aaamusic | On 06, Apr 2013

Mixing the traditional and the modern is a move that often has us curling our toes in apprehensive distrust. While it is something that can go very right, it’s only much more likely to fall flat, resulting in something that resembles a bit of an abortive try-hard, done lovelessly for its own sake. And there’s often nothing sadder than that.

So, Derbyshire-based Trio Haiku Salut have certainly given themselves very big and trendy shoes to fill, doubly so given that their entire debut album Tricolore is an instrumental piece. So no lyrics here to deflect and distract criticisms, but, after a good listen, I think it’s safe to say that they don’t need to worry about any of that; immediately, we are given a promising indicator of what’s to come. The opening track Say It, electrically whimsical in its fragility and off-key amelody, is a real embodiment of the tone and direction of the album; disarmingly elegant, while just that little bit unhinged.

Next, Sounds Like There’s a Pacman Crunching Your Heart opens as a sunset-soaked ruminative, with twangy acoustic strings rippling on the slow swell of contented, pastoral chorus.  The instrumental proficiency of the trio is really quite admirable, as is their simplicity of execution, but just when you were thinking things were a little too beautifully conventional, drum machine thumps and buzzing lo-fi chirps come to promptly pull the rug from under you.

Leaf Stricken continues this theme, blending truly mellow guitar work with fractured, jittery drumtracks, while the beauty of the instrumental piano work is further illustrated in Los Elefantes, betraying perhaps more classical influences. Even in the absence of any digital shenanigans, I would be perfectly content to sit and listen to that singular element alone, but restlessly the track rises on the hypnotic and strained breaths of turbulent accordion and intermittent synth blips. At the halfway mark, the track blows out, and shifts over itself with rattling spacedust and plonky bass, echoing into a more spacious and spiralling affair, staccato accordion deflecting off of pattering wooden percussion.

The astutely titled II: Lonesome George (Or Well, There’s No-One Like) :II yields impressive and fluttering Spanish guitar work, before descending into the unsettling rise and fall of nautical accordion upon an oppressive military drumbeat with interesting use of stop-start elliptic silence, while Watanabe presents classical key work pure and simple, and it’s pretty wonderful.  Pattering raindrop keys zig-zag over some of the best piano work on the album. They really know how to make something that sounds elegant and has you helplessly infatuated.

At the halfway point in the album, Haiku Interlude #1 serves as a suitable opener to the second half; I’m even a little disappointed that its cavernous pluck of strings and scattering percussion wasn’t expanded into a fuller track in place of others. However, following that brief respite, we are welcomed by the now familiar embrace of classical style guitar in Six Impossible Things. In spite of all of the album’s avant-garde posturing, it’s hard to escape the irony that the more conventional styles exhibited throughout it are its best; it’s really difficult to overstate how the placid atmosphere created by the simple lines enamours you as a listener. Then comes the ubiquitous accordion, though instead of seasick churns, here the trio reach an even richer aesthetic through its use; perhaps it gets a little overbearing as the track goes on, but it flourishes into a jaunty and swirling waltz towards the end that serves to keep things from getting stale.

Rustic Sense of Migration is particularly arresting for its more prominent use of dual guitar lines, blending further the highs and the lows, which really serves to heighten again at this point the beauty of those parts throughout the album. This beauty swells as guitar lines shift into piano lines, and remains statuesque in this beauty as it refrains from any quirky dabbling, remaining purely conventional, and as you may have guessed by this point, this is not a bad thing at all.

And then there’s Glockelbar. From the very beginning, you can feel its promise, through the pulse of its clipping bass drum into the hauntingly beautiful arpeggiated piano melodies and swirling and sombre accordion.  It builds ever so subtly, folding upon itself, intertwined with chaotically percussive whispers and gently abrasive synth, before erupting into…nothing. It just ends. Now this is obviously the trio’s intention, but I found myself disappointed, hearing one of their more compelling and comprehensive musical motifs – particularly one that embodies the spirit of the album so wholly – evaporate so suddenly just when I felt it had so much more potential.

Thankfully Train Tracks for Wheezy turns out to be what I had hoped for from the previous track; beautiful piano and elegant violins drift over tingling and pulsing percussion, along with some of the best and most touching piano work on the album, hearkening back to Watanabe. The accordion is here again of course, single-handedly transforming the aesthetic, as it does elsewhere, into                  something it just couldn’t be otherwise. Even better, the track pulls off the best moment of musical paroxysm on the album so far as it explodes into another rolling psychedelic and carnivalesque spiral, honed to a zany perfection.

And cleverly the whole thing comes full circle as the musical motif from the opening track here gets a reprise in the closing track No, You Say It. But just when you think it’s all going to fade calmly and contentedly into a nice and familiar rounding-off of the albums slightly off-kilter and maladroit classical reinventions, it surges into an all-out rave! Two minutes left on the album, and I find myself thinking ‘Where was all this earlier?!’.  It’s just brilliant. It is the first and only time that the album lets go of all inhibitions and embraces some of the potential generic extremes that the previous tracks have made increasingly apparent;  even the accordion work gets a new lease of life, overcharged and buzzing, fitting the pace perfectly with a crushingly chromatic forward march.

I’m just so bewildered as to why they only bothered to go down this route once, and in the albums dying moments. Now, what they have done here on this record is admirable, relaxing and very, very enjoyable, but it doesn’t grab you in the way you know it can and wish it would. Each tracks strength lies in its classical and simplistic compositions, as well as unorthodox instrumental choices; while the electronic trickery serves to evolve the generic quality of the work as a whole (it’s a call-out to modern classical artists, prompting a reinvention of the wheel as to where such a revered and traditional style can be taken) it never feels quite as integral as it could be. And this final breath only proves that they still had so many tricks up their sleeve.

However, it cannot be denied that the album is a pleasure to listen to, and more than a little interesting and original; their often near-seamless fusion of the synthetic and the organic makes it seem as natural as the classical sources that give birth to it in the first place. Relaxing and alarming like dial-up birdsong, it really makes you wonder why more people aren’t so brave as to try their hand at what the trio are attempting. Crucially, the most exciting thing is that it pushes a new hybrid genre, but there’s still much more work to be done, and hopefully Haiku Salut will be the ones to do it – I’m confident they have a lot more fire in them.

★★★★★

Matt Fellows