Reviews of the album:
Turn the lights down low and exhale, slowly. This is gritty inner urban jazz, scratching and probing, skulking down shady laneways, steering clear of the bright glare to consider darkermoments and pensivemoods.
The debut six-track album fromMiau proudly and defiantly stands apart. The sound laid down byPennyMcBride on trumpet and flugelhorn (plus occasional vocals), Nick Ketley on bass, and Bon King on drums is lean and sinewy, all ropey veins and taut, stringymuscle. It dares you to define it all in a phrase. Go on. Give it shot.
Well, there’s the centrepiece trackEmerald, an intelligent, persistent conversation, coloured with pastel shades and prescient phrases. Like a leaf on a river, it travels slowly, confidently under its own inertia. The ghost ofMiles Davis is nodding, appreciating that this inner-Sydney sound has its own agenda.
Belly carries a haunting, worrying edge – the unsmiling thrum of an uncompromising bass pattern, a gossamer of spooky trumpet dancing slowly, seductively in a smoky room.
Carparkis low-rent inner-city noir, offering hazy notions that drift just out of reach. The words purr and hiss, an echo of Beat prose, but this ain’t no revival and it sure ain’t sentimental. It’s too stark and raw. It’s fleshy and exposed, enough tomake the timid blush.
Miau draws you in but refuses to allow you to get too comfortable. So, turn the lights down low and exhale, slowly.“ (David Sly)