1/2

With great creative success, John Zorn has recently been matching a set of his compositions, each one titled after spirit beings from Jewish traditions, with his favorite performers. Marc Ribot is renowned for coaxing a wild range of beautifully strange, emotive sounds from guitars, making him a potentially fantastic contributor to Zorn's series. Some earlier Book of Angels material veered into fairly inaccessible freeform atonal jams, but such experimentalism was sensibly interspersed with inviting, deeply layered melodic beauty to glue it all together. Not so here, unfortunately.

In all but a couple of fairly conventionally melodic songs, Ribot and his rhythm section basically regurgitate the cud of one or two thin musical ideas with intricate note twiddling. Despite a tempo change here or there, the record in general floods out without enough varied intensity to create tension or drama. Although the musicianship is downright godlike in its virtuosity, it leaves little room for the listener. There are performances of wild, reckless abandon, but they merely come off as narrow and careless. It amounts to little more than a self-absorbed academic exercise of freeform electric guitar noodling, the likes of which has been done to death in prog rock and freeform jazz. If you can't get enough of that stuff, step right up. Everyone else, head instead over to Zorn's six earlier Books and Ribot's Cubanos Postizos discs and Don't Blame Me.