Jørgen Teller and the Empty Stares – Live Arrogant LP (Mastermind)
Free rock-oriented guitar wandering with a rhythm section who showed up for jazz (Soren Gørm’s upright bass is a dead giveaway) but are made to play it straight. Kinda hard to tell where this one was going at first, but any doubts are dispelled in the first five minutes or so. There’s a good bit of interesting musicianship at play, and guitarist Teller and company certainly don’t shy from guttural heaviness where it is needed most. Primal, pounding drum tribe matches well with the enormity of acoustic/pickup string bass, and Teller’s wild, lacerating barbed-wire guitar halos evoke “Death Valley ‘69” with Caspar Brotzmann instead of Lydia Lunch. Four songs that lurch uneasily between jazzbo meditation with spindly noise guitar, and pounding crime beat noir-bop with expressive noise slash guitar (think the “sack of oranges” speech in “The Grifters” is apropos of the dread and premeditated violence at play in this sound). The deeper you go into this one, the more impressed you’ll be – this trio definitely has the chops that most workaday guitar destruction combos are unable to issue forth, and the formal background of non-rock music only makes the pummeling you’ll receive bruise you up even harder. Silkscreened sleeve with few credits. (http://mastermindrec.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
