This London-based nine-piece are an anarchic party band who come across as a wild tribe of burlesque buskers.
You could easily imagine them finding gainful employment as the house band for Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy series. A similar surreal humour is evident from one track title which sees them reimagining jazz pianist Thelonius Monk as Melodious Thunk, and this jokiness has occasionally led the band to introduce themselves onstage as the 'genital misfits'.
In an email interview with Ilikemusic, the band summed up their heady mixture of folk-rap-dub-balkan-jazz as "Turbo-Folk with a bass face riding on the back of a lama on absinth", a description which is hard to top.
Singer Noémie Ducimetière has a squeaky little girl lost voice, kind of Coco-Rosie meets Joanna Newsom, which contrasts with rowdy Chumbawumba style rap and is backed by a range of diverse instruments which include piano, banjo, trumpet, accordion and saxophone.
The album's cover art and official photos give a good representation of the carnivalesque flavour that feeds into their pick'n'mix sound while the oom-pah rhythms add to the music hall style theatrics.
This is probably good entertainment value in a live setting but on record the songs don't really match the madness.
There are 14 tracks but 5 of these of little more than self indulgent fragments or off-cuts. Of the 'proper' songs, the roller coaster of Spiralling Breeze (see video) exemplifies the restless energy whereby no song begins and ends in one style.
It's a pumped-up, manic quality which, for me, fairly quickly loses its novelty value.
