Robeone 2024
Optimistica
Always look on the bright side of life: veteran of ebony-and-ivory extravaganzas embraces bright perspectives.
Never averse to mysterious aspects of a tune, Robert Schindler has been accessing, and assessing, the variety of moods keyboards are able to deliver for years now. Yet while the American artist’s last effort, "Dream Suite" from 2022, seemed to split between jazz and rhythm-and-blues in its homage to past masters of Moog synthesizer, “Optimistica” sees him return to the fierce fusion of yore. More so, the seven wonders on offer introduce a sort of concept, which is no mean feat for an instrumental album, and paint a luminous – but nuanced, as opposed to dazzling – sonic panorama that the listener will find easy to relate to, because the musical images they project must lighten up any burden imposed on one by daily routine.
Of course, all of this is nowhere near new age – Moogs are too expressive to sound amorphous or abstract – and though opening mini-epic “Billie’s Heart” lays non-linear piano motifs over shimmering background, once beats enter the frame to give momentum to the piece’s increasingly cosmic scope, proper adventures start off, romantic resonance inviting the audience to take a trip into the great unknown. And if the spaced-out “Broken Days” arrives untethered from toil and trouble of down-to-earth existence, even when the ivories imitate sax, the number’s meandering layers gradually arrange the ether into order before “No Clue” reins in its initial frenzy and goes for a jovial jive. Still, if the platter’s title track reimagines acoustic ragtime for a “Star Wars” cantina scene as faux flutes and fiddle get factored in, “Peace A Dream” merges emotional turmoil with harmonized elegy.
This is what makes “Possibly Blue” so immersive: the sense of subdued serenity – pregnant with hope and ready to burst in vivid effervescence which will be dynamically revealed in “Colors” that emerges in its progressive rock grandeur to twang the album into the sunset – and into silence too. Feeling optimistic doesn’t feel like an option in Robeone’s world: one simply has to embrace bright future here.
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