Seems like the perfect time to sneak this one through ye olde FOND/SOUND blog. Led by Makoto Matsushita, proud creator of one of City Pop’s timeless gems (First Light), and Chris Mosdell, proud creator of this totally slept on “Japanese” techno-pop gem, comes this decidedly different collaboration called Paradigm Shift. Like its namesake, it actually does represent a shift in their style. I struggle to actually properly slot this album anywhere. What would happen if The Police jettisoned off the insufferable Sting and actually let Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland explore everything they couldn’t with that spoiled sport? Well, most likely, it would sound like mercurial jazz, funk, prog, ambient, and AOR odyssey we hear Paradigm Shift take us through here in The Rain Child And The River King. However, until we have a critical reassessment of The Police (which I’d gladly join the PRO party), you’ll get this…
Paradigm Shift began as an outlet for Makoto Matsushita to go further into the wiggy realms he was diving into on his own Quiet Skies. Enlisting the help of YMO lyricist Chris Mosdell, he found the perfect foil to complement his complex musical ideas. To distance himself from his own output, he took the same crew who helmed Quiet Skies and quietly formed this supergroup for Japan’s experimental jazz label Better Days. The first self-titled release showed struggling to figure out what kind of group were they. They couldn’t settle on being a fusion group or a neo-prog outfit, so they landed on some other morass.
If you have a low tolerance for chorus effects and delay pedals, this might not be your album. But, if you can see past some of the dated aspects of The Rain Child And The Summer King, you can easily appreciate the very complex, some would say, “mathy” music Paradigm Shift creates on this, their best creation. Songs like “Stories From The Huge Heart” bring to mind Zenyatta Mondata’s tonal pleasures, but others like the titular track, remind me of the ECM (M standing for their Pat Metheny) sound everyone, justly, grew to hate…the difference here is Paradigm Shift actually bother to structure a song around shiftless ambient jazz, to actually put some feeling behind the music. Even the biggest pinched harmonic haters could meander a bit in songs like these, without losing their taste for the harder or softer stuff.
I don’t know why, but I just love the very dated parts I told you to gloss over. Some may cringe at the notorious sound of the Yamaha FM7 electric piano coursing through “Bringing Home The Singing Fire” but for me it actually sits far more modern than most of our contemporaries trying to ride nostalgic waves and missing that arc of a diver. It could be because Makoto still graces us with his wonderfully earnest vocals or because the others in the group know when to come in to back him up, but count me as a fan. These pure moods, for wise adults, should always be appreciated.
For those tracks that don’t skirt the adult contemporary line, a song line “Catechism”, for example, presents all sorts of interesting ideas, in the course of a four minute song. Snakey, and fiery, here Paradigm Shift turn up the intensity and appear to create by collage, cycling through tribal noise, tropical jazz funk, and ambient soul music like they were meant to all flow together.
And flow together it does, as The Rain Child And The Summer King short run time and concise 8-track length lets you easily power through an intense amount of ideas that really could have been stretched out far further, but are (thankfully) compacted into very concise, digestible bits. The ambition here lies powerful in its use of subtlety.