The Cry: The Cry

Like a seance, the French improvising trio of pianist Christine Ott, keyboardist Mathieu Gabry and drummer/percussionist Pierre-Loïc Le Bliguet, collectively calling themselves The Cry, manage to seep into one's crowded consciousness with an ethereal language spoken before, but just not quite like they speak it on their eponymous debut outing.

Is it jazz? Who knows. Is it ambient avant-garde? Yeah maybe. Let the jury decide on the evidence. Take for instance, "Chorus Alpha," that at first enters the bandwidth with Bliguet's brush whispering snare. Then the ancient sound of foreboding rolls in courtesy of Ott's otherworldly Ondes Martenot, an early 20th Century electronic instrument sounding rather like a theremin. Mabry then captains the electronic sea until, with about three minutes of the track's hypnotic nine minutes remaining, it morse codes into one of those early 1980s krautrock autobahn pulses. It is fun to hear.

For "Seven Days" sits Ott at her piano, mournful, speculative, wanting, waiting as her trio mates circle around her letting her express what needs be said at this precise moment. The closing "Overture Closure" takes its cue from the title ending themes of any one of the glut of dystopian morality tales flooding the streaming platforms but allows one to create the scenes and write the script. The Cry's opening opus, the alluring yet alien, twenty-one minute "Fire of Love," conjures all of its many episodes into one amoebic mass of irony, yet triumph.