JACK O THE CLOCK - Night Loops

It takes courage and a bit of recklessness to tear down the increasingly politically correct boundaries of today's rock music; this is often achieved by diluting sonic forms and spaces, which in their constant evanescence remain suspended between evocative suggestion and sheer boredom.

California's Jack O' The Clock, mindful of the lessons taught by Frank Zappa or Henry Cow, have turned rock avant-garde's smelly sock inside out, putting lyricism and inventiveness back at the center of their sonic research, and adding fresh shades to darkness and its possible chromatic variants, with music that is introspective and restless, sounding authentic and honest, yet always elusive.

It's no understatement to place their sound alongside historic bands like King Crimson, Genesis, Henry Cow, Gentle Giant and even the Golden Palominos, bearing in mind that their clever folk and singer-songwriter infiltrations have a wide range, stretching from Tom Waits to Sufjan Stevens, by way of Scott Walker and Van Dyke Parks.

Their fourth album, "Night Loops", is one of the rare records capable of winning back an audience worn out by the predictability of so many hype bands and by the self-indulgent languor of the last standard-bearers of post-rock: the restlessness and density of its musical architecture are the kind built for continuous, renewable pleasure with every listen. Take, for instance, the five minutes and thirty-eight seconds of "Fixture": vibraphone, muffled percussion, violin and orchestral drones weave the hypnotic carpet over which bassoon, electrified viola, tubular bells, loops, drums and snakedrum follow one another, building to a vocal apotheosis that crosses the line into gothic-folk before dissolving into marimba sounds and instrumental rarefaction.

"Night Loops" is pervaded by a constant emotional tension that seeps even into the brief instrumental excursions binding together the longer, more elaborate tracks: sometimes it's a tremor of voices, mandolin and piano ("Tiny Sonographic Heart"), or the sound of trombone and sax laid over ghostly field recordings ("Familiar 1: Night Heron Over Harrison Square"), or again a whisper of voices over a violent flood of industrial noise ("Furnace").

Folk is the stylistic element that, while never taking centre stage, acts as a trait d'union between composition and instrumental elaboration. The most successful archetype of this approach is "Come Back Tomorrow": here acoustic guitars and violin carry the mellow tone of Anglo-American singer-songwriter tradition, but constant dissonances and sonic digressions turn everything into a carousel of joys and melancholies chasing each other without ever meeting.

"Ten Fingers" too is nothing more than a folk-song you could find on any singer-songwriter album, but after being transfigured by Jack O' The Clock, little remains normal across its seven-plus minutes of instrumental digressions: percussion filtered through electronics, ambient drones, an atmosphere thick with foreboding, and filtered vocals fray the pop fabric with disorienting, fascinating effects. Fragments of blues peek through on "Bethlehem Watcher", another of the album's most original episodes, with pipe organ and doo-wop duelling over bluegrass-style violin lines, in a hybridization rarely found in the history of rock. The more straightforward "Down Below" revives the glories of 90s American alternative rock, the kind that found new life in Golden Palominos and the stars-and-stripes version of post-rock, where jazz, funk, rock, country and tribalism melted into a single sonic sludge.

Jack O' The Clock don't linger on a handful of ideas just to recycle them endlessly: their music thrives on challenges, even at the risk of sounding disturbing and abrasive, as in the patchwork of dissonance and free-jazz on "How The Light Is Approached", or in the brief orchestral chamber-rock of "Familiar 2: Barred Owl", where horns and electronics duet amid layered sounds and dog yelps.

At this point there's more than enough reason to file "Night Loops" among the unmissable listens of recent months, but there's still plenty to tell, starting with the splendid prog-jazz-rock score that makes "Salt Moon" sound like a plausible outtake from the King Crimson of the "Larks' Tongues In Aspic" era, continuing through the six-plus minutes of "As Long As the Earth Lasts", which amid unusual funk and jazz-rock textures quotes passages from the Bible and tribal music in a primordial, liberating orgy, before finding comfort in the melancholic folk weave of the closing "Rehearsing The Long Walk Home". A ballad with dark tones and near-impossible chords, it moves from acoustic delicacies to psychedelic digressions almost worthy of Pink Floyd, with a fine solo in the background that frames one of the album's most poetic passages.

Everything Jack O' The Clock had promised across their three previous albums has finally become reality on "Night Loops". Make it yours.

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21/01/2015