Slowly Rolling Camera – Where the Streets Lead (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24bit/48kHz | Time – 46:10 minutes | 532 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Edition Records
Where the Streets Lead is the new album from Slowly Rolling Camera, following on from their acclaimed 2018 album, Juniper. Colliding the worlds of jazz, trip-hop and cinematic soundscapes, their music blends strong melodies, big grooves and surprising turns of phrase, infused with expansive emotional gravitas. With this album, recorded throughout 2020, the music takes on a greater scale which includes an 8-piece string section and a list of world-class guests including Mark Lockheart, Jasper Hoiby, Verneri Pohjola, Chris Potter and Sachal Vasandani, as well as the band’s regular guitarist Stuart McCallum.
This is an album about opportunity, about embracing unknowns and seeing what life throws at you. It’s a reflection on searching for balance, a sense of purpose and identity in everyday life. For the core group of Dave Stapleton, Deri Roberts and Elliot Bennett, it’s a unified take on the journey and the influences that have shaped them all individually and as a collective.
Where the Streets Lead is emphatic in its purpose to communicate the joy of collaboration and to communicate through an audio-sensory landscape their vision of the world. There is a boldness and simplicity in its conception balanced with the attention to detail in its production. With Juniper, their new pathway was set. Where the Streets Lead, is a natural progression and development of the bands’ exploration.
Since 2013, Slowly Rolling Camera is one of the major players of the effervescent British jazz scene. The Cardiff-based band, led by keyboardist Dave Stapleton, drummer Elliot Bennett and producer and sound designer Deri Roberts, offers a pluralistic form of jazz that travels various paths, from trip hop to ambient and funk. Where the Streets Lead offers above all strong melodic and lyrical frameworks (an effect amplified by the use of strings), backed by ultra solid rhythms, and an unstoppable groove. This makes for something more emotional than cerebral (which perhaps differentiates these Welshmen from a band like Gogo Penguin), and the album brings in some big names like saxophonists Chris Potter and Mark Lockheart, Danish bassist Jasper Hoiby, Finnish trumpeter Verneri Pohjola, American singer Sachal Vasandani and the band’s regular guitarist and member of The Cinematic Orchestra, Stuart McCallum. A superb, dreamy soundtrack of contemporary jazz in which to abandon oneself. – Marc Zisman
Tracklist:
01. Slowly Rolling Camera – You Are the Truth
02. Slowly Rolling Camera – Where the Streets Lead
03. Slowly Rolling Camera – Lost Orbits
04. Slowly Rolling Camera – The Afternoon of Human Life
05. Slowly Rolling Camera – Widest Possible Aperture
06. Slowly Rolling Camera – Illuminate
07. Slowly Rolling Camera – Feels Like Fiction
08. Slowly Rolling Camera – A Force for Good
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