Book of Omens
(Nine Winds)
If you like your art as dark as a gallery at midnight this is the album for you. If you like your art to stir visions of doom, of the apocalypse or of a very, very bad-hair day, this is the album for you. If you like your art as dense as a Jackson Pollack painting or as Joyce’s prose in Finnegans Wake, try wrapping your shell-likes around this aural assault.
Daniel Rosenboom is Faustian figure who used to have a respectable career as a classical trumpeter, before going over to the dark side to realise a vision in which the galaxies of jazz and heavy metal collide, and hurtling meteors shower about our ears.
If that sounds like a nightmare then your imagination is only grasping the blackened edges of Rosenboom’s sonic cataclysm. Many will duck for cover, but those who weather the maelstrom will be rewarded by stunningly ominous compositional ideas realised with brilliance and, sometimes, downright ferocity.
Joining Rosenboom are reeds player Vinny Golia (whose bass clarinet could be sound you hear when the Grim Reaper beckons), guitarist Jake Vossler (who can build towering, battlemented walls of distortion), bassist Tim Lefebvre and drummer Matt Mayhall.
Rosenboom knows how to seduce as well as deliver the coup de grace. Some people will, like me, be stunned by the potency of both the concept and realisation. The rest of you have been warned.