The Smoking Rolo Sideshow - Mucho Mojo Baby

With a fluctuating array of contributors and an eclectic melting-pot approach to songwriting, The Smoking Rolo Sideshow appear to be vying for the in-demand tag of ‘Broken Social Scene of Northumberland’. Musically things sound closer to Josh Homme’s Desert Sessions: see The Devil’s Best Tune’s beefy slab of stoner rock, which lives up to its Tenacious D-esque title with guitar solos galore. Or perhaps a gothic Dinosaur Jr, such as on the sleazy Snake Oil Charm. Or maybe the Coral crossed with The Fucking Champs (on A Waltz In Clown Shoes’ carnivalesque mix of playful eclecticism and six-string virtuosity). With so many competing influences, Mucho Mojo Baby understandably suffers from incoherence at times, and at 65 minutes, it’s a shade too mucho to digest comfortably. But as a consistently interesting rejection of the one-note mediocrity that scuppers so many emerging bands, they deserve to graduate from sideshow to main attraction. [Chris Buckle]