Fabulously strange, inventive and and cleverly unsettling third album by the Brighton experimental post-punk, alt-rock quintet with a series of first-person narratives and inner monologues by fictional, disturbing characters - from cult leaders, serial killers, cannibals, sociopaths and arsonists. Fronted by singer and drummer Ollie Judge whose delivery gradually becomes more subtle than the full-on throaty screams of their earlier releases, it is as much the contributions of the rest of the band that bring a heady mix of oddball sounds - Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson, Beguiling guitar riffs, wandering bass lines and orchestral strings (from Ruisi Quartet) harpsichord and more intertwine in intangibly chaotic, catchy ways, with echoes of Pavement, The Fall, Sonic Youth and more in a mesmeric, proggy experimentalism. Lyrically the album is inspired by a couple of particular books – Ryo Murakami’s In The Miso Soup and Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is The Flesh, the latter about a dystopian society in which humans are manufactured for consumption and sold in supermarkets, alluded to in the bizarre but alluring single Crispy Skin. Hell and depravity are conjured in all sorts of ways like an unfurling, unconventional horror movie in nine songs. Other standouts include Cro-Magnon Man (“I'll frame my life in the bones that I have left”), Building 650 is in the setting of Tokyo (“We are friends / There's murder sometimes / But he's a real nice guy / Well, Frank's my friend / We tie them up … / A flame could melt his nose and mouth / A flame could melt almost anything.” Blood On The Boulders is slow and menacing, while closer Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence) brings a cinematic vividness through ghostly guest vocalists Rosa Brook, Clarissa Connelly and Tony Njoku, with subtle additional percussion by Zands Duggan, and powerful, emotive flugelhorn by Chris Dowding. Marta Salogni also joins in with production alongside old friend Dan Carey - all together pushing the boundaries in all sorts of extraordinary ways. Out on Warp Records.
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