CINEMATIC ORCHESTRA - Ma Fleur

After a full four years of waiting, Jason Swinscoe's band finally follows up on that balanced hybrid of post-rock, jazz and chamber music that went by the name of "Man With The Movie Camera". As in the previous album, and across the whole output of a band whose vocation has been clear since its very name, "Ma Fleur" develops the descriptive potential of a sound that, even when not directly conceived to accompany images, always proves ideal as a backdrop or soundtrack to stories, visions, suggestions.

This new soundtrack for a film that (for now) hasn't been written tests the Cinematic Orchestra within a largely linear, acoustic dimension, one that now plays with real conviction on the plane of a song form that is at times clearly defined and heightened by a more frequent use of vocals, entrusted on some tracks to guests such as Patrick Watson, Lou Rhodes and soul singer Fontella Bass. Calling it a "pop turn" would be an exaggeration, but it's certainly true that the presence of singing on seven of the eleven tracks on this record shows the band's will to pursue a path of greater accessibility and immediacy, alternating with instrumental textures that are, as ever, elaborated with great care, and that continue to provide the ideal terrain for the band's usual cinematic suggestions and assorted sonic experiments.

Since these are genuine "songs", it's as such that most of the tracks on "Ma Fleur" should be approached and judged; starting with the opening, splendid "To Build A Home", with its slow, enveloping pace, built around just a few piano notes and Patrick Watson's voice, which flows light and moving, lending real intensity both to the hazier passages and to the swells in tone, here supported by an elegant string arrangement. The pity is that, to find another moment as effective as this, one has to wait almost until the end of the album, and even then it's nothing more than a kind of brief slight return of the opening track, namely "That Home", which restates, with piano as sole accompaniment, the fine songwriting of "To Build A Home", but also makes plain the fascination the Cinematic Orchestra feel for the more subdued interpretations of Antony.

The other sung tracks, by contrast, pass by with little impact, giving the impression of ideas barely sketched out - like the dialogue between the voices over the fine acoustic phrasing of "Music Box" - or not entirely in focus, as in the case of "Familiar Ground", a flat ballad in a "black music" vein, to which not even Fontella Bass's voice manages to add any depth. The idea of elegant, velvety songs comes across slightly better in the alternation between near-motionless passages and swelling harmonic openings of "Breathe" and in the spare "Into You", where the interplay between Watson's and Rhodes's voices works better. The same can be said of the first part of the closing "Time And Space", a dark, placid ballad sung by Lou Rhodes alone, later crossed by faint "acid" gusts that lend a vaguely disorienting quality to the fine interweaving of piano and strings, which is marked - and partly spoiled - by rhythmic fragmentations that don't entirely fit.

Much like the coda of the long closing track, the instrumental tracks too fail to convey any clearly defined sonic direction on the band's part. The lovely Morricone-esque suggestions of the strings-only "Prelude" (nothing we haven't heard before, yet still very pleasant) are counterbalanced by the monotonous acid-free-lounge iterations of "Child Song" and "Ma Fleur", and by the overabundance of elements in "As The Stars Fall Into You", a track that encapsulates all the fascinating qualities, but also all the limitations, of the by-now well-established "post" explorations rooted in jazz, winding between passages of stark orchestration, electronic fragments and disorienting rhythmic inserts.

The coexistence - not a particularly cohesive one - of the plurality of elements described above makes "Ma Fleur" a work that is not without charm, yet inconsistent and lacking in impact, one in which Swinscoe and co. still seem, in the end, undecided between jazzy experimentation and glossy, easy-impact refinement. Credit should nonetheless go to them for at least the praiseworthy effort of translating the well-tested traits of their sound into a simple song form with an acoustic character, one that finds full realization only in "To Build A Home", but which is enough to keep one from judging the whole of "Ma Fleur" negatively.

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11/06/2007