Fixed Rope

Express Rising's third full-length album transforms the project from a solo outfit of Chicago beat junkie Dante Carfagna into a trio including Kevin Blagg and William Suran. It also abandons the dusty hip-hop breakbeats and samples utilized in ER's two self-titled albums, opting for live instrumentation, including pedal steel guitar and banjo along with keyboards and primitive drum machines. Mood-wise, the album maintains the forlorn, downcast feeling of the first two albums, perfectly matching the blurry, snowy cover artwork. Impressively, the album's 12 moody instrumentals were improvised and recorded in a single take in a studio somewhere in rural Arkansas, revealing the trio to have spectacular chemistry. One could very easily mistake Fixed Rope for the work of a solo producer meticulously layering tracks and samples over the period of several months. The album perfectly evokes a feeling of spending a long, dreary winter stuck and snowbound in a Midwestern bunker far away from civi