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Artists Of The Year
CMU Albums Of The Year 2009: Tyondai Braxton – Central Market
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 11 December 2009
As we head towards the end of the year, we’ll be revealing, in no particular order, our ten favourite albums of 2009. Today, Tyondai Braxton’s ‘Central Market’.
The son of highly regarded avant-garde jazz musician Anthony Braxton, Tyondai is best known these days as the frontman of post-rockers Battles. His second solo album, ‘Central Market’, has been described as ‘free jazz meets Disney’ by some. But, while jazz it might be, to lump it in with a largely improvisational art form is a little insulting to the amount of work that has gone into composing it.
Suggesting it sounds like the soundtrack to an animated film, however, is completely fair. In fact, it most reminds me of Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack to ‘Spirited Away’ (an album I also recommend highly, incidentally). The orchestral instruments do sound as if they’re voicing an array of strange characters, while Braxton’s occasional abstract and heavily affected vocalisations act, if not as a narrator, then some sort of benevolent overseer.
While the first five tracks of the album follow this pattern, flowing into one another to create one complete piece, proceedings are brought to a halt with ‘J City’, which, though not what you’d call a ‘standard’ rock song, has the guitar-drums-bass-vocals format we’re all more used to. And it would be weird for it to be included, if it didn’t somehow work.
When Braxton returns to the style of the rest of the album for its final track, ‘Dead Strings’, albeit with a darker tone, you realise that, had track five, ‘Unfurling’, run straight into it, the shift would have been too jarring and ruined the flow of the whole thing. Because of this careful construction, ‘Central Market’ really works as a whole, perhaps more so than any other album I’ve heard this year.
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