The fourth album, Grit to Grace, is set of live performances all done in one day, November 8, 2020.
We wanted to do everything in one day as a 3 piece band and mix just that.
No audience unfortunately due to COVID-19 restrictions, but we were very fortunate to capture most of the album in live videos.
We performed a few old songs from previous albums: Raindance, Elsewhere, Twilight Dancer from the Layers of Meaning (album 3), and Mystic Train and Distant Shores from Ultraviolet Voodoo (album 2), but with no overdubs.
Add to that 5 new songs from the very heavy Phoenix Rising and The Calvary (the Grit); all the way to Questions from Above, and Shields & Halos (the Grace). We wanted to cram it all into one single album, and this is that.
The third album, Layers of Meaning, started with many of our jams in 2018 that sounded like Jazz, so we refined the best ones here.
We went for a sense of space, and flow with swing. We added one song which was more progressive rock, but not heavy; just graceful.
We went for a more polished and traditional jazz mix, with the great Rich Breen in Burbank, California.
Raindance the first song, threads the needle of progressive rock using a jazz feel. It's been described as sounding like the band Rush but with a pure Jazz feel and James Bond meets Pat Metheny Group.
The second album, Ultraviolet Voodoo, is a metaphysical combination of Rock riffs, Funk feel and Jazz writing with deep melodic and harmonic structure.
Our goal with this second album was to double down on the diversity of beats and time feels almost every song has two or three different types of drum beats; different types of time signatures key changes and they’re all in different keys. We wanted that so that there is a reason to listen to the whole album and that things would hopefully somehow tie together at some very high level of abstraction.
We tried to really make the feel of the chorus in the bridges in the song structure different than the starting and ending parts of the song we wanted to explore abstraction spaces that don’t really sound like they’re in a key and don’t really sound like they’re from a specific genre you will hear that especially in the song Mystic Train where there this is bridge and outro which is like the first bridge. Very spacey. Literally and figuratively. Follow the Radius. Same with the Bridge inside the Ultraviolet Voodoo.
The first album, Cinematic, is a mixture of elements of hard rock, jazz, funk, fusion with a cinematic bent. Instrumental tracks that have very different moods from brooding, mysterious, psychedelic, to party fun. Versatile yet interesting, intense, intellectual and heavy at times.
