Opening with shivering strings, An Announcement to Answer imparts a tangible organic feel that wraps itself about the listener in warm, textured folds but it is over all too quickly, unwinding just shy of the forty minute mark. On this, his third release, Will Holland, finds himself digging deeply into the Cuban Soul and Funk diaspora from the 60’s and 70’s, layering them thickly alongside elements from Japan and Africa to create an album that is at once sunny and exotic but tinged with a sense of moodiness. It is an intoxicating journey from start to finish, one that left me a little breathless and looking to repeat it immediately.
this is an album for muggy August nights, strolling underneath pale streetlights casting an orange glow as a stray dog skirts about just on the edge of darkness. “Sabor”, with its swollen horn arrangements, nimble guitar work, and loping vocals builds a fantasy of summer streets late at night with people lounging indolently against dirty brick walls or stretched out on the steps of a building breathing in the scent of the city slowly. Closing out the album is the delicately sweet “”Tell It Like You Mean It” with a saxophone arrangement that strikes closely to the feel and flavor of Rova’s “Suite For A Better World” if it were dropped in the middle of a Brazilian Carnival with undulating bass lines and lightly skipping percussion.
This is what good music does, it is transportive, carrying the listener out of the mundane and to something more vibrant and nuanced. Not many do this as well as Holland, under his Quantic moniker. An Announcement to Answer is sultry listen, one that is warm to the touch, confident and breathless at the same moment. For all its quickly evaporating thirty-eight minutes captured my mind and heart easily putting it on my Best of 2006 list. To get a feel, you can sample the album over at his website.