bonfire nights

We’d like to take credit in saying we deliberately delayed featuring this one by Bonfire Nights until tonight’s fireworks night. Truth is a crueller mistress don’t you find, we haplessly overlooked it in the mounting record hill. Such hapless honesty I’d like to think is not a given thing on your usual review site. Still such oversights aside, one thing that is certain is that it doesn’t diminish or detract from the darkening brooding beauty emitting from the grooves of this, their debut full length ‘Entopica Phenomica’. Strictly limited to just 300 hand numbered wax copies, this babe strays and wanders the shadowy hinterlands of psychedelia, yet rather than your obvious and expected forays into flowery tropes and chiming cascades, these dudes burn with a hollowing alchemy that fuses both desire and a mercurial melodic astuteness to craft emotion fracturing epics that bruise, blister and blossom with sly seduction, their sound is grizzled in a dead heading dark glamour that swings, swoons and struts with a pathological prowling air of classicism. Nine tracks lurk within these grooves, not a duff one among them, each pushing the ante evermore in the ascendancy and each revealing an additional facet of the collective Bonfire Nights persona. The set features the fledging singles heralds ‘ego death’ and ‘low’ both featured too much gushing praise here, the former described once upon a time around here as a flat lining slab of austere neo psych Dadaism’, which in hindsight revisiting our previous recollections we weren’t that far off the mark for this babe is lassoed upon a  hypnotically fried framing that’s aligned the Wire’s nagging ‘I am the fly’ albeit as though observed through the kaleidoscopic viewfinder of the Walking Seeds’ ‘bad orb….’. ‘low’ on the other hand is the sound of ghost riders on the distant horizon, their spectral dust ravaged gospel opines smoked and rumbling to a familiar tongue occasioned by both brian Jonestown massacre and the black angels. Elsewhere there’s the shimmertoning reverb rattling voodoo blues of ‘Bo Diddley did me’ sparring to a grooving much recalling the Gun Club while blessed with a snaking like prowling throb ‘going around’ jettisons off into momentary dream drifted cosmic drone terrains occasionally returning to touch base with a subtle strut ravaged sassy glam teased toning trailing in its wake, one for the Hookworms / the Lucid Dream heads among you I’m guessing. The coolly coalesced cosmedelic ‘mesmer isles’ had us momentarily recalling the danse society graced as it is in chill waving frosted overtures and a bleakening hollowness while the Meek-esque instrumental ‘signal failure’ is a delightfully love noted distress call emitting its final thoughts from an abandoned lunar outpost. All said, arms pushed up the back and forced to choose the best moments, in truth you can’t put a rizla paper between them, but there’s two that stand out – ‘easy touch’ just keeps returning back over and over again, another of the stray pre-album singles, this one seductively moored upon a sensual purr that ripples with soft tension and a desire laden kiss which all said had us of an urge to go scouting through our record collection for our prized White Rose movement platters. Equally apt at hugging the earlobes the punch you out cold smoulder toning pop grandeur of ‘hearts to blame’ with its sighing forlorn burn sits somewhere located glowering and licking it wounds on a sonic spectrum alongside Toy’s more crushing moments. Essential as if you hadn’t already guessed.