GTB Blog

**** This is trip hop-informed contemporary jazz-rock at its very best

Posted September 11, 2015

The Portishead-affiliated jazz-rock band hit new heights on their first fully improvised album You may be familiar with Portishead’s rhythm dream-team of Jim Barr and Clive Deamer. You may not know, though, that since 2000 they have been members of …
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Jazz-rock, yes, but not as we know it. Bands attempting to combine the two traditions so often slip into gee-whiz bombast or bland modal ambience. Not so the Bristol-based quartet Get the Blessing. A collection that was, it seems, mostly improvised from scratch in the space of a few days, this is fiercely intelligent music in which muted trumpet and saxophone, enhanced by thoughtful washes of electronica, perform pirouettes over refreshingly melodic vamps. The Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley drops by, too. Clive Deamer’s drumming is astonishingly measured and precise throughout.

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**** It’s probably their best album yet, and the titles aren’t bad either

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This album is an incredible achievement in which there is not one bad aspect. A Masterpiece of temperance and understatement, a career defining moment in which we all fall in love with ‘The Blessing’

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an extremely powerful, memorable, atmospheric and original album, built on the jazz tradition, but to which the label ‘jazz’ is pretty much an irrelevance. One of the best records I’ve heard in a while

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The only element to expect is more understated intelligent brilliance

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**** it’s perhaps their least classifiable album to date, certainly the most interesting, and arguably the best… they remain one of the most interesting bands around – and a terrific live act

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**** Get The Blessing have successfully achieved in Lope and Antilope the right balance between what once was and what now is

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This is an album to listen to and revisit, full of creative interplay, sonic tricks, clever minimal solos and huge and varied atmosphere

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bristles with more improvising and ensemble ingenuity and the result is an album that manages to unleash the momentum trip hop hampered by the constraints of downtempo dance music could never really tackle

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