Cicada

As someone once noted, if you haven’t heard them, it’s hard to describe what Hazmat Modine do, but if you have heard them the job becomes even harder. Led by singer, songwriter and harmonica player Wade Schuman, the New York-based band’s second album is rooted in traditional pre-World War II American blues, jazz, jug-band and vaudeville, with fusion elements of ska, klezmer, Latin and other global forms. But that doesn’t even begin to convey their eccentricity. They frequently feature two harmonicas (diatonic and chromatic), balalaika, piccolo, tuba and cimbalom. Their debut album, Bahamut, featured a collaboration with the Tuvan throat singers Huun Huur Tu. The follow-up – named after one of the several insects Schuman recorded in locations from Central Park to the Sumatran jungle and then dropped liberally into the soundtrack – must be the only pop record ever to feature two sousaphone players.

Guests include Natalie Merchant, the Kronos Quartet and Benin’s Gangbé Brass Band, who contribute to two tracks including the splendid ‘Cotonou Stomp’, which, with characteristic perversity, isn’t remotely African at all but is a Latin big-band rave-up. With equally wilful cussedness, it’s followed by ‘Dead Crow’, a swampy, blues-laden piece which features steel guitar, harmonica, tuba, talking drums and string quartet. You get the idea: Hazmat’s speciality is creating a kind of surreal musical equivalent of a Dali painting – or perhaps an MC Escher drawing – in which nothing is quite what it seems. Quirky if intermittently brilliant, and the novelty is seldom allowed to get in the way of some genuinely fine music.