Broken Vessels

by Steven E. McDonaldThe length of time between the initial appearance of Todd Fields' movie about out-of-control paramedics and the release of this album of music "from and inspired by" the film would indicate a rather typical Laswellian post-production condition. In other words, rather than release an album that compiles cues and themes from the motion picture score, Laswell has instead reconstructed the work to provide more structural cohesiveness indicated by the way the tracks segue from one to the next, and the structural cohesiveness of several of them, indicating that short cues have been repeated, combined, and modified to create a song-like structure.Otherwise, the album provides a condensed trip through many of Laswell's touchstones -- ambient drones, modified world music elements, cracking funk, ear-bleed level rock, explosively percussive rhythm structures, and so on. Nicky Skopelitis provides terrific support via some blazing guitar work, while Lance Carter's drumming seems (in terms of Laswell's production methods) less significant by far. Broken Vessels is not one of Laswell's milestones, by any means, but it is an engaging and propulsive recording.