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LOSALIOS releases new album in May

Source: Bounce.com

LOSALIOS, led by former Blankey Jet City drummer Nakamura Tatsuya, releases a new album on May 25. Title and details have yet to be determined. It’s been a year and half since LOSALIOS released its previous album, the end of the beauty. Honesty/El-Malo (and Bonnie Pink support) member Aida Shigekazu plays guitar on the album, with the versatile TOKIE providing bass. LOSALIOS is also scheduled on May 28 to perform a one-man show titled Tokyo Chain Reaction No. 3 ~ Night of Explosion.

Beauty has no end

At its safest, LOSALIOS sounds like a surf twang band. At its most extreme, it sounds like the roof is coming off the fucking walls.

On its third album the end of the beauty, LOSALIOS expands its combination of jazz improvisation and rock ‘n’ roll grit.

the end of the beauty is a somewhat apt title, if your concept of “beauty” isn’t far removed from “pretty”. At times, this album can get downright ugly, but ugly in a way that’s beautiful.

On its previous album Colorado Shit Dog, LOSALIOS keyed into the grunge-meets-jazz template forged by former downtown New York improviser Wayne Horvitz. (He’s a former New Yorker; not a former improviser.)

This time, it sounds like LOSALIOS have taken a few pages from the playbook of John Zorn’s Naked City.

Strip away Zorn’s musical attention deficit disorder, and you end up with some hard, fast but ultimately tuneful pieces.

That’s the end of the beauty to the letter.

“Three Dog Night” and “Snake Eyes” borrow liberally from ’60s twang. “Faster Talking Heads” starts off with a very distinctly southern U.S. guitar style but eventually dissolves into a messy skonky fit.

“Kaze no Namae” starts off with a “Sing! Sing! Sing!” beat, gives way to a dissonant rock beat, then features an acoustic guitar solo.

“Chaser” is a long, fiery violin solo on top of folk guitar, and a bizzare bassline.

“Aurora ga Mai Kuruu Toki” bears — in spirit — a close resemblance to Zorn’s epic cut-and-paste pieces Spillane and Two-Lane Highway. It starts off quietly, then builds up and breaks down over the course of seven minutes.

The album gets much more dissonant toward the end. Arrange “Madorumi” for string quartet, and the Kronos Quartet could pass it off as a new commission.

The concluding track “Areno e Kaeru Monotachi e” is perhaps the crux of LOSALIOS’ aesthetic. The band plays a basic rock riff, but as the chords get heavier and the momentum builds, it explodes in a blast of dissonance.

It’s a fitting close to a wild and fiery album.

Guitarist Tsuchiya Masami shines throughout the end of the beauty, navigating rhythmic and harmonic complexities with ease. Wonderous bass player TOKIE may not play on all the tracks, but guest musicians Mick Karn and Dudley Phillips certainly keep up.

And somehow, leader Nakamura Tatsuya keeps it all together with some solid timekeeping drumming.

the end of the beauty is a beauty itself.

Blankey Jet City reunites? Sort of …

Source: Bounce.com

Former Blankey Jet City member Nakamura Tatsuya’s instrumental band

LOSALIOS is scheduled to release its third album, “the end of the

beauty”, on a new label on Sept. 3. In addition to regular members

TOKIE (RIZE, AJICO), Katou Takashi (Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra) and

Takeda Shinji, the new album also includes guest performances by Mick Kahn, Tsuchiya Masami, Oki Yuichi (also from Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra) and saigenji. The album also includes individual contributions by

Nakamura’s Blankey Jet City bandmates Asai Kenichi and Terai Toshiyuki.

Grunge jazz, redux

Back in 1994, Seattle-based jazz keyboardist Wayne Horvitz jumped on the grunge bandwagon and formed perhaps the only “grunge jazz” band around.

For three years, Horvitz and his group, Pigpen, combined the improvisatory fire of John Zorn’s Naked City with the sonic sludge of the Pacific Northwest’s rock and roll calling card.

No — it wasn’t as scary as it looks in text. If anything, Pigpen produced far more interesting recordings than Zony Mash, the project Horvitz pursued after Pigpen ran its creative course.

Jump cut, five years later, to Japan.

Whether by design or by coincidence, LOSALIOS has picked up where Horvitz left off.

The quartet is something of a supergroup. Nakamura Tatsuya was drummer of the hugely popular Blankey Jet City. Guitarist Kako Takashi plays with the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, while bass player TOKIE performed with Nakamura’s bandmate Asai Kenichi in AJICO.

Performing nothing but instrumentals, LOSALIOS superimposes fiery improvisation over grunge guitars.

This quartet isn’t merely a rock ‘n’ roll jam band — they’ve woven dissonant, disjointed improvisation into their sonic pallete.

The band’s second album, Colorado Shit Dog — no idea what a shit dog is and why it’s from Colorado in particular — traces a more direct lineage to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew than most jazz-inspired rock albums (or rock-inspired jazz albums).

It’s almost impossible to differentiate between TOKIE and Kako — they’re playing is so locked, it’s as if they’re thinking with one mind.

Saxophone player Takeda Shinji does a marvelous job providing a foreground voice to the mix, but he can blend in with the insanity of the group’s noise-making when need be.

Through it all, Nakamura holds everything together with a rock solid drumming. Even when he’s pounding a difficult rhythm, he doesn’t let his bandmates’ liberal noodling interfere with his timing.

That solidarity serves the group well on such tracks as “Coganemushi”, where effects pedals blur the band into a reverb-drenched mush, or “Snake and Steak”, where a tricky compound meter leaves no room for tonality.

Some tracks play it straight, such as the surf-inspired “Hit Man” or the dramatic “Blue Black”.

But for the most part, tracks such as “Palakeen” — in which the band accelerates to revved up jam — epitomize the nimbleness of LOSALIOS’ collective improvisatory skills.

Most of the musicians in the band may have cut their teeth in rock ‘n’ roll, but they make for one hell of a jazz ensemble. Colorado Shit Dog is a fine introduction to a band that doesn’t make “grunge jazz” sound so scary.