Elsewhere with Umphrey’s

By T. Virgil Parker

When I got the advance copy of Umphrey’s new disk I knew my day was pretty much shot. Based on my previous experience of the band, nothing was going to get done while I was listening to this. Defusing that much sound is almost an ordeal, but in the sense of an extreme sport or a rite of passage. Listening to Anchor Drops, their last album, built up a highly distracting metaphor in my mind: A nuclear music box from another dimension. Raw notes are dumped in by the truckload, spidery mechanical octopus arms sort them. Impossible music comes out the other end. I’d like to get my hands on one, but sadly, metaphors take a long time to get on the market.
Meanwhile, their new disk: Safety in Numbers, would have to suffice. One thing which I had forgotten about Umphrey’s McGee, is that your expectations about them have very little to do with their musical objectives. They managed to create a sound without much of a precedent in their body of work. This new music is so smooth you can almost hear ice tinkling in Black Velvet.  You detect a distant nod to Steely Dan, a flashlight shown down some dusty corridors of Jazz, but hanging like a net over the entire set of songs is an essence that seems to serve both as the contour that contains the music, and the music itself: The essence of silk. They will no doubt continue to devastate audiences with their penetrating live music, but no one could have easily predicted this pocket of serenity hiding behind Umphrey’s elaborate contortions.
You can imagine that I was rather anxious to have a few words with Umphrey’s formidable keyboard player, Joel Cummings.

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Edges

All too often precisely crafted and passionate poetry are at opposite ends of a spectrum. There are rare exceptions when the discipline of the craft coheres into the primal creative thrust. Chris Wanzool's intensity shines through multi-layered imagery and metaphors so subtle that you have to do a little digging to find out what hit you. When you do, you'll remember the real definition of poetry: It makes your hair stand on end.

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Tim Parker, MA
Publisher, College Crier