Seven years. It doesn’t seem likely, but it is, indeed, seven years since the Neil Cowley Trio decided to take a break, a short while after releasing Spacebound Apes. Now the trio has returned, with Entity, and it’s extremely good to have them back.
The new trio is the same as the old trio — composer Cowley on piano, Rex Horan on bass and Evan Jenkins on drums, pictured on the album cover in a strange amalgamation that melds the faces of the stubbled Jenkins, the neatly bearded Cowley and the casually hirsute Horan into one image. They’ve not been idle in the intervening years, each of them has been involved in a variety of musical projects and settings, but the trio is together again for this, its seventh studio album, which was recorded at Real World Studios.
Cowley describes Entity as “a warts and all human sounding record,” differentiating it from the digitally-produced and processed sound that characterises much of contemporary music. If this also suggests a raw, rough, pub-rock kind of recording, then it’s a masterly piece of misdirection. This is an album filled with melody, sophisticated playing, immediately catchy hooks, and, as always from Cowley, some witty track titles.
The album opens with the exquisite “Marble,” a dreamlike and beautiful tune, the softness of touch displayed by all three musicians contrasting with the hardness of the title even as Evans’ percussion builds the tempo and tension. This approach typifies much of the music: “Those Claws,” “Entity” and “Photo Box” are all notable for this restrained beauty. It’s also notable that while “Lemon Meringue” and “Shoop” both display a certain jauntiness and bounce, nothing on Entity matches the hard-edged, uptempo, muscularity of some of the trio’s previous work. “Adam Alphabet,” which Cowley has described as “rolling along like a surfboard on a bread slicer” and which is driven by one of his insistent, irresistible, earworm-ready piano phrases, comes closest. The trio’s acoustic instrumentation is to the fore, but subtle washes of synthetic/electronic sound do appear, underpinning “V&A” for example. Such sounds go uncredited, but they may well be from Cowley, or from producer and engineer Ethan Johns, credited on the cover with “inducing tears, joy and sonic beauty.”
Entity, as the trio’s website reminds us, can be defined as “an organization that has an identity separate from those of its members.” Entity is the product of just such an organization, an album in which joy and sonic beauty abound.
Release date is 20 September 2024
