"...The title track opens with long, slightly bent drones, which soon increase in tempo and activity, then slow down to cautious, spacious fragmentation. On "Tell the Bees", they quietly take things further out, rubbing, bending and twisting the strings as the double reed plays dark moans and sighs underneath. Although the instrumentation is more often found in modern classical chamber groups, their sound is both free yet very focused. Like the better free improv of today, it is really in between categories, having a tradition of its own. Since this is completely acoustic music, it is carefully captured and well recorded. The magic of this trio is that it is both delicate and mysterious at the same time. It has an inner logic or thread, yet you never really know what is coming up. There is a distant calm at the center, yet the occasional agitation make things exciting at times. The cover art of red paint splotches on stone seems most fitting for the sounds found within."
Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery
"The Branch Will Not Break is an impressive collection of musical episodes. To call them songs would be somewhat innaccurate because they're closer to tone poems, or paintings with notes. And this splendid trio - Carrie Shull on oboe and English horn, Tara Flandreau on viola, and Reuben Radding on double bass - are like a collective Jackson Pollock, working on a canvas that barely contains the energy of their ideas.
The opening title tune suggests a traditional symphonic warmup, but the conventional quickly ends as the music escalates to a Phillip Glass-like freneticism, with Flandreau's viola and Radding's double bass dancing fiercely with Shull's oboe. On "Tell the Bees," Radding simply lets his double bass creak as the imagery shifts among a beehive, a traffic jam, gulls shrieking above the seashore and a ship at sea creaking with the list of the waves. "In Fear of Harvest" is a melancholy, dark, brooding, string-driven piece and on "Echolocation" Shull wails on the oboe like Trane blowing the soprano, moving the disc into the realm of free jazz chamber music. Some of the landscapes herein are densely populated; others, like "Twilights" and "Zooid," are bleak and spare, but no less affecting. There's even a wry bit of humor involving the use of time in "Temporal Defense," the shortest piece on the disc.
In light of the naturalistic bent of the titles, the final tune, "Obscure Zealots," could be interpreted as a statement on the trio itself and how each member feels about the somewhat thankles task of expressing love of and concern for the natural world through music. It is this final aspect which gives The Branch Will Not Break both its triumph and its sadness." - Terrell Holmes, All About Jazz - NY
