Call Upon The Author

The clichéd cop out ‘it’s an acquired taste’ should be used sparingly but Neil Cowley Trio’s third album Radio Silence is indeed a taste that has yet to be acquired.
Opening track Monoface starts off with a mildly depressing and slightly disjointed tune before finding itself with a mixture of music that is one quarter cheery and three quarters insanely irritating. Just to make it worse, the apparent disjointedness manages to survive until the very end of the five minute ordeal like a cockroach surviving a nuclear blitz.
Sadly the rest of the album follows in the same dull suit and, well, let’s just say that it might very well be a good cure for insomnia. It isn’t helped by the fact that the whole fifty-five minutes of this record consists entirely of instrumental jazz, and while instrumental music is usually something to savour, having it served as one huge dollop is enough to make anyone clamour for some lyrics.
The tempo does occasionally pick up with tracks such as Vice Skating but even then it’s just too gentle to keep the attention and becomes even less noticeable than the background noise. When the music does occasionally venture forth to reclaim your interest it does so in a harsh clash of chords and unappealing beats.
While it would be nice to say that their third album was a great success that makes jazz appealing, it seems that this review is going to have to end with an extremely bad pun, because that’s just what we like to do; in the case of Neil Cowley Trio, radio silence is golden.