Nomo-Invisible cities[afrobeat]

On last year's Ghost Rock, NOMO established their own brand of future funk, built on hypnotic grooves comprised of drums and a huge collection of electrified, homemade likembes and scrap metal. The horn section, once the thundering heart of the band, took on a different role, settling into spaced-out dialogue with the rhythms-- leader Elliot Bergman's more conversational horn charts recalled Charles Mingus and Sun Ra in their perfectly pitched balance between structure and disorder. Invisible Cities serves as something of a breath-catching moment for a band that's taken a giant leap on each of its albums, bringing some of the thunder back while further elaborating on the progress made on Ghost Rock.

Bergman's scrap metal instrument collection continues to grow-- this time, he's made a musical contraption out of street sweeper tines to deepen the band's gamelan-ish percussion patterns even further. The band also pays tribute to one of the 20th century's great instrument inventors, Moondog, by covering his German-period composition "Bumbo", a perfect fit for NOMO's mix of complex rhythm, homemade sounds, and arrangements that allow individual horns a chance to break out of the group. They add wordless female voices to the mix on the weird, rambling "Ma", giving the song a striking avant-exotica sound as the nagging guitar part chafes at the snaking baritone sax line.

Amid cosmic freakouts like the echoing rocket ride "Banners on High" and oozing slow-burns like the smeared half-free/half-composed "Elijah", NOMO bring out a few big, crunching horn themes that recall their early, Afrobeat-inspired music. The title track is a total bomb, with the electric likembes providing a bubbling harmonic bed for the horns to lie on over the fractured drum beat. "Waiting" is a classic funk workout with fluid sax parts and a few wicked sections where the horns solo against each other, while "Patterns" rides a swamp vamp the Meters would've loved to call their own.

Invisible Cities is the exact record NOMO needed to make at the point in their evolution. It consolidates all their gains and nicely sums up their output to this point, and as much as you can point to influences and basic kinship with other artists, the music NOMO are now making is very much their own thing. NOMO's facility with both rhythm and tunefulness also makes it easy to follow them as they head down their own path. If you've come this far with the group, Invisible Cities won't disappoint, and it's also a pretty great place to start.

— Joe Tangari, May 4, 2009





01. Invisible Cities
02. Bumbo
03. Waiting
04. Crescent
05. Patterns
06. Ma
07. Banners On High
08. Elijah
09. Nocturne

Nomo-Invisible cities [Rapidshare]

Nomo-Invisible cities [Megaupload]