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Review

The Thing

The Thing, Caf? Oto, London 04/10/2011


by Tim Owen

October 06, 2011

/ LIVE

The Thing play forceful, brawny jazz, steeped in garage rock flavour

To paraphrase Lou Reed, you can’t beat 2 saxophones, bass, drum. Particularly, these days, where both saxophones are played (not simultaneously, you understand) by Mats Gustafsson, and Ingebrigt H?ker Flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love are taking care of bass and drum duties. The tripartite Thing has a physically imposing presence, uniformly decked out in no-nonsense jeans and Ruby’s B-B-Q Ts. I guess that’s some sort of sponsorship deal: it’s certainly easy to believe that brisket and pork ribs are staples of the Thing’s diet. And its a pretty useful signifier of the group’s signature sound of forceful, brawny jazz, steeped in garage rock flavour.

It doesn’t seem like five minutes since I finished typing my Jazz Mann review of The Thing’s 2009-recorded collaborative live albums, “Shinjuke Growl” and “Shinjuku Crawl”. Now they have a new one to promote, a studio effort that they’ve named “Mono”, with reference, says Gustafsson, “to the band’s mono mania”. I don’t think he was referring to infectious mononucleosis; more likely it was single-channel sound he had in mind; direct sonics, stripped-back and bullshit free. In any case, from tonight’s evidence “Mono”, the album, sounds like a step back from the outré improv of those “Shinjuku” collaborations, fine as they were, and back to the skronking garage jazz at which The Thing so vividly excel.

Set one rocked hard from the git-go. Even H?ker Flaten?s nonchalantly thrummed bass solo, which he ended by leaning toward an amp to create a deep bass feedback loop, had an exoskeletal rigidity to it. The feedback signalled a steady rock pulse that carried The Thing through a bourbon soaked, New Orleans vibe to something altogether more riff-centric, and a climax underpinned by a driving drum rhythm that had maybe a touch of Meters style to it. According to Gustafsson, this was a version of Stephanie McDee’s Zydeco hit “Call the Police”. He also described something earlier in the sequence as “a Norwegian wedding song”, but that was an in-joke reference to the fact that two of the band were recently married (not to each other, you understand). They closed the first set with a no-nonsense mid-tempo unpicking of the new album title track, “Mono”.

The second set’s pulse was initially slower, beginning with solo bass, then Gustafsson extrapolating from the intro to PJ Harvey’s “To Bring You My Love”, before settling into an impassioned version of Don Cherry’s inexhaustible “Awake Nu”. A hushed passage with the tenderness of a lullaby could have been a nod to Johnny Hodges, but Gustafsson later identified the source as the African American spiritual “There is a Balm in Gilead”. After that the pressure inexorably built up again, through what may have been Sonny Rollin’s “The Bridge” and then (again, according to Gustafsson) “a couple of Dutch themes” that I didn’t identify. I’m guessing they weren’t by 2 Unlimited. Another new track, “The Viking” began in a stentorian mode that the band expertly modulated through a dynamic duet for sax and drums, until Gustafsson could congruously quote Sonny Rollins’ calypso-tinged “St. Thomas”; a neat, bravura transition. The climax to the night was an expertly-judged segue from a long preamble of knotty, staccato impressionism, to a romp through the Sonics’ garage classic “Have Love Will Travel”.

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