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Beat Love Oracle — Radical Risk
(Bandcamp aMarxe no#, 2024, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2024-11-06

Radical Risk Cover art

Now for something radically different, at least when compared to previous Beat Love Oracle releases. For the last four albums the core of the band was Frank Nuyts (marimba, synthesizer, vocals), Frank Debruyne (sax, synthesizers, vocals), drummer Ronald Dhaene, and electric bassist Stijn Deldaele. This time they decided to do things different by adding Taiwanese pianist Liang-Yu Wang, who adds a whole new dimension to the Beat Love Oracle sound. Her style is derived from chamber music, and she is currently based in Chicago, half a world away from the other four members, but comports herself with pristine elegance on her acoustic instrument in the shadow of the mostly-electric jazz oriented musicians. From the beginning, Nuyts has composed all of the group’s material and that doesn’t change here, but the addition of piano to the formula has brought the music back closer to the sound of his previous band, Hardscore, which was an octet that included Nuyts, Dhaene, and Debruyne, plus a pianist (and much more), a far more robust sound but stylistically similar to Beat Love Oracle. While a lot of the textures and jazz elements to date have seemed reminiscent of instrumental Frank Zappa, due in part to the everpresent marimba, the piano serves to offset that to a large degree. The centerpiece of the album is the 26-minute four-part title track (and each “part” has multiple parts as well), a piece that takes the listener through a number of portals along its brisk trajectory, in and out of unusual corners where classical meets jazz with beautifully melodic and elegant sax solos and shifting meter as a staple of the sound. The opener, “Bar Foot,” has a nice swing to it, and here the piano really does its magic on the contour of the sound, while “Hammer Abandon” opens with a gentler touch on piano, later joined by marimba and the rhythm section before it all comes driving home around the three-minute mark, keeping the pace up — with numerous dreamy detours — for the remainder of its nine minutes. A powerful album indeed — Nuyts has don a superb job composing and all of the players are firing on all cylinders.

Filed under: New releases, 2024 releases

Related artist(s): Beat Love Oracle

More info
http://amarxe.bandcamp.com/album/radical-risk

 

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