Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 13/02/06
Label: Brassland / Talitres

For quite some time, we've become increasingly at ease with the practice of genre cross-fertilisation. Thus, electronica can be folky, metal may be ambient, punk might well be bluesy, hip hop enmeshed with jazz and so on - until now, we've reached a point where we're all tripping gaily into the deep, boundary-less heartland of rampant eclecticism. At least, that's the ideal. In reality, it's only the music that we've been educated in and so recognise which we allow to practise stylistic promiscuity. When it comes to music we understand less well - classical and world, for the vast majority of us - we come on like Victorian homeowners getting sniffy about the new neighbours. It's all very well mixing things up, but what about each keeping to its own kind, eh?

To hell with that. Like Rachel's, Threnody Ensemble and, to a lesser extent, The Dirty Three, Clogs are flying the flag for challenging, classical music. Not that this Australian / American quartet - led by composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist Padma Newsome - is stridently avant-garde. Far from it - their fourth album is a luminously lovely, emotionally eloquent and thoroughly accessible exercise in…well, it's hard to say, exactly. "Lantern" recalls the hypnotic drive of post-rock, Ralph Vaughan Williams' pastoral romanticism, the psychedelic jazz of Kevin Ayres' Whole World project and baroque chamber music, without wholly casting its lot in with any of these.

Newsome is also a member of mighty American country noir cum gothic-disco outfit The National and that says as much about him as do his compositions for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra et al. The fact that Clogs' music is mostly instrumental, however (only one piece here, the exquisite title track, features vocals), certainly isn't what marks it as "classical", but then, the engagement of Newsome and Clogs guitarist Bryce Dessner (also part of The National's line up) with alt. rock doesn't itself make them modernists, either.

The best approach here is to set aside genre delineations (who needs 'em?) and simply surrender. Given the hypnotic, Mogwai-like rises and falls which constitute "The Song Of The Cricket", the Tortoise-ish, jazzy flurries of "5/4" and the seemingly ancient Celtic air that is the haunting title track, it's not hard. Using guitars, violin, mandola, viola, bassoon, melodica, piano and percussion, Clogs subtly mix minimalist, modernist and romantic classical forms with rock and jazz. When is classical music not classical music, then? Answer: when it's Clogs' "Lantern". Time to see the light.

    by Sharon O'Connell