Avey’s own group and in a recent project called “Authority Melts From Me,” based on his field research of Voodoodrumming in Haiti. Avey put out his first record, “A New Face.” He’s played with the excellent saxophonist Miguel Zénon, both in Mr. That year they made a duo record together, “Vienna Dialogues,” playing versions of classical lieder.įour years later, with his trio and Mr. Avey unless you keep track of the saxophonist Dave Liebman, with whom he’s worked off and on since 2006, before he graduated from music school. (He’s either internalized Cecil Taylor or others who have internalized Cecil Taylor.) It’s not background music. It owes a lot to the harmony and atmospheres of Debussy and Ravel, but here and there - for instance, on his own “Late November” and his version of the Michael Jackson hit “P.Y.T.” - it turns polytonal and polyrhythmic, with a piano-as-tuned-drum-set conception. It is full of will to not be easily reduced and categorized, though it is frequently very beautiful. It values individual touch and rhythm and phrasing, abruptness and negative space.īut it goes where it wants. JON PARELESīobby Avey’s “Be Not So Long to Speak,” a solo-piano record of mystery, patience, imagination and clear design, could have been made only by a jazz pianist. The album’s spell of solitary desolation can’t be set aside so easily. Coyne concludes “Always There in Our Hearts” with an affirmation of “The joy of life that overwhelms” amid cacophony and echoes, he doesn’t sound all that convinced. And when, after brooding for nearly an hour, Mr. But that song, and the seven-minute “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die,” grow incantatory, with inexorably surging drums in “You Lust” and a slow-motion spatial barrage of notes and textures in “Butterfly.”Īt times the music falls short of its arty ambitions “Turning Violent,” with a falsetto vocal and an ominous pulse, is too close to Radiohead for its own good. The album includes just nine songs in 55 minutes, and about halfway through comes “You Lust,” which marches along for 13 minutes on an unvarying four-note electric piano line. Throughout “The Terror,” the band’s guitars have been all but supplanted by keyboards and synthesizers, often set to loop and drone, with eerie sounds welling up out of nowhere. But its obsessiveness brings its own rewards. “The Terror” rarely does it’s a take-it-or-leave-it album that’s willing to be inert or annoying. Through three decades Wayne Coyne has led his band on an uncharted trajectory amid punk, psychedelia, studio obsessiveness, science fiction, mysticism and noise Steven Drozd, who joined the Flaming Lips as their drummer in 1991, largely shapes the music.Īlong the way, Flaming Lips albums have usually offset their gloomy moments with garage-rock stomps or melodic confections even the band’s generally bummed-out 2009 album, “Embryonic,” had some crash and shimmer. “The Terror” embraces repetition and abrasiveness more monolithically than previous Flaming Lips albums. But there’s no escaping bleakness on “The Terror,” which willfully tosses away nearly anything that might offer easy pleasure or comic relief. The goofy costumes, flashing lights, confetti blasts and general hilarity of the Flaming Lips’ concerts largely conceal the sense of dread that has also run through their songs in a recording career that has now lasted for an improbable 30 years.
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