Perfect Imperfection
A beautiful piano piece This Paper House played by George Cooper begins the album and sets a serene, lyrical tone. This is taken up in next track The Wheel with a gorgeous echoing and ambient flugelhorn from Gary Alesbrook that leads into composer, arranger and producer Al Swainger dancing with his bass in the musical ether, synths orchestrating further peace and calm.
Atmospherics, musically speaking, and like the weather this can change suddenly, so that wheel then turns into a fine fusion of percussion, piano chords, guitar riffs, Rhodes, and flugelhorn runs.
As a listener, I am already blissfully subdued but also pumped for more. Yin yang - and the varying tones, moods, styles of this collection are a transportation to pure pleasure.
Third track Seedling is a further emblematic stager, the swathe of sound growing into its statement of how creation and performance blossom in a musical symbiosis with Mike Outram’s guitar branching out in the crescendo.
Pacing the Web, with a joint composition credit to drummer Jon Clark, has a whimsical capering start – accentuated by muted trumpet bursts – and this is a playful addition to the moods varying throughout. Clark and Outram engage together in some pacey three-legged racing.
‘Pointless Beauty’ and ‘Impure Imagination’ as titles signal the yin yang I have already mentioned, but also paradox and oxymoron, the former of these two alienations more easily attributable to a fact of a sensitive life lived. I mention this as the inner cd cover has a typically thoughtful rumination from Swainger on life and art/art and life where, for example, he contemplates how ‘Our lives are very often shaped by seeming chaos. Sometimes that means grief, loss and instability. Sometimes it brings joy, insight and liberation’. He continues to mention ‘fragility’ and ‘imperfection’ and I reference this as it points to the candour and openness of the person – this articulated and shared in his Pointless Beauty newsletter as well as postings across a spectrum of observations on Facebook – and though we don’t need to know this to hear and sense the intellectual/spiritual/artistic exploration in and of the music, it adds a layer of engagement for us to further enrich the listening experience.
To link this back to the music specifically, two tracks We’re Only Haunted and Out of Time have a beauty and serenity/liveliness (more paradox!) that is full of meaningfulness which I will suggest – and using Al’s own words – ‘help us feel oriented’ to an artistic purpose and, with this collection of fine music and performers, sonic reality of that talented exploration.
There is so much more wonderful music in the five tracks following the ‘intermission’ of Out of Time I could dissect and regale, but that would be superfluous. I highly recommend that you experience this for yourself. For more details and to get, go here
My review of the 2022 Pointless Beauty album Hearts Full of Grace can be read here.
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