ALBUM REVIEW: BADBADNOTGOOD – Talk Memory

XL Recordings

Released: 08.10.21

Twin jazz traditions of reinventive improvisation and polyrhythmic precision coalesce in the form of Toronto’s BADBADNOTGOOD. Funnily enough, across four previous LPs, the fusion-minded trio have revealed a dyadic reverence and disdain for genre conventions, deliberately espousing mercurial experimentation over staid orthodoxy. In this sense, they’re an idiosyncratic hybrid of insider and outsider – auteurs of a sort in the stringently formatted world of contemporary jazz pop.

Much like 2016’s IV, Talk Memory sees its authors consciously temper their jam-band impulses, with the brash angularity of records past shrewdly eschewed for emotive virtuosity. Here, psychedelic flourishes sinuously entwine with soulful timbres to engender an air of reflexive consonance – a judicious shift in emphasis that lends the band’s sublime unorthodoxy a deeper grounding.