Deep Sea Vents

Deep Sea Vents is a self-consciously quirky, sometimes witty and occasionally beguiling ten-track album of songs by Bruce Hornsby in collaboration with the New York-based, post-classical chamber sextet, yMusic, which was co-founded in 2008 by Rob Moose. A multi-instrumentalist, arranger, producer, conductor and orchestrator, Moose has worked with everyone from Taylor Swift and The Decemberists to Joshua Bell and Jay-Z. For Deep Sea Vents, Hornsby and yMusic (performing under the collective moniker BrhyM) have cast a loose-knit net of ruminations on the many permutations of water: ocean, rivulet, pirate preying ground. The album opener, ‘Wild Whaling Life’, comes out swinging with an acoustic bass groove around which strings, horns and winds dart like a school of fish in the open sea. ‘Foreign Sounds’ conveys the heartbreaking plight of a marine creature who can’t find its way home due to underwater noise pollution. The title-track uses the near-farcical strains of a jazz-age vamp to plumb fathoms-deep geothermal fields. Some of the material on Deep Sea Vents is a tad too experimental for its own good, for example, the zig-zag rhythmic changes, rambling melodic lines and edgy vocal effects of ‘Platypus Wow’. Otherwise, Deep Sea Vents offers listeners a satisfying dive.