Ye Olde 2: Ye Olde 2: At the End of Time

Ten years after the first Ye Olde (Yestereve Records, 2015) was framed around a fantasy quest into a riotous Brooklyn guitar summit, trombonist extraordinaire Jacob Garchik returns with Ye Olde 2: At the End of Time, a 48-minute sci-fi prog jazz odyssey stretching from the heat death of the universe to the resurrection of consciousness itself.

The original crew—Mary Halvorson, Brandon Seabrook, and Jonathan Goldberger on guitars, Vinnie Sperrazza on drums—anchors six of the eight tracks plus the finale. For tracks seven and eight, Garchik conjures a mirror band called Simulacrus (Ava Mendoza, Miles Okazaki, Sean Moran, and drummer Josh Dion), effectively doubling the firepower and turning the closing minutes into a nine-musician asteroid storm.

The album ignites with "One Can Only Go Up," where Seabrook's banjo-guitar hybrid unleashes barbed-wire arpeggios, Halvorson peppers the sky with prepared-guitar shrapnel that sounds like short-circuiting satellites, and Goldberger's baritone guitar rumbles low enough to register on the Richter scale. These three formidable jazz guitarists operate with telepathic discipline, riffing in knotty unison, peeling off into controlled chaos, then snapping back into lockstep around a muscular jazz-rock pulse. Garchik's spirited trombone work steers the ascent through choruses that could soundtrack a SpaceX rocket approaching liftoff. As the band descends earthward, his lucid solo does not just punctuate the landing—it drives the melody home with authoritative clarity, making sure the theme sticks even as the ensemble settles back into gravitational pull.

Momentum builds through "Dyson Spheres," "Exo-Microbiology," and "Omega Point," propelled by riffs that owe as much to Mahavishnu Orchestra as to medieval dance tunes and free-jazz modalities, elevated by the guitarists' explosive soloing and raw intensity. When Simulacrus storms in for "Omega Point" and the climactic "Ye Olde vs Simulacrus," the collision of six guitars plus trombone feels less like a battle of the bands than the Big Bang running in reverse—pure creative violence rendered with surgical wit.

Garchik and his twin ensembles treat entropy like a dare, stacking riffs and counter-riffs until the architecture becomes gloriously, deliberately overstuffed—a sonic monument to civilisation's tendency to build until there is no room left to breathe. This is music for the last party at the edge of oblivion, where existential dread meets gut-level exhilaration. Somewhere in the cosmic void, a floating brain is nodding along.

Comments