Luckily for fans and former wincers, UM’s newest effort, Mantis, is a giant step in many different good directions for a band that at times can be one of the best things contemporary prog-rock offers.

First and foremost, the band takes the entire song cycle very seriously, in the sense that their frat boy sense of humor and their obvious need to experiment with pop structure is toned down noticeably. From the very start of the opening “Made to Measure,” a jaunty thematic prelude to the numerous 7 to 11 minute tracks found later, the band is dealing with some dark issues, going so far as to “carve their own headstones” and take not one, but two “Cemetery Walks.” While never specifically naming their fears and confusion, vocalists Brendan Bayliss and Joel Cummings (who takes a significant step up in his role as secondary singer and songwriter) keep their lyrics streamlined, simple, and with just enough solemnity to match the music’s layered approach. “Prophecy Now” repeats similar lines over and over but allows the melody to become the glue between subtly growing piano leads, bone dry rhythm tracks, and surprisingly free and loose string parts. Because past albums represented Umphrey’s improvisational soul by simply reproducing live favorites with more guitar compression, a track like this is all the more impressive, as the vocals give context for the song’s internal build-up, and the changing acid jazz-metal accents from the always entertaining and versatile drumming of Kris Myers. While the more subdued sections of Mantis are not as immediately catchy as some of the band’s previous songs and efforts, they end up being more rewarding on repeated listens, due to their depth and design, as opposed to the band forcing it down the throat of the listener’s ear.

Beyond their maturing sense of vocals, the band has finally given it’s songs some room to breath in the studio setting. The title track, not including it’s peaceful and tiny xylophone-based “Preamble,” weighs in at nearly a dozen minutes, and spans the pallet from thunderous tom-drum driven overture
to triumphant chorus refrain to jazz piano rave ups reminiscent of Bowie more so than Yes or Rush. The longer supposition allows for UM’s very solid studio wizardry to have a deeper impact; it ceases to act as a peak of a track, and more as a transitional element. “Mantis” dives from a cloudy mix of sonic grumbling into a brief silence, before lifting itself off the ground with a beautiful slow Bayliss-penned bridge section, followed by an ending that never tries to be too dramatic. “Cemetery Gates” is content spreading a minimum of progressions over it’s seven minute span, and then brings back the chorus for another dancier reprise; once accused by many of having the most acute attention deficit disorder in rock, Umphrey’s relaxes their instincts and backs up their decreased riffage with wisely placed alien melodies and subtler takes on their trademark dual guitar leads.

Perhaps the combination is, at this point, too relaxed for lead guitarist Jake Cinninger, whose usual virtuosic playing and writing seems at times forced and out of place on Mantis. “Turn and Run” roams along the floor with a dirty bass/keyboard rumble, gleefully sharpening the pub-rock underbelly with shards of thrash, but runs into an elongated solo that barks too loud at first and never fully satisfies. “Spires” goes so far as to replace the normal guitar buildup with a full band (plus string section) cyclone of noise that ends up being more effective.

While it’s new hybrid of prog and complex Steely Dan-like verse structures isn’t perfected on the album, perhaps Mantis exists as a great step ahead for a band still searching for new sounds and ways to express their musical brilliance. Indeed, it’s the closing fury of “1348” which best showcases the potential of Umphrey’s, sandwiching a complex hook-filled stanza between ragged brutal thumping instrumental sections reminiscent of King Crimson. Every note is purposeful, the rhythms work like toned muscles and tendons, and the layered counter-picking of guitars sounds like a electric spider web, while the vocal section does it’s job and leaves town, simultaneously acting as epilogue and prelude. Hopefully the next act is as graceful a progression as Mantis.

6 out of 10 stars: For a band that might put out 20 or so more albums, this one will be looked at as a turning point in the right direction.

