Bart
The third album from Canadians Bart expands on the ‘70s sway of their last. Today, Tomorrow, and the Next Day is doused in a luxurious, lounged vision of pop, fleshed out with orchestral swells and stacked vocal harmonies. The album exists in a velour wonderland that skews towards at the tied down troubadours of the day. Some Kind of Way slips back into that mold a bit as it opens with “How Do I Find It,” tying the song to the last album’s aesthetics, but they quickly push further into an eclectic mold that refuses to be pinned down. From the stutter-funk staccatos of “Turncoat” to the shout-along slashes of “Forced Perspective,” the album pushes the band away from their silken sway and towards the kind of patchwork exploration of the sound that sutured the ‘70s together.
The newest ripple is the rise of a psychedelic jazz component. Threaded throughout the album are works that find the band joining contemporaries Possum, Badge Époque Ensemble, and The Cosmic Range in straddling the lines of jazz and psychedelia. Bart has always existed on the periphery of this sound, but with new members Carl Didur (piano/synth) and Patrick Smith (soprano sax, flute) sparring with Joseph Shabason’s return on the tenor sax, the album begins to open up into something headier. It feels like a turning point for the band, pushing past their ballads and into a headier fusion of sounds. This comes to a head on centerpiece “Rose Quartz,” which finds the band pairing the vocal smoothness of their past with touches of icy psych and jazz-funk. The track feels like the culmination of what the band is working at, and perhaps where they’re headed as the last notes of Some Kind of Way echo off into the ether.
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