Rob’s Album Of The Week: Pino Palladino & Blake Mills’ Notes With Attachments

Music is inventive when it naturally grows from a blank canvas. There’s no prior rehearsals or anything written down ahead time, just ideas instantly coming to mind and flowing through the creative ether. Any genre can pull this off but when it’s done with jazz it can be quite the listening experience. Welsh bass aficionado Pino Palladino collaborated with Californian singer-songwriter and producer Blake Mills to push the style’s limits in Notes With Attachments. The album is due out on March 12 via both Mills’ label New Deal Records and the New York City jazz label Impulse! Records and it’s astounding.

The way the soundscapes are all spread out in each song is something that’ll immediately take hold. It’s similar to an instrumental soundtrack with deep tones from the bass, guitar and horns. I also think that it’s incredible how an artist like Palladino, who has performed with the likes of D’Angelo, The Who, Nine Inch Nails, Adele and B.B. King among others, teamed up with Mills, who got his start in folk music, to create a record like this one. It’s musically all over the place but sonically it’s like a hot rod. Blazingly electric and complex to the senses while abiding by a free flowing structure.

Kind of hard to believe winter is almost over, right? In a few weeks spring will be here…