Trance Lucid, Palace of Ether

Trance Lucid plays a lively rocking trio music on their Palace of Ether (AM 01313). Dave Halverson has much to do with the outcome, coming through with some very hip rock guitar and writing the music, doubling on bass and synthesizers; Terry Lee plays some respectably rocking drums; Richard Bugbee mans the keyboards in an appropriate way.

It's fusionoid without settling squarely into what one expects from that style these days. It's jazz-rock without landing hard and consistently on a head-solos-head format.

What drives all this is some nice compositional, chordal, rifforal catchiness. Dave can rip out with a very decent, tasteful rock solo per se and he does in the midst of all this, but it's the musical guitar-compositional sequences and their variations that get your attention and stay in the memory. And all three play the right things to go with that.

Call it what you like, instrumentally progressive rock, whatever. It just lays down nicely and puts a good imprint on your listening mind.

Yeah, now that's good to hear!