MoonJune 2024
Deerand
For the duration and beyond: fourth album of Persian fusion ensemble forms a spellbinding time-and-space continuum and lures in progressive rock stars to help illuminate it.
That’s what Iran must be associated with instead of ayatollahs: the ever-adventurous spirit of music and other cultural aspects many people attribute, erroneously so, to the country’s ancient past. It’s the spirit which is very much alive and kept contemporary by such collectives as this foursome whose decade-long striving for perfection resulted in four astounding pieces possessed of international appeal. Still, while the platter’s title refers to the local musical term meaning the time value of a note, there’s nothing pedantic about melodic passages under the record’s colorful cover artwork, because the tunes develop so unpredictably as to be extremely, albeit never perilously, audacious. And alluringly heartfelt as well.
This is the reason for the titular composition to need every single moment of its almost-26-minute span – it requires a lot of space to properly breathe and to spread its wings. Slowly soaring from Mazyar Younesi’s deliberately dimmed piano passages – elegant and subdued, yet increasingly resonant, in a classically influenced Petrucciani way – to stratosphere where Markus Reuter-sculpted soundscapes get populated with Ehsan Sadigh’s guitar waves, “Deerand” exudes a sense of perpetual flight even before Soheil Peyghambari’s woodwinds warm the epic’s heady, quasi-orchestral expanse, and Rouzbeh Fadavi’s drums imbue the room with grooves, first unhurried and then rather frantic ones. So when the gloomy “Tehran II” arrives on the scene, parping urban menace into the otherwise serene, sometimes funereal and ultimately explosive, sonic panorama, tentative inquiries as to why the band’s album couldn’t be another numbered “Station” as their previous opuses were become irrelevant: the Persian perspectives of the platter’s tracks are too focused on aural maneuvers to accept any sort of signposting – but reflecting reality from a different angle will serve them just fine.
And that’s why Tony Levin’s electric contrabass on the melancholic, if twangy and pregnant with promise, “Mirror Side” and Chapman Stick on “Allegro per il Ré” feel so apposite in their ability to anchor the sparse creepiness of the quartet’s performances on the former and the upliftingly harmonized impetuosity of the riff-driven latter. This is where the time value of a note seems precious: in the constant movement of momentum captured by the Iranian team with delicious precision and desire to share their pleasure with the world.
*****
