DESENSITIZED TO INSANITY

Last year, like some other Prog Archives Collaborators, I received a Private Message in the Prog Archives Forums asking me to listen to this album in a website (cyclonerecords.ca/releases/wheresthenine-desensitizedtoinsanity.htm, which is owned by the record label which has this band and others signed as recording artists). So, I listened to this album and I found interesting things on it.

That website says that drummer Barry Connors was a member of a Canadian Rock band called Conney Hatch in the eighties. I think that I listened to this band at least once in the FM Radio stations of my city, but I can´t remember anything about this band now. But it is really a suprise to find that Connors is a very good drummer and that now he plays very complicated and precise drum parts in this album. The other member of the band, keyboard player-guitarist Dean Watson is also a very good musician, and both knew each other after playing in a band years ago. As I read in that website (more or less as I remember now), both composed the instrumental music in this album in an unusual way: both live in separate cities in Canada and they used the web to send their parts. First, Connors sent to Watson his recorded rhythm ideas and Connors sent him his recorded keyboards-guitars parts. Later they recorded this album together. I think that they used the modern computer recording technology available in a recording studio (and I also know that some of this recording computer software even can print the recorded music in scores). I also think that Connors had to send the drum parts written in scores to Watson, because maybe it could be very difficult to compose the keyboards-guitars parts by only listening to the recorded parts. The parts played by both musicians have a lot of interaction and precision, so I think that it could be the only way to compose the musical pieces in that unusual way.

The musical style from this band is really hard to be defined as only "Jazz Rock Fusion". Yes, the album has this style of music as the main ingredient, but I also could listen to several influences taken from bands like: Bruford, U.K. (in some keyboard atmospheres), Return to Forever, King Crimson (from the good line-ups of the late sixties-seventies), Jeff Beck (as a Fusion guitarist in the mid-seventies), Billy Cobham, Jean-Luc Ponty (from the seventies), ELP (particularly in track 1), and even Rush in some parts. Some parts are heavier and I think that they also have some influences from Heavy Prog Rock bands. The musical pieces also have very good solos, and some "Retro" sounds, particularly in the keyboard solos, because I think that there is a lot of influence from keyboard players like Jan Hammer. I don`t write this to criticize this band as lacking in originality, because nobody can escape from some influences from previous bands. The music has a lot of originality in all this mixture, and it is even "dark" in some places. I think that the titles of the musical pieces have some humour, like "She´s Furious" (I really could imagine an angry woman shouting only by listening to the music!), "Threw the Looking Glass" (not titled "Through the Looking Glass", as one could expect), "Lethargic Waltz" (a bit monotonous as the title could suggest, but it is not pllayed like a waltz, I think) and "The Camera Ear" (not titled as "The Camera Eye", an old Rush song). Even the cover design has some humour: two men (maybe the musicians, I don`t know!) photographed using straitjackets in an asylum! Maybe the cover concept was done this way to give the idea of some humour and that the musicians don`t take themselves very seriously. But this cover design is the only thing that, as public image for a predominantly Jazz-Rock Fusion band in style, could confuse some people and made them think that this band is more a Heavy Rock band than a Jazz-Rock Fusion band. Anyway, this album is very good, despite the songs are similar, with heavy and difficult drums and keyboards which sometimes are not very easy to be "processed" by the listener by only listening to them once, and in some parts the album is so heavy and dense that the listener is sometimes a bit tired. But anyway, this band is really very good and deserves to be listened with interest. I think that many fans of the Jazz-Rock Fusion musical style, the Prog Rock style and even from the Heavy Prog Rock style could like this album. It sounds like it was done with a lot of care and work. A four stars rating from me for this album.