Thursday, November 14, 2013

Taylor's Universe- Evidence (Marvel of Beauty Records)

Multi-instrumentalist, Robin Taylor is back to take you into Taylor’s Universe. It is quite a few of the same folks with Karsten Vogel on sax and bass clarinet, Klaus Thrane on drums but also some new blood with Thomas Ulstrup on synthesizer solos and Claus Bøhling on guitar solos, with Robin playing everything else you hear, except Louise Nippers voice on Red Afternoon. This is the first new records from Claus Bøhling since his work with my band, the Øresund Space Collective and I have to say he is still in top form! This album was recorded between May and October 2013, so they put it out weeks after finishing it!  The CD begins with the long and moody track, Buildings, which features a number of solos by all those involved. The end gets really freaky before coming back to a normal sound and beautiful outro solo by Karsten. The synth solo prior to the freaky section had a really cool sound. Red Afternoon is next and starts right off with the dreamy voice and keyboard and bass before the others join in. This is a pretty cool track with a really slow pace and just drifing bass that I like. Great balance between heavy and lightness. Claus plays a killer solo at the end of this track. Great wah guitar! Marie Marolle has a mysterious theme, almost like it should be in a Dario Argento movie but then it really changes when Claus kicks in around 2½ mins. They return to the strange theme that it started with eventually. Karsten comes in later than on the other tracks. Forever and a Day features a lot of great guitar and synths solos and they just trade back and forth over a good portion of the song. Karsten is playing a much smaller role in this track. For those of you out there that are not familiar with Taylor’s Universe it is basically an instrumental jazz rock outfit with a bit more improvised flavour than Robin’s other work. Robin composes, arranges and produces all this records but he leaves a lot of space for all the other players and actually rarely is the one taking the lead, except on the bass on this CD, even though he also plays guitar, keyboards, flute and percussion and other things you can hear. I like this stuff a lot…

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