Novation

Travis Basso, the alter ego of Blacklite, swapped out his copy of Blues for Allah for Paul Oakenfold discs early in his college days, and realized fairly quickly that dance music was going to be his outlet for musical exploration. Utilizing samplers, drum machines, and any post-apocalyptic piece of musical equipment he can lay his hands on, Blacklite produces all his tracks live on stage, and often it can sound like he’s either a relative of an octopus, or a fantastic juggler. He’s been playing gigs around the Westchester area for years, including several music festivals at Concordia College, where Basso has co-headlined. His shows often combine the best of thumping house DJ sets, with a analog style that more reflects classic electronic music of the late 70’s. Beyond that, however, his knack for counter-point often offers a resemblance to ambient and IDM musicians, even stretching to Steven Reich -like moments on stage, when the breadth of swirling melodic synth lines forms like a crystalline spider web over the drum and bass.

Blacklite pieces together simplistic rhythm tracks that can sometimes sound like the best segments of Mega Man or Contra, but it’s always the attention to writing songs within his confined set up that grabs your concentration. It’s always interesting to learn how an individual crafts his compositions, and in a case like the solo Blacklite, this methodology is especially exciting. I got a chance to ask some unbelievably abstract questions to Blacklite, and he answered the Listening Room like a champ…

Listening Room: What made you decide to push all those different flashing buttons and knobs?

Travis Basso: Well, since I was in high school I wanted to make music (like many teenage boys) and I played guitar but it was in freshman year of college that I was introduced to dance music (Oakenfold/Van Dyke) and jam-band’s that are dance oriented (New Deal/Disco Biscuits) and from there I knew I wanted to make dance music. But I didn’t know how. I tried to study the music with my ears but I could not make the music with my acoustic guitar. For my next birthday my mom said she would buy me some sort of musical equipment and while I was looking at synths and such she pointed to the Korg Electribe AmkII Analogue Modeling Synthesizer (God bless her heart) and it was perfect. About a year later I had a girlfriend who bought me the Electribe EMX1 and the rest is Blacklite. What I liked most about the electribes is that I am not a trained keyboardist (I can barely play piano) but with the electribes I don’t need to be a professional performer (per se) rather I become a professional producer and engineer. Live, I am more of an engineer, deciding when to bring stuff in and out and how is should all sound and weave.

LR: Do you dream about Kraftwerk?

TB: Of course I do! I couldn’t do what I do if I didn’t know where it all came from. It didn’t happen at first but eventually I learned to love disco (did you know there is really good disco out there?!) which gave birth to House music. Most people would never even know I grew up on Grateful Dead and my whole family is Dead-heads. That is why I wanted to do what I do; just plain DJ’ing never seemed free enough…what if the floor is really moving and I want to drop it back into the chorus one more time? Sure a good DJ could probably do it but I wanted the freedom of being able to play the same song a dozen different ways! Well this past summer I played at this amazing festival called “Cabinfest” in Andes NY and it was there that I was properly exposed to real amazing cutting-edge House music as well as DJ’s and people who took music as serious as I do. After that I bombarded myself with Electro-House in order to make that sound. Alongside that I grew to appreciate and enjoy 80’s music a lot more (because a lot of electro-house is coming from 80’s sounds and bands). So right now on my Ipod I have almost only DJ sets that I got free offline: DJ Strex, DJ Mark Starr, DJ Joey Seminara, DJ Peter Worth, DJ Anna Kiss, The Digitalist, DJ Mohammad Ragab, DJ Robonitronicus, Deadmau5, Chromeo, and Armand Van Helden.

LR: Give us a step-by-step explanation of how you write and produce a track that you end up preforming live..

TB: It is a process. I never have a preconceived “song” in my head. Sure throughout the day I get ideas and inspirations and every time I listen to music I make mental notes of things I notice or decipher that I would like to try or experiment with. All those things float around in my head but I never sit down thinking “ok so the bass comes in like this and the synths start…” A lot of people thinking that being in some altered state is going to help too. No way. Sure, House music was born with LSD and everybody knows rave music is married to “E” but neither of those are going to help you make dance music. The rule of thumb is that being on any drug to try and help the creative process will only result in one of two things: either spending a tremendous amount of time on nothing (“whoa I just spent an hour on my kick drum sound, and it still sucks!”).

