ALBUM REVIEWS
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ALBUM REVIEWS |
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Rolo Tomassi
COSMOLOGY HASSLE RECORDS 28.6.10 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk
The last track, the title track, Cosmology, builds to a rising tune in a shoegaze epic. If you are acquainted, even slightly, with the oeuvre of the mighty Rolo Tomassi, that’ll come as a major surprise. So much so that I played the album again to make sure. Then the first album, then Cosmology again. Once upon a time I struggled to get through more than half the first album at one sitting but my ears have grown accustomed and Rolo have matured. Live, this is the most astonishing band – they pin you to the wall with sound and drag you back up close with the dynamics till the audience are stunned into confusion. I must have seen them half a dozen times and that’s never enough. On disc they can be harder work, since we’re not used to giving recorded music our total attention. Here, all the elements are present and correct – jazz fusion noodling, riffing onslaught, back of the throat roaring and mighty screams. James and Eva provide the vocal attack and every time I hear Eva I picture her contorted with the passion of the sound as she rips out the screams, bent over backwards, clutching the mic with two hands like a squirrel with a nut. James’ keyboards are still a major presence, providing the proggy elements and the jazzy drums keep things swinging off-kilter. Things go quiet / loud much as before and this is recognisably the same viscerally thrilling band. I’m not going to describe individual tracks as, without the sleeve in front of me, they do tend to blur into one but some are familiar from gigs (Agamemnon, Kasia, Sakia) and Party Wounds stands out with it’s bouncy bass. The departure for them is the way the album becomes more accessible towards the end, as it reaches the last few tracks. Accessible, that is, by Rolo Tomassi’s standards and Rolo are still capable of sending your average listener running from the room, hands over their ears. This is a welcome addition to the Rolo canon so long as it doesn’t herald any more conventionality in their next album. If we’ve learnt anything from bands like The Fall (and I’m not sure we have….) it’s that it’s better to plough your own furrow than be a competent member of the pack. As Bill Graham used to say about The Grateful Dead: “They’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones who do what they do.” With bands like Rolo Tomassi, Castrovalva, Pulled Apart By Horses, Chickenhawk and These Monsters, the new wave of noise from Yorkshire is looking very healthy indeed. www.myspace.com/rolotomassi |
