BRAND X: XCOMMUNICATION (1992)
1) Xanax Taxi; 2) Liquid Time;
3) Kluzinski Period; 4) Healing Dream; 5) Mental Floss; 6) Strangeness; 7) A
Duck Exploding; 8) Message To You; 9) Church Of Hope; 10) Kluzinski Reprise.
Say what you want, but there are dumb careers
and there are smart careers, and even if you happen to be instinctively bored
by any sort of jazz fusion, you will still have to admit that Brand X had an
almost unusually smart career for a band that was once started by Phil Collins.
For instance, they totally sat out the Eighties, a most unfortunate decade for
old-timers as a whole, and only once its excesses were over, Goodsall revived
the old brand once again — this time, envisioning Brand X as a lean and mean
«power trio». The only old veterans here are Goodsall himself and Percy Jones
(the two guys who were most important in the first place), with new drummer
Frank Katz perfectly adequate to the task ahead. As for the keyboard layers,
they are all being taken care of by means of new technologies — namely,
Goodsall's MIDI-guitar.
The result is a very solid record whose fanbase
will probably count up to a few hundred people, as it happens with most jazz
teams on the planet these days — nothing groundbreaking, just a tasteful and
intelligent application of the formula with a few quirky, amusing, and/or
memorable nuances. No toying around with dance pop, adult contemporary, stadium
rock, or New Age motives — just forty-five minutes of good old fusion where
your ear only tells you that we are way past 1976 because of those MIDI guitar
tones (hence, occasional flashes of Belew-era King Crimson before your eyes).
Another more modern association might be with
Steve Vai, except Goodsall never goes for the gusto with distortion, special
effects, or shredding — but he does now occasionally integrate monster heavy
riffs into tricky time signatures, alternating them with softer jazzier
passages, as it happens on the opening ʽXanax Taxiʼ, where the first half is
jackhammered inside your head and the second half lightly tap-dances on the
crushed dust of your skull. Also, on the suitably titled ʽChurch Of Hypeʼ he
has a few «rock god» flashes where he turns his guitar into a Harley-Davidson
for a brief while, but, like Vai, there's a reasonable sense of irony there if
you can feel it.
More often, though, what makes this album stand
out a wee bit above the rest are the little things — for instance, the way
Goodsall sustains that intense vibrato on the main theme riff of ʽLiquid Timeʼ;
or the little «pseudo-orchestral» interludes on ʽKluzinski Periodʼ (who the
heck is Kluzinski, I wonder?) where the man's MIDI guitars occasionally break
in like a strictly disciplined army of business-meaning cellos, before we go
back to «sloppy» free jazz mode; or Percy Jones' predictable, but still-fun-after-all-these-years
bass showcase on ʽStrangenessʼ; or all the weird noises on ʽA Duck Explodingʼ (there
might be something exploding there,
but how can a duck explode for seven minutes?).
Most importantly, there is enough musical diversity
in these tracks to make them distinguishable from each other, which, as far as
I am concerned, is the key thing in distinguishing good fusion from bad fusion
— there's even an acoustic guitar interlude in the middle (ʽHealing Dreamʼ),
and none of the pieces are there simply as excuses for jamming. Again, this
does not make them great as such, but it does assure you that XCommunication is more than just a
«nostalgic comeback»: it is a bona fide attempt to push the Brand X sound into
further territory from where it was standing a decade ago. If the results are
not overwhelming, it is solely because it is hard to think how they could be overwhelming at this juncture
(you don't exactly see, say, John McLaughlin revolutionising the world of
music circa 1992, and John Goodsall ain't him). Other than that, though, it's
all certainly worth a thumbs up, for the fans at least.
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