Bilge Pump - Rupert the Sky

Bilge Pump want to take an angle grinder to traditional guitar-based rock music, and at points on this album it seems that’s exactly what they've achieved. Over ten years since forming this is only the second LP from this Leeds outfit and it's an album that takes pride in its weirdness and its atonal jazz-punk melodies, if such a term can be used here. Improved production hasn’t smoothed these rough edges, instead it gives clarity to the fat and bulbous bass, and allows the drums to impose some order on the chaos. Most of the songs here have something that should appeal to anybody willing to give it a chance. A Storm In A Teardrop, for example, has an almost sing-a-long chorus, in a leery, drug-addled kind of way. What this all adds up to is a disturbing and difficult album which, given time, may well bear some more digestible fruit.