Adult Jazz

The band, not the music description.

As far as I can tell, they've never been mentioned or discussed on ILM, except indirectly by their presence on lists elsewhere. Which on the one hand is surprising because it looks like their 2014 album Gist Is got a fair amount of buzz and support from people like Bjork, but on the other hand I'd certainly never heard of them until this year, so <shrugs>.

Seems like they basically disappeared for a decade before coming back with an album this year So Sorry, So Slow, which I stumbled upon for essentially algorhythmic reasons.

I have since been continually returning to it off and on these past few months.

It's a strange listen, occupying a midpoint between Owen Pallett (who I suspect knows these guys? Any time something reminds me of Owen that turns out to be the case) and Bjork's Vulnicura (which may explain her endorsement), but not in a way I would have envisioned before I heard it.

The basic set-up - piano, bass, drums and strings - belies how intensely rhythmic this music is (the strings are almost exclusively deployed as slashing riffs, like little buzzsaws), coupled with a queasiness that I suspect many will find offputting. It's stagey and a bit theatrical and it seesaws from sounding formless and fragmented to being intensely tuneful to the point of sing-songy (must be the way that occasionally the vocal melody and the piano lines and the drums will suddenly and briefly align, like an image snapping into focus).

And that seesaw effect extends to the vocals and lyrics, which will pivot from elliptical to very direct in a way I find quite disarming. I find little snippets in the latter category ("I don't mind if he calls me / I don't mind if he ignores me") lodged in my head more frequently than for any other artist this year bar Taylor.

Anyway, Adult Jazz!

i will check out any tim f rec. thanks!

there are some owen songs that have definitely stuck with me in the way you describe.

Oh yeah, a lot of the lyrics on In Conflict especially were like that for me. Stuff like "Song For Five and Six" and "The Secret Seven".

A few more things about the Adult Jazz album I had planned to say:

- My description of the "basic set-up" above is a bit reductive and doesn't capture the full breadth of the arrangements. There's also a fair amount of horns and just some really odd sounds of uncertain provenance.

- The more shadowy sections of this album, like the back to back of "Earth of Worms" and "No Sentry", can get quite weird and sort of broken-sounding, like someone dropped a late-period Talk Talk song on the pavement and then glued the shattered pieces back together with only a vague recollection of what the original song sounded like.

- This effect is heightened by the vocalist's intermittent use of autotune, which, while not unpleasant exactly, definitely can create a kind of sickly pallor (as well as erecting, I assume intentionally, a barrier to direct relatability).