Mood music for the Americana inclined.
“Music For Roads” is a cross-cultural collaboration between Nordic jazz and indie folk/americana players, including Finnish trumpet player Verneri Pohjola, Finnish americana/folk band Tuomo & Markus, Finnish drummer Jaska Lukkarinen, French saxophonist Sylvain Rifflet and American guitarist and multi-collaborator Marc Ribot. The album is, for us at least, best described as ambient-americana, a term that seems to translate as music for unmade movies that would require an americana-ish soundtrack. What kind of roads, though – and what genre of film – are two very valid questions. Certainly on the opening piece ‘Appalachian Landscape‘ there’s a sudden journey into a wide-open landscape, with folky guitar quickly brightened by expansive trumpet playing as if each vista is overtaken by a new and even more impressive one as a high winding road makes its ways through mountains, the air clearing as the altitude increases. ‘Division Street‘ takes a veer off down a dust track into open prairies where there’s an undercurrent of tension and slowly simmering resentment, whilst ‘Vega‘ feels like an early morning – around sunrise – arrival into a shining city, perhaps involving a sweeping panoramic shot of a car crossing a river on an oversized girder bridge. ‘Waiting Room‘ – a bonus song on the physical release of “Music For Roads” features Marc Ribot on vocals – is a time traveling journey along a psychedelic highway, with the feel of the late sixties and early seventies vibes translating into a commentary on the current state of the world and politics which, simplistically, takes the worst of that era and suggests that this is where we are once more.
Naturally, being predominantly instrumentals, the album is open to whatever the listener projects onto the sounds, but there is a musical palette here we can recognise. The south of the border feel alongside a martial beat leads us into the world of modern noire, the bleeping electronic opener of ‘Highway One Loop‘ that melts away to that music for dusty highways can’t help but bring to mind 21st century cities in the middle of deserts (and maybe just a hint of a spacey jam from a distant Grateful Dead concert). But whichever dreams the sounds invoke, they are never less than intriguing. If you can take some jazz with your americana, and you don’t mind songs with no words, then this may well be an album worth your time.
