Get The Blessing

To a large extent this is the jazz album that will excite and intrigue non-jazz fans. It will also satisfy any jazz music fans with a love of strong, dark and complex music.

Get The Blessing have been around for 15 years but this is only their 5th album and it has many shades and forms captured within it. The band have affiliations with Portishead and Radiohead and there are clear trip-hop influences but that only adds to the depth and joy of the sounds on offer.

From the opening ‘Phaenomena’ with its heavy and distorted bass line, skitterish drumming and horn lead, giving respect to the style of Ornette Coleman, and through to the lighter sounding but more complex ‘Carapace’ with its core solo trumpet suggesting loneliness amongst the complex sounds around it and then to ‘Monkfish’, sounding more conventional but still eliciting a level of excitement at the interplay between strong and individual sounds but still producing something very much complete – all different facets to the band’s sound but all around a core of musicians who know each other’s playing inside and out and who know exactly how to stimulate and trigger one another.

I don’t get any sense of introspection from this album, as I have from many recent jazz albums,rather it is music for the band but presented to the listener and as such it feels like a gift.

The album rewards deep listening, real darkened room and isolation stuff, but the rewards are plenty and very well worth the effort. It is an album that you can go back to time and again to discover new pathways and rooms in the labrynth.