Local vocalist (and noted geologist) Chuck Ver Straeten is a storyteller, and while he manifests his musical narratives mostly without actual lyrics, he is, in his own way, voluble, not laconic. His gutturally expulsive sprechgesang sounds Norse, but the language is inscrutably atavistic, inchoate phonemes that are viscerally expressive, pre-language run amok. His luxuriant accent drapes over the rhythm section like a cosmopolitan lounge act incarnation of Al Johnson from 1990s Chicago underground greats U.S. Maple. Indeed, Ver Straeten is not so much singing as channeling a quarter-century of trombone-playing, by emulating the instrument with his dynamic vocalizations. When he finally does speak intelligibly, mid-album, the abruptness of the communicative shift has a jarring effect, as he unfurls a fleeting deluge of rote, somewhat cloying bromides.
The album’s songs are titled ruminatively, like chapters of a mid-life memoir. The sound is cavernous, but crisp. Drummer Harvey Sorgen is propulsively textural, torrential or delicate, as the moment demands—ride cymbals like cloudbursts, floor toms a thunderous cascade. Ver Straeten’s vibrato is robustly male but has an almost feminine lushness. The man has range, his rapid-fire fricatives tickling the senses with impish urgency, and the album’s sonic palette is expansive, with a bittersweet, elegiac quality that’s heightened by the presence of longtime Ver Straeten mentor, the now-deceased Woodstock pianist Karl Berger. Berger’s performances throughout, alongside those of querulous Hudson Valley bassist Michael Bisio, are invaluable—his interjections and phrasing a melodic axis around which several tracks revolve, arpeggiations darkly portentous, Satie-esque. Improv’s intrinsic lack of structure tests its rigor. This music careens but has patience.
