Mike Keneally and The Metropole Orkest
The Universe Will Provide
(Favored Nations)
Rating: 4 out of 5
Mike Keneally’s first tour with Frank Zappa was Zappa’s last. The 1988 touring band was a monster. Multiple horns, guitars, keyboards, percussionists and vocalists combined virtually all of the styles that Zappa had toyed with over the years, and before internal squabbles killed that menacing musical machine, its performances were chronicled on stellar live albums like The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life and Make A Jazz Noise Here. The Universe Will Provide picks up where that band left off.
Keneally’s career since Zappa has been much like that of his mentor. Keneally has released a plethora of different sounding works, more satisfied to take a musical journey than to settle in any one musical neighborhood—especially in recent years. 2001’s Wooden Smoke is a delightfully quiet and complex acoustic-based disc, while this year’s Dog might be Keneally’s loudest (not to mention his best) recording to date. And like those two discs, his collaboration with The Metropole Orkest, The Universe Will Provide is, again, like nothing he’s done before. Sure, longtime listeners of Keneally can easily hear him solo within the compositions, but this is truly a team effort.
The Metropole Orchestra is a bit of an anomaly in the classical world. Are they a classical orchestra? Most definitely. Can they also play jazz, rock and improvise—both collectively and individually—in the midst of it all? Yes they can, which is why they are an obvious choice for an equally well-rounded musician like Keneally to both compose for and play with.
The music on this disc borrows from likely heroes of everybody in the room: Looney Tunes, Varese, Webern, Stravinsky, Stanley Kubrick, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, and, yes, Zappa. Keneally’s powerhouse guitar work is both a featured lead and a unifying force, both in improvisational terms and when, like in the tune “Four Slices of Toast,” it can be heard soloing in unison with trombone, saxophone and trumpet. The rhythm section is terribly tight, as well, nailing Keneally’s schizophrenic compositions with ease. Powerful, gentle, free, tight, jazzy and wholly unique, you simply have to hear this disc to really believe it.
Having said all that, Universe almost sounds like a B-sides compilation from a greater, more uniform Kenneally/Metropole project. Keneally calls the album “a collaboration between me and my eight-year-old self” and that it “was composed for the enjoyment of eight-year-olds of all ages.” He quite obviously wrote the material with an attitude of “let’s see what we can do” instead of settling on more of a singular, epic statement. But cut him some slack. With so much talent in one place—Keneally, himself, the most talented of all the players—it would be hard not to get a little too excited and lose just a little bit of focus. Let’s hope Keneally and Metropole work together again. Highly recommended.