Skerik's Syncopated Taint Septet’s first ever studio album Husky on HYENA Records is vital and alive, bursting with fresh vision in arrangement, composition, improvisation, rhythm and recording. It's an album with seemingly multiple layers that are revealed slowly and surely with repeated listens. Its rhythmic vocabularies often draw from hip-hop and funk, which is part and parcel of SST7's vernacular, as equally called upon as the harmonic languages of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie and John Coltrane. With a five-front horn line, SST7 create a gigantic sound. And yet they don't shy away from nimble, dancing harmonies that can be as refined and delicate one moment as they are muscular and bruising the next.
Husky's opening cut, "The Third Rail," emerges like a locomotive in the distance, faint horns growing ever louder as it rumbles forward. Rather unexpectedly, however, it turns elegant, managing to tread the line between lithe swing and grinding, gutbucket thump. The politically charged, "Go To Hell Mr. Bush," is a window into the band's psyche because the music seemingly declares that creativity in the face of conservatism is the best anecdote. "Syncopate The Taint" explodes in twisted fragments of brass. "Fry His Ass" has a rock steady groove that slowly and hypnotically uncoils. Skerik's tenor saxophone floats along mysteriously. Hip-hop influences like J. Dilla and Questlove can be heard here, while a Wurlitzer winds in and out with subtle shadings. "Irritaint" is a showstopper with New Orleans' brass band funk in its DNA. It doesn't take much imagination to envision Big Easy revelers dancing all night to this one. By the time "Summer Pudding" hits, SST7 are blowing the roof off. With its booming melody, big energy and insistent rhythm perhaps there's a new anthem waiting in the wings for summer 2006.
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