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Originally penned with Elephant9 keyboardist Ståle Storlokken for the 2010 Molde Jazz festival, and featuring the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, …Unicorn is a towering two-hour concept work on a Norse saga scale.
Based on the true story of the whaleship Essex (see Moby-Dick/Mastodon’s Leviathan), with Hollow Earth theories and Utopian fiction as fuel, a powerful fable is tracked by familiar ’Psycho rock flavours, classical figures and jazz. Introducing itself with a Gershwin-like clarinet glide (Out Of The Woods) gushing into a saxed-out/Mahavishnued The Hollow Lands, cabin boy character Thomas Nickerson recalls his recruitment (‘they nabbed me poaching last spring/Said I’d sail or swing’). From here we follow doomed vessel Through The Veil – MC5 jazz-rock into Sabbath – across Prokofiev-like Doldrums and on Into The Gyre, a Beach Boys/Mars Volta meld that floats away on Flotsam.
Disc two – or side three on vinyl – peters a little, reflecting the elegiac darkness of the crew’s travails until Mutiny! supplies a galloping, Yes-propelled lifeboat that launches the superb finale Into The Mystic. Here Ola Kvernberg’s exquisite violin recalls Jean-Luc Ponty’s joyous Zappa handiwork over muscular ritornellos and an uplifting string and Moog-driven resolution.
A battered, barnacled beauty.
