Hawaii's Nerve Beats challenge self-imposed limitations, massaging out some percussion based odysseys that, for my money, offer a musical equivalent to a Borges short or a Benjamin essay: structure is acknowledged only to upend it in the margins and hidden spaces.
Too much?
Perhaps, but the Mike Watt styling
reworked with a beatnik (in a good way) experimentation serves up
some deliciousness. I like the word succulent. I don't use it often
enough, but the connotations are brilliant. Nerve Beats are ripe with
temptation -- an absolute reservoir of tonality. Moist and juicy,
their recordings experiment with every configuration one can compile
given the horizons they erect. The game, however, isn't fixed as,
with any horizon, it shifts as you move within it. Decidedly
minimalist in their approach, Nerve Beats tease out enough
possibility that proves the rule that the contradictions exist within
the structure. Deconstruction is a heavy term, riddled with enough
baggage to keep you perpetually cycling through a Kafka-esque dreamscape. The joy, however, has always been when the system
outruns its limits, when theory can't keep up with practice. Behold,
a rupture! The static becomes dynamic; the minimal becomes complex;
the familiar becomes strange.
Or something.
It's an impressive undertaking, and, to
my mind, Nerve Beats not only accomplish what they set out to do but
also rework the notion of progression by swaddling it in repetition.
Utilizing jazz concepts is a tricky dance, but these cats find a way
to center it while not appearing to control its development. Sure,
one can argue, they allow the rules of the game to actuate the
result, but the details of the journey are what piece together the
narrative. It's succinct, disjointed symmetry that uses all the tools
of concision against itself.
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