Artist: The Plum Magnetic
Album: Terra Animata
Genre: World, Fusion, Progressive Rock, Jazz

The Plum Magnetic‘s Terra Animata contains 8 tracks, and even despite the opener, “Spring,” being a mere 25 seconds, the album as a whole clocks in just shy of 57 minutes as half the songs are a sprawling 10 minutes a piece.

Vocals are scarcely heard in the flurry of innovative arrangements, various instrumental layers, soothing grooves, and an impressive amalgamation of several varying styles, but in a way, the minimal vocal output is one of the album’s biggest strong-points as there’s nothing overtly distracting from the true highlight, the imposing instrumental prowess.

“Trece Leches” is the second track but its opening is really when the album truly begins. For nearly 10 minutes, “Trece Leches” grabs a hold of you and refuses to let go as it guides you through the initiative stages of what’s certain to be an adventure through unfamiliar soundscapes. My absolute favorite thing about this track is the inclusion of the 6-string banjo. For the most part, “Trece Leche” is a jazzy world-fusion offering where banjo would ostensibly have no place, but the band manages to incorporate it in an organic manner to where it doesn’t feel like just another layer, rather an intrinsic part of the song’s being.

Apart from the 25-second opener’s brief vocal melody, the third track, “Sweet Confusion,” is when we get our first taste of vocals over full instrumentation. In a hard-to-label progressive dub jam, the band slows it down a little but continues to display their individual talents and their cohesiveness as a whole. Throughout the album, I continued to get a feeling less like I was listening to an album and more like I was sitting in on a studio jam session. The production on Terra Animata is minimalistic in the sense that it has a very raw and organic feel that fits the music perfectly. This is far more apparent on the instrumental tracks and first really hit me during “The Electric Jungle,” a beautiful, break-neck cut that may be the most impressive in its delivery. It’s very intense yet elegant at the same time and flows in movements more like an orchestral composition than a standard prog-fusion album track. Even though the vocals fit in the moments that they’re featured on the album, it’s the songs like this that I truly enjoy.

As each track passes, it becomes irrefutably clear that each member of The Plum Magnetic is great at what they do and why they work together so well. There are so many elements combined in their crafts that it’s nearly impossible to appreciate or even absorb it all in one play-through. “SheshBesh,” the fifth track, almost has a simple feel to it, as if the structure isn’t complex, at least in comparison to the tracks that came before it, but that really couldn’t be further from the truth. The song spans so many ideas and genres and evolves in an unraveling of it all in a really comforting nature. It’s just so easy to get lost in that you almost have to pinch yourself to snap out of it once the song ends.

There are moments in the album’s second half that start to feel a bit long-winded. “The Delicious” is the first track that I felt was just too long for what it had to offer. It keeps the same pace with minimal development for it’s entire 10-minute runtime. There’s really nothing wrong with the track beyond the length, even with a slow-burner approach. Around the half-way point, or even sooner, you’ve more or less gotten what you’re going to get from it and start to look forward to what’s offered on the following track.

Said following track is the title track, the final track, and the album’s longest (by a few seconds). Instrumentally, compared to most of the rest of the album, it feels a little cluttered. It’s the first time since the third track that we get full vocals again and it has a nice groove to it but the sporadic instruments for some reason feel slightly overwhelming unlike they had on the previous offerings. Where I felt on the instrumental tracks that vocals would be a disturbance, the opposite is in effect here; it’s nearly impossible to focus on the vocals or lyrics as the background barrage forces its way into the forefront, leaving the vocals little chance of true involvement.

Despite some minor structural impediments here and there, the parts that are solid throughout Terra Animata make for a really entertaining listen. I found myself listening to “Trece Leches,” “The Electric Jungle,” and “SheshBesh” over and over, which make up for a good 23 minutes of the album alone. This New Orleans quartet have a lot to offer and they’re a force to be reckoned with instrumentally but it appears that at times they let their talents take over just a tad too much, making for something a little less hypnotic and a little more distracting.

SCORE: 7.2/10
Review written by: Brian Lion — (Follow him on Twitter)

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Brian Leak

Editor-In-Chief. King of forgetting drinks in the freezer. Pop culture pack rat. X-Phile. LOST apologist.

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