KITES

While the evocative beauty of JADE WARRIOR represents master storytelling in its own right, they negotiated a fine line between gifted non verbal conveyance and the largely futile practice of attempting to represent narrative minutiae. On their 4 Island releases, only "Kites" drifts. While the group's sonorous palate remains intact, the effect is that of listening to a must-buy original soundtrack after seeing the movie, only worse, since there is no movie at all.

While the first half proposes several significant highlights, particularly the meditatively percussive "Wind Borne", it is on the thematic sequence of the second part that the disk feels somehow lacking. Instead of revelling in Oriental flourishes implied by the seemingly arbitrary titles, it contents itself with largely amorphous soundscapes punctuated by occasional fretted sounds generally lacking even the understated substance we have come to expect.

I suppose the album closer is lovely in its own way, but by this point we have turned our eyes from this rather drab kite to its more colorful and substantive siblings launched by the same talented hands.