When I was four or five years old, my parents decided they'd had enough of the city life and moved into a very rural area about 30 miles from Austin, exposing me to a completely new side of American culture. After a few years of adjusting, I eventually embraced simple living and, naturally, the music of the simpler people. Then, one day, while driving into Austin, my mother was flipping channels on the radio when suddenly, amid the rants of early morning talk show hosts and adult contemporary, I heard the most glorious sound I have yet to hear.
When I got home I tried desperately to find that station again. Why had I never listened to it before? I spent literally an hour tuning the knobs of my stereo until it finally struck me that all those damn trees that provided us country folk with clean air were also mitigating my reception. From then on, I always attended my mother's trips into the city. It allowed me to become familiar with all the college radio stations and the variety of music they played. Years went by. Owning a car facilitated my musical addictions and I discovered a place in my high school parking lot where I could pick up that one station perfectly. And thanks to that one song ("Blue in Green"), I became the man before you today.
I've already heard a dozen or so ill-conceived comparisons made for Yesterdays New Quintet: DJ Shadow, Amon Tobin, Coltrane, even Squarepusher. None of these are radically far from the group's essential style (except maybe Squarepusher) but when names are dropped in such a succession, it usually spells out a rote, by-the-numbers album. Congratulations, YNQ-- you delivered!
The record actually starts off fairly promising with decidedly downtempo beats supporting a Milt Jackson vibraphone line that gives way to a female MacInTalk voice reciting "Yesterdays New Quintet" continuously (as she does randomly throughout the record). The first of the DJ Shadow influences becomes apparent in the fractured beats of "Julani" (the group features a DJ in lieu of a live drummer) as drum fills are sampled, scratched, then strangely absent. "Julani" climaxes rhythmically and segues into "Papa," a funk jam already in progress.
It's "Keeper of My Soul," however, that sets the formula for the album. The Quintet find a "hook" or a "groove," pummel it into the ground using the same instrumental experiments as every other song (i.e. a wah-wah pedal and a Fender Rhodes), and then awkwardly fade out. That said, many of the tracks sound like excerpts from longer drone sessions. Hip-hop producer Madlib arranged this entire album, and many times, it appears that we're listening to unused or discarded backing tracks from his more successful endeavors as Quasimoto on last year's The Unseen.
Angles Without Edges isn't guilty of being bad, just uninspired. Good jazz, like good electronic music, relies on many individually unique sounds to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Yesterdays New Quintet all too often sounds like a simple cut-n-paste job.
