.The Bad Plus

For All I Care

On each of their previous albums, the Bad Plus let it be known
— via covers of tunes from Blondie to Black Sabbath, Rush to
Bacharach/David — that they owed as much to classic rock and pop
as to prog jazz. So it’s no real shocker that the piano trio would
release an album offering no original material, or that the track list
would be an eclectic one, skittering from Heart (a faithfully
reproduced “Barracuda”) to the Bee Gees (a soothingly spacy “How Deep
Is Your Love”), with a little Stravinsky, Babbitt, and Ligeti thrown
in.For All I Care adds vocalist Wendy Lewis to the line-up of
pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer David King,
and though it inches the Bad Plus closer to the pop mainstream, it
never loses the particular rhythmic and harmonic quirks that have
defined them so far.

At the CD’s best — the Flaming Lips’ “Feeling Yourself
Disintegrate,” Wilco’s “Radio Cure,” Roger Miller’s “Lock, Stock and
Teardrops,” even Yes’ “Long Distance Runaround” — time is
stretched like taffy, splinters of sound jab and dart and disappear,
and all four participants flirt with detachment and dissonance even
while holding tight to the center. But elsewhere, Lewis can seem like
the fourth wheel she is.On the opening “Lithium” (the group’s second
Nirvana cover — “Smells like Teen Spirit” anchored their debut),
she merely echoes Cobain, and the disjointed Pink Floyd tune
“Comfortably Numb,” despite sparkling individual performances from the
core trio, would have come off less bar-band and more Bad Plus had the
vocals been stripped altogether. (Heads Up)

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