Esbjörn Svensson Trio - Viaticum (2005)
>jazz fusion
Very much a 21st-century jazz album, sparse and brooding but far too indebted to more trendy styles of post-rock and ambient. These influences tend to make this amount to little more than 70-odd minutes of nothing, but it's 70-odd minutes of nothing with some cool textural work and some great performances. Svensson is exceptional here, very subtle but often injecting incredible life into the otherwise rather stangant album, with lots of piano runs indebted to the poppy, pleasant nature of cool jazz. Instrumentalists of this caliber could produce something much better, but this is pretty solid.
2.5+
Digable Planets - Blowout Comb (1994)
>jazz rap, east coast hip hop, conscious hip hop
The MC's are much livelier and more potent on Reachin', the instrumentals, however, are significantly improved. Reachin' is well-produced, but it's just simple poppy jazz rap at its core. This, on the other hand, is the best produced jazz rap album I've ever heard. It takes legitimate, non-gimmicky influence from jazz that works incredibly well, and most importantly, the drums bang like a mother ("Black Ego", goddamn). The MC's really are not on the top of their games, though, and some songs don't quite hit the mark. Regardless, one of the best jazz rap albums out there.
3.0+
Manuel Göttsching - E2-E4 (1984)
>progressive electronic
Around three tracks and half an hour into this album, I started to think that the first track was pretty damn cool. I honestly had no idea that so much time had passed and that I was no longer on the first track of the album, everything here flows so beautifully. Göttsching's use of repetition is never boring, this is an enthralling piece of music all the way through, and an incredibly anachronistic one at that, arguably serving as an early example of techno with it's pulsating rhythms. The guitar is out-of-place, and the middle kind of drags, neither do much to take away from this album.
3.0+
