BLUE LAMBENCY DOWNWARD

Blue Lambency Downward marks a point of no return for Toby Driver and his projects. Up untill this point in time his albums were maked by an interesting and completelly innovative mixture or death metal, experimental jazz, folk music, clasical music, etc, etc, etc. However from this album onwards, the heavy metal metal influeces will be continuosly shrunk untill being just a trace of influence for the Boston group and the jazz influences will become increasingly prominent.

Blue Lambency Downward is right in the middle of that transition, what caused some noticable issues. The most nocieable one is regarding the music: the compositions, in spite of not being bad at all, are not as focused, diverse or well balanced as both some of his previous and future releases, such as Choirs Of The Eye and Coyote.

Those downsides, however, do not make the album void with actual content, boring or lost amidst the band's experimentation (that do lack some direction to some extent) as some other reviewers have pointed. Sure, this album is far from being perfect, but it is quite good. In all honesty, I think that their biggest problem was actually lacking experimentation.

The kind of experimentation that I refer to is the one they did in previous albums and in the times of Maudlin of the Well, mixing some of the most improbable things ever. Mixing music genres you would never expect to see together in an album, let alone in a single song. Although Blue Lambency Downward is still quite experimental, the whole album still sits quite confortably on its jazzy tunes. Despite that, the jazz they present here is still a killer.

Another problem that do weights negatively here is the lack of balance of the album. Instead of being smoothly developed through its 43 minutes, Blue lambency Downward clearly has two songs that literally hold the album together: the opener (title track) and the closer (Symmetrical Arizona). Maybe if it wasn't so polarized, the final product could be better much better that it is now.

Grade and Final Thoughts

Blue Lambency Downward is, overall, an excellet album. The problems it has don't keep it from still being an enjoyable and fun album to listen to. Sit confortably, get a glass of whine and enjoy yet another interesting and intriguing release by this great Boston band.

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