The lure for aggro-industrial metal heads to throw down their guitars and pick up a blunted saxophone style can't be an everyday occurrence. Yet that's precisely what funked-out, jazz-friendly, trip-hop musicians
9 Lazy 9 did -- even when it's not entirely clear why. There are a lot of loose, filtered dance loops underneath unstructured jazz. Quite a number of danceable grooves along with nary a vocal. Lethargic, free-floating pieces like "Shak" and "Not Nice" search for that chill-out funk most widely known in
Groove Armada bedrooms, but the album seems so expansive that it fails to make much of a detectable impact. Genre switching is certainly entertaining -- and healthy -- for new bands. The problem's that
Paradise Blown is too nascent, too speculative, that its trip-hopped-up intentions are left nodding themselves off into slumber. ~ Dean Carlson