The Trunk 10/9/2017: From the Vaults - Liquid of Choice

From the Vaults is an irregular series which takes a second look at some of BEM's older releases, those you may have missed if you're relatively new to the label. For this inaugural edition, we're going back to last October to revisit an album with what may well be the most confusing cover art we've ever seen: Liquid of Choice, by Bristolian instrumental quartet The Brackish.

We should start doing caption competitions.

The Brackish is composed of guitarists Luke Cawthra and Neil Smith, bassist Jon Short, and drummer Matthew Jones. Their first record was 2014's Big Guys, a varied, adventurous album that was extremely well-received, even finding some success outside progressive circles; Tom Colyer of Drunken Werewolf went as far as calling it "true musical genius", noting how effectively and seamlessly it blends influences from a huge number of different genres and styles. Indeed, Liquid of Choice continues this healthy tradition of stylistic mixing. Nobody's quite sure how to classify it - various websites have put it under "pop/rock", "krautrock", and "jazz-rock", and The Brackish themselves add psychedelic and metal to the laundry list in their official bio.

One might expect music like this to lack focus and drive and end up as a sort of homogeneous musical soup, but one would be sorely mistaken. What we have here is a record that can claim to draw equal influence from "Steve Reich, Sabbath, Can and Tortoise", as the band puts it, and continually make good on that claim over the course of slightly less than an hour.

The album starts out solidly psychedelic with the title track and closes on a similar note as 'Cactus Gulch and the Hellish Walk Home' winds down, but, in between, there's the faintly unsettling jazz-funk of 'Something Negative on the Dancefloor', the ominous crunch of 'Fun Factory', and the metal-inflected wall-of-sound guitars that dominate 'Physical Jerks'. Yet it's never quite clear where the transitions happen, exactly. The joins and seams are there, but you don't feel them.

I don't think I'm alone in this assessment, either. Québecois progressive podcast Profil praised "the perfection of every style and fluidity of the instruments" on the final track in particular, while Progradar mentioned that they "had no idea at all how... The Brackish have slipped through [their] radar". (That James R. Turner bloke seems like a pretty good writer! I wonder if he'll turn up later...)

All things considered, it's safe to say that The Brackish are a truly fascinating band and Liquid of Choice is an album well worth your time. You can pick up your copy from the BEM webstore right here.

I still don't know what that kid's doing there, though.

Status Update

This week, we're pleased to welcome James R. Turner (there he is!), who's taking his place alongside me as another PR mastermind for Bad Elephant Music.

The label is also now officially affiliated with the House of York. Sorry, Henry IV.

Other than that, it's business as usual at Elephant Towers; we're mostly preparing ourselves for the release of Whitewater's Universal Medium. It's less than two weeks away now, and still available to preorder here.

Review Roundup

My Tricksy Spirit's self-titled debut album continues to draw praise, with PROG Magazine's Kris Needs saying the band deserve "a bong of your time". And I didn't even know it was possible to measure time by pieces of drugs paraphernalia! The album is available right now here.

Also, this isn't strictly a review, but Mark Barton, former webmaster of losingtoday.com, really rates Schnauser! If that sounds like your cup of tea, you can grab a copy of Irritant here.