Stephan Palmer - "Sevenfold"
(Ambientlive 2011)
Stephan Palmer - "Sevenfold"
(Ambientlive 2011)
From Aural Innovations #42 (May 2011)
Steve Palmer explores new territory on his latest solo release, mining orchestral and chamber music, experimenting with interesting contrasts, but without abandoning Space and Progressive Rock. As a long time Steve Palmer fan I was pleasantly surprised by a lot of what I heard and had to digest the album over three listens before I could take any notes. Sevenfold consists of seven tracks, each simply titled Part 1, 2, and so on.
Track one is an interesting piece of music on which Steve weaves very different patterns and themes together, morphing and blending them into an intriguing single whole. There's an odd, haunting organ-like melody, a playful rhythmic melody, and a semi-grooving/jazzy motif. It's a simple repetitive melody and theme but I like the way it moves along… swaying and warbling and with various effects adding color. Track two is a dual piano piece with soundscapes and space electronics. The piano patterns are intense, like some strange chamber music composition. But then guitar and drums kick in and we're in Space Rock jam mode though with the piano theme continuing, which makes for a disarming but very cool contrast that brought to mind the avant-Prog chamber music of Univers Zero gone Space Rock. Track three features old time bombastic heavy Prog with a spaced out electronic edge, and I love the heavy but lysergically efx'd organ sound. Track four is a dark and moody, yet hauntingly soothing orchestral piece with a spacey ambience. It's got a cosmic sort of Philip Glass feel to the compositional style. Very nice. Track five is another cool blend of contrasts, with ethnic stringed instruments, percussion, lightly symphonic keys and space atmospherics, all led by a gradually evolving keyboard melody. There's lots of interesting, varied keyboards on track 6, the soulful Bluesy organ and church organ together being an especially nice touch. And at 15 minutes the last track is by far the longest, and is a slowly developing spacey Prog Rock piece. Like the earlier tracks, I like the way Steve brings together multiple keyboard sounds and patterns. There's lots happening but you don't have to be aware of it as this pleasant music carries you along. Very nice but fairly "normal" Space-Prog, relative to the surprising styles and craftily blended contrasts that preceded it.
Overall I found Sevenfold to be a solid set, especially enjoyable given that it goes into directions that I wouldn't have expected. Given the prolific rate of Mooch, Blue Lily Commission and Steve Palmer solo releases these past few years, Steve certainly is keeping things exciting for the fans who are keeping up.
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Reviewed by Nulight