As co-founder of Swans and a volcanic drummer behind such notables as Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young, Jonathan Kane has provided the rhythmic foundation for several classic Downtown NYC landmarks. Perhaps it's this pedigree that allows Kane to deliver his solo debut February with such high decibel self-assurance. His music's intrinsic swagger is crucial to the album's success, for here Kane has chosen to work almost exclusively within the outwardly stagnant vocabulary of the blues. Though he utilizes some of the most familiar and overworked progressions of the past several decades, on these five pieces he side-steps cliché by marshaling his minimalist riffs to their trance-inducing limits, and deftly sparks a synaptic link between Neu!-style repetition and the hypnotic electric blues of Junior Kimbrough.
With the exception of some guitar contributions from Igor Cubrilovic, February is a true solo work, as Kane handles the rest of the guitar, bass, and drum duties himself. On these five instrumental pieces he's stripped away all of his music's inessentials, excising overwrought vocals or flashy solos to instead pare these blues-based excursions down to a streamlined, locomotive core.
Kicking immediately into an unapologetic foursquare blues riff, the 12-minute opener "Curl" initially does little to impress, Kane biding his time as he patiently sweeps again and again through each dusty corner. As the track progresses, however, the riff begins to build a tenacious momentum through a series of almost imperceptable directional shifts, and soon the massed overtones of the guitars course against Kane's powerhouse drumming to assemble into a singularly captivating propulsive drone. Likewise, the set's version of the traditional "Motherless Child" elongates the old spiritual's structure nearly beyond the point of recognition, with each melodic detail considered in isolation beneath distant ascending distortion and the rolling boulders of Kane's unyielding rhythms.
Spacious tracks like "Pops" and "Sis" incorporate subtle traces of parched earth Americana to somewhat less invigorating effect, although Kane supplies each with a certain sawtooth grit and a cold-blooded rattlesnake resolve. But he saves his most effective transmutation for last with his mammoth set-closing take on Rhys Chatham's epic "Guitar Trio". Whereas the original was a cascading, open-tuned electrical current, Kane's blues-refracted interpretation concentrates its substantial energies onto the piece's imposing rhythmic lumber. Over the course of the track's 12-minute length, Kane adds and removes sonic elements with the single-minded endurance of wide, muddy river carving itself a canyon, and with the unwavering confidence of an already-veteran solo performer secure in his vision.
