Fantastically inventive, stylishly strange, experimental post-punk by the London band on this latest release, with angular guitars, guffawing brass, jittery, ghostly, restless orchestral strings, and semi-spoken, sometimes whispered, arresting, often menacing vocals, all by the quintet of Max Oscarnold, Nathalia Bruno, Bobby Voltaire, Dominic Odair and Edgar Smith. Their influences seem rich, with a dash of folk, psychedelia, krautrock, Velvet Underground, even an early hallucinatory Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, and later, My Bloody Valentine, or the experimental esoteric Dutch band Trespassers W. They very much fit the term underground, and in fact it was in a basement in east London around six years ago where it all began. Mysterious, enigmatic, slightly disturbing, often using unusual chord progressions and darker, more dissonant scales and melodies, they’re a mesmeric, atypical listen, with the string and vocal drones and ringing electronica of opener Thursday’s Bells, moving into the pacy, jangly string and brass restlessness of one of the standouts 2x1; the marvellously rumbling, rhythmic cauldron of energy that builds on X Says; the chanting, folky oddness of 1898; the swaggering but whispered indie of Sparrows Hill; the rolling guitar arpeggios and bassline of Sister; the industrial, chugging, feedback-atmospheric textures of Halb Lieb I; the beautiful whispered, twanging guitar number Purple Born, which sounds like the soundtrack to a dark western before turning more into a shoegaze landscape; all the way to surreal and ghostly closer Pugilist. Unlike much else you’re likely to hear this year, beyond definition or any real category, and full of boundary pushing fascination. Out on Tough Love Records.
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