Not everybody can combine styles convincingly. That is obvious. In fact it's rather hard. When you talk about combining avant and straight-ahead jazz, funk, hip hop, sampling, electricity, rock and collage, the list gets very short.
M'lumbo can and does do it convincingly. Last month (December 19th) I covered their Tuning in to Tomorrow album on my Gapplegate Music Review blog. Today I cover another recent one here. Their Celestial Ghetto (Pursuance 02) continues where the first one left off. Jane Ira Bloom is their guest; she does some nice solos (I've never heard her not sounding good)! And they all go places again. There's mid-size post-bop, interesting arrangements, funk hipness and a cosmic outness that works its way into your head if you let it. Some good soloing from the band too. Yeah the guitarist is cool also (this blog mentions that g-word in the header, so...). It's all about a big, complex collage of sound that also grooves with some very cool horn/band parts and kicks with an excellent rhythm section. Does that give you a sound picture?
The sampling of spoken word is fairly constant, and on some systems, it sounds a little up in the mix. On the system of mine that most faithfully reproduces sound, it doesn't. So that is not a quibble at this point. The difference in how almost anything complex sounds on different systems is a source of chagrin with me, and this is very complex sound-staging. A mention will suffice.
Anyway another interesting one from the gang at M'lumboland. These folks can burn it up and be original in good ways. They do that here. Catch them!
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