STEVE TIBBETTS
The Fall of Us All
This is
guitar music rich with pictures, elegantly morphing images that seem to float
over and through one another in liquid collision like an old Fillmore light
show: Jimi Hendrix in a weather-beaten bark canoe, paddling upriver through
a light curtain of rain in an Asian jungle; Bo Diddley as a Buddhist monk robed
in saffron, shuffling off to his dawn prayers in time to his trademark shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits
beat; Carlos Santana struck dumb in the Sahara in front of a tremulous desert
mirage; Robert Fripp in the court not of the Crimson King, but of the Dalai
Lama.
As a guitarist, Steve Tibbetts definitely makes great mind movies. But The
Fall of Us All, Tibbetts' sixth album for ECM, is also a trip of another,
more explosive and enriching kind, a dynamic study of Eastern modality and universal
spiritualism driven by rock & roll ambition. Immediate touchstones are the
Zenlike art pop of Brian Eno's Another Green World, Santana's classic
1972 album of Coltrane-ish Arabian mysticism, Caravanserai, and the
Butterfield Blues Band's prescient 1966 blues-raga "East West." But
Tibbetts is very much his own man as both a composer and an improviser.
You can hear it, indeed feel it, in the breathtaking guitar and percussion
ballet "Dzogchen Punks." A typhoon whirl of Tibbetts' manic Indo guitar
and the startling gunfire percussion of his long-time collaborator, Marc Anderson,
suddenly brakes into a dark, free-fall expanse of water-music riffing and finger-tap
drumming, like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness meets the third side
of Hendrix's Electric Ladyland. In "Full Moon Dogs", Tibbetts
opens with that scuffling Bo-cum-Buddha beat against the dulcimer-like chime
of his own acoustic guitar and floating, wordless female vocals before ripping
into a heated guitar and percussion argument, complete with high-speed congas
and clanging prayer cymbals.
If nothing else, The Fall of Us All is a great showcase for Tibbetts'
ways with guitar feedback. In "Roam and Spy," he shifts with graceful
elasticity from revving-motorcycle growls to pithy dot-dash transmissions and
laserlike beams of scream. But context, not chops, is everything on this album,
whether it's the light brush-stroke harmonics of Tibbetts' guitar in "Drinking
Lesson" or the way his acoustic mourning becomes electric halfway through
"Hellbound Train" with a cat's cradle of acid-blues guitar tangle,
voodoo percussion, and apoplectic drumbeats.
Tibbetts has spent the better part of two decades and eight albums--including
two now rare, independent late-70s releases--in search of the Lost Chord. With
The Fall of Us All, he has found something very close to it. Rolling
Stone
Moments of primal violence and confusion emerge, but these are set against expanses
of contemplation and gorgeous melodicism. If this were a diary, it would provide
some frightening and exhilarating reading.
CD
Review
...a
gripping soundscape that fluctuates from primal rage and caustic guitars on
the industrial sizzlers to ambient ear massages on acoustic interludes.
The Fall never falls short of exhilarating. USA Today
It's when Tibbetts plugs his guitar in that his music really escapes the pull
of this earth and begins to chart the nether regions of the cosmos. On most
of the electric cuts, Tibbetts erupts in his trademark style, which sounds somewhere
between Carlos Santana on some fierce brown acid and Ghidrah the Three-Headed
Monster thrashing against high-voltage power cables in the night sky above Tokyo.
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