By Nick Ostrum
Cursed Month is the first release by guitarist Lingyuan Yang’s trio with pianist Shinya Lin and drummer Asher Herzog. From the first notes of the opener Ritual Fire, one gets the sense the rest of the album is going to big and tortuous, but also structured. Think heavy prog with idiosyncratic elements. Parts of it draw on hard rock, parts on Second Viennese School dizzying atonality (Schoenberg’s Op. 33a comes to mind), Zappa-esque warped time signatures and tempos, and Tzadik-leaning tightness and rapid-fire genre-blending. The problem is that that description makes this album sound like a muddle; it is anything but.
Cursed Month has clarity despite the bucket of techniques and styles it flings at the listener. That clarity lies in Yang’s vision, and his frequent use of pointillistic guitar cascades. Where other guitarists would fall into dense and dissonant chords, Yang doubles-down on tight staccato plinking and prismatic sound refractions. He punctures rather than threads his way through the thorny overgrowth that Lin and Herzog lay for him. For its part, the rhythm section is tight and heavy. Lin can go on tears and lay catchy melodies, but he more frequently takes over the backing role of the absent bass. Then again, I am not sure this is really missing that bass between Herzog and Lin’s pulsing clunk. Yang and Lin also entangle in tight torrents and swoops. Amidst the cacophony. Cursed Monthalso has its shimmery, brittle, and just plain beautiful moments. The beginnings of Spring Snow and The Song of the Mist are among them. However, even in these tracks, that warped prog drive inevitably takes over, and Yang stomps his pedal to unleash a stream of clicks and computer-bug stutters over Lin’s more delicate scales.
Having listened to this album on repeat over the last couple months, I am still not sure exactly what to make of it. It is dark and disorienting. It is playful and unpredictable. It fuses unlike elements in convincing ways. It is a contemporary, postmodern form of fusion in the best and least restrictive senses of the term. Through it all, one hears the haunt of the cursed month, but this trio has found a way to deconstruct, reconfigure, and redeploy what made that month, whenever and wherever it was, so cursed, and, in the end, has made a damn fine album.
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