Chicago cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm has long been a restless spirit on his city's independent music scene, and more recently, he's been a wandering spirit constantly in search of new modes of expression not only for his instrument, but for his curiosity.
Terminal 4 is Lonberg-Holm's latest project in an ongoing series that is supposed to "expand the parameters of pop music as we know it." Fair enough. To join him in this venture he's enlisted guitarists
Ben Vida (Town and Country), Jeb Bishop (
Vandermark 5), who also plays trombone here, bassist Joshua Abrams (David Boykin Outet), and, on one cut, the subtly stunning vocalist Terria Gartelos. For a guy who's played with everyone weird from
Bobby Conn and
U.S. Maple to
Simon Joyner,
Smog, Dutch Harbor, and
L'Altra, this is one very accessible recording. With the possible exception of the lone vocal track, "She Caught Herself," which sounds like Anton Webern's lieder composed by
Will Oldham and sung by
Cat Power, everything else here is riff-based and melodically sound. Lonberg-Holm is able to create instrumental songs that utilize the cello not only as a lead instrument, but one that creates shimmering dissonances and harmonies with all the other elements in a particular composition. A case in point would be "This Was the Frippe Time." Bishop's trombone and
Vida's guitar play a minor key theme with a stringing melody that opens out onto Lonberg-Holm's cello line which fills it out and plays an octave lower than both the guitar and the simple but rhythmically effective bassline. It's lovely, as Bishop's weaving into the line gives the tune a shyly dramatic element á la
Burt Bacharach's middle eights. Such a gorgeous little song: it's hummable yet adventurous and sophisticated. Elsewhere, Lonberg-Holm gets more experimental while keeping the basic idea of pop form intact, such as on "Pending Solitude" (It's hardly a name for pop, is it?). Here, cello lines are droned against scraped guitar strings and white noise, while Bishop plays a slow, uninterrupted solo that reminds one of the guitar line in the first five minutes of
Miles' "Spanish Key." Unidentified sounds enter and leave without warning or trace. This sounds like improvisation, but it so meticulously organized and mournfully played it had to have been constructed. Out of these disparate elements Chicago's most restless musician has given us a quirky, tarnished yet striking gem of a record. Play it once, play it twice, or a hundred times...never will you penetrate the secret of its beauty or the simplicity of its secret. ~ Thom Jurek