Root Cellar – Fermentations
For Buffalo’s Root Cellar, the act of creation is a patient one. The chamber quintet’s debut album, Fermentations, arrives via Erie’s Infrasonic Press with a backstory as interesting as its sound. The six expansive tracks were captured live in two distinct sessions at Revolution Gallery, separated by over a year. This lengthy process, engineered and mixed by Shaun Mullins, has produced a remarkably cohesive, hour-long album that breathes with the energy of its live origins yet feels brilliantly intentional in its construction. It’s a fitting title, as the album documents a sound that has been allowed to bubble, evolve, and mature, settling into something complex and potent. Fermentations is our album of the week.
The band’s “post-jazz” description is a starting point, but it hardly covers the ground they explore. The group, formed in 2017, operates at a compelling intersection of influences. There’s the structural sensibility of post-rock outfits like Tortoise, the avant-garde freedom of players like Tomeka Reid or Tim Berne, and, most surprisingly, the muscular, pocket-driven weight of a band like Rage Against the Machine. The quintet—Kyle McGinty on trumpet, Katie Weissman on cello, Evan Kaderbeck on guitar, Ed Klavoon on bass, and Bill Conroy on drums—leverages this diverse background to create a fluid exchange between solid grooves and open improvisation, often within the same piece.
The album’s opening track, “Wet Heel,” immediately establishes this dynamic. It builds from deep electronic drones and short, chaotic cello phrases before the whole band drops into a heavy, Rage-esque rock groove. Just as the listener gets comfortable, the structure dissolves into a freeform section that feels like a tense, woodland quarrel between bass and horn. This side-by-side placement of the composed and the improvised is the album’s core idea, and the transitions are handled with a natural, unforced flow that makes the two approaches feel like parts of a single, coherent language.
While every track offers a different angle on the band’s sound, certain moments stand out. “Unexpected Rough Air” is somber and affecting, initially led by a hypnotic dance between cello and trumpet. Its most striking feature is a section of stunning unison where the trumpet, bass, and guitar all riff on the same intricate lead line. “Blackwell” offers a more grounded entry point, built around a powerful bass groove that demonstrates how well the group can establish a pocket, explore its outer edges, and then lock back in with precision. Later, the atmospheric “Simple Suite” allows Kaderbeck’s guitar to take the lead with explorations that are meditative yet deliberate, painting a picture of a world both bleak and beautiful.
The true success of Fermentations is in hearing a band so completely in command of its own identity. Root Cellar has forged a unique musical dialect from its members’ varied backgrounds, one where aggressive grooves and chaotic improvisation are not opposing forces, but part of the same syntax. The album is a powerful introduction to this new vocabulary, and it’s remarkable to listen to the five musicians speak it amongst themselves, live, with such fluency. Its a challenging listen, but in all the best ways.
Categorised in: Album of the Week
This post was written by Ronald Walczyk