Art, entertainment – both, neither?
Clearly both.
Where Swiss singer the Hildegard Lernt Fliegen polymath Andreas Schaerer is concerned the art is clear, the entertainment caught up in the sheer acrobatics of his voice and the feeling that you don’t know where this is going to go.
Oh and it can groove when it wants to.
In a setting where accordion dominates as his main foil this isn’t remotely folky as such settings can be.
The drumming of Lucas Niggli isn’t particularly demonstrative on a track like standout of all that’s here ‘Laki Penan’. But the guitar lines delivered by Kalle Kalima are more significant.
One reading here would be to think of this as a kind of Astor Piazzolla situation in the less giddy sections. And while there’s no bandoneon, accordionist Luciano Biondini obliges certainly early on in the album.
But that feeling fades.
I glazed over a bit to be frank at the less convincing ‘Magma Mia.’
But ‘Mr More’ is a blast full of noises off and a squally clap along fervour.
This Swiss, Cameroon, Italian, Finnish band has already delivered an album called A Novel of Anomaly so it’s not a case of a maiden voyage at all.
Schaerer likes to dart about in the falsetto sounding parts of his range and he certainly has ideas to burn, his voice a little in register like Michael Schiefel’s whose album with vibes master David Friedman while more conventional last year also dazzled in an even jazzier way on Hiptoe.
Schaerer invents his own language which provides an intimation of bebop without really following that style through in any sort of period sense.
While it’s experimental it isn’t difficult at all to digest and there’s a certain spaciousness and joy the quartet is so good at carving out particularly on the title track with its intimation of distant tolling bells and a certain eerie ominous quality.
Niggli and Kalima cook up a cross rhythmic African sounding groove on ‘Siesta in Utopia’ that wouldn’t be out of a place on a Richard Bona album.
Kalima’s bizarre pitch bending on ‘Eglised by the Moon’ is the most eccentric thing here and you get almost a Weimar cabaret feel from some of the singer’s more experimental passages here as he restlessly explores terra incognita with a kind of pretend muted trumpet improvisation part of the spell that sends me to thoughts of the method 20 years ago of Raul Midón on his for the ages soulful classic, State of Mind.
Trigger warning! You feel with ‘Bad Eye’ that some yodelling is not far away. Thankfully that doesn’t quite happen. And instead there’s a jazz rock-out set to dervish accordion that might well please fans of Kimmo Pohjonen. Kalima then unleashes lots of guitar hero like posturings that happens to be fun folding in bits of detunery for good measure and above all a sense of letting go.
Schaerer, 48, hails from Visp in southern Switzerland and later gravitated to Bern. He was a guitarist in a punk band in his teens and that outlandishness from the past serves him well chasing a different kind of status and musical space to inhabit.
All kinds of scatting and operatic coloratura are all grist to his mill and happily without being at all football terrace anthemic or doom laden minor poet maudlin, what’s here is a dynamic road less travelled thrill instead.
