#jonathan bylerley

[dustedmagazine]

Emergency Group — Venal Twin (Centripetal Force)

Venal Twin is the second album this year from a band hip deep in 1970s fusion jazz. The players, as ever, include guitarist Jonathan Byerley of Plates of Cake and Anti-Westerns, keyboardist (and Barnard college prof) Robert Boston, drummer Andreas Brade (he teaches at Brooklyn School of music), and bassist Dave Mandl, and as before, they spin out from jazz, rock, kraut and psychedelia in heady extended jams.

These four cuts laid down in a separate session, though around the same time as Inspection of Cruelty, of which I said, in a brief review last March, “A 1970s futuristic cool hangs over the whole enterprise, in its chugging rhythms, its radiant runs of electric keyboards, its motorific jams.” All that still applies, in long, evolving reveries that drift and dream, but also twitch with coiled, suppressed violence. The wah-wah’d guitar in the opening title track is on edge right from the onset, and the keyboard thrashes with fever as it seeks out phosphorescing grooves. You can hear the bass better on this recording, and you recognize how Mandl values force and propulsion over all; he is always nudging, always bumping things forward, not bludgeoning exactly, but not letting anyone take a breather. These cuts are lengthy, but not the sidelong rovers of the earlier album, and they allow for brief, fiery bursts of wild shreddery that burst through the seams of head-nodding ritual rhythms.

“Dime Champ” goes the hardest out of this set, relentlessly pushing forward, more than a little funk in its wiry, minimalist frame. Guitar and drums are locked in syncopated foundation, while the guitar squawks, squeaks and italicizes and electric keyboards throw off neon flurries of cool temperature replies. You can intuit a dialog between these two melodic instruments, Byerley’s guitar in frantic, hair pulling agitation, Boston’s keys in icy, sly response. A change in rhythms about four minutes in pushes this cut towards Afro-beat, a clipped polyrhythm heavy on cowbell underpinning wild squalls of bent guitar notes.

The closer, “Wine & Lotto” likewise turns up the rhythm section, a rattling snare cadence braced by ponderous bass taking up the forefront of the cut. Keep listening, and bare-wire tangles of guitar sound jut from this frame, while nocturnal intimations of piano hover and curl. The piece goes on for nearly half an hour, evolving slowly like wreathes of smoke in blue light, a febrile play of heat and chill, of sync and contradiction, that never flags or stales.

Jennifer Kelly