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Monday, September 1, 2008

Happy House - Inoxydable (Circum Disc, 2008) ****

Happy House is a French band led by guitarist Olivier Benoit, with Julien Favreuille on sax, Nicolas Mahieux on bass and Jean-Luc Landsweerdt on drums. Their rock-influenced jazz is very modern, very creative and unlike many fusion : the music has incredible strong focus and emotional expressiveness. The quality of the band is that they join fragility with explosiveness, control with boundless possibilities, subtlety with a raw punk-attitude. The band was created more than 15 years ago, and started out much more in a free jazz environment, but just to take everyone by surprise, the band now shifted its approach to very composed and often complex pieces, with lots of rhythm and mood changes, but without losing the directness of jazz improvisation or of rock music. Dark, angry and sentimental, and still maintaining coherence, not bad ... And the fact that these four guys have played together for a while can also be heard. Nice!

Listen and buy from CDBaby.

© stef

1 comments:

Mr Magoo said...

Cool album. It's a bit out there but I still like it.