I start with the drums – the standard 4-to-the-floor – get the timbres sounding unique but all gelling together. Then I will add some hi-hat flare and if I can hear a good rhythm I might add some more very unique sounding percussion timbres but sometimes, I add them later as the song develops and I can hear what it needs. Sometimes, though, a fairly standard 4-to-the-floor is enough. After that comes the bass synth. I decide what key (roughly) I want the song to be in; many times I write in C because the physical keyboard (digitally I can shift through about 8 octaves) on my Electribe is about one octave going from A to an octave higher C so the C scale just fits perfectly, so I try to stray from that. Then I just play the drums and experiment with playing different bass lines and once I have something interesting I go back and edit in all the style and flair like making one part of the bass slide up or putting in a trill or some sort of effects automation. Then I let that loop and play while I play an interesting synth part using a similar concept of real time playing then going back and adding the flair. Once that is done I have the main foundation of the song. Lately I have been working on more refined songs that rely more on the performance aspect of slowly building and breaking down and building the song to move the song along instead of a series of different “sections”. Also something I am trying to do more often is write all the synth parts without defining the timbre first. That way you can hear whether or not the parts are gelling or fighting each other and then you can begin to define and sculpt the timbres. This was a little more general than specific but is exactly how I wrote “Novation” (see above).

LR: Your shows have a visual element as well; you sometimes will show old newsreel footage of WWII era events, and your self-made art often dresses the stage while you preform. What’s the connection between your music and your art?

TB: Living in this post-modern world everything is characterized by dislocation/disconnection, absurdity, abstraction: we view a war in our living rooms, we meet people around the world at our desk, our idols are people pretending to be someone else in completely impossible situation which we believe to be more real than our own lives; we think “reality” is a television show. This becomes a thread through everything and my art exists to explore this. My painting process is such that I never “touch” the canvas – I pour paint on it, blow on the paint, spray it with wine – I create expressions of emotions and moods and atmosphere and “scapes” all in an attempt to explore the feelings and sentiments of our post-modern society. My music is made primarily through inorganic methods (synthesizers, drums machines) using abstract sounds and absurd sounds all blended together to make people dance; which in essence capitalizes on the contemporary notion of entitlement to gratification. Music is a linear art – it has a beginning, middle, and end as well as a conceivable progression whereas Art exists in the moment it doesn’t begin or end nor is there a perceivable progression – but through the use of film one can capture the process of art and mirror it alongside of music thus weaving the two together to work off of each other was well as with each other. All of this serves the purpose to explore myself and our current human condition as well as to express myself and my thoughts on our 21^st century human condition.

LR: If you could have all the people in the country dancing to your music, would you use your power for good or evil?

TB: Excellent question. It depends on how you look at it. To me I would use my power for good by making people dance 24/7. They could still go to work and such but electro-house would be played all the time everywhere, every day, every second. I would have people dancing at work 24/7 with people taking shifts to keep it all going. I myself would be torn between wanting to only dance and wanting to make my music and perform it. And yes, I would dance harder and longer than anybody (I already do).

BLACKLITE is preforming in Greenpoint, Brooklyn this Saturday (January 24th) at RedStar Bar, at 7pm. You can check out more from the mind of Blacklite, including more free music, here: http://blacklitemusic.wordpress.com/2008/12/30/dance-city/

Perhaps trying to lull the crowd into a false sense of that aforementioned relaxation, bassist Marc Brownstein and drummer Allen Aucoin began the show by leading a sparse dub/slow funk jam out of nothingness, building patiently into a menacing march that would lead into a revamped “Floodlights.”  For a band that has in the past improvised at the highest of speeds, patience was very much at the forefront here: keyboardist Aron Magner lithely laid down synth bubbles and sweeps with grace, and guitarist Jon Gutwillig was content with just adding subtle blips to the 15 minute intro. While a great contrast to their reputation as four-on-the-floor machines, this initial foray into their new dub interests, followed by a hip-hop inflected jam out of the song itself, seemed to wane a little early, and perhaps dealing with sound issues on stage, the band played with a nervous energy that betrayed the downtempo vibe. Additionally, one must ask whether “Floodlights,” a Brownstein penned Beastie Boys knockoff first played live almost a decade ago, is really the kind of song that represents the band anymore as they open a 5 show run for NYE.

