If you are going to put together a dozen-strong jazz and funk troupe with a 50-piece orchestra, as Snarky Puppy’s Michael League has decided to do, you are going to need some authoritarian percussion to keep so many musicians on the same page. This is the problem with
Waves Upon Waves, the opening track of this second outing between the United States group and the Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest: symphonic grandeur is overshadowed by a walloping beat. Happily, most cuts on League’s ambitious suite fare better. It’s a concept album about dreaming, named in Catalan (League lives in Barcelona) and skittering across the state of half-waking, recurring dreams and so forth. The essential ingredient remains the orchestra’s towering blocks of strings, played loud but with the finesse you would expect from an institution in business since 1945, while various Puppies add shape-shifting character.
Recurrent is jaunty and cinematic but with an itchy Latin rhythm.
Drift is slow, with a prowling motif, while
Chimera slips somewhat uncomfortably into a widdling guitar. A daring, high-wire act only League would attempt. —
Neil Spencer, The Observer
Snarky Puppy & Metropole Orkest. Somni.
