Flatiron 2025
Raging against technological vagaries, Brooklyn composer and his comrades serve up most human record of their two-decade career.
Prove You’re Not A Robot
Alex Skolnick has come a long way since his days as a precocious heavy metal star and embraced quite a few styles over the years, the guitarist’s most daring endeavor being forging an avant-garde variety of fusion in the company of contrabassist Nathan Peck and drummer Matt Zebroski. This little ensemble’s five studio albums include both covers and original material, and their sixth could have followed the same path – if only the American master didn’t rein in the collective’s bebop leanings and heavy stomp to favor arresting tunes that stun the listener with exquisite delivery. More so, the eight numbers on offer demonstrate the divide between the genre the performers seemed to pursue previously and proper jazz-rock, because lyrical licks rub shoulders here with fiery, albeit brief, rifferamas to a great emotional effect.
Setting the pattern of transparency, titular epic may bring the record into focus with a light lilt in Skolnick’s filigree, yet the muscular twang will make this track pleasantly tangible. As tight knots tied by the rhythm section under the leader’s six strings provide the melody with a trampoline, rather than safety net, his notes bounce off of Zebroski and Peck’s imaginative swing in quite an elegant fashion before leaving them, for a joyous while, to jive alone. The result is a perfect platform for a wordless, and almost otherworldly, reading of Tom Petty’s “Breakdown” that reveals a series of adventurous bends and wondrous angles the song’s writer could not foreseen but would appreciate. Further on, the platter’s other borrowed melody – or, in fact, two interwoven melodies, because “Armando’s Mood” appears to be a portmanteau of Chick Corea and Steve Howe’s instrumentals – breathes with life and bristles with tentative swagger.
Still, “The Polish Goodbye” intrepidly taps into rockabilly and mines dynamic depths reserved solely for a three-piece’s telepathy in which there’s no place to hide and a lot of spots to come out and shine at the center of sonic image and in a supporting role. This trio, however, know how to engage in both aspects of their explosive merriment and also the medieval elegy they reach for in “Infinite Hotel” whose resonant, gradually sped-up nuances are simply soul-shattering. And though “Asking For A Friend” melds electric and acoustic tones to create sublime balladry, “Parallel Universe” ups the ante by adding dainty drama to the overall aural image – until rimshots start to drive it towards flurries of pure rapture.
Is there a better approach to preparing the scene for the folk-influenced “Guiding Ethos” that gives the record a delicate – and, in places, near-frenetic – finale? Hardly so: altogether, the many delights of “Prove You’re Not A Robot” go far beyond the album’s title and intent and enter the realm of man’s grasp of universal vibe.
*****
