Album Review: CB3, Exploration
It seems unlikely that, if you went back seven years and asked the jazzy instrumentalist three-piece CB3 releasing the self-titled Charlotta’s Burnin’ Trio full-length what they’d sound like by the time they got to their third record, neither guitarist Charlotta Andersson nor drummer Natanael Solmonsson would be able to predict the turn wrought on Exploration. Even if you go back to 2018’s From Nothing to Eternity EP (discussed here), when the Malmö, Sweden-based outfit brought in bassist Pelle Lindsjö, it seems unlikely.
Thus it would seem that Exploration — the follow-up to 2020’s Aeons (review here) and 2021’s companion Aeons Live Session (review here), as well as the group’s first offering through Majestic Mountain Records — is a genuine manifestation of its title.
With a recording helmed by Joakim Lindberg (Malsten, Hater, Octopus Ride, etc.) and splatter-painted art by Robin Gnista, the five-song/45-minute Exploration arrives led by its longest track (immediate points) in the 11-minute “Daydreams,” and almost immediately pushes against expectation in replacing the band’s heretofore instrumental jams with vocal-topped cosmic dream grunge, Andersson‘s own voice coming to the fore to add melody and structure to the procession. It is as if CB3, having explored their way outward through increasingly psychedelic terrain over the course of their first two albums and handful of other live outings and EPs, have brought a new meaning for themselves to the titular ideal here presented. It’s almost playful. They’ve done an awful lot of exploration to this point in their tenure, but never like this.
To say the stylistic shift suits them is playing it diplomatic. Exploration holds firm to the immersive instrumental depths CB3 fostered on Aeons and its subsequent live incarnation, and brings them to someplace new and expressive. Andersson‘s voice is coated in echo and reverb, spacious and delivered languid in the tradition of some of Acid King‘s more floating stretches, and from the quick drum-fill-into-riff beginning of “Daydreams,” there’s a sense of immediacy that comes through despite the smoothness of the rolling grooves that ensue. It is a delicate balance skillfully attained, and since three of Exploration‘s inclusions top 10 minutes — that’s “Daydreams” (11:07) and the side-B-consuming closing duo “In a Rainbow with Friends” (10:42) and “Through Space and Time” (10:33) — it’s hardly as though Andersson as a songwriter has abandoned the prior spaciousness.
The embrace of structure has added to their sound overall rather than detracted from it, and “Daydreams” demonstrates this as it moves from its verse into a bassier jam/solo section, the guitar ringing out over an ever-more-solid rhythmic foundation, brightly toned and heavy in kind, accomplished enough in the playing to be prog but more interested in texture than technique, at least there, and leading into a break of standalone guitar and vocals, vague chime percussion, sitar-ish drone and a hypnotic, swelling build.
This triumph they reinforce with less than 30 seconds to go, bringing back the more grounded central riff just before ending and giving way to “To Space and Away” (8:05), the hook of which is a landmark for the album and the band in kind, picking up the grunge cues from the buzz-tone guitar in “Daydreams” and setting them into a righteously mellow tempo with repetitions about melting away into space and away and away into space and away into space and so on into another ethereal lead, build back to the verse, more melting. Some Zeppelin-ish touches emerge in the midsection jam amid a more fervent moment of chug, but by the time the song reaches its midpoint, they’ve broken it all the way down with Solmonsson‘s drums holding it together as the guitar and bass both, indeed, seem to have melted.
Just before 5:40 into the eight-minute “To Space and Away,” the guitar effects fade into the background and Andersson‘s circular lyric returns, fading in over a light strum to reignite the zero-gravity hook, full fuzz thrust, bass rumbling and drums back on board providing the push to the suitably ethereal, long-fade finish. Wrapping side A, “Going to the Horizon” (5:26) is even more straightforward, beginning with sharp start-stop hits and diving into its verse — “Going to the horizon/I see colors all around…”; the title repeats but the other lines change — to show CB3 having discovered solid ground for all their psychedelic adventures.
As with “Daydreams” and “To Space and Away,” there’s a shift into an instrumental section, as if to remind of the jammed-out underpinnings from which these songs are built — could even be the vocals were added after the fact, but the way it flows and all fits together hints otherwise — and they once again come back to the verse to round out, emphasizing the meta-exploration taking place, CB3 trying what’s for them a genuinely new approach and succeeding outright in manifesting a new stage of the band. They haven’t quite reinvented themselves on Exploration, but they’ve harnessed a vibe across the span of the album that feels very much like a payoff moment for the work they’ve done to this point.
That holds true as “In a Rainbow with Friends” moves from its post-rock bliss into a long stretch of drumless swirling drone, a solo and a gradual build, not quite so predictable as to be wholly linear, but able to provide a blueprint of structure anyway, even without the vocals. One might be tempted to call it side B branching out if it weren’t a central component of CB3‘s approach all along. “Through Space and Time” finishes by bringing together the instrumental reach with a more daring, more confident vocal — one wonders if it wasn’t the last to be recorded as well — that nonetheless summarizes the amalgam of exospheric jamming and more direct heavy rock, Andersson‘s guitar tapping through swirls as the bass and drums keep step, smoothly redirecting from the verse into a slowdown/crashout before the vocals once again step into a forward position in driving the material and shaping the impact of the finale that follows in the second half of the song, still slow, but marked by a vitality that is further representative of Exploration as a whole. They leave no doubt as to their capacity to pull this off live, which, if past is prologue, they might just choose to do on a subsequent release. If such a thing were to occur, in the parlance of our times, I’m here for it.
What Exploration makes even truer, though, is that it has become harder to predict where CB3 might go next. If one takes their progression album by album, from the standup-bass-inclusive Charlotta’s Burnin’ Trio through the psychedelic flourish of Aeons and now Exploration, they’d be believable as three separate bands despite just one lineup change with Lindsjö taking over for Jonas Nilsson on bass, and while one certainly wouldn’t mind if they followed this path forward through blending open jams and structured craft with the consistent aura of live performance as they do here, perhaps toying with the balance of one to the other as they seem to in formative fashion between the likes of “Going to the Horizon” and “In a Rainbow with Friends,” they give no indication that their whims won’t take them someplace else entirely next time. As much as the resonance of “To Space and Away,” “Daydreams” and “Through Space and Time” seems to ooze itself like so much nebular gas, CB3 are all the more exciting for wondering what might still follow. If this is them exploring — and clearly it is — then may they continue to explore.
CB3, Exploration (2022)
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Tags: CB3, CB3 Exploration, Exploration, Majestic Mountain Records, Malmö, Sweden
