Cardinal Fuzz (Europe) / Man Hand (North America)
Haven’t heard from these guys in a while, then suddenly this pops onto the 2020 radar in ultra-limited quantities. It’s been an age, the last official Sunburned Hand Of The Man release must have been the one on Ecstatic Peace back in 2010, but as always they’ve been peppering the intervening years with a steady flow of hard-to-get-your-hands-on CDrs and cassette goodness.
Glad to see them back though, with founders John Moloney and Rob Thomas joined by a slimmed-down collective of Jeremy Pisani, Ron Schneiderman and Gary War. Fondly remember them plying the goods at Sycamores Club in Bristol (now sadly demolished ) as a nine-strong guitar entity circling a fed-back megaphone epicentre. That was serious noise-love slipping shamanic, but this newbie channels the Sunburned groove into less frazzled territory.
I’d say it’s the most commercially comfortable they’ve ever been, the bleed of Complexion and Fire Escape distilled into a tight rhythmic spread, Jaybird’s song-forms spring boarding into a cleaner, sleek-lined experience here on Headless. A kiss of summer in the contouring for sure, with “The Great Hope” scooping a lovely synergy between all involved, Amon Düül II-like duals snaking the alabaster, spear-fished in weaving synth. Zig-zags that in the past would have un-ravelled into a sprawling stream of consciousness-type sharazz (Magnetic Drugs and Live In Shit spring to mind), but here is focused into a danceable rub of kinetics that your hips just want to follow. “Coffee & Cheese” adds in a heavy riffery vibe that fills out in cosmic cobwebs and smearing glints, with noddling frets that should have been given a longer leash. A slight disappointment is that “Unsustainable” twilights too soon, bubbles Barbarella-like in stretchy sustain, LFO lines and oily jigsaws, stuck together with the gentle clattering of a shopping trolley.A relaxed vibe that “Agitation Cycle” spikes with some lightly woven motorik meat in a Camera-esque couture, cable-tied to a swirling sweetness and shuffling scutter lightly pin-pricked in cute Stockhausen satellites. Great to see the band grabbing a bit of kraut limelight (I’m secretly hoping for a whole album’s worth sometime soon) before getting all country-tinged for “The Most Relevant” as this reverbing percussive sinks below a slippery double-edged fret.
Then just when you’re thinking this could do with some vocals, those time-travelling boys read your mind completely with the album’s finale. “Framework” breaks the instrumental verve of the record to dish out some old-school weirdness, and has Moloney pickling the star-dusted drift and hammocking melody with some lovely psilocybin patter. That tingling whiff of Serge Gainsbourg‘s Histoire De Melody Nelson corner-creeping the mind in a lush re-appropriation of the ’70s, something that’s got me really looking forward to seeing how they’re going to carve it up in a live context later in the year.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