Nevertheless, it’s the Biscuits’ unpredictability that makes them what they are, and the first set picked up steam and logistical interest as Aucoin led the band to faster tempos in “Shem-Rah-Boo,” the classic tale of narcissism strewn across slap bass hyper-funk, and a flurry of segues off its jam that included literally 90 seconds of “Little Betty Boop” and the ending section of “Svengali.” Instead of resting on their dub laurels, the band seemed to harken back to their 2001-era style in their improvisation, playing fast and furious in a way that is unique to them: the style is obviously steeped in psy-trance and house music, with the drums and bass providing simplistic backdrops for a swirling combination of Magner and Barber, but the tempo is something faster. With Allen pushing the kick drum harder and harder in the speed-trance sections, the electronic canvas took on a dark and angry undertone, envoking even bands like Ministry into the Biscuits’ cadre of genre-hopping forays. This was accentuated in the first set-closing “Save the Robots,” whose layered and smooth middle jam gave way to an intense ending section, which, in this particular case, worked well in a relatively shorter time frame. Additionally, taking a cue from fellow electronic jam-band Sound Tribe Sector 9, the Biscuits made more use of their ever increasingly laptop presence on stage; Brownstein especially seemed to get the hang of his bass synth setup rather quickly in ”’Robots” and the second set’s “Story of the World.”

Unfortunately, the beginning of the second set belied the aforementioned issue of where the band is in terms of composition and songwriting. Starting with a new track, somewhat reminiscent of Tortoise in a strange way, the offbeat song seemed to carry no weight in it’s placement to the NYC crowd. Currently, the band still relies on older tracks to revolve their set around. While the improvisation continues to mature and grow after more than a decade, it just doesn’t seem like the band is able to consistently catch lighting in a bottle with their new songs, nor develop the new original material over time to a seemingly younger but still demanding fan base. However, perhaps cognisant of this issue themselves, the band still finds ways of surprising the audience with new ideas tacked on to classic tracks. For instance, “Munchkin Invasion” got the second set moving back in the speedier direction, featuring a dark circus-like jam, and in that spirit of innovation, extending the last measure of the song, slowly repeating the phrase and subtly moving it upwards and out into a quick and unrelenting DnB beat.

It was obvious from the first 30 minutes of set two, all fast trance and DnB as “Munchkin” moved into the instrumental “Liquid Handcuffs,” that the Disco Biscuits were in no mood to relax during the first night of their historic NYC run this week. A jumpy and excited Gutwillig was definitely the figurehead for a band that’s been in a little bit of gig-withdrawal, and even on the first night of the run, the band was willing to deliver heavy hitters in droves, while bypassing any hint of easing into the home stand. Hopefully, for fans looking for a resurgence in 2009, the band can take some of it’s momentum into their upcoming tour and some new originals.

Having seen the reunited Police experiment in 2007, with all the large stage spectacle that comes with one of the biggest fall-into-bed-with-ex-girlfriend circumstances in rock history, it’s nice to be able to take a strictly aural examination of what the unit that once broke boundries between punk, new wave, and pop was able to do in their wrinkled years. Certifiable, a 2-disc set recorded live in Buenos Aires, allows for an unadulterated listen, free of distractions such as Sting’s uninterested gaze, Andy Summer’s increasing resemblance to a hobbit, and Stewart Copeland’s seemingly never ending promises/threats to “get naked and swim among you,” which was mentioned at least twice at the show I saw. The results are interesting, and understandably mixed.

