Colin Cannon: McGolrick (Infrequent Seams, 2021)

May 12, 2021 at 10:51 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Colin Cannon: McGolrick

Brooklyn composer Colin Cannon’s new album, named after a park in Brooklyn, is a pretty confounding suite that leaps between genres, and is threaded together by numerous phone messages, making it feel extremely personal although it’s not quite clear what all of the voices and musical references mean to him. Opening piece “Get Up” starts out orchestral avant-prog, then gets submerged in a deeply psychedelic haze four minutes in; it really takes your head to a different space when his vocals hit. “Can’t Get the Time” is even proggier, and is filled with choral harmonies as well as flashes of distant shouts. “Radio” picks up some scrambled transmissions, riding a current from a repeating bit about Jesus, then rapidly switching to bits of gospel, Dixieland, prog-rock, and vaportrap, then gradually swelling up with strings before the full band bursts through. “Electric” segues right into “Sunshine”, in which a vintage recording of “You Are My Sunshine” becomes surrounded by a colorful arrangement of the song which gradually gets crazier, and at one point it sounds like a skewed bit of “Over the Rainbow” sneaks in, while “You Are My Sunshine” sinks to the bottom. The three-part “The Scraps” starts out gentle and acoustic, but by the end, it swells into a symphony of police sirens, honking car alarms, and shouting kids. The kids are given their own brief track, and then their voices are incorporated once again into the knotty, lengthy “McGolrick”, which veers from tender to manic, but lands with a big finish.

Leave a Comment »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

The Answer Is In The Beat