World Sanguine Report — Third One Rises

Captain Beefheart meets Tom Waits in a bar. They get drunk have a sing off and what you end up with is Third One Rises. When you think about it neither Beefheart nor Waits really have anyone that sounds like them or tries to emulate them so what Andrew Plummer and World Sanguine Report have created here is fairly unique. Like the two artists I’ve mentioned there are obvious influences. Big Band, Swing, Blues and Jazz are present here to a lesser or greater extent but the resulting album is more than just an amalgam of those sounds.

Actually the album starts off by leading you in a completely different direction and I thought I was in for an album of Prog Rock music with a touch of Gong. But this is only present on the first track and the album heads off at a tangent from that at a fair old speed ending up in a far different head space.

From track two onwards we move further and further into stranger territory. Track 2 sounds like The Doors doing Strange Days with Tom Waits doing the vocals. Track three we’re into jazz/big band  territory and so it goes getting more and more like Trout Mask Replica as the tracks go by until by track 8 we’ve left Tom Waits behind and have taken Captain Beefheart fully on board. (Play anyone track 10 “Jazz Hell Murder Ballard,” and ask them who it is and the only answer they’ll come up with is “Beefheart.”)

This is a lovely release. I know nothing about Andrew Plummer, all the tracks are credited as written by him but there is also a large number of other musicians on the album including some well-known names from the Jazz world like Alex Bonney and David Kane.  One off project or long term band I don’t know but with this performance it would be nice to see another World Sanguine Report album in the near future.