Friday Five: Nick Collins Sextet, Same Eyes, microplastique, Good Man's Brother, Pluot

MUSIC REVIEW FRIDAY FIVE

Cover art for the albums and singles featured in the Friday Five.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features jazz by the Nick Collins Sextet, synth-pop by Same Eyes, experimental jazz by microplastique, grunge by Good Man's Brother, and twinkling math rock by Pluot.

 

Nick Collins Sextet, The Late Set (Live)
As someone who is usually deep in REM stage by the time Nick Collins and his band hit the stage at Blue LLama Jazz Club, I'm happy to have this document of one of his many performances at the Ann Arbor venue. Released on Blue LLama's in-house record label, The Late Set features drummer Collins, pianist Rick Roe, Detroit trombonist Vincent Chandler, saxophonist Andrew Bishop, trumpeter Dwight Adams, and bassist Jeff Pedraz holding it down on eight swingers, starting with Wayne Shorter's "The Big Push" and wrapping up with Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke's "Epistrophy."

 

Same Eyes, "It's Too Late"
Ann Arbor synth-poppers Same Eyes were a singles machine from 2023 through early 2024, culminating in the compilation The Slow Decline in June. The group is already back with a new song, and while Same Eyes has been performing live as a quartet—drums, bass, guitar, and vocals along with triggered keyboards—for a while now, "It's Too Late" sounds like another all-synth affair. It's also another brooding, hook-filled stab at '80s-evoking pop. Same Eyes' songwriting has been elite since its formation in summer 2019, and "It's Too Late" is great addition to the canon.

 

microplastique, blare blow bloom!
Chicago drummer and U-M grad Adam Shead leads microplastique, an avant-garde jazz quartet that can be both bombastically serious and whimsically silly on the live recordings that make up blare blow bloom! The band includes Ann Arbor/Chicago saxophonist/flutist Molly Jones along with pianist Josh Harlow and trumpeter Ben Zucker, alongside Shead's enmorous bag of percussion items, from a snare and woodblocks to bells and glockenspiel. Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Tony Oxley, and Steve Reich are some of the musicians namechecked in the liner notes, and you can hear their percussive, harmonically adventurous influences throughout the densely textured album. (Watch Shead and trumpeter Mark Kirschenmann perform a duet the Ann Arbor District Library's Secret Lab in 2017.)

 

Good Man's Brother, "Call of the Void"
The bluesy, grungy, Monster Magnet meets Alice in Chains-evoking "Call of the Void" is the debut single by Detroit-area band Good Man's Brother, which includes rhythm guitarist and co-vocalist Adam Wilkinson who does sound at The Blind Pig.

 

Pluot, Eye to Eye EP
"Japanese math rock band in Ann Arbor, Michigan" is the bio for Pluot, which teases the Eye to Eye EP over the last year with singles "Apocalypse" and "In the Mirror." Led by guitarist Takahito Mori, Pluot's version of math rock skews more toward the emo-side of things: think the twinkling sounds of American Football versus the pummeling riffs of Don Caballero. Even with all the shifting rhythms and off-kilter time signatures, the music is deeply catchy, with vocalist Echo Bennett's airy, Japanese singing both floating above the instrumental interplay and holding the songs together with short melodic vocal phrases.


Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp.