Dinosaur – Wonder Trail
(Edition. EDN1111. CD Review by Patrick Hadfield)

Wonder Trail opens with a large chord; noise plays a significant role in the record with discordant electronic sounds interrupting more melodic passages. This keeps one’s senses open – like Dali scribbling on the Mona Lisa – but it can also be frustrating, particularly in a relatively short album and when the music being interrupted is so fine.

Trumpeter Laura Jurd wrote all the tracks, but the music they create is very much a group effort: Elliot Galvin on synths and keyboards, Conor Chaplin on electric bass and Corrie Dick on drums create the soundscape over which Jurd’s trumpet can fly. She has become more expansive with this record, perhaps more sure of her own voice.

Several of the tracks have an almost funk-like groove, propelled by Chaplin’s bass and Dick’s drumming, most evident on a section of the excellent Quiet Thunder, the opener Renewal, Part 1 and particularly its close sibling Renewal, Part 2 – before it is repeatedly interrupted.

Several tunes feature words from a variety of voices (uncredited on the review CD). Not songs so much as repeated refrains, the words have a folk inflection and add to a dreamlike character to the music.

There is also a solid dance-like feel to many of the numbers. Once Jurd’s trumpet takes over from the words on Set Free and the bass kicks in, it is actually hard to sit still. And Still We Wonder has a similar effect, though with lighter groove. I can imagine remixes of these tracks filling dance floors.

Patrick Hadfield lives in Edinburgh, occasionally takes photographs, and sometimes blogs at On the Beat. Twitter: @patrickhadfield.