Band: NomoRelease Date: May 5, 2009
Genre: Jazz
Less than a year after the acclaimed Ghost Rock, NOMO have completed its spirited sister album—recorded during the Ghost Rock sessions and tours. Invisible Cities is informed by their ceaseless travelling, and visits to places both real and unreal. The sonic empire of NOMO is expanding; busting up genres and musical borders with astonishing results. With a theme stolen from Italian novelist Italo Calvino, each tune on Invisible Cities is a little world of it’s own, dense with rhythm and timbre. Hot horns blaze through intersecting lines, heavy percussion drives the band down winding streets, the bass rumbles in some subterranean corridor. The sounds come from far reaching points, not from a fixed place on a globe, but from an area of the human spirit; One that is joyous, open and in motion.
Like Ghost Rock, Invisible Cities reaches into new places both sonically and emotionally, and pulls up some real bangers: The title track’s horns are drenched in Echoplex and its driving beat is straight from the swamp. Bumbo, Moondog’s best tune, gets a NOMO island makeover, with a set of antique fire extinguishers clanging away in a 21st century steel drum style. Crescent is a shimmering silver stream of electric kalimbas, with handclaps and bamboo flutes giving the tune a more delicate feel than NOMO has offered up on previous albums. Giving Elijah a listen, it’s immediately apparent that this is stirring spiritual jazz of a higher order; the tune was written as a lament for one of bandleader Elliot Bergman’s childhood friends. Warren Defever’s immaculate production work creates a space where the music can grow, develop, layer on top of itself, and reveal this band in artful new ways.
[source: beyondjazz]
