Pat Metheny Unity Group: Kin (←→)
Pat Metheny Unity Group
Kin (←→)
(Nonesuch)
The glorious textures that instrumentally astound on the new album, Kin (←→), from the Pat Metheny Unity Group, offer a beckoning detachment from reality. The stealthy grooving bass riff that soon leads on the first track, “Day One,” is so intensely warm, it feels liberating and seems to yield a new awakening to dreams, hopes and limitless possibilities. This contemporary jazz album, from beginning to end, offers a uniquely stylistic, emotionally cinematic showcase. Fiery electric guitar riffs, brilliantly complex horn solos, holistically bona fide percussion, rhythms and other instruments magnificently at work, causes the mind to surrender into this plushy comfortable escapade. Somewhere near the end of the 15-minute shifting beauty of “Day One,” the change in tempo paints a scene poetically gorgeous. It is no wonder that when the album debuted it, it went straight to #1 on Billboard’s contemporary jazz chart. Pat Metheny is a legendary jazz musician who has 20 Grammys in various different categories and three gold records. His mastery is quite like his music – boundless. Every piece of his exceptional music stature alongside that of Chris Potter, Ben Williams, Antonio Sanchez and Giulio Carmassion basically shocks the listener into breathy adoration the way the lone appearance of a stunning flower may capture all sorts of contemporary and historic homage from all walks of life at various different times and angles. “Sign of the Season,” feels like validation through the very practice of standing in a soft rain. “Kin” exists in what delightfully feels like a suffocating romance. “Rise Up” is enraptured with choppy waves of layered acoustic guitar flurry accentuated in handclaps for rhythm, the eruption is splendid from there on out as horns take over.