GoGo Penguin’s last album, v2.0, was a Kind Of Jazz favourite two years ago, narrowly missing out on our Top 10 of 2014. Since then, the band have gone on to bigger and better things, signing to Blue Note, and sharing the stage with Kamasi Washington at the EFG London Jazz Festival in 2015, an event compered by Gilles Peterson, no less.
According to Blue Note’s press release, the new album finds the band taking their mash-up of minimalist piano themes, deeply propulsive bass lines and electronica-inspired drums to new heights.
So is Man Made Object, which was released on February 5th, worthy of the hype? Or is it simply v2.1, a simple tweak marketed as a major upgrade?
The album starts promisingly enough. All Res opens with pianist Chris Illingworth playing a classically-inspired theme, and is soon joined by Nick Blacka, with some beautifully bowed bass. At around 43 seconds, the drums start – courtesy of Rob Turner – and quickly build. “Many of the songs on this album started out as electronic compositions that I made on sequencing software like Logic or Ableton,” the drummer reveals. “I’ll then play to the band and we’ll find ways of replicating it acoustically.”
There’s an undeniable excitement to the sound, which builds in the manner of EDM – or electronic dance music. The drumming continues at a frantic pace, replicating the sequencing software, until it suddenly breaks at three minutes, reverting to just piano and bowed bass, before kicking off once more. The tune lasts for just over five minutes, and then comes to a sudden an unexpected stop.
Unspeakable World, the second track, sounds as though it was based on the simple, somewhat repetitive piano riff that opens the tune. Again, the track gradually evolves, the bass coming in around the one minute mark, and the drums moving up a gear. The pace slows in the middle, before building back up to a climax. And then an unexpected ending. But haven’t we heard that before?
GoGo Penguin are smart enough to ensure there are enough subtle variations in the music to keep things interesting. Branches Break has more of a chill-out vibe, rather than pure EDM, whilst Weird Cat is based on a bass riff, courtesy of Nick Blacka, and the piano only comes in a little later. But soon the breakbeat-style drumming kicks in once more, and I felt myself beginning to drift.
There is precious little in the way of interaction between the three musicians, and limited scope for improvisation either. These tunes are as tightly plotted as a Nordic detective series, each shift in the time signature planned well in advance. The Blue Notes press release inadvertently refers to this, quoting a New York gig review by the New York Times. “The members stay locked in their grooves,” it reads, “three young men making music with jazz instruments, rock dynamics and circumscribed dance-music strategies.”
Sadly, it begins to sound like a strategy a few tunes in. One can go back to the great jazz albums, and discover new layers each time; subtle accents by the drummer, that lead the pianist in a different direction; the pianist comping as the bass player takes a solo, listening carefully to every note he plays. Such subtleties are largely absent here, and the three musicians largely stay ‘locked in their grooves’.
None of this is to suggest that Man Made Object is a bad album. Their attempts to fuse jazz with electronica is occasionally inspired, and works well in small doses, and if this helps to broaden the audience for jazz, then so much the better. But I suspect that this will be an album that ends up as background music in a bar or club, rather than merit any further exploration.
As a reviewer, there’s a danger of coming across like the ‘jazz police’, daring to criticise the next big thing. But when the album title is inspired by the pianist’s fascination with “ideas of robotics, transhumanism and human augmentation,” surely it’s right that someone calls the emergency services. No crime has been committed, but the band should perhaps be cautioned.
