Kiriki Club

A Birmingham-based sextet with backgrounds as various as clowning, dance, theatre and live art (hence a name inspired by Les Kiriki, a short film about Japanese acrobats by early 20th-century filmmaker Segundo de Chomón, don't you know!), Kiriki Club's live performances can be lively and eccentric affairs, winning over many a festival audience. On their characteristically diverse debut album, Sam Frankie Fox on lead vocals, Martin Cox on double bass and guitar, Katie Stevens on sax and woodwinds, Genevieve Say on percussion, Joelle Barker on percussion and Ricardo Santos Rocha on guitar and melodeon, embrace a bewildering wealth of influences, ranging from lugubrious country swing (‘Liquor’) and fado (‘Tenho-me Persuadido’) to the fiery Tejano ‘Mi Corazón’ via a melodramatically reimagined Welsh male-voice choir piece (‘O Gymru/Ar Lan Y Môr’) and a tango-inflected murder ballad (‘Waiting for You’).

Inevitably, some of these delirious diversions are more successful than others – ‘Simple Song’, for instance, sounds somewhat pedestrian in this exotic company simply by living up to its title, while the faux audience noise and announcements of the jazzy ‘I Hate You’ quickly become more irritating than funny– but overall this is a commendably intriguing and multifaceted debut.