#jared blum

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving! 🦃 It’s Friday again, meaning it’s time for another NEW RELEASE ROUND-UP! Which of these new releases is your personal favorite? Let me know in the comments, and suggest your own new releases for the week if they’re not listed! 💿

Besides its public perception it was somehow always clear that Faith No More isn’t just your average run-of-the-mill rock band. Mike Patton’s solo works or his releases with Tomahawk or Fantômas clearly show how diverse the interests of members of the band are. Bill Gould, also a founding member of Faith No More, is no exception in this regard. Together with the sound artist Jared Blum he explores a remarkably interesting  mixture of  bleak, doomy ambient, blended with folkish melodies and outlandish sound experiments. This alone isn’t that much of a special mixtures, but Gould and Blum do a really good work approaching this genre slightly different than usual with their latest release “The Talking Book”.

Dark drones rumble underneath the tracks, while grainy guitars hint to long forgotten melodies of lonesome americana nostalgia. Distant voices flicker here and there creating a ghostly, haunting tension. Together with the eerie reverbs that appear ever so often, the tracks have a strangely deserted, sometimes nearly shamanic feeling to it. Ranging from thick bass-ladden drones and delicate sound-mangling to bitter sweet piano or guitar lines, “The Talking Book” creates a large variety of different atmospheres and sound-aesthetics that all manage to maintain a saddening melancholic touch. What sets these tracks apart from a lot of others pieces working in a similar field, is the pacing of the elements.

Instead of working with a very small palette of sounds and a slowly evolving tempo, Gould & Blum have no problem changing the direction of a track abruptly, introducing other instruments or new sounds out of the blue and letting them disappear just moments later. Nevertheless the listener doesn’t have the impression that the tracks are hurried. Especially the two longer explorations Maxim and The Fallen, both reaching past the ten minute mark, are a sonic joyride par excellence. “The Talking Book” is an album that shouldn’t be missed.