Artist: Colorful Rhythm

Artist: Colorful Rhythm

Links: https://www.facebook.com/ColorfulRhythm

http://www.colorfulrhythm.com/

Colorful Rhythm's self-titled album is built on the expressive piano-playing of Judy Huang. The release impresses with Huang's virtuosity (and ascendant vocals), and by evoking a wide range of emotions.

A great place to start is "I Feel Good." Saturated with brightness, the song fuses the orchestral pop of Grimes with the percussive accents of Animal Collective. At the other end of the spectrum is the brooding "Resolution," which is haunted by dark melodies recalling Tori Amos. (The song's lengthy industrial-piano outtro contains a progression at 3:14 that the playful Amos would no doubt approve of.) "Iridescent" is Colorful Rhythm's opus: a nearly six-minute journey marked by instrumental bridges setting various moods (e.g. 1:10 and 3:58), dynamic beat-driven hooks (e.g. 1:29 and 3:39), and a transcendent theme originating from a doubled piano/vocal (e.g. :55).

Five of the songs are instrumental. But to say this is piano music would be like saying that pianist David Helfgott (on stage, "grunts, groans and mutterings") didn't likely benefit from David Hirschfelder's arrangement/orchestration in arriving at the Oscar-nominated Shine score. Indeed, Huang adds considerable dimension through the use of module- or keyboard-based sounds, all of which imbue her musicality with extra layers of feeling. The blink-and-you-miss-it speed of "Shadow in the Woods" is Huang's "Flight of the Bumblebee." But it is "Good Day My Friends" and "Dancing in the Rain" that point to Huang's love for complex patterns -- patterns which supply the canvas for Colorful Rhythm's electronic textures.

All of this is to say that Colorful Rhythm marshals its myriad resources to deliver on a vast array of emotions, communicating feeling in ways only truly great instrumentalists can.

*** The author of this review, George Harris, plays the ashiko for the following band: http://youtu.be/tMS73-1kCr8