Solace [City Centre Offices,2010]
The fifth album from John Tejada and Takeshi Nishamoto's duo, I'm Not A Gun, Solace feels like a pronounced refinement of their work to date on the project. These two have been collaborating for some twelve years now, and clearly as musicians they compliment one another perfectly - there's an easiness and fluency running through the likes of 'Big Steps' that doesn't come over night, and track after track finds the collaboration reaching new heights of synergy and purpose.
With its tripping-over, fractured beats and intricately poised, interlocking guitar melodies 'In Sepia' is one of the album's finest moments. In this sort of mode Nishimoto and Tejada come closest to the heartland of organic, real-time post-rock, while on the mechanised pulses of 'Colored Sky Colored Mind' the duo plough through more electronic, sequenced material. At the other end of the spectrum, you can hear Nishimoto's classical training coming through on the largely acoustic, nicely phrased 'Runners', whose nylon-strung tones entangle themselves in Tejada's bleeping digital percussion. Solace surely captures this long-standing project at the summit of its powers, and anyone who's found themselves taken with Tejada and Nishimoto's prior work will most definitely want to grab this latest (and greatest?) effort.
