It’s the beats. It’s the beats that puts you in the hot seat that will make you jump out of your chair and say to yourself, “What the hell was that? Play that again”. Well, that’s what got my ears all pumped up when it comes to a band like The Verge, who take the orchestrations of Norwegian / European jazz, improvisations, and rock to a whole other level.
The band first met at the legendary Norwegian Jazz School NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and did one of their first shows five years ago. The line-up considers Emil Storløkken Åse (Phoenix) on guitar, Aksel Rønning (Cosmic Swing Orchestra) on saxophone and flute, Alf Høines (Caramel 11) on bass guitar, and fellow comrade Ingvald André Vassbø (Kannan) on drums.
Drawing from their roots which is evidential on their sole self-titled debut released this year, The Verge are a band that pushes you over the edge of the cliff to pull in these heavy, intense improvisational rock orientations with heavy riffs, blaring saxes, and fuzz-tone bass.
Crashing the doors down with ‘Nessesse’, they set out to find the missing treasure with a galloping beat thanks to Alf’s rumbling bass work, Rønning’s psychedelic tones that speak of Bowie’s ‘Hallo Spaceboy’, and Rønning’s film-noir textures, setting up the crime scene. Vassbø’s passive yet aggressive drum work techniques which is shown on ‘Gratitude’, delivers the ambient soundscapes with a delivery to make you want to dig out your catalog from the ECM label.
The dooming, yet ominous terror behind ‘Emils lat – Postludium’ gives us an insight on what dangers lay ahead, thanks to Rønning’s wildly sax improv that at first, he’s blowing the shofar during Yom Kippur at synagogue before laying in a metallic approach to Fire Orchestra’s Enter suite that comes to mind while laying down the Sabbath grooves for ‘The Blast Supper’ to erupt like a massive volcano coming out of nowhere!
Insane time changes, stop-and-go routines, call-and-response motif’s the band are playing hot potato with this bad boy, trying to reach the finish line before entering The Doors first album Åse does, expanding Robby Krieger’s fingerpicking techniques that he used in the closing 11-minute track ‘The End’ for the first few minutes on ‘Patterns for Meditation’.
Ase expands his techniques to make it more of a reverbing effect, capturing the ghosts that haunts the different areas of the music come to life with some blistering, heavy bluesy sludge that makes it very prog-like combining the forces of Hawkwind’s In Search of Space-era, and Ash Ra Tempel.
Keeping the Norway tradition blaring out of the wood works, The Verge’s sole self-titled debut is the album that can put you through a sonic trance with unexpected results that are earth-shattering, glorious, and keeping you on the edge of your seat.
