Hazmat Modine's first album, 2006's
Bahamut, earned a placing in the Billboard blues chart. Five years later, the band's second,
Cicada, might be more appropriately slotted in the magazine's traditional jazz chart. Truthfully, however,
Hazmat Modine present an eclectic mixture of roots styles that is nearly beyond category. Bandleader Wade Schuman sings in an expressive adenoidal tenor and fronts a group dominated by both familiar and less frequently employed horns (Joe Daley plays sousaphone and tuba) in what might be called a "
Ry Cooder meets
the Dirty Dozen Brass Band" manner. But that's only the core of the sound, which also includes other unusual instruments and found sounds. The instrumental "In Two Years," for example, combines a haunting trumpet refrain, odd percussion, and the sounds of fireworks. Schuman can turn to traditional blues, as he does on "Buddy," which has a "St. James Infirmary" feel to it, and to conventional old-school R&B, on "I've Been Lonely for So Long." But even on such tracks, he changes things up, letting the horns weave in and out as he sings in a mannered, slightly tongue-in-cheek style, like
Tom Waits in a higher key. The danger with such self-consciously mixed-up revivalist music is of course that it can come off as something of a joke, but Schuman and company are too accomplished as players for that; they are having a lot of fun, not just being funny. No wonder they have attracted prominent guests like
Natalie Merchant, who blends into the group vocals on "Child of a Blind Man," and
the Kronos Quartet, who make of the closing track, "Dead Crow," a hybrid of country hoedown and contemporary chamber music. ~ William Ruhlmann