Blogarhythms

I hope you all had a relaxing Monday, because yesterday’s blog activities, while tranquil and beauteous, failed to keep the peace and instill the quiet in my day. The crack of thunder, the clash of personalities and financial insecurities could give fuckall about pretty songs so they all ganged up to make my Monday unusually wet & wild, not to mention loud & disorienting.

All stress aside, I started thinking that the sirens and screeching brass I’d tried to downplay in yesterday’s post might actually be helpful in drowning out some of the noise of the day, and that some more robust, faster-paced rhythms might actual improve the downtrodden spirit. To that end today’s featurees should assist in turning the volume, tempo and energy up considerably for us all.

Hailing from Ann Arbor, Michigan, the nine members of Nomo play pulsing, propulsive, percussion-heavy Afro-Beat jams infused with the flavors of Jazz, Soul, Prog-Rock, Krautrock, Electronica, Funk, various folk traditions & so-called World Music, and reverberating with the skronk & scream of a collection of horns and woodwinds. And while that may not coalesce into a Public Enemy-esque wall of noise, the music on the troupe’s new disc Ghost Rock is unabashedly influenced by Fela Kuti’s West African brand of Funk and so shares a commonality with the oft-sampled Funk of James Brown and his many associates which provided the foundation for all the noise-bricks in that wall.

Though it hits stores today I’ve had a copy of Ghost Rock for a minute and have become particularly fond of a song called “My Dear” during that time. It’s hard enough for me to resist a track that starts with an open drum break, but top the funkily broken kick/snare rhythm & popping hand-drums with a repetitious bass & guitar groove, vibrantly ethereal electric piano tones, a chorus of horns & some squealing solos and I won’t even try to. That’s why “My Dear” has been my pick any time I’ve dipped into Ghost Rock’s tracklist to supplement one of my playlists, and why it should find favor with anybody trying to wring the sweat out of a dancefloor (especially one filled with fans of Broken-Beat and organic House) or B-Boy circle.

Nomo “My Dear”

Both the title track and “Last Beat” boast a grittier undercurrent fueled by fuzzy guitar, growling bass and guttural keyboard lines that allow lighter, more sprightly bell-toned electric piano melodies, majestic brass arrangements and free-form soloing to rest on and bounce off of the heavier, more elastic Funk/Rock rhythm base. While joints like “Brainwave,” “Rings,” “Nova” and “All the Stars” (a clattering Afro-Carribean Klezmer-Jazz tribal workout “All the Stars” that sounds like Maynard Ferguson jamming with the Carlos Niño-produced Hu Vibrational) feature robotic chirps, synths and grainy electronic effects in addition to the band’s usually fluid bass, locomotive rhythms and layers of percussion that make them sound like Battles gone Blaxploitation. And the lamellophone & melodic-laden “Three Shades” sounds like some mixture of ’80s New Wave and Sophistipop, heavy Dub Reggae, Afrobeat and Big-Band Jazz.

So maybe Nomo are noisy, just not in that annoying police siren-blaring, rush-hour traffic horn-blasting, car-alarm screaming sort of way that reminds you of contemporary life’s annoyances. Their Ghost Rock is more like the swirling, humming, bio-mechanically twitchy sound a spaceship from some future time when interstellar travel is commonplace might make when as it soars, roaring into unknown darkness towards other worlds. Or the sound of life long ago, closer to nature, where wind, water, wood, grass, earth and sky made the first music, and the only machines around were the minds, hearts and hands of humans who heard it and yearned to duplicate it.

Maybe there was a ghost in that machine that knew those sounds had power? Power to sooth, to calm, to relax, to excite, to inflame, to inspire? And maybe the power contained in the sound of that ghost rocking, whether quietly, noisily or somewhere in between, is what kept life moving then, keeps it moving now, and still will if and when we touch the stars.

Rock on ghost, rock on…