By: Jedd Beaudoin
yrd (2001), the fourth release from New York guitarist Greg Rapaport, provides an exciting glimpse at a world where metal, funk and some other as-yet-unnamed musical mutation live in a kind of bizarre and wholesomely unsettling harmony. Whether the clear Sunday morning funk/jazz runs of "Mahdah," the airy, imaginative "Bugjuice," or the plain crazy "Diminished Returns," Wyrd becomes a kind of feast for those wishing to dine on exciting and dense (yet still accessible) harmonic matter. Of course that's not to say that the music here is without heart, for heart is a common denominator to all the tracks, though "Silk," the penultimate piece seems to speak the word most loudly and serves to solidify Wyrd's status as a winning recording, one of the most intriguing and refreshing instrumental releases in recent memory, one that could finally launch Rapaport into (inter)national acclaim.
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