Alabaster DePlume - Come With Fierce Grace

The Quietus

Continuing a notably productive period, Alabaster DePlume is releasing Come With Fierce Grace, his fifth album in as many years. Taking its point of departure from leftovers from the recording sessions for 2022’s GOLD, Come With Fierce Grace has a similar energy to its elder sibling but takes a more stripped-back approach.

Though not a strictly instrumental album, there are fewer vocals on the whole than GOLD, and DePlume’s spoken word only makes two appearances. The composer and multi-instrumentalist, whose primary instrument is the saxophone, brings in other artists to fill in the gaps. Margate-based Guinean artist Falle Nioke opens the album with ‘Sibomandi’, his earthy voice providing a foil to the buzzing saxophone.

The percussion on the album is second only to the sax in terms of its presence. Rather than merely keeping a beat, the percussion has a propulsive quality, forcefully moving the songs forward. Some of the most compelling moments of Come With Fierce Grace are when it feels like the rhythm has fully consumed the song, for example, the saxophone lead of ‘Greek Honey Slick’ punctuating the drums and interplaying with a low-lying muted guitar.

The diversity of drums and percussion instruments and players also lends a different quality to the sound, bringing in a slapped, clacking flatness. It’s a perfect match to the frequently staccato energy of the saxophone.

While the higher energy tracks are more immediately recognisable, Come With Fierce Grace is filled with soft, lulling textures. The stretched-out shiver of ‘Fall on Flowers’ creeps in calmly, a ramshackle clatter of percussion in the distance picking up speed and encouraging the shift in the saxophone from a languorous vibrato to a muffled, tumbling refrain.

‘Not Even Sobbing’ has a low, aching tone countered by a wordless vocal that refuses to match that feeling of mourning. Long pauses that feel like time for the ache to set in on the first listen become space to breathe on repeated listens. That perceived ache dissipates on the following track, ‘The Best Thing in the World’, whose warbling strings and synths roll through a gently mesmerising repetition.

It’s late album track ‘Naked Like Water’ that acts as both thesis statement and outlier, both summarising the different atmospheres of the songs that precede it as well as something denser and akin to psych-jazz. Donna Thompson’s wordless vocals and exuberant yawps similarly traverse that spectrum from soothing to energising. It’s not the final word of the album – that goes to DePlume himself – but it’s still a neat encapsulation of all of its permutations of mood, tone, and arrangement.

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Pitchfork

Read Daniel Bromfield’s review of the album.

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Fotis Nikolakopoulos

International Anthem wasn’t a favorite at its beginnings. Gradually it delivered, to us listeners, with a fierce grace to quote the full of empathy album title, the music of today. Totally out of genres, labels and tagging. It seems to me that International Anthem has become a hub for a wide open roster of musicians who embody anything that comes from the black tradition but definitely travels to the future.

One of them is the Englishman Alabaster DePlume, named Gus Fairbairn in the world outside music. Even though he, obviously, comes from a different tradition than those playing jazz based musics in the States, you can never tell, when listening to the album, that he is not from there. But this isn’t the point, it never was.

There’s no easy way to describe the music in Come With Fierce Grace. This could be pop music, as all the tracks end before the six minute mark and many of them clock around three minutes. They feel (and I mean it as this album is all about sentiment) like small vignettes, passages that incorporate anything that could be called modern music.

DePlume is a spoken-word artist, writer and saxophonist. All those different (or not so different after all) fields conjure a new language, his language. Some are based on the voice, like the threnody of Naked Like Water with Donna Thompson, others use the melody lines of the sax as an instrumental journey for the heart of the sentiment. Soul (like on Did you know with the voice of Momoko Gill), jazz, blues and small ballads create the core of an eclectic, totally new experience –but also as old as the black tradition where partially is based on.

I really love this album and it will make it on my top ten list for 2023. DePlume (along with Celine Voccia if you are asking…) is the biggest musical discovery for me this difficult year and I truly thank him for the music.

Buy and listen here: https://alabasterdeplume.bandcamp.com/album/come-with-fierce-grace

Come With Fierce Grace by Alabaster DePlume

@koultouranafigo