 Melting Mergers
 Melting Mergers
 Review by Larry Toering

Melting Mergers is an album that fuses EDM, electronica, funk and world samples together by keyboardist/composer David Lee Bassett, drummer/percussionist Vinnie Bargas, and dancer Emily Paris. In addition to those featured artists in this act, the album contains an A-list of players who collaborated on the tracks recorded in the Pacific Northwest. There’s no struggling between the genres, and it is all very modern sounding. Still, the classic appeal of it also holds it together.
This is evidenced by two covers: the first by Pink Floyd and the second by John Coltrane, among what are otherwise a lot of amazingly original compositions. And that is why it gets a more prog than not tag at MSJ.
It comes recommended for there being nothing quite like it to come along in some time, probably since David Lee Bassett himself last recorded (but that’s another story). What it boils down to is that you don’t hear something like this every day in either genre presented. To top it off, Emily Paris is a professional belly dancer and she performs with the band. It’s a clean (more progressive than not) album with horns playing a distinctively jazzy role without being hardcore jazz music.
This review is available in book format (hardcover and paperback) in Music Street Journal: 2018 Volume 1 at garyhillauthor.com/Music-Street-Journal-2018.
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