Rock and jazz have hardly been strangers over the 70 or so years that they have shared a space in the popular music world. But often, such meetings have been more about jazz vibes being bolted onto an otherwise rock structure, albeit an ornate and complex one. Hardly a balanced meeting of sonic minds.
What makes Alex Lakusta’s Island Ghosts stand apart from what has gone before is that by taking the looseness and unexpected changes of pace and poise and timing and texture of a more post-rock framework, he immediately creates a space that jazz…and touches of soul, and ambient cinematics, groove and grandure…can sit in and mix and merge with ease.
As “Beat Mullet’s” soulful jazz waves ebb and flow on a filmic tide, it is clear that Island Ghosts is a genre-hopping journey through those liminal fringes where many sounds and styles meet. And while many of the tracks are built from the coming together of complementary sounds, such as “Waves in Patterns’” blend of funky groove and shimmering sonics, others are more about contrast.
“Cimbers,” for example, is chilled and ambient, yet there is a gorgeously abrasive texture running through the heart of the song; “Return Ticket” adds squalling guitar histrionics to some wandering and wonderful jazz-saxophone, and the two-part title track that plays us out first woos us with serene soundtracking before rising into anthemic pop-rock to wind up the album.
Albums that wander in and out of the jazz-o-sphere are not new. Genre-hopping songs are hardly unexpected. Cinematic soundtracks are commonplace, and the idea of deconstructing rock music before building it into something more interesting has certainly been done before. But to find all those things going on, not to mention an array of great compositions and infectious, rewarding tracks, in the same place is exactly why you need this album in your collection.
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