By Michael J. West | Published December 2025
Angst sprays like flop sweat from “Hummus,” the opening track on tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger’s Dark Days, and the album continues in that mode. If you hadn’t guessed from the title, the album isn’t a soothing balm but a deep-mining catharsis. The otherwise jaunty “Mopti” packs anguish and fatigue into its bridge and uncertainty into its harmonies. Even the mildest pieces, the 7/4 “Casa Pueblo” and the ballad “Nash’s World,” have discomfited undertones.
Preminger at his happiest still prefers his music to have a raw edge; this is not him at his happiest. Recorded in December 2024, at a time of personal trauma for Preminger, Dark Days easily transforms into a conduit for our collective traumas. (If that needs more illumination, check the news.) We can ride the bumpy, fraught road laid down by “FTSC,” trudge to the downcast key and rhythm of “Dark Days” and find a low-level release in the semisweet closer “Barca.”
Yet it’s really the sidemen who make this catharsis happen. Bassist Kim Cass and drummer Terreon Gully are solid and taut, yet skittery. This translates on “Hymn #1 (For Moving On)” and the enigmatic “Sarajevo With Neira” to a kind of stately nervousness, a holding of one’s composure while the number rises in the pressure gauge; on “Barca,” it becomes an urgent energy that amplifies the track’s sense of release. Still, guitarist Ely Perlman, a protégé of Preminger’s, is the album’s secret sauce. His ominous lines on “Hummus,” “Hymn #1” and “Sarahevo With Neira” are deft and inventive, but engage just the right amount of causticity, distortion and unease to leave them trailing in the ear. Sometimes, as on Dark Days, unease is what we really need.
