Pixel, We Are All Small Pixels

On a morning of another blizzard outside and my computer giving me the fits with a severe need to defrag I play Pixel's album We Are All Small Pixels (Cuneiform Rune 372) (LP or CD) and I get stupidly happy. Good music does that. To hell with the blizzard.

So why is this good? They are from Oslo. But that's not why. They are a band that makes the phrase jazz-rock respectable because the songs singer and double bassist Ellen Andrea Wang writes for the band are really fetching and they rock. Drummer Jon Audun Baar, trumpeter Jonas Kilmork Vemøy and saxophonist Harald Lassen give substance to the music and make what could be what is.

It's in a way as radical as Morphine (with that bari doing rock) in that they work with what they have and make something different. Ellen sounds great as vocalist and her bass makes you dig in. But the arrangements, the heat of an excellent drummer and those hip horns put this in gear.

This may be only their second album--but hey they sound really seasoned and hot as hell when they go to it. The songs are really something and Ellen delivers them! OK, get this one too. But only if you want. It's put a smile on my face all week. I don't smile all the time, either.

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!