Their name remains an utter tongue twister of emphasis. But come on in past the stutter and stumble of trying to say Ydivide even approximately, after the rain the weather is divvied up clement all over. Turned out nice again.
Because admirably long haired drummer Clemens Kuratle’s multi-national band Ydivide emerge – it’s blindingly obvious – with their best work to date.
Fans of the English saxist Dee Byrne certainly aren’t short changed on the tender Dee lightfully insightful opener that acts as the appealingly weary title track. No need to hang around waiting for this plangent gem. The band hit the ground running.
It’s a world away from Dee’s work back in the day with the bare all funky Emrys Baird-led Soul Immigrants or her blistering double act with Cath Roberts in an array of reliably honking hair-raising free form escapades.
So it’s instead a case that jagged, pleasingly contrary, not at all off the peg jazz-rock and hooky rhythms form the band’s stock in trade.
The drummer is along with busy bassist Lukas Traxel, Tonto to his Lone Ranger, who also hails from the jazz loving land of the Toblerone, here along with English star pianist Elliot Galvin and Irish guitarist Chris – son of Ronan – Guilfoyle who collectively develop a lot of traction and heat. Above all they sound like a band, not a collection of individuals whose egos might need their own spotlights as an interim sop before they all bolt for the exit and gallop off to climb their own personal mountains. Lay ee odl lay ee odl lay hee hoo.
There’s a salty minor key grown-upness to the harmonies.
And yet this isn’t an all out assault on the senses.
Because the chugging ‘For E. S.’ calms things down wholesale.
Oh, there’s a great symmetry in both control and arc of that piece as it unfolds.
Tunes are the drummmer’s and pretty decent they are too as mercifully is his style which has a roiling insistence to it constantly triangulating a maelstrom clutched from responses to Byrne’s juddering sax break out passages and the twists and turns of the beat and pulsar detours. Nods along the way include a tip of the hat to US rockers Wilco. But no one goes too cuckoo or worse off-piste stylistically in the ever fruitless pursuit of the philosopher’s stone.
If geosat-ing for the most accessible of the pieces it’s at the end – named for US comic Roy Wood Jr who hosts the US version of topical panel show Have I Got News For You.
Breaking news here is that this is Ydivide’s best work to date and bear in mind that Lumumba also on the same label wasn’t too shabby either.
Usually you need to don a hairshirt to fit the mood of the pervasive output of Swiss label Intakt’s doggedly out-there stubbornly avant-garde arty improv inclined releases. You don’t this time. Not that this is crass, over easy-on-the-ear listening that makes too many toothsome compromises, either. It doesn’t. But it is just so less clinical than so much overcooked wannabe innovative stuff out there. And it’s all the more refreshing for that and such individuality. What a riot of ideas socking it to us ever raucously this all proves. We all need some Clemency now and then.
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