Rolo Tomasae - Plan B
(Sic Audio)
The work of jazz musicians who take on the sound of rock has a history that's inconsistent, at best. There are those musicians who can shift freely between the two, or, if they're really good, meld the two seamlessly. But, more often than not, the resulting sound is a hackneyed attempt at rock swagger or slightly rough jazz that's just edgy enough to "rock" and cause shudders at the offices of Downbeat.
Rolo Tomasae met in NYU's jazz performance program and began to create a sound that made clear their admiration for Webern or Berg, but slowly fell prey to the rock god lifestyle and transformed into a trio whose output bears little that belies any musical influences outside of fairly traditional rock and jazz spheres. Plan B, their debut, contains material that's highly varied, at least on a superficial level, and, if nothing else, songwriter and guitarist Brian McBrearty has proven his ability to craft solid, well-constructed songs within the parameters of several established genres. McBrearty, however, does little in the way of transcending the common components of these styles in order to create something that's truly forward-looking or new. Granted, "A" leads off the album in an atmospheric, ambient haze before Plan B delves into funk, jazz, and that sparse, instrumental sound that I refuse to call post-rock... but McBrearty, bassist David Perrott, and drummer Liam Hurley never really do anything new with these sounds, rarely allowing the jazz to mingle with the ambient textures or injecting their basement party funk with something that would propel it into bolder territory. There are moments in which Rolo Tomasae point at something more exciting: "A'" represents perhaps the only track on the album on which the band finds substantial success in covering new ground, and there are slivers of time in which other tracks offer a rare glimpse of the amalgam of jazz, rock, and modern composition that Rolo Tomasae could have offered. Sure, it's nice and smooth, but much of Plan B flows comfortably and languidly within the well-traversed world of straight-ahead jazz idioms, ripe with unimaginatively utilized guitar effects and stylistic shifts that do little more than prove musicianship and dexterity.
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