Fire! with Jim O'Rourke: Unreleased?

Label: Rune Grammaphon

A monster record featuring some of planet Earth's heaviest hitters, the curiously named Unreleased? makes adventurous avant-jazz positively groove. The quartet -- Jim O'Rourke on guitar and synth, plus Fire!: Mats Gustafsson on sax and more, Johan Berthling on bass and Andreas Werliin on drums -- build up such a head of steam on the nine-minute second track, "...Please, I Am Released,"  that the whole assemblage seems to start smoking and eventually, go up in a raging conflagration. And yet, for all its intensity, this music should be incredibly accessible to anyone who's ever nodded their head to muscular rock or soul jazz, anything that moves with the sort of unstoppable momentum that also comes with a dollop of implied chaos. It's the one short piece here, "By Whom and Why Am I Previously Unreleased," that's the strangest, a three-minute excursion into a light-refracting primordial improv (or improv-seeming) soup. From there, the fourth and final piece, "Happy Ending Borrowing Yours," storms like some hurricanes we know: huge, slow-moving, and flooding a vast area with gale-force sax work and group action. It's so out it's in! Heads and the open-minded should give this a try -- find out if you can handle this heat.