I was a little disappointed with guitarist Mike Keneally's first 2004 release, Dog. It seemed to be lacking a little something physical, some cohesive element, in the music, but where it worked it worked great - it was just too unbalanced by some out of place avant-garde-ish pieces that didn't really fit in on such an otherwise rockin' release. So when the announcement came that The Universe Will Provide, Keneally's seemingly long-in-production "orchestral" piece was coming shortly on the heels of Dog, I wasn't quite sure how to react. Caution was the only thing I could feel - this would be the moment that revealed if Keneally had slipped quietly over that dark side a peak of creativity often has, or if he had somehow managed to take everything to the next level. The latter, amazingly, is the verdict.
The Universe Will Provide somehow manages to combine all of Keneally's previous excesses, from the wildly tangential and angular avant garde excursions of Nonkertompf to the enveloping warmth of Wooden Smoke, and the result is a stunning, beautiful exploration of what I can only imagine are the soundtracks to a kid's most vivid dreams - all of it without a single word. Forget that snippets of this can be found in the weakness of Dog's "This Tastes Like A Hotel" - the confused, meaningless meandering is nowhere to be found in any of this album's 13 pieces.
Most impressive of all, however, is that this manages to escape the embarassment of being a "rocker with orchestra" vanity piece. This, if anything, is the album that Keneally has been saving all his creativity to make. Set free from Zappa's band a few years before his unfortunate death, Keneally's been flirting around the fringes of this kind of work, but it's only now that his skills and personality have matured to the point where something like this is created purely out of a need and not an ego-soothing exercise in excess. It couldn't have happened before now and it couldn't have happened later. It happened, perfectly, now.
(The beautiful lull will give you many hours of pleasure.)
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