Anyone who hates the sound of slap bass should give Sean Fairchild – aka Combinator – a wide berth. Those who can endlessly listen to Les Claypool, Mark King or Larry Graham, however, will appreciate this Seattle maestro, whose basslines bobble like a rubber duck in a Jacuzzi and provide unlikely key flavour in some pretty startling musical stews.
Fairchild’s hyperactive approach is reflected in his prolific release schedule: this is his third album of 2020. As ever, it uses his thumb as the jumping off point for some furiously urgent multilayered grooves that take in jazz-rock scales, metal shredding and itchy electronic beats. There’s also some more traditional songcraft at work here too, as Can’t Pretend To Know weaves his labyrinthine arrangements into a platform for an infectious, Latin-tinged love song. The swoonsome soul of O Discordia is emoted over a chaotic melange of bleepy electronica, punky noise and Fairchild’s four-stringed gymnastics, but he’s just as adept at subverting emo-ish rock anthems such Unemployable Elite with curiously bubbling undercurrents, or turning Led Zep’s No Quarter into a semi-ambient electronic reverie. JS