You find yourself leaning in to listen more closely, bathed in the layers, textures and detail that have a higher overarching purpose
Whirlwind Recordings: WR4854, WR4854LP
Nathaniel Facey (alto saxophone); Tom Farmer (double bass); Shaney Forbes (drums)
Special guests: Ivo Neame (piano), David Preston (guitar)
Recorded at RAK Studios, London on 11/12 February 2025
It is 19 years since Empirical released their self-titled debut album and in that time they have not ceased to bring a thrillingly sharp, contemporary-edged take on the art form. Their new album ‘Like Lambs: To The Slaughter’ is no exception; a jazz suite inspired by one of the world’s biggest issues – the decline of modern civilisation no less.
“It’s a concept album in the sense that it’s got a story to tell about where we all find ourselves in the world today – over-stimulated and under-informed”, explains drummer Shaney Forbes. “It taps into the prevailing Zeitgeist that human civilization is hurtling toward collapse; something that is fired on by wilful ignorance and human destructiveness”.
The album is a reworking of a 2022 EP release of four long-form pieces composed by Forbes during the pandemic with an original running time of 32 minutes. Here it is significantly reworked as a fully-fledged suite that is very different in sound, structure and length (51 minutes).
Since the EP was recorded, long-standing member of the group, Lewis Wright, has moved to the USA leaving a vibraphone-shaped hole in the line-up. Rather than recruiting like-for-like, the remaining members Nathaniel Facey (alto saxophone), Tom Farmer (double bass) and Shaney Forbes (drums) invited two special guests to join the project: Ivo Neame on piano and David Preston on guitar, with whom they have a long history of working together. The band has adopted this fluid approach to band composition before, matching personnel to individual projects, and it has always turned out well. And so too does it here with Neame and Preston sounding like they have always been there.
The band’s trademark interplay is never at risk in this long-form format. All are at the top their game here, with the composition providing a starting point for the intense musical dialogue that ensues. And they are often complex pieces, adding to the joy of rooting out the individual lines of variation that rewards subsequent listens.
But it is the totality that is particularly impressive. The music draws your hushed attention, recognising that every note and phrase is delivered, not just in service to an individual piece, but to the suite as a whole. While there are recording breaks between segments, these feel like brief moments to catch a breath, for musicians and listeners alike, before moving on to the next engaging episode. As a consequence, you find yourself leaning in to listen more closely, bathed in the layers, textures and detail that have a higher overarching purpose.
A gently tumbling cascade of piano keys announces the opening ‘The Garden of Beginnings: Innocence and Bliss’ with Facey’s flute-like blowings developing a pastoral theme that recurs through the suite. Things build gradually on the complex and fiercely impressive ‘Giants’, with an insistent piano riff and drum rhythms based on traditional Yoruba music. When it all opens up, Neame and Facey’s solos and punched-note dialogue sparks, raising the intensity.
The album’s three-part centrepiece ‘Like Lambs’ brings things back down, at least to start with. The reflective first part ‘Like Lambs: Ignorance and Innocence’ sees Neame’s lightly touched keys swirling around Farmer’s arco bass. ‘Like Lambs: To The Slaughter’ warms things up again, working from the simplest two note piano riff up to a heated cross-band debate, with Preston’s trembling guitar bursts cutting through. On ‘Like Lambs: To Our Own Demise’ Facey strikes a rising free line over Forbes’ broiling drums, before it all coalesces around rising rhythms with recurring imprints of that two-note riff.
Facey’s dreamily echoing alto over rippling piano on ‘The Garden of Beginnings: Earth’ brings a return of the pastoral theme, which becomes a relaxed blues ballad with Preston at his most laid-back. His popping guitar effects open up ‘Drogon’, which soon picks up pace. Facey delivers a twisting and wriggling solo that refuses to be contained, and when Neame takes over it is with the same energy, with Forbes and Farmer stoking the fire to reach further heights.
‘The Garden of Beginnings: Devine Revelation’ brings respite and resolution with a return to pastoral themes, this time more insistently presented, before breaking to reprise blues ballad tones immersed in buttered sax and warm keys: a hopeful note to end on.
This is a highly cohesive and rewarding suite where the whole is so much more than the sum of the parts. Recommended.