Seeing as how there is almost no new original material, and that everyone in the world will know 90 percent of the tracklist enough to sing along, the album nevertheless prevails in offering a very new set of music to even ardent Police fans. The playing of the reunited band stays very loose from the very start of opener “Message in a Bottle” through the whole first disc, a marked change from the strict composed franticness of the band when it dissolved in the early 80’s. It bears more of a resemblance to the early era punk hybrid Police, although instead of that era’s tendency to hide sensitivity and groove behind rave ups and speed, the aged version uses it’s reggae chops and atmospheric sensibilities to develop very organic versions of even the most rigid of pop tracks, like “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” and “Every Breath”.

Additionally, and most likely a result to Copeland’s love affair with Oysterhead, the band tacks on new extended jams to almost every single track, sometimes going far off the beaten path in a very refreshing way. Fans of Copeland’s intense versatility and virtuosity will have his playing as reason alone to hear this album, as he scatters dub, jazz, and even metal across the familiar landscapes of the Police hits. “Driven to Tears” is slow and menacing at it’s start, leading to a heavy bridge powered by Copeland’s stadium-sized playing. It’s also a reminder of how long the Police have had to learn how to play to stadiums; some of the best improvisation on the album comes from sections where the bands plays minimally, allowing the huge speaker systems to hit the audience in a more thoughtful way.

However, as mentioned before, a clear audible picture of the new Police certainly yields some imbalances in how the band functioned on the comeback trail. While Copeland sounds refreshed, invigorated, and contemporary, that same enthusiasm doesn’t necessarily appear from Sting. To his credit, Sting hits every note and then some; his ability to smoothly deliver melody, both in composition and the jam sections, is showcased everywhere. But even while maintaining a great competence on bass and vocals, Sting just sounds like he wants to be doing other things, let alone tantric meditation. He doesn’t seem to have the same connection to many of the older songs’ more adolescent themes. Andy Summers, on the contrary, tries very hard, but that shows itself for most of the album. His struggles to regain rock chops after decades of ambient and jazz projects keep him constantly one step behind Copeland and Sting, and it sometimes drags down some of the faster classics like “Truth Hits Everbody.” On the bright side, when he’s allowed to relax and play more speciously in the improve segments, Summers tends to connect much more and lead the sections towards their peak.

7/10: Good for casual fans who saw the show; better for hardcore Police fans who have been imagining what Roxanne would sound like with a jam.

Full disclosure: I’m a musician, and so I’ve been taught to not really care about what critics have to say, if not to despise them on principal alone. So, having been asked to write for what I consider an excellent source of music knowledge and review, a diamond in a sand-sea of musical talk and brouhaha, a blog with impeccable dedication to spreading new and independent music…I of course am filled with fear, insecurity, self-loathing, and Rolaids. How can I grasp what everyone will want to read about and discover? How will my pre-dispositions to what I enjoy affect what I can bring to you? Do my deepest, inner thoughts bear any relevance to your very existence? Did I use the right HTML code to get that picture of Wilco small enough to fit?

Now, the good news is, I’ve formulated a plan that should get all of us through this, safely, with no permanent injuries, and in the end, I think you’ll gain 3 things.
For one, I’m going to keep bringing up history, in relation to popular music, and what it means today. I’ll talk about the impact of grunge, shoegazer, industrial, electronic, punk, hardcore, thrash, hip hop, new wave and more, and why they’re just as important as music from the 50’s-70’s. Additionally, there’s lots of music from any decade that just bears mentioning when it’s relevant again.

Second, I’m gonna review new albums and bands fairly, keeping in mind the circumstances which face that band, and how that affects the music. I’m not necessarily the nicest guy in the world, but I love music in a way that shapes my every move. And who doesn’t love someone telling you why Of Montreal is stealing from the jambands they probably claim to hate?

Finally, I’m going to give you a glimpse into the often boring but sometimes notable life as a working musician in the Northeast, and wonder aloud (and in type) how and why my experiences matter to me, my band, my friends, and our dozen or so wonderful fans. As in life, sometimes they’ll be rants, and sometimes they’ll be melodramatic flirtations with optimism. Enjoy both responsibly!

So I’m in…please let me know what I’m doing wrong, and if I’m right…keep listening.