A cold description of Music From the Early 21st Century might be that it’s just three middle-aged dudes engaging in musical wankery over shapeless chord patterns made up as they went along. But since these middle-aged men are drummer Bobby Previte, keyboardist Jamie Saft and guitarist Nels Cline, such an account would totally miss the mark, because of their limitless technical abilities and supernatural powers of telepathic empathy.
Raucous, heavy jams that recalls Last Exit, Music From the Early 21st Century is a fortuitous meeting of three musicians who are eminently equipped to handle the rigors and risk-taking inherent in these kind of supercharged collaborations.
Previte and Saft have performed and recorded together extensively as two thirds of Saft’s New Standards trio along with bass icon Steve Swallow. The Previte/Saft/Cline trio doesn’t have a real leader, it’s democracy (veering toward anarchy) in action. Saft had previously been involved with heavy rock/jazz guitar/keyboards/drums outfits, like The Spanish Donkey (with Joe Morris and Mike Pride), but insert Cline into any situation and sit back to watch sparks of a whole different nature fly.
I’m not going to lie, these are songs that don’t have a whole lot of form to them, they truly are jams. That’s what happens when you’re performing pure improvisation in front of a live audience. That said, hours of these tracks were curated down to album length by Previte who cut away the lingering and much of the crowd noise — many of these tracks fade out — and present the essence of this group. Besides, the emphasis on the unpremeditated interplay without guardrails puts elite musicians in a position to put on an intense chops show.
What’s left from a brief tour of the Northeast in early 2019 is all killer, no filler. Cline creates an entire harmonic structure from feedback on “Photobomb” then goes into attack mode. “Paywall” has suggestions of dub amid the guitar squalls as well as Deep Purple’s Jon Lord found in Saft’s crunchy organ. Saft’s Minimoog sets a retro-space fantasy bottom end for “Parkour,” where Previte’s drum subtleties are stellar.
Cline’s absolute master of electronics through his guitar is evident from the looping that commences with the soul-laden “The Extreme Present,” where he later creates an exotic figure that could have been inspired by Middle Eastern music. “Totes” slows it down for a spell, with Saft on a shimmering electric piano.
Saft makes his organ sound like a growling stomach on “Occession,” helping to create a slumber out of which Previte pulls the band, and Cline rains down long, scary notes as Saft makes his B3 swell up as large as an elephant. Cline is soon digging deep in his bag of sinister effects and collectively they are forging the sound of hell being summoned.
Saft gets his Rod Argent going on for the first three-plus minutes of “The New Weird,” settling into a smooth, smoky swing that Previte mines for all it’s worth. Cline likewise goes lounge club jazz, and just when you think they are going to get through a song clean, they bring out the dirty again and the civility comes crashing down.
Previte’s toms mete out a foreboding beat in tandem with the buzzing and humming of Saft’s keyboards during “Machine Learning” and Cline interjects shrill, cataclysmic figures to complete the sonic picture of doom. “Flash Mob” brings together funk and Krautrock in a delicious combination, dominated by Previte’s in-the-pocket pulse and Saft’s Atari sonorities. And then the boys take the song in a different with a different groove, providing a platform for more Cline shredding.
Music From the Early 21st Century is, thankfully, not typical of music from the era in which we are living in. It’s instead an artifact of three towering talents whose individual quests to take music into dangerous, dark alleys find perfectly sympathetic partners. It will drop on February 28, 2020 from Rare Noise Records.
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