With a title track that sounds like the theme tune of the best TV series of your life – only it doesn’t exist yet – and some star guest jazz players joining the core trio of Dave Stapleton, Deri Roberts, and Elliot Bennett, Slowly Rolling Camera mark their 10th year with a luxuriously immersive sixth studio release on Edition Records.
Silver Shadow evokes an analogue film world of reels and projections, a monochrome noir with great lighting, referenced on the vinyl album’s sleeve. Its eight compact tracks, only one breaking the five-minute mark, are described as film montages, ones that go big-screen, images translated into the medium of sound – a viscous, touch sensitive medium here – with shimmering trip-hop keys from pianist-composer Dave Stapleton on the Fender-Rhodes and electronics maestro Deri Roberts, skittering beats from Bennett, and guest turns across the album from bassist-band leader Jasper Høiby, Josh Arcoleo on sax and Verneri Pohjola on trumpet, and the brilliant work of guitarist Stuart McCallum. McCallum is a veteran of the Cinematic Orchestra and currently one half of the amazing duo that is The Breath (with singer/flautist Ríoghnach Connolly, and there are echoes here of the Cinematic Orchestra, as well as Nineties legends Portishead, but with strong juice in the jazz department.
It opens with a languid “Rebirth”, gentle ambient slides, distant, glistening keys and measured solos from Arcoleo and Pohjola, Roberts’ trip-hop beats settling the listener in before going all dub at the edges, and the scene changes to a pursuit, fluttering out to the sonic equivalent of a sonic haze. It’s good late night listening, headphone listening, hammock listening. There’s lots of delicate detail and texture in the production, and some contrasts between the tracks, the dense brass of “Evergreen” giving way to the spectral piano figure of “Beam”, descending as it does to an underworld of deep dub and expressionist perspectives.
It compresses their fusion of jazz and trip-hop, honed over their past three albums as an instrumental trio, to a pleasurable level of saturation across these evocative, cinematic tracks. Get the setting right, and all the good movies will start behind the eyes.
