We’re OK. But We’re Lost Anyway

Is this title an exercise in assured bravado and chutzpah for this Geneva-based band’s fifth album, or is it a plea for help to find their way out of their musical undergrowth? On the one hand, their sound is intriguing. Melodically, it shares some of its characteristics with West Coast 60s bands like It’s a Beautiful Day: inventive melodies and lyrics, fine solo singing from Jo Burke and endearing chorus singing, but with supercharged drums and percussion and arrangements based around repeated riffs that reference everything from R&B to Afro-rock, contemporary classical minimalism to dance. On the other hand, the underlying repeated riffs seem to lock up the performers and you just want them to develop their compositions and/or free the 12 musicians from their tightly-arranged repetitive confinement.

Tracks like ‘Blabber’, drizzled with discordant strings and underlaid by marimbas, or ‘Beginning’, with its atonal jazz flickers, pleasingly, if fleetingly, show they have vision and the chops to set their music on fire, particularly with the added drive of their percussion players. And tunes like ‘So Many Th ings (To Feel Guilty About)’ share our current general malaise and show the punch of their lyrics: ‘for being needy and greedy, for criticising, for being a pushover, for being British.’ They’re OK… but they could be brilliant.