Archie Bronson Outfit - Derdang Derdang

The best groups, one imagines - from The Beatles in Help to The Magic Band making Trout Mask Replica - live and create together in romantic squalor. If that's so, chez Bronson, one imagines, would be either a bottle-and-paperback-strewn penthouse occupied by spreadeagled souls for whom every morning follows a particularly intense yesternight - somewhere youd always awaken with your tongue tasting like a watch strap or else a rudimentary shack in a gnarly shanty town with a murder of crows in the yard, a zinc hip-bath and a woodpile. Thats what Ive been picturing with the Outfit on the hi-fi, anyway. In fact, as it turns out, that wasnt too far off the mark. We came back from a European tour and we had nothing to do, so started writing this album and we did it all in Dorians bedroom and we went a bit nuts, says singer Sam Windett, from just north of a fulsome beard. We went music crazy for a while. Wed get up, have a coffee and stumble straight into the room and start playing. We played for days and days and that turned into weeks and weeks. Pausing briefly for some sunlight, they decamped to the basement of an old farmhouse. After yet more jamming, writing and refining they had 50 mini-discs of music for consideration for their second album. Honing the songs down was an arduous process, but when it was done they flew to Nashville, Tennessee to record them with producer Jacquire King (Tom Waits, Kings Of Leon). And the result is a compact marvel of high-strung energy and kick-bollock ramshackling theyre, quite sensibly, calling Derdang Derdang. Theres an intensity and urgency to Sams singing that might recall Pere Ubu for some, an angularity to the boys riffing which has echoes of The Monks in its unhinged thrust and bluesy roots. Theyd steeped themselves in soul music and Scandinavian psych, Faust, Son House and The Gun Club, but the long gestation and careful editing means that, chiefly, The ABO on Derdang Derdang sound like themselves and thats a) hard to do and b) a splendid thing now theyve learnt how to lay back, get good and greasy and cut a groove like a demented termite.

Be the first to review this record. Best reviewer each month gets £10 off their next order!