Sean Trane
Latest album (so far) of Chick’s Elektric Band, with the usual suspect of Weckl, Gambale, Marienthal, and Patutucci, and another irritating attempt to push on his musical audience more of the Ron Hubbard scientologist crap that he’s been addicted to since the early 70’s. Apparently, Chick wanted to make a concept album, based on Huba-Huba’s cosmic schmaltzy theories, and to give some kind of substance to link apparently unrelated instrumental tracks, he extracted from the guru’s book some passages, and added some rather irrelevant relatively short (max 2.5 mins) musical interludes between the main tracks all called Port View.
Outside of that, the album is rather schizophrenic, divided between some instrumental progressive jazz-rock/fusion (just a few female choirs) and a bunch of Latin jazz music, ranging from samba, rumba to bossa and even what sounds to me like calypso music. To be honest, the JR/F stuff is rather good (but heard hundreds of time before), and likely to please rock fans (especially proggers). Can’t say the music is original, but apparently they are fairly well inspired and the instrumental interplay is flawless. I’m sure the Latin-jazz tracks are just as flawless, but since that kind of music is definitely not up my alley. Intrinsically I generally find that I like better the first oeuvres from a band, but in the Elektric Band’s case, the early stuff featured 80’s production values and songwriting, which were (and still are) definitely not my cup of tea.
So, if you don’t mind the scientology, this album might just be one of the best wearing the CC’s EB moniker, but it doesn’t mean that I would own it, and especially support such a wrong-doing machiavelic huba-huba force that the album tends to make publicity for. Lack of objectivity, maybe, but I’m taking a full star away, just because of the indoctrination effort.