When bassist Mike Watt, drummer Mike Pride and guitarist/banjoist Brandon Seabrook cooked up a collection of funky no-wave avant-rock tracks long distance during the height of covid lockdown (Stove Top, 2021), it was a treat for the three improv-music warriors to find common ground to come up with something so uncommon. Given the circumstances in which it was created, it seemed that their arrangement they dubbed Three-Layer Cake would be some one-off thing.
It wasn’t. The daring trio has reconvened to make a second album that builds momentum off of the first one. Sounds The Color Of Grounds (Otherly Love Records) is a second helping from musicians who never put constraints on what they should play. Not for Watt, who held down the bottom for the legend punk band the Minutemen and post-punk rockers fIREHOSE. Or Seabrook, whose lent his singular talents to Anthony Braxton, Nels Cline & Mostly Other People Do the Killing. Or Pride, who had been part of some rowdy units with Jon Irabagon and Jason Stein, and likewise put in time under Braxton’s leadership.
Three-Layer Cake is a band whose name describes the process by which they create the music. Pride goes first, providing the ‘bottom’ layer with his rhythmic foundation. He sends his tapes over to Watt, who adds his funk-punk bass that is as uniquely identifiable as a fingerprint. With the rhythm section part completed, the Pride/Watt product is sent over to Seabrook who gets to put his potpourri of melodic ingredients from guitar and banjo over a dark roux. The ‘gumbo’ analogy becomes more apt for their second effort in that this time, there’s a fourth step: Seabrook and Pride convened in a studio and pile on additional overdubs, injecting a little bit of structure that goes alongside the highly extemporaneous creative process.
Despite this atypical method, the resultant music still rings like it’s three dudes — three highly virtuosic dudes, mind you — sitting in a room together jamming together seriously intent on spinning magic from thin air.
You can quickly ascertain the logic behind a title “Deliverdance,” Seabrook’s banjo prancing over Pride’s brawny gait while Watt utters quatrains at just the right spots. Yes, that’s right, Watt has added his poetry to the music this time, for three of the tracks, anyway, a signal that he was comfortable enough that this project had established a strong enough particularity that it didn’t lean too hard on his past work.
“Lickspittle Spatter” springs from a Pride drum solo, and it’s a wonder to hear Watt so effortlessly find a tonal center for it. That frees up Seabrook to attack the rhythm corpus with a bowed banjo but both him and Watt keep Pride’s thumps at the center of it all. Pride also goes completely free for the foundation of “From Couplets To Corpuscles,” as the three burrow into a prog-fusion thing anchored firmly by Watt’s bass. Seabrook meanwhile plays skittering single lines framed by bright, chromatic chords. Somehow, this all fits together.
One place in particular where the additional overdubs bears sweet fruit is “Occluded Ostracized And Onanistic,” a 30’s jazz pulse enriched by Seabrook’s doubled rhythm guitar parts and Pride’s glockenspiel.
Pride and Watt’s slo-mo funk drive of “What Was Cut From The Negative Space” is ornamented by Seabrook’s acoustic guitars with shots of ridiculously overdriven guitar to put an edge on it. Hints of klezmer seep from Seabrook while “Tchotchkes” as a whole signifies warped punk-funk with a splash of reggae tossed in.
Pride’s poetic verses sprinkled throughout the scattered, trippy “The Lonely Sail” are answered by Pride on marimba and his Secret Tempo bandmate/leader Jonathan Moritz on saxophone.
Three-Layer Cake once again bakes some of the most indescribably audacious music, where gonzo meets prowess. Sounds The Color Of Grounds can be acquired today from Bandcamp.
*** Three-Layer Cake CD’s and vinyl on Amazon ***
*** Minutemen CD’s and vinyl on Amazon ***
*** mike watt CD’s and vinyl on Amazon ***
*** Brandon Seabrook CD’s and vinyl on Amazon ***
*** Mike Pride CD’s and vinyl on Amazon ***
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