The Peeled Eye: The Peeled Eye

Berlin, Germany-based Shameless Records is managed by seasoned and well-travelled multi-instrumentalist Boris Hauf who resides as a prominent Euro-jazz improviser and experimentalist while also recording with members of Chicago's fruitful improv circuit. No doubt, Hauf is known to trek into unchartered musical arenas, evidenced by the band Efzeg where micro-textures and minimalism often serve as a forum for expansion. But the plot thickens on the debut release of The Peeled Eye which is billed as a "noisecore/doomjazz quartet." Fans of the New York downtown scene, guitarist Sonny Sharrock and metal-jazz should be up for the occasion as the quartet delivers more than just a few sonic booms here.

I received a CD for review, but the album is solely offered as a limited edition (300 pressings) LP and available via digital download. Otherwise, it's evident that the musicians gave it their all on this brash outing. Hauf's vicious baritone sax lines and electric guitarist Martin Siewart's distortion filled skronk and grunge phrasings frame the battlefield for the ensemble's variable improvisational exercises. They cover a surfeit of possibilities atop the rhythm section's thrusting cadences.

On "Heavy Quarters," streaming EFX processes paint the background, accelerated by Hauf's ravenous choruses and Siewart's elephantine sound-sculpting forays. Think of death metal coupled with free-jazz tactics, but they spawn inferences to Ornette Coleman's electrified, free funk albums of the 70s and 80s during "Diiiiisko," marked by the guitarist's strenuously executed and jostling chord progressions above a boisterous rhythmic deportment.

The quartet consummates the album with "PP Remains," which is a free-floating, intensifying and jaunty improv fest, featuring the frontline's call/response dialogues, heightened by Siewart's scraping and wily phraseology. Overall, the band zooms in for the kill as they aggressively tread through hazardous musical terrain amid a take no prisoners' mode of operation.

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