Consumer Guide Album

Last Exit: Iron Path [ESP-Disk', 2015]
Sole studio album from latter-day free jazz ensemble comprising hyperactive New York mastermind Bill Laswell on bass, German freedom honker Peter Brötzmann on sax, harmolodic beatmaster Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums, and stronger-than-Blood Sonny Sharrock blowing tunes up on guitar. Having folded all three of their live caterwauls into one hedged pick in 1987, I missed the real album a year later, but 27 years after that it still rocks. Studio provenance is the ticket. There's a shape and specific gravity to these 10 sub-five-minute tracks that I attribute to Laswell, who's always specialized in getting legible music out of the avant fringe, and a life force I attribute to Jackson even more than Sharrock--solid as the music is, he never stops bubbling under. When non-jazzer Chuck Eddy included all four Last Exit albums in his Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, this was his favorite, e.g.: "Sick steers in a farm field moo amid a tornado, then Sonny Sharrock's guitar starts yanking the sound back in, restating a warped melody from one of his own records. Ronald Shannon Jackson's traps bulldoze the mess, Peter Brötzmann's sax heads up a battle-charge. A chariot driver cracks his whip, shouts 'Hyah! Hyah!' . . . " But while the label is hyping this fierce reissue by claiming kinship with drone-metal doomsters like Earth and Blut aus Nord, I don't hear it. The drums are just too uppity. A-