JOHN MCLAUGHLIN — Floating Point (review)

JOHN MCLAUGHLIN — Floating Point album cover Album · 2008 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
McL’s latest album has been awaited by many and the reviews were generally good, so I was not thinking I’d encounter such tedious album, and I’m glad I could rent it from my library system. Why this album received good critical acclaim is beyond me, unless critics love that awful Synclavier guitar of his. Exactly why McL keeps coming back with such a horrible appendice on his axe, one that takes all of his playing game’s biting qualities, and make him sound like a sour puss and a wuss, is also well out of my comprehension.

You’d guess McL wanted to revisit his 80’s work with this Floating Point, and its bland moot cosmic artwork resembling a WMP illustration. Sonically you could almost believe it, if it wasn’t for the good drumming in some tracks (Raju, one of the few highlight), while it sounds like an ugly beatbox on others (The Voice). Overall, the mood is to cool fusion, but not one that would fit ECM, the instrumental (bar, you guessed it, The Voice) fusion that he makes with the usual suspects of late. One of the problem is that the tracks all hover around the same tonalities and that by the ¾ of the album you’re pretty tired of it, especially once the most synthetic track of them all, 14U (one for you, I suppose) is simply attracting my fingers onto either the skip or eject buttons of the remote control. The last track is named after the touring band of late this year Five Peace Band that boasted a different line-up including Chick Corea, but it’s not related at all musically, even if it is one of the better tracks of an album that you can easily do without.

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