4 out of 5

Label: Columbia

Produced by: Tchad Blake

‘These Are the Vistas’ is a pretty slick album.  Its approachability as a satisfyingly accomplished jazz session with enough song structure to act like a pop rock disc merits the notice it received at the time of its release.  But: this is still The Bad Plus in its infancy, shaking loose from genre habits to become a band outside of polished Tchad Blake production and cheeky non-jazz covers.  So we still feel like a comfortable-with-each-other group of like-minded friends finding a common groove as opposed to the more fully-fledged identity BP would form over the course of albums to come.  Still, the initial run of tracks on ‘Vistas’ – including the press-garnering Nirvana cover – should be enough to dismiss the suspicion that these are some green college kids putting on their jazz caps post a few years spent in Vintage Vinyl.  Opener ‘Big Eater’ and the contemplative ‘Everywhere You Turn’ understand progression and build before evolving into calculated noise, while the group can flip over to a pop-riff on track #2s ‘Keep the Bugs…’ and then twist ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ into the jazz song it always was.  Toward the middle of the disc, the wonderfully upbeat ‘1972 Bronze Medalist’ leads us into the masterful swoon of ‘Guilty,’ which pans through a range of emotions from joy to triumph to disappointment over its five minutes.

But there is a misstep, and it’s a fairly notable one.  Aphex Twin’s ‘Flim.’  The joy of ‘Teen Spirit’ is in how it becomes the band’s own track.  But ‘Flim’ seems more like a dare.  It’s played pretty straight – there’s not much room for flourish – and it sounds rather too calculated for the looser work on the rest of the disc, and just to highlight this, it’s the only song with notable production manipulation (’cause it’s an electronic track, yo), whereas Blake had otherwise done an excellent job of keeping things sounding pretty pure and organic.  Yes, it is an impressive track, it’s just, oddly, a bit too tight-lipped.  And seemingly to counter that, it’s preceded by the stop-start ‘Boo-Wah,’ a short exercise in jazz chops that, again, feels less like a song and more like something that just had to be done.

Thankfully, the album swings right back with an awesome take on ‘Heart of Glass’ and then the quiet little closer ‘Silence is the Question.’

To be honest – such hills and valleys are evident on all the early Bad Plus albums (and, uh, I haven’t listened to the later ones yet), and the majority of ‘Vistas’ is so comfortable to listen to, valleys here are easy to skip right past.  So, y’know, Retrospect Me offers this, like, 10 year old piece of advice: believe the hype.  These guys are going to be around for a while.