Swedish/Norwegian trio the Thing play free jazz that you can stage dive to. Though the group—saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, and bassist Ingebrit Håker Flaten—initially came together in 1999 as a tribute project dedicated to trumpeter/out-music legend Don Cherry, they quickly evolved and found its own identity, performing improvised music that’s informed by the urgency and simplicity of garage rock. If you line up a list of the Thing’s cover selections—songs by the Cramps, the Sonics, and PJ Harvey—against their roster of collaborators—weirdo-luminaries like Jim O’Rourke, Peter Brötzmann, Merzbow—you can get an idea of where their sensibilities lay.
Boot! is the Thing’s sixth full-length album and it’s among the group’s finest efforts at pairing bludgeoning physicality with heady free jazz chops. The record opens with a high-volume re-think of “India”, from John Coltrane’s 1963 album Impressions. Here spiritual jazz is recast as raw and sludgy stoner rock, with Flaten and Gustafsson dropping the lead melody down a few octaves and delivering the notes in loose, creaky unisons before dropping into a savage free-for-all. So long as you are acquainted with and sympathetic to the work of Geezer Butler, the song will retain some of Coltrane's meditative spirit.
The original compositions on Boot! work the band’s extensive vocabulary of skree and pummel. The Thing’s reputation is based on loud and heavy blowouts, but they also make expert use of dynamics. Over the course of 10 minutes, “Reboot” shifts from rigid pounding to quiet saxophone squawks, to a pummeling groove that recalls the heavier work of experimental-minded Dutch punk band, the Ex. On the title track, Flaten and Gustafsson play a series of long and hoarse honks, establishing a grinding, doomy tempo while Nilssen-Love gradually builds steam in the background.
The Thing frequently appropriate contemporary rock tunes into their repertoire, but their approach is markedly different than that of, say, pianist Brad Mehldau re-working Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film)” or the Bad Plus covering Nirvana’s “Smell’s Like Teen Spirit”. In those re-thinks, jazz players expand and complicate the harmonies of the songs' melodic hooks. The Thing are more likely to look to the rhythmic thwacking of a power chord for inspiration. On Boot!, they steer clear of rock and roll covers, but the fuzz, grit, and energy of the music are still very much a part of their sound. Heavy riffs are treated as scaffolding for excursions into free improvisation—a mechanism through which Gustafsson, Nilssen-Love, and Flaten can access a heightened level of bombast, a place where the guitar is always on fire.
