3 out of 5

Produced by: Bobby Previte

Label: RareNoiseRecords

Utterly fascinating, utterly listenable, and yet, Bobby Previte’s Mass – a ‘re-arrangement’ of Renaissance composer Guillaume DuFay’s Missa Sancti Jacobi – is oddly distancing.

Each element, and each track, is impressive in its own regard, but Previte’s take on this, which he’d apparently been laboring over in one form or another for over a decade, feels oddly restrained for all its bluster, preventing the sense of awe or reverence that seems to have been the goal here; it is, after all, music written in support of text and not music written explicitly to rock out to, and so Previte may have been properly trying to maintain that hook and punctuating it with metal / rock affectations, it just never goes beyond a certain level of intensity, and must always return to its choral roots at various points – often not very smoothly, either – as provided by The Rose Ensemble.

The affectations mentioned are a swirl of chugging distorted guitars and bass, swelling organs, and fantastical drumming.  The guitars are produced very cleanly, and the juxtaposition of the chanting with the riffing is immediately grabbing; when the recording falls back on organ playing, the cleanliness is again at play, but it’s not landing with enough reverb to amp up the holiness.  Previte’s crisp drumwork is a joy, keying us into the mood over all other aspects, and in keeping with the above, things are actually best when he’s laid back: it’s produced like a jazz album, so all that crispness sounds just right at a certain lolled pace.

All throughout Mass there absolutely excellent moments when the idea just gels.  When that happens, it’s an amazing thing, and you suddenly are hearing this new breed of genre smashing music.  But in its attempts to perhaps remain too true to the source material’s intentions, the experience is either undercut by sudden breaks in buildups (for chanting; for organs) or a seeming cap of intensity past which the music isn’t allowed to exceed.  This hasn’t stopped me from listening to the thing on repeat, because it’s true that it doesn’t sound exactly like much else, I just also hope for Mass 2, the big budget sequel with bigger explosions and more impressive effects.