Three-Layer Cake: Sounds The Color Of Grounds

The trio of Mike Watt, Brandon Seabrook and Mike Pride began as a pandemic-era experiment, exchanging music files remotely to create Stove Top (RareNoise, 2021). Now, as Three-Layer Cake, they return with Sounds The Color Of Grounds, a record that reveals a fully realized and cohesive jazz-punk—or perhaps punk-jazz—ensemble.

Watt, etched into punk rock's Mt. Rushmore, co-founded the Minutemen with D. Boon in 1980, and later formed fIREHOSE in 1986 following Boon's tragic death. Never confined by genre, Watt's musical range spans from The Stooges to John Coltrane. Guitarist and banjoist Seabrook, who grew up listening to the Minutemen, shares that same DIY ethos. His own sonic chaos is on full display in his recent solo outing Object Of Unknown Function (Pyroclastic, 2024). Providing the connective tissue is drummer Pride, a versatile force whose pulse anchors groups led by the likes of Anthony Braxton, Jon Irabagon and Peter Evans.

The band's eclectic sound calls back to the Minutemen's expansive aesthetic. The album opens with "Deliverdance," where Seabrook's frenzied banjo and Pride's hyperactive drumming set the stage for Watt's spoken-word musings. His meditative prose—self- described as "semi-sonnets"—appear on three tracks and were originally written for visual artist Raymond Pettibon.

Beyond the breakneck pace of "The Hasta Cloth," the trio explores more introspective terrain. "From Couplets To Corpuscles" offers a brooding meditation, while "What Was Cut From The Negative Space" staggers like a reggae-soaked blues hallucination.

The trio's remote collaboration lends itself to layered, reactive compositions. Seabrook weaves guitars and samples into dense tapestries; Pride augments his drum kit with marimba, gongs and other percussive textures. On "The Lonely Sail," saxophonist Jonathan Moritz joins the fray, answering Watt's recitations with spectral phrasing as Seabrook's sci-fi fragments and Pride's shimmering percussion swirl around him.

Three layers quickly become four, five, six... And yet, despite the complex assembly, the result is unified and immediate—a testament to the trio's shared vision and boundary-defying instincts.