for an as-yet-unknown sonic terrain where the genres they engage no longer matter as separate entities. ~ Thom Jurek|

Tracklisting:

1.Beastie, Beastie
2.First Thing To Pop Is The Eye
3.Jurasek
4.Sugar Rush Mountain
5.Bewitched, Dwarfed and Defeathered
6.Lucidnes