Susurrus Station - 1,2 Unbuckle the Blue

Swedish-American avant-gardists Susurrus Station's second LP starts strongly with the darkly burlesque rumble of Top-Down Town, a cacophony of ominous sax and horn screeches held together by a military snare and two-step bass. The obvious influence is Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, except that Susurrus Station's lyrics veer more towards fragmentary abstraction than Cave's winding narratives. Lines like 'Out on the frontier, growing tired of the human form / The tensions are lacklustre in the saltpetre storm' walk a tightrope between the obliquely poetic and the plain pretentious. The self-conscious 'out-there'-ness pervades the music too, from the scratchy strings and tempo shifts of Literal Drift to the syncopated, atonal guitar of Nettles' Nest. Although the effect is often hair-raising it's easy to be turned off by singer J. Breeden's muffled delivery of the type of scribblings that would make Will Self proud. A case of the tortured genius, methinks. [Nick Mitchell]