TGB - Room 4 (2024) Hi-Res

Marking two decades of continuous, eclectic evolution, TGB – the Portuguese power trio boasting tuba ace Sérgio Carolino, guitarist Mário Delgado and drummer Alexandre Frazão – take another captivating whirligig around their enigmatic universe of collective musical influences, filtering an impeccable sonic palette via the prism of Room4, the ensemble’s fourth stunning full-length for the Clean Feed imprint.
While the album’s moniker most obviously alludes to its chronological position in the TGB canon, Room4 also suggests the demarcation of a specific paradigm or zone, a metaphysical lab (or playground) for advanced exploration and visionary development, codified within self-regulated boundaries. These bespoke frontiers allow Carolino, Delgado and Frazão to paint with confidence, license and liberating zeal, to continually push at plastic parameters, exhausting every eventuality inside a pulsating, creative framework. Operating between lines, like fanged guerrillas in the improvisatory midst, TGB expertly pursue their brassy paroxysms of jazz-fired blues parp and impish, artful exchanges alive with chattering mutant syntax, alongside hauntingly redolent ambient meditations and other more tender, contemplative, refinements.
Room4 also finds TGB fully flexing their own compositional chops, eschewing the cover versions and reinterpretations scattered across previous releases, which saw them put their own idiosyncratic spin on tunes by everyone from jazz icons Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans to proto-metal behemoths such as Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Here they ingeniously distil their catholic tastes across a breathtakingly broad gamut of originals, oscillating between febrile alien funk and muscular rock, languid Americana-style atmospherics and pointillist marching-band pomp. And yet, for all its head-spinning diversity, its wild tracer fire of conflicting styles and dazzling rhythmic cut-and-thrust, Room4 is firmly rooted in the TGB hivemind, every idiomatic outburst, each unorthodox diversion, as seemingly effortless and natural as the one before; a scattershot celebration of this gloriously protean trio’s formidable spirit and verve.