Action Jazz, eh?  What does that mean?  Surely it can’t be an attempt to pick up the torch which has become close to fizzling out with the deaths of all those activist free jazz pioneers of late (such as Max Roach with his Freedom Now Suite)?  I mean the Norwegians don’t strike me as an oppressed minority or anything.  Maybe it is something to do with fishing quotas - how about Lift Every Plaice And Squid (hmmm…can anyone do any better?). 

Or just maybe this is Mats Gustafsson, Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, and Paal Nilsen Love’s attempt to reinvigorate the genre with their own powerful brand of bottled noise.  Credence to this is lent by the liner notes, which  display a fridge magnet manifesto, proclaiming “OUT OF THE SO CALLED EMPTINESS: CHANNELS OF ENERGY”.  As such, the name couldn’t be more apt – this is a restless beast of an album, which scarcely gives itself a second to draw breath as it gathers in source material from a variety of disparate sources, chews them up and spits them back out with a red-faced savageness.

Opener “Sounds Like A Sandwich” (by lablemates Cato Salsa Experience) sounds less like a sandwich than being caught amongst stampeding horses spooked by an earthquake, while Yosuke Yamashita’s “Chiasma” sounds more like a sandwich, bookending some guttural howling and tumultuous drumming between repetitions of a morse code theme.  Ornette Coleman’s “Broken Shadows” is reduced to a skulky Drum Thing, before a cover of Lightning Bolt’s (action rock?) “Ride The Sky” leaps out with murderous intentions, Gustaffson spewing glass fragments while Nilsen-Love nails his kit to the floor.  This sets the mood for The Thing’s own two-part “Better Living…Through BBQ” (which seems to me to be a rather different credo, and one easily tempered by the vagaries of an unseasonal summer) before this meaty, muscular brute of an album curls up to sleep amongst the trashcans with the metallic scrapes and foraging percussion of Gustafsson’s “Strayhorn”.

Make Action Jazz your raison d’etre with a purchase from the Smalltown shop.