With their first album, Roller Trio, from Leeds, scored 2012 Mobo and Mercury prize nominations, and stunned the jazz-averse by being an open and vivacious sax/guitar/drums band that genuinely fuse John Zornian abstract-sax blastings with rock’n’roll. Fracture is the more intricate follow-up, a reflection of hundreds of hours of road life, improv, and new writing since. Some of the music has coalesced from improvisations, some of it (like the tightly contrapuntal and then waywardly grooving Mango, or the tempo-shuffling Three Pea Soup) are complex structures, and the idiomatic sources are wide. Reef Knot is a looping, hooting sax motif inspired by a hip-hop groove that turns into a thrash, while the jigging, unison-themed Doris is contrastingly charming, like a Celtic knees-up. There are dark, ambient-electronic mists, a multi-tracked, somewhat Portico-echoing trance (Tracer), and sharp contrasts like the idiosyncratically wheeling rock-ballad Splinter, an imaginative original from guitarist Luke Wynter. The improv occasionally runs out of steam a little, but Wynter, saxist James Mainwaring and drummer Luke Reddin-Williams have come up with a second album that’s different and diverse, and on a live show it must be a gas.
