The Stix

by

Jaga Jazzist

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The brilliance of Jaga Jazzist's first album, "A Living Room Hush", lay in its inspired marriage of new wave "electronica" and traditional jazz chord sequences. The end result - a combination of odd, often tense back-beats, familiarly languid jazz phrasing and distinctive melodies - was certainly daring but, more importantly totally controlled, allowing the best of this ingenious fusion to shine through. Arguably one of the most innovative "jazz" albums of the last 10 years and... a very difficult act to follow.

Faced with this task, their second album sees them grappling with the same problems that beset a previous generation of pioneering "jazz fusion" artists, in particular The Mahavishnu Orchestra - how to extend further into difficult and potentially disparate musical styles without losing the plot. Their solution, to concentrate more on fast "industrial techno" & "jungle" rhythms and harsher instrumentation at the expense of the laid-back, "pure jazz" melodies that underpinned "A Living Room Hush", is certainly brave and, in the end, highly effective, but the outcome is much more "frantic" and challenging.

So, for those seeking a comfortable continuation to their previous release, "The Stix" will be a disappointment; but for those interested in seeing how far the fusions they are clearly dedicated to exploring can be pushed, it's a triumph - dense, multi layered electronica combined with equally complex "avant garde" jazz in a thrilling roller coaster ride of musical exploration that runs, at times, dangerously close to the edge of how far it can be taken without degenerating into "the brilliantly unlistenable". Sun Ra and John McLaughlin would be proud.

This is a review about the sound quality only, not the music.

I really should not buy several disks at one time from a band that I have not heard before. I bought a couple of Jaga disks on the strength of Kaleidoscopic by Lars Hornveth who is in Jaga. Not only was the music on Kaleidoscopic fantastic, but the sound quality was great too. However with the two Jaga disks I got, the sound quality is painful. They are both 'loudness war' disks (google the term if you don't know what it is). Massive amounts of dynamic range compression, lots of clipping, and tonnes of distortion are the hallmarks of this disk. It's too bad because I think I might of enjoyed the music if it hadn't been crushed in an attempt to get maximum volume. I wish they would have some belief in their music and not think they have to wreck it just so it can be heard, cause you know what? WE ALREADY BOUGHT YOUR CD! You don't have to make the cd painful to listen to so it sounds louder. Moreover, ipods etc have replaygain/volumecheck type stuff, so everything is the same volume anyway.

I get tired of buying music only to find out it has been damaged during mastering. Bleech.