Maintaining a consistent level of excellence during improvisational collaborations is a difficult task. Sometimes even when the musicians and the audience find the results cathartic, they don’t always translate well to recorded media. Unfortunately, After at Once is one of those instances.
One of the problems with this album is that much of it sounds like a recorded band practice, and the useful musical phrases are proportionate to any impromptu brainstorming. “A Short Cry,” for instance, has drones that aren’t particularly interesting on their own soon joined by clanging that’s merely distracting. Screams startle the band into action on “Touches,” driving them into a nice tribal pulse, but when the scream comes again after the group abruptly stops several minutes later, it seems that their previous adrenaline burst has left them too exhausted to rouse themselves again and not much comes of it. “Between Blue & Yellow” has decent drumming, but the horns that join the song have limited expressive value.
The title track has fairly ominous drones, but the sarod playing doesn’t go anywhere. Also, the haunting piano near the end of the song is too infrequent and too hard to hear to be fully appreciated. “Awake There” meanders all over the place, with occasional crashes that come out of nowhere to try to galvanize the other musicians, but too frequently I had to keep pinching myself to stay awake. The most structured song is “Sword Abandoned,” with solid melodic playing and vocals, but there are howling sounds swirling in the background that don’t complement the other music.
There are some decent spots here and there, but I’ve heard it done much better elsewhere.
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