The fog lifts
Enemy have always been mind boggling. But on Countdown (‘trane spotters, ahoy), not the pensioner friendly game show, Fiend was recorded at Swiss club the Bird’s Eye in Basel where they settle into an irresistible groove found liberally explored all over. Hello darkness my old fiend.
Truth be told I have always been a bit baffled by the maverick, off kilter, dazzling pyrotechnics of Enemy.
It’s not that I dislike what they do it’s just that I haven’t the foggiest what it is they are trying to say.
On one level it’s easy. Someone presses keys (Kit Downes), plucks strings (Petter Eldh), hits a third also blamelessly inanimate object (James Maddren).
Factor in some highly oblique harmonic language, intertwining contrapuntal ideas, a flirtation with the avant-garde without ever being completely ”out” (whatever that means any more) and original tunes.
It’s not cold. Bird’s Eye the company make frozen foods; Bird’s Eye the club in Basel heats things up. The club has successfully been the scene of other rewarding live albums to date – for instance drummer Mareike Wiening’s 2021 album for Greenleaf, Live at Bird’s Eye Basel.
Nor is it arch. Because there’s lots of passion and few in-jokes found on Fiend. Right from the off on ‘Monks’ the velocity is mighty. But as a tune you would struggle to whistle it. As a singer you would need an operatic technique to even think about its slalom-like twists and turns.
Downes, now 38, quotes classical music along the way in at least one tiny fragment otherwise it’s the kind of generic uptempo modernistic piano trio music you get from many’s an adventurous European piano trio. But other piano trios out there adopt a far easier approach and paradoxically still fail to inject their own ideas however more obviously conveyed into a language and vast tradition that often swallows them whole as if to mock the peril of their ambition.
Billed as their first live album – you can’t actually tell it’s live initially.
Their best work even factoring this new one in to date is Vermillion (2022) which followed on from a flawed self titled album four years earlier.
That first Enemy album had a bit more in common than anything since with Downes’ Basho period and the Mercury nominated Golden (2009) that Maddren was also on along with big Cal, the Monk loving Scot, Gourlay.
I didn’t like last year’s The Betrayal. But Fiend is a return to form, the live ingredient injects ramped up energy into earlier treatments – or maybe it’s just a more familiar listen. But the small club magic that nearly always spurs jazzers on helps. Certainly and this is to Enemy’s credit they reward repeat listening partly to try to figure out the mystery of their rituals, the wrinkles in what Alan Partridge would never find however much he admires the scale of REO Speedwagon’s live shows.
A Kit Downes plays Neal Doughty concept album is one I’d love to hear. Can’t fight this feeling.
Not as mad as it sounds when you think of Brad Mehldau’s take on Rush.
For the prog lovers among us then Partridge’s fellow Norvician has been there and done that in a Holdsworthian framed guise with Troyka. Enemy in some of their more experimental passages are a bit prog but nothing like what was achieved with Chris Montague and Josh Blackmore.
I wonder what kind of fiend Downes has in mind. I thought of a poem by Robert Graves (1895-1985) – ‘Mermaid, Dragon, Fiend’ an extract of which is below. Other fiends are available.
Dragons have no darting tongues,
Robert Graves
Teeth saw-edged, nor rattling scales;
No fire issues from their lungs,
No black poison from their tails:
For they are creatures of dark air,
Unsubstantial tossing forms,
Thunderclaps of man’s despair
In mid-whirl of mental storms.
And there’s a true and only fiend
Worse than prophets prophesy,
Whose full powers to hurt are screened
Lest the race of man should die.
And yet just as often I prefer Downes sometimes in other contexts like his wonderfully intimate and personal duo album with Seb Rochford called A Short Diary or with Andrew Cyrille and Bill Frisell on Breaking the Shell.
Codebreaking abilities required
Enemy’s version of John Coltrane’s ‘Countdown’ is a good example of the complexity of the Enemy playbook. You could listen even if you know the piece extremely well for quite a while here and not realise that the trio are playing the tune. That doesn’t matter as it eventually emerges. But what are they trying to say? Demolish the supporting walls and build a new inner circle? Maybe. Later on ‘Neglecting Number One’ which was also on The Betrayal as were ‘Fiend’ and ‘Liability’ there’s bits of what sounds like stride and a far more jazzier intent that might make you reach for a bit of James P. Johnson.
Critics fawn over Downes and have been doing so for years. That’s understandable. He is a dazzling player and doesn’t just show off for the sake of it unlike the more preeningly self regarding type who values technique above everything else even feeling!
Few though can explain at least so far beyond the hyperbole how or more exactly where his style sits in the canon. I’m not going to attempt that beyond saying who he doesn’t sound like: Fergus McCreadie, Sultan Stevenson, Django Bates, Robert Mitchell, Alexander Hawkins, Pat Thomas – to pick some leading jazz and more broadly improvising pianists around right now who happen to come from Britain. He’s most like Elliot Galvin whose album The Ruin is the most interesting avant garde bit of innovation by an English pianist so far this year (but Galvin’s comping on Marius Neset’s Cabaret isn’t so compelling).
Now living in Berlin Downes reaches audiences in Germany few British pianists can. He sounds different to many German pianists too – we think the best album led by a pianist from Germany this year is Julia Hülsmann’s latest Under the Surface. And while Hülsmann is a modernist like Downes there the comparison ends. Her style is far less camouflaged, a bit less frenetic perhaps, stricter. Downes does loose abandon better.
Eldh on ‘Sun Flex’ provides a masterclass in controlled but at times alarming accelerando.
Eldh deserves a word or two. His work with Django Bates launched his profile internationally and I still like to go back to albums like 2016’s The Study of Touch which is a far better album than anything Enemy have achieved so far. Hear him most obviously laying it down at the beginning of the absorbing ‘Sun Flex,’ a masterclass in controlled but at times alarming accelerando. Maddren’s best soloing is on ‘Liability’ – the sort of thing at a gig that always gains the most applause. And sure enough here you realise there is an audience at last!
They still haven’t arrived at their final destination and have time on their side. But maybe the view from the train window a long way from Norwich is a little less misted over than ever before and you can see shapes out there in the distance you never knew even existed or better than nothing make a far from preposterous stab peering at even when the carriage blinds are half way down.
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