Ben LaMar Gay

★★★★ Open Arms To Open Us INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM. CD/DL/LP

Second LP by ‘postmodern folklorist’ puts Chicagoan’s eclectic sensibilities to fore.

It may have been inspired by childhood summers on his Aunt Lola’s Alabama farm but there’s nothing parochial about the sequel to 2018’s Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun. As on that debut – seven unreleased albums condensed into one – this 16-tracker veers all over the stylistic map. While wobbly off-kilter highlights Bang Melodically Bang and Oh Great Be The Lake nod, atmospherically, to Steve Reich, Tom Waits and Prince, Gay’s restless broken beats and sozzledsounding cornet beautifully offset throaty Rwanda-born singer Dorothée Munyaneza (Nyuzura) and shredding cellist Tomeka Reid (In Tongues And In Droves). A polychromatic affair that zaps between skewed soul, wobbly electronics, progressive jazz and baile funk, the whole of Open

Arms… is much larger than the sum of its parts.