SHIFT carve niche both ‘Jagged and Bold’ on new album

Last Updated on March 14, 2024, 4:12 PM | Published: March 12, 2024

OKLAHOMA CITY — Unreasonably talented and unrepentingly daring, OKC’s preeminent prog power trio, SHIFT, tested the limits of their genre-crossing, boundary-disregarding skills on the still remarkable 2022 debut “Timelines,” raising hopes and curiosities about just how much more complexity and conceptual density they could wring out of an anticipated follow-up.

Which makes it all the more sweet that they don’t.

“Jagged and Bold” – SHIFT’s newest full-length offering that hit streamers everywhere on February 29th – is loaded with mind-shattering musicianship and audacity, yes, but it largely eschews the prog-rock prerogative of high-concept pontificating and show-off compositions full of neck-breaking turnarounds and tempo changes.

Instead, the band offers up a collection of hypnotically rhythmic, adventurously loose pieces held together and made whole by perhaps the most elusive and uncommon element imaginable for intellectual prog: raw, naked emotion.

The songs, movements, and moments that comprise “Jagged and Bold” are so clearly built out of the fears and uncertainties of a changing, perhaps crumbling world. Especially as all three members are reaching their mid-20s, they’re staring down the remains of the world they thought they’d inherit and the increasingly tragic, infuriating, and unnavigable world that’s taken root in its place.

Moreover, there’s a growing physical distance that can’t be denied now.

Bassist Benji Askren has been touring and playing stadiums with rising country star Cam Allen and blowing minds locally as part of Original Flow and the Wavvez. Drummer Matt Robertson moved to Kansas City to pursue jazz studies and performance. Singer/songwriter/keyboardist/synth-wizard Alyx Rosfeld headed to Phoenix on their way to potential parts unknown.

So it’s no surprise that each track throughout “Jagged and Bold” presents a new angle on the overwhelming fears, doubts, confusions, and even angers of separation and space. Where “Timelines” dealt with the overwhelming enormity and infinity of time, “Jagged and Bold” grapples instead with the very human realization that there’s just never enough.

Fitting, then, that the songs each play out like persistent panic attacks, moving with the rhythms of anxiety itself.

Rather than rely on the progressive standbys of turn-on-a-dime changes and intricate compositions, nearly every track here begins simply, locking in a repeating chord progression or a single rhythmic or counter-melodic hook, and then builds and builds and builds, pushing right up to – and often past – the breaking point.

And once they break, all bets are off. Songs will crash into explosive fusion drumming free-for-alls and cacophonous bass breakdowns. 

“Mantra Ray,” both the album’s thematic and musical centerpiece, sees Askren establish a singular, relentless bassline that is then continuously reoriented and re-syncopated by Robertson’s twisting rhythms and Rosfeld’s morphing, mutating sequencer, passing like a storm that breaks into a loose cobble of lead bass and piano beds.

Sometimes a wailing saxophone enters the fray of a song and adds something unexpectedly epic in an almost retro, cinematic way. Sometimes the sound of a cello creeps out of the murk and adds somehow more tension and atmosphere.

Sometimes a song like “Stalactites” unfurls and opens up to reveal Robertson rapping, or perhaps more accurately, reciting a kind of wild-eyed, anxious Beat poetry laying bare his concerns about the group hanging ever more and more precariously away from the ceiling from which they’ve all grown. Like the formation in the song’s title, the only result is to either reach the ground intact or to break and fall, because the growth can’t be stopped.

And in this way, “Jagged and Bold” is as much about fearlessness as it is about fear.

When you’re a studied, skilled, head-spinningly proficient musician – as all three core members of SHIFT undoubtedly are – there’s often nothing more terrifying than simplicity. Your instincts grow to convince you that more ideas, more changes, more complexity is always better. Playing and composing over the head of the listener becomes a defense mechanism. You have to always be proving your skill or you risk it becoming all for naught.

For these players to so directly confront simplicity in the composition, space in the production, and shockingly blunt, honest emotion in the themes and lyrics is nothing short of fearlessness, very nearly unprecedented in the strictly considered, high-concept worlds of prog-rock and fusion.

It’s become too easy to think of these sounds and styles as being sterile and slick. Prog has become all about clean sweep arpeggios and unflinching precision. Fusion has devolved into something manufactured for grocery stores and infomercials.

But looking back to the 60s and 70s outset of these genres finds Funkadelic caputuring the sounds of unhinged insanity, Jaco Pastorius and Billy Cobham allowing themselves to explore the outer reaches of tension and release, and groups like Genesis and King Crimson developing new ways of performing heart-pounding drama.

Miles Davis arguably created the entire style when he gathered a collection of players and demanded that they all embrace the anger and confusion and chaos of the late-60s and just play on what would become the seminal “Bitches Brew.” He took the greatest thinking musicians in the world at the time and he insisted that they feel.

Make no mistake, SHIFT are feeling in that same way.

With the physical distances and changing priorities now between them, the future of SHIFT beyond “Jagged and Bold” remains uncertain, as evidenced by the massive, theatrical closing epic “SHIFTDEATH.”

But even if they find a way to carry on (and I suspect that they will in some form or another,) it’s clear that this phase of all of their lives is coming to a close, revealing instead something rougher around the edges, but something braver all the same.

“Jagged and Bold” by SHIFT is available now on all streaming services.

Follow SHIFT on Instagram at @shift.band.

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