Dog Leg Dilemma: Not This Time

A sonic cornucopia, Canadian electric jazz quartet Dog Leg Dilemma's debut Not This Timeunfolds like a deconstructed buffet. Bits and pieces of musical genres drop in and out of the album's seven compositions with John Woo freneticism, combining at seemingly random intervals as if someone swept the cutting room floor of a recording studio and then assembled the whole by pasting together the discards of everything from circus music, to German Om-pah bands, to reggae, to punk, to ambient soundscapes and everything in between.

The resulting collage of disparate rhythms, textures, melodic structures and styles is outlandish, chaotic, humorous, utterly unpredictable, and entertaining.

And while Dog Leg Dilemma anchors its music with traditional jazz instrumentation—saxophone, bass, drums, and guitar—and pepper their tunes with blistering jazz solos, the overall approach is a true departure. Unlike other genre bending experiments, which tend to confine their forays either track-by-track or to a milder range of influences that serve a dominant structure, Not This Time careens from one touchstone to the next at a dizzying pace. The logic of the transitions is deliberately mystifying, and the result never settles into a singular image, tone, or narrative. It simply keeps erupting like a Dadaist exposition on speed.

This is not music for the faint of heart. Nor is it a ponderously cerebral thought-experiment. It's an explosion of form astute and appealingly lighthearted, as off-kilter as it is absorbing.