Nomo - Invisible Cities

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

Less than a year after the acclaimed Ghost Rock, NOMO have completed its spirited sister albumrecorded during the Ghost Rock sessions and tours. Invisible Cities is informed by their ceaseless travelling, and visits to places both real and unreal. The sonic empire of NOMO is expanding; busting up genres and musical borders with astonishing results. With a theme stolen from Italian novelist Italo Calvino, each tune on Invisible Cities is a little world of its own, dense with rhythm and timbre. Hot horns blaze through intersecting lines, heavy percussion drives the band down winding streets, the bass rumbles in some subterranean corridor. The sounds come fromfar reaching points, not from a fixed place on a globe, but from an area of the human spirit; One that is joyous, open and in motion.

Like Ghost Rock, Invisible Cities reaches into new places both sonically and emotionally, and pulls up some real bangers: The title tracks horns are drenched in Echoplex and its driving beat is straight from the swamp. Bumbo, Moondogs best tune, gets a NOMO island makeover, with a set of antique fire extinguishers clanging away in a 21st century steel drum style. Crescent is a shimmering silver stream of electric kalimbas, with handclaps and bamboo flutes giving the tune a more delicate feel than NOMO has offered up on previous albums. Giving Elijah a listen, its immediately apparent that this is stirring spiritual jazz of a higher order; the tune was written as a lament for one of bandleader Elliot Bergmans childhood friends. Warren Defevers immaculate production work creates a space where the music can grow, develop, layer on top of itself, and reveal this band in artful new ways.