The Seventh of the Eight New Goldberg Albums

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Bandcamp Web page)

The title of the seventh album in clarinetist Ben Goldberg’s 8 Albums on August 8 releases departs from single words and brief phrases: Just What You Thought You Wanted. This is a quartet album with Goldberg accompanied by a rhythm trio consisting of Matt Hollenberg on electric guitar, bassist John Hébert, and Hamir Atwal on drums. All four of the performers contribute to the composition of the eight tracks.

For the most part, the rhetoric is meditative. However, two of the tracks are significantly intensive: “Frenzy in Four” (which speaks for itself) and “Echo of the Abyss.” These serve as “punctuation marks” for the more meditative tracks that precede each of them. To be fair, I am not sure I have grasped the semantics of any of the track titles, let alone figured out how they related to that I wanted (or what I thought I wanted)! Nevertheless, as an attentive listener, I was perfectly satisfied to let the rhetoric speak for itself.

More interesting is that the first two tracks on this album are the first to last for more than ten minutes over the course of all the preceded albums in this collection. Their titles are “Obscure Horizon” (12:50) and “Warp Signal” (16:34), both of which seem consistent with extended duration. I should also confess that this particular album seized my attention from the very first track, on which each of the four performers has his own take on adventurous improvisation. Was that what I “thought I wanted?” Quite honestly, I have no idea. Nevertheless, my attention was seized by that very first track and sustained over the duration of the entire album!