One-Armed Bandit

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Album Information

Total Tracks: 9   Total Length: 53:37

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Peter Shapiro

eMusic Contributor

12.14.10
Jaga Jazzist put more flesh on their skeletal grooves
2010 | Label: Ninja Tune

In the past this ever-shifting collective of Norwegian musicians centered on the Horntveth siblings (Lars, Martin and Line) sounded like a less pointy-headed, less bloodless Tortoise. On One-Armed Bandit, Jaga Jazzist has put more flesh on their skeletal grooves and embraced the more opulent strains of jazz, prog and funk.

Much of the album, particularly the title track and "Book of Glass," sounds like Harold Budd's Get Carter score as re-recorded by Miami Vice's Jan Hammer (with a little help from cosmic disco forbear John Forde). Elsewhere, "Prognissekongen" is a strangely perfect blend of Fela Kuti, mid '80s Frank Zappa and an early '70s advert for a feminine hygiene product; "Music! Dance! Drama!" is reminiscent of a handheld Casio VL-Tone tumbling down a flight of stairs into a workingman's club brass band. Indeed, One-Armed Bandit falls squarely in line with the recent trend for rehabilitating the sound of the once derided early '80s using barely-polyphonic synths. What sets One-Armed Bandit apart from most of the neon day-glo dorks pedaling this sound is the occasionally startling arrangements and juxtapositions and its rejection of facile nostalgia.

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Jaga Jazzist’s least jazz-rooted, most prog album to date, One-Armed Bandit is not associable with Tortoise and 2000s-era Stereolab merely for the assistance of John McEntire, who mixed it and is credited with analog synth processing. Echoing, at various points, both bands at their most rocking, Baroque, and searching, One-Armed Bandit dazzles early on. Throughout the 13 minutes that make up the title track and the following “Bananfleur Overalt,” the listener is pulled through a suspenseful succession of passages, like a score to a Mediterranean tropical cyclone, that work in tight-riffing bass clarinet, zipping vibraphone, buzzing guitar, sighing pedal steel, dancing harpsichord, and even some distant skronk-sax over galloping and tapping rhythms that switch time signatures with an oddly elegant twitchiness. Later portions of the album are larded with so many graceless, attention-deficit hazards that it’s unknown exactly what the band (or is that “groop”?) was attempting to accomplish — perhaps a challenge or, more specifically, instrumental paeans to Frank Zappa and Mars Volta with horn charts. – Andy Kellman

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