MAINSTREAM

Quiet Sun's Mainstream is a complex, succulent, abstract-adverted and classic creative album, released with little reference to anything but its own character and to the astonishing or great five artists that face up the ensemble, with different forms of supreme talent, cool groove, transient expansion and even some hot-art independent hard tone. At least by pure feeling, everything he is generous and preciously simple, but tirelessly trademarked and pressed as a vintage, special and pretentious composition. The album has a horizon of music and mottoes so enlarged, that it spreads genuine affection for uncustomary, converted or styled (deeply) interesting qualities. The notes come perfect, the classic off-spread seems frivolous compared to music, plus the band really assudes on highly distractive and double-side expressed full manners and rich humbles - for Mainstream to essentially be the greatest even they worked on (it's the only one, but I'm just saying that a lot of work, under a lot of time, did wonders). After all this, it becomes a bit of unmentionably special rock, music, fusion, space taste and abstraction eclectic development. It's fun but also deadly serious and hard-listened, it sounds round and complete, it is progressive-seeded or concept-art awakened. Where it breathtakes and where it fails really comes to sound as secondary and bit too deeply preferential.

Dave Jarrett works on the complex and feisty keyboard session in Mainstream, but Hayward and Manzanera also join it, the keyboard stuff is huge, addictive and pretty much taken out of normal shapes. Hayward anyhow works on drums and percussion aesthetics, with Manzanera is the crazy, artistic guitarist. MacCormick's bass will, on the other hand, strike that rhythm and that essential vibe in every moment you pretty much get with him. Brian Eno is invited with a lot of synths and...strategies, nothing spectacular, but indeed the closest thing you can associate him to rock. This album gets way too many small hints to Roxy Music and the bands the artists flew in or out in their career, without meaning at all a musical connection.

Following up (all the way) is the album's matter of music and steaming style, finding, in short time, many moments of overwhelming pleasure and quality, reasonable abstract and full hustles of craft, a lot of fusion feed, some purely technical and nerve-plural lines, and deep or distanced (by the success achieved) high mentions of a music's pallet of elements, all of these complementing or contrasting, avoiding or looming each other into Mainstream's various art.

Sol Caliente brings the suspense of Mainstream's greatest writing and playing, having quite all it takes to produce a fever of an art and a high tide of risky motions: a tiny abstract sound-fight introduction, getting more scratching by decomposing & independent guitar riffs, finally reaching a dark-gray main theme, of a small catchy line, but which evolves under a mainly sensational improvisation of poly-fusion; the guitar's insanity, the drums' soft spill and the various key-moods reflect best what hard gulp it all is. The second part is even better, the word of playing it being "excruciating" but meaning "mindblowing". This piece (having taken a whoop of half a paragraph to shallowly get interpreted) is undoubtedly a masterful thing. It is only after this one that good standards continue or stop to appear. The movement, for sure, changes. Trumpets with Motherhood actually is the finale of the previous climax, having hallucinative short lines of guitar and keyboard atmosphere and tangled scratches.

Bargain Classics is bright and interesting, experimental and indescribable at first, then roasted in a tilting furious and ambitioned rock and fusion impact. It's a pulsating and heartbeat-stopping fine massive piece, but it also shares insensitive losses of perspective. The art haunts every pouring spice, the music's idea of saved up expression doesn't even exist, plus the emotion stabs an abstract smash.

R.F.D. gets into a dream of hazes and stormy harmonies, by powerful synth-morphs and keyboard fusion. It's a first contrast in the album, showing the dependent glamor and thirsty rocket science within moody and frightening sounds and clouds.

With Mummy Was An Asteroid, the album starts slipping, this one being a humongous dazzle and mad-wave of all the crashing instruments playing rock and avant-melodiousness, plus sharing a flavoring radical ambition of sound and arrangement, discouragingly psyching up the austerity of art and poly-rock. Great guitar melody and bossy grooves, but that's all.

The album ends soon, with Trot as another abstract fusion fruity loop, rich but imperfect and with Rongwrong as the highest eclectic composition, following a heartless but consistent art of harmony, soft string, dapple explosions and tough to follow juice-beats, plus a more kind and passive instrumental fantasy.

Mainstream can knock down a lot of elementary music and quality, mainly being the work of special artists and properly efficient art-abstract orientations. This is a three-three point five stars album for me, going however on excellent chords, as it tends to be a shot-fix album of rare progressive improvisation. And a geniality strangely spoiled by the music emotion.