ReView: Chris Connelly – Bloodhounds0

Chris Connelly
Album: Bloodhounds
Category: Alternative / Rock
Label: Armalyte Industries
Release Date: 2018-11-11

One simply has to marvel at the prodigious rate Chris Connelly seems able to create out music, both as a collaborator and as a solo artist. With numerous releases in 2018 already, the man dropped his Bloodhounds double album, collecting 16 tracks of his distinguished brand of art rock. Those familiar with his work should know what to expect, especially in relation to his previous record, The Tide Stripped Bare; one could describe Bloodhounds as a different gallery exhibit in the same museum – full of his signatures of Bowie-esque crooning and emotive wails, psychedelic layers of keyboards and discordant guitars, and strident rhythms that are at times jaunty, other times reticent, but always compelling. This is most evident on “Another Song About a Sculpture,” which recalls the opening track on the previous album… only this time, it’s a sculpture and takes on a more pensive and introspective tone, especially with the electric piano and distant harmonicas. A song like “AAISW” with its buggy guitar solos, punchy hip-thrusting drumbeats, and shouted vocals, or the opening title track with its brash rhythms and swirls of dreamily sustained keys and noisy guitars all evoke the sounds of the early ‘70s a la Roxy Music and Brian Eno, while other moments like “Jump, Goddess, Jump” and the subtly R&B-tinged “I Figured It Would Be My Undoing” will surely recall memories of the Thin White Duke. Then there are the howls of guitar feedback on “Ascension” and the loud lounge feel of harmonized guitars and fretless bass on “Encyclopedia of Haunted Lovers,” or the atonal stabs of piano and guitar atop a slow but swinging rhythm on “Anna Karina’s Guide to Being Mesmerized,” all audibly transporting the listener to another time and place that feels like Paris in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, but with that sublimely dissonant quality that adorns all of Connelly’s music, making it sound very much its own. As such, Bloodhounds might sound to some like a quintessential Chris Connelly solo record, but like every great artist, he crafts a singularly sonic world that one should like to revisit now and again.
 
Track list:

1. Bloodhounds
2. Jump, Goddess, Jump
3. Ascension
4. A Farewell to Athens
5. Desolation Blues
6. AAISW
7. F-Birds
8. Anna Karina’s Guide to Being Mesmerized
9. Encyclopedia of Haunted Lovers
10. Our Last Conversation
11. I Figured It Would Be My Undoing
12. I Dream in Argentina
13. Richter Grey Stairs
14. Mirador, Matador, Minataur
15. Another Song About a Sculpture
16. Brush Stroke Blues

 
Chris Connelly
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Armalyte Industries
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Ilker Yücel (Ilker81x)