Like a walrus at a passion party, Mr. Marco's V7 has spent most of the past decade not fitting in.
An identity-crisis mashup of instrumental prog, interstellar funk, lost film soundtracks, and sounds mistaken for jazz has made the band one of the area's most consistently intriguing acts. The group celebrates the release of its third album, Spaceraser, Friday — then promptly gets to work finishing an epic Turkish suite inspired by bassist Johnny Hamil's resourceful ethnomusicology.
"If somebody's going to a foreign country, I hand them $100 and say, 'Bring me back as many recordings as you can,'" Hamil says. "Even though you can try to get it on the Internet, you're not going to find the local stuff."
The veteran quartet takes frequent left turns without going in circles. Spaceraser invokes the freewheeling, riff-oriented funk of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis and the sexy scores of Ennio Morricone. It's the V7's first album to feature steel guitarist Michael Stover, who also gigs with the country-informed Wood Roses and Wild Chipmunk and the Cuddly Poos (an organ trio in which he plays bass).
"There's no jazz there, really," Stover says of Spaceraser. "Except for the fact that we're improvising."
The loose construction of the V7's wordless compositions was naturally suited to live recording, for which the band enlisted local producer Chad Meise and his 24-track analog tape machine. In a departure from the V7's first two records, Spaceraser includes a few overdubs.
"We started playing with a lot of effects-drenched stuff," Hamil says. "There are some tracks on there that are just amazing combinations of sounds."
The album's lightning-in-a-bottle moments are loose and spontaneous, as are the V7's epic performances. The group recently enjoyed a dinner-hour residence at the Record Bar and aims to revive that endeavor later this summer, along with scattered regional performances.
Despite its rampant avant-gardism, Spaceraser does make one concession to the mainstream: conventional packaging.
Stores refused to stock the band's two previous albums "because they were oblong," Hamil says. "They were like, 'That's really great — now take them back.'"
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