Marc Ribot’s unorthodox right-handed playing style, developed under the tutelage of revered mentor, Haitian classical guitarist/composer Frantz Casseus and honed to a polished sheen during his storied stint as an R&B sideman, sounds quite natural at this point in his eclectically nomadic career. Given his technical fluency, Ribot is justly celebrated as a session player, but he is much more than that — intuitive enough to have profound influence as an esteemed collaborator, the unsung hero teasing out idiomatic layers in Tom Waits’ music and lending soulful texture to numerous Elvis Costello records, just to name two of his most enduring creative partnerships, and passionate and voluble enough to have pursued his own projects with singular focus.
For Ceramic Dog, Ribot enlisted Chess Smith, a percussionist who plays with ferocity and nuance, and Shahzad Ismaily, a versatile bassist capable of shifting between a mellifluous bebop style and assaultive punk minimalism, sometimes amidst the same track. For well over a decade, the trio has used the album format to stretch beyond the constraints of genre sonically and indulge both poetic and agit-prop impulses lyrically. At their best, the trio coalesces with verve, especially in the latter stretch of their new release.
Ribot emerged as a key contributor to the work of John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards and John Zorn during a time when NYC’s Downtown was establishing its own mythology, less high concept than today’s boutique-ridden landscape, but more spontaneously thrilling. He’s bohemian, and this aura, while perhaps a bit shopworn to some, is endearing and somehow revitalizing in the context of the current moment, imbuing these songs with an enduring quality after a year and a half of relative isolation and a pervasive feeling of loss.
He shows his thematic cards early, that is to say he’s outspoken and caustic, but sly, winking, tongue-in-cheek, as if he’s not taking himself too seriously. Polemical set opener “B Flat Ontology”’s verses can be overwrought and clunky, shoehorned in in their sheer verbosity — as Ribot laces doggedly into a world gone awry. Lines like “This one/vivisected a celebrity on YouTube” suggest a more acerbic Mark Knopfler. And yet the band must be applauded for unadulterated literary ambition, gleeful nihilism that also recalls the Dadaesque musings of indispensable Lower East Side bard John S. Hall, whose King Missile scored hilariously, epochally unlikely hits with “Jesus Was Way Cool” and “Detachable Penis” during a fruitful early 1990s stretch. The reggae-inflected “Nickelodeon”’s poesy comes across as more nonsensical, pleasantly banal, like elevated doggerel, but there’s an exuberant intensity to the performance, viscerally evoking the late, lamented Nuyorican Poets Cafe slams in their heyday. The melodies can be a bit rote, but they’re as beautifully rendered as you might expect from these artists, pleasurably out-of-time, not modish, trendy.
“Wanna” cuts in with a more prickly, No Wave urgency. It’s an album of many hues, tonal shjfts, and Ribot and cohorts are nothing if not versatile. The track’s capaciously recorded with foreboding riffage that wouldn’t be out of place on an early 1990s Helmet record. Hope is as wildly eclectic as its name portends, and while the experimentation stagnates at times, it exhilarates more often — a tension that not only plays out holistically, but within the songs themselves.
“I don’t accept any aspect/of capitalist society,” an unrepentant Ribot declaims to introduce “The Activist,” and just as his didactic screeds sometimes put us off, he reels us back in, beguilingly self-deprecating — the man knows whereof he speaks, being a venerable firebrand community organizer who earned his bona fides long ago. The piece closes with a burst of abrasive, serrated guitar, one of several late-album exemplars of potently distilled sonic virtuosity I would have liked to hear more frequently, as in the squalling sax, courtesy of Darius Jones, that introduces “They Met in the Middle,” and the shriek of catharsis that cleaves the song in half, erupting spontaneously, midway through, as well as the wryly-named “Bertha the Cool”’s lush jazz funk groove, reminiscent of the quietly influential Steve Coleman and Five Elements, refreshing after the verbal fusillades dominating the album up to that point.
Hope’s closing stretch is magisterial, resoundingly punctuated. “Maple Leaf Rage” might be named in homage to Joplin and ragtime, but a sense of the elegiac is the only discernible connection between the two compositions. The track arrives muted, tentative, with abundant negative space, becoming gradually more pointillistic as this keenly attuned trio establish themselves individually, but remaining reflective, hinting at stillness. The shouting and freneticism that characterized the first part of the record have dissipated, and the track breathes. Bandleader Ribot arrests the chaos, and Hope settles into place, at least momentarily, until the guitar kicks in, echoing the first passage with amplification and force, an avant-garde roundelay, and the song is deepened by this contrapuntal interplay. The record’s occasionally high-gloss production overwhelms its minimalist spirit here and there, and yet Ribot’s charm lies in his shapeshifting musical voice, as much a venerable journeyman professional as he is an irascible deconstructionist. So it is with the jagged guitar lines that tear this track open — impeccable and yet rawly emotive. It’s always a kick to hear Ribot solo. He conjures Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” here, in the way this one sputters to a standstill, at last capitulates to silence, an echoing cavern of the mind.
