WALK THE NILE

With a two long car journeys and a half decent hifi system available last weekend, I had planned to listen to a dozen new albums but instead, I spent most time listening to Elephant9's 'Walk The Nile' quite a few times and with great pleasure.

Their 2008 'Dodovoodoo' delightfully borrowed from and skated all over the early jazz rock scene. From the handful of critics who bothered to write, a list of a dozen or so early influences were to be found across the resulting reviews. 'Walk The Nile' is more focussed. This is largely Hammond and or overdriven electric piano led music, which with its thrashing drumming results in what at first sounds like good old fashioned jazz rock but with something of the 21st century, that is difficult to nail. I tend to go along with Elephant9's label, Rune Grammofon's blurb wrt the citing and parallelling with the original Tony Williams Lifetime, although I would go further saying this recording has echoes of the Jack Bruce edition of the 'Turn It Over' period, especially with its dirty deep down thudding bass. But it is not a copy: the drumming as suggested, deliberately lacks the precision of the late Tony Williams so creating some of the degrees of separation. And whilst the Lifetime thing is more obvious in the shorter high speed tunes, the long slower tracks suggest psychedelia, such as the title track.

An album of high energy music, (and in view of my initial hearing, certainly drive time music), which I need a little time before deciding if this is going to impact on me to the same extent as Elephant9's first - my favourite album of 2008. But it is the best I've heard of its type this year.