Keyboardist/composer
Peter Vandenberghe's rambunctious piano trio
Too Noisy Fish do not whisper a soft greeting on the opening track of their sophomore album, 2013's
Fight Eat Sleep. A slap upside the head is more like it. Unlike the opening tune ("13 Potatoes") of the Flemish trio's 2011 debut,
Fast Easy Sick -- which saw drummer
Teun Verbruggen announcing his presence with crashing and bashing almost goofily at odds with the initial contemplative mood of
Vandenberghe and bassist
Kristof Roseeuw -- all three bandmembers are immediately in sync and fired up on
Fight Eat Sleep's opener, "Bring It Home/Oh God."
Too Noisy Fish are all muscle and no fussle as
Vandenberghe and
Roseeuw lock into an irregular stop-start pulse, the pianist throws in an emphatic off-meter chord as punctuation, and
Verbruggen pummels his kit. Engineering and mixing the sessions at his California studio,
Oz Fritz gave the trio a huge sound -- particularly
Verbruggen, whose drums are massive and rockish despite his paradoxically nimble touch. After the initial onslaught of pyrotechnics -- including an interlude in which the roaring
Roseeuw seems to saw his bass in two -- the opener's second half (the "Oh God" part) sets the listener gently down in the comfortable easy chair of a bluesy, sonorous ballad that even features
Verbruggen switching to brushes. Merely four minutes into the album and a breather is already a good idea.