3 out of 5

Label: Astral Spirits, Monofonus Press

Produced by: Greg Norman (recorded by)

Just because you can play a lil’ bit of all genres doesn’t mean you should.

…Which is a bit of a misleading knock against longtime Chicago session-man Matthew Lux’s first outing as a band leader, gathering his “Communication Arts Quartet” for ‘Contra/Fact,’ a rearranged / compressed / extended LP version of a cassette release; the album does, eventually, resolve into loose jazz bop that is fitting for a dude who’s played with Isotope 217 and a lot of Rob Mazurek projects – i.e. take your Chicago indieheads from Tortoise and the like, with their groove and electronics, and shift the dial toward jazz. That’s super dismissive, but I don’t think entirely inaccurate; I also like that music, but it tends towards chill, and that’s mostly the m.o. for this album as well.

But circling back around, the original edition of Contra/Fact forefronted a very Tortoise-y track – same here – and then stitches together some loosely slinky horns and bass and drums with occasional forays into electronic noise / ambience. Here, after that opener (which is fantastic; an absolute toe-tapper that ranks with the best of any given Thrill Jockey badass funk), Lux has brought the two longform experimental tracks up front: Ninna Nanna’s minimalist percussion; Mercury Lights’s slow crawl of electronics. While neither of these tracks are bad, they suggest a complete lack of stylistic focus for the Communication Arts Quintet, and underlines this project as people getting together to jam on ideas. Neat, but it tests my patience each time.

A short interstitial (new to this edition; the cassette has some different interstitials – and additional tracks!) leads us to a pair of excellent, laid-back jazz, with Lux’s presence as a bassist feeling right at home in a very organic feel-good pairing of Paw Paw and Israels’. We then close out (prior to a final coda of sorts) with the album’s other funkier highlight, C.G.L.W.

If the Chicago style is your bag, this album definitely works, though I do think Lux and his crew’s somewhat broad, wandering scope, and an unideal sequencing, waters down the effectiveness of this set to something akin to a polished jam session.