The cover of Joseph Shabason’s album ‘Welcome To Hell’ might lead you in one direction, that of some heavy, heavy forms of metal in all shapes and forms. Yet Shabason takes his music in quite a few other ones, no less ‘hellish’ though.
One of the inspirations cited for Shabason’s music is the famous Toy Machine skateboarding video from 1996 that bears the same name as this album. That video had a kaleidoscopic, improvisational feel to it, and that is the same feel Shabason implements to his jazz-based music here, with often direct references to that video, like on ‘Zero/Donny Barley’.
The original skateboarding video featured music by the likes of The Misfits, Black Sabbath, and Sonic Youth, and somehow, that soundtrack seems to be still ringing in Shabason’s ears, but he takes a deconstruction approach here,
Shabason tears the heavy elements down, slows them down, sometimes to a crawling pace, adds jazz modal structures akin to early seventies Miles Davies, and then reassembles them to create an ambient jazz structure that sounds completely its own.
Even if it was just a theoretical concept it would sound great, but Shabason puts his theory so well into practice, making his Welcome to Hell actually quite welcome.
