GTB Blog
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.
**** It’s probably their best album yet, and the titles aren’t bad either
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’
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
The only element to expect is more understated intelligent brilliance
**** 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
**** Get The Blessing have successfully achieved in Lope and Antilope the right balance between what once was and what now is
This is an album to listen to and revisit, full of creative interplay, sonic tricks, clever minimal solos and huge and varied atmosphere
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
The eccentricity of Get the Blessing’s disparate influences have, with this album, congealed into a captivating, compulsively listenable singularity
The title of U.K. quartet Get the Blessing’s third album, OC DC, explicitly references two of their prime inspirations, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. At the same time, it winkingly acknowledges Australia’s greatest hard-rock export. The band’s iridescent melodies and …
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