Logical Conclusion - Double Black Diamond

Hear The Track Here

Soundclick veterans will know this one. You hang around a site long enough and you start to notice the ebb and flow of people in it, and when you've spent years on a site you get a great many re-appearances. It's always nice to see old friends coming back to the site and we've seen the return of a few extremely well known names from the past, including - as it happens - one half of Logical Conclusion. Logical Conclusion is a duo from America consisting of Skye van Duuren and Robert Rice, but if you've been around a while you may well know Skye Van Duuren under another name. The last time he was active on Soundclick he was going under the name of Lord Skye. Aaahhh, now you are beginning to look a little greener around the gills so you obviously remember that listening to his music was no walk in the park. We all have to start somewhere though right, and by the time of my last review - To New Lands (Sailing) (May 2007) - I was actually being quite nice about his work.

His genre at the time was Games Soundtracks and that obviously plays a part too. Logical Conclusion's genre though is Modern Jazz which given my aversion to all things soundtrack is a sweet deal because I definitely like jazz in all its forms. Unless, of course, it isn't jazz. That's when things can get a bit explosive. The primary charge I laid at his door in those few reviews I did between 2006 and 2007 is that he has way too much reliance on standard - even factory - sounds. Doesn't mean anything in some music but when you are trying to recreate classic and classical structures that sound fidelity is probably THE most important factor - at least for me. If the instruments don't strike the right tone and texture then it doesn't really matter what those instruments are doing musically. There again, at the best of times I can be a crotchety old so and so and this is probably not the best of times.

So while the track was most definitely Modern Jazz, and a rollicking version of it at that, the sounds definitely let it down, at least in my view. But a sound is just a sound right? Yes, and I freely admit that there are sounds I really, really don't like. If I didn't recognise the impossibility of such a thing, I could have sworn that Skye deliberately went looking for every single keyboard sound with an irritant fact of 25 and worked them all into this tune. I think even he would have to agree that a lot of the leads happening in the track have their roots in the video games world, but nonetheless do sterling service in this track too - even if they are the aural equivalent of blackboard and chalk to this reviewer. So, if you can stand the leads, Double Black Diamond is a belter of a jazz track.

Highly Recommended Jazz (but beware of razor sharp leads)