Pat Metheny Group - Offramp - 180g LP

Product no.: 2727893
Pat Metheny Group - Offramp - 180g LP
£24.95
Price includes VAT, plus delivery


Available delivery methods: UK Tracked with Signature, UK Express, Airmail Tracked with Signature, UK Standard, Heavy Item

ECM - 2727893 - 180 Gram Vinyl - Limited Edition - Pressed in Germany

Every note of Pat Metheny’s heavenly soloing on Offramp is its own crescent. His is a talent spun from sunlight, and one that might damage the eyes were its full force to be unleashed at once. Thankfully, we need no special equipment but our own ears to appreciate the intensities he brings to this immortal PMG date, which after the global reach of As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls expanded the compositional and technical prowess of Metheny and keyboardist Lyle Mays to deeper, more serpentine caverns of experimentation.

The Synclavier-enhanced calls of “Barcarole” are the album’s birth cries, each a punctilious footstep into the greater semantic complexities of “Are You Going With Me?” This smooth ride through sun-kissed plains drips with the tears of an unrecoverable past, Metheny’s guitar bellowing like a human trumpet keening at the speed of travel. “Eighteen” inoculates the proceedings with the livewire exuberance in which these musicians so deeply excel. Metheny is light on his feet and infinitely careful about his twists and turns, infusing each with that unmistakable audible grin. 

Dan Gottlieb kicks up a dust storm in the title song, which also features Metheny in one of his wildest excursions yet. Fractured pianism, an explosive glockenspiel, and Steve Rodby’s fantastic ground lines paint just the right ambiance to allow Metheny to uncork a bottle of some unrepeatable tincture that he seems to have been saving  for this very occasion. After this flip and a half, “James” comes across as an acrobatics of its own kind, gracing our cochlea with heartwarming electricity, leaving the wispy skies of “The Bat Part 2” as our only postcard.

Yet all of the above combined barely tickles the underbelly of “Au Lait,” which still stands as Metheny’s most perfect statement. Though something of a carnivalesque on the surface, complete with rolling snare and haunting vocals courtesy of Vasconcelos, one also feels sung to of something far more serious. Whatever that might be, we experience it in real time, every wordless call a way station to where it all began. Metheny is as transcendent as he will ever be, each swing more harmonic than the last over the Joe Hisaishi-like touches from Mays. Oracular and airborne, this is a space we never wish to leave. And on the inside, it never does.

Metheny is a skillful writer who, with heart in place of pen, takes a kernel of an idea and draws every imaginable root before starting in on the leaves. Like a solar eclipse, such music comes all too rarely in any given generation. The beauty of Offramp is that it always feels like the first time." - Tyran Grillo

Musicians:
- Pat Metheny: guitar, guitar synthesizer
- Lyle Mays: keyboards
- Steve Rodby: bass
- Nana Vasconcelos: percussion, berimbau, voice 
- Dan Gottlieb: drums


Recording Information:
- Recorded October 1981 at Power Station, New York
- Engineer: Kongshaug and Gragg Lunsford
- Produced by Manfred Eicher

Pat Metheny Group Offramp Track Listing:

1.  Barcarole
2.  Are You Going With Me?
3.  Au Lait
4.  Eighteen
5.  Offramp
6.  James
7.  The Bat Part II

Pat Metheny Group - Offramp - 180g LP

 

Customers who bought this product also bought

* Prices include VAT, plus delivery

Browse this category: JAZZ