Pre-Order: Tara Clerkin Trio – Somewhere Good

With two extraordinary mini-albums making a splash on London’s World of Echo label in wake of their self-titled 2020 debut, Somewhere Good is, in many ways, the Tara Clerkin Trio’s most realised work. In running their usual gauntlet of idiosyncratic approaches, Clerkin & co. Color in and outside of compositional lines over the course of 40+ celebratory minutes – never wallowing, despite inherently somber subject matters of self-defeat, disease, displacement, restlessness, gentrification – allowing their arrangements and improvisations ample space and time to situate, stretch out, breathe, cross-pollinate, and ultimately take deeper hold on the listener’s imagination – all while somehow sounding more like themselves than ever before.Of course, there are traceable influences herein.. Being the big dumb American from the small boring town that I am, cornfed on ’90s alternative radio with the enchantingly exotic sounds of Maxinquaye and Mezzanine emanatin