A quirkily catchy, lo-fi, psychedelic-funk, dadaist-influenced, wonderfully oddball, original release by the Midlands-born, Brighton-based poet, painter, film-maker and multi-instrumentalist Jamie Broughton. A follow-up to 2024’s big long sun: speaking, all-round DIY creator Broughton conjures a variety of instrument and sounds, including guitar, synths and samplers, bass, drums, woodwind and layered vocal harmonies with a charming sparseness of eccentric eclecticism, with influences from woozy Conan Mockasin-esque psychedelic weirdness or the pop-funk-jazz of Steve Lacy or the alternative, experimental pop of Field Music. Soft-thrumming skip-rhythm opener to fold is instantly a love song with a differently poetic frame of reference: “ to fold into a thousand flakes of snow / to smoulder like the embers as they glow / to shiver like an arrow in a bow / to quiver like an apple hanging low”; like a dove opens with a drone-y, droopy feeling synth, then moves into a scintillating strange swing-rhythm along with atypical vocal harmonies and a drunken brass. The soft funk comes with boo bam, then the initial downbeat disco of a casual dance between friends that then leaps into a frenzy of bass and shrill recorder. The repetitive when the mood's right is strangely mesmeric, and oodles of oddnesses continue to gather, not least the fuzz electronica of fast like i like my money, which has some parallels with the work of London’s Snapped Ankles. There’s a slow, distorted funk and electronica on the chicken or the egg?, while figure this one out moves more into a hazy psychedelia. While most of the numbers are oblique love songs, closer lion and the butterfly offers up a gently spoken fable narrative with lyrics that wouldn’t be out of place in an early Genesis album. Oddly beautiful, wilfully different, admirably DIY and eccentric. Out on MIOHMI Records.
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