POLAR BEAR - In Each And Every One

Polar Bear are perhaps the most curious and surprising act to come out of the Leaf stable in recent years. Looking closely, the quintet who style themselves as post-jazz in Tony Morley's court had already racked up three solid albums before this one, the first of which even achieved decent sales on the back of a cool-jazz blend that gave little hint of the free-jazz drift the band would later embrace. The self-titled record on Tin Angel was the turning point for the act, which pairs leader Sebastian Rochford's drums with Pete Wareham's sax, Tom Herbert's bass, Leafcutter John's guitar and John Burton's noise injections - it was there that the blend of post-ECM atmospheres and improvised anarchy was born, a blend that within a few years would tear apart the traditionalist elegance of their early work.

Looking closely, the mere fact that three out of five members also belong to another mixed-breed project on the Leaf roster - Melt Yourself Down - unequivocally hints at the degree of eclecticism built into the group from the start. And it's precisely this eclecticism that triumphs on this fifth installment of the Polar Bear saga: "In Each And Every One" is without doubt the most extreme, kaleidoscopic, disjointed and bombastic album of their career, the one in which the atmospheric dimension reaches its peak while simultaneously achieving the greatest distance yet from their original sound, heading toward pure free improvisation. The attempt is commendable, but the result is a dizzying rollercoaster alternating genuine expressive peaks with decidedly predictable and toothless avant-ish gestures. So much so that the icy, Ecm-adjacent opening of "Open See" (Jan Garbarek, but also Terje Rypdal) leads you to believe you're in for something sensational, and if you could just skip ahead straight to the tribal-cosmic mantra of closer "Sometimes", that impression might even hold up on both counts.

What scales back this enthusiasm, confirmed as it still is, are already the backward-looking yet interesting comeback of "Be Free" and the vividly colored minimalist fountain of "Chotpot". "They're All Ks And Qs Lucien", a curious twist on bop conventions dominated by a mighty bass line, still keeps pace with an extra thread of originality: it's instead the thoroughly predictable homage to AMM on "WW" that opens the doors to the murkier depths, trodden single-file also by the industrial turmoil of "Maliana" and the extremely noisy, terrifying "Life And Life".

The desolation is best expressed in the bleak, unhealthy little sketch formed by the two halves of "Lost In Death", while "Two Storms" echoes the preceding noise-like passage, this time leaving it to the sax to openly challenge the listener's eardrums. The point is that we've heard more than enough free-jazz of this kind since the aforementioned AMM, recycled in approach as much as in sound and always passed off as something new. The same, to be honest, could be said of the atmospheric digressions on which a certain label has even built its empire: but while the latter can find in elegance and class a fulfillment even greater than that of pure originality (now impossible anyway), the former loses much of its meaning and appeal if it doesn't carry even a single breath of fresh air.

The potential, in any case, is confirmed.

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12/05/2014