Archie
Bronson Outfit’s last record was my number 1 album of 2010, so
this had quite a bit to live up to.
While it never quite reaches the heights of Coconut, Wild Crush is
still a super album of highly inventive retro-rock. It opens with the rumbling and wah-wah heavy
‘Two Doves on a Lake’, which is a frankly magnificent way to begin anything (an
album, a day, a wedding, a heist, anything). 5 minutes of increasingly weird yet
repetitive bombardment. It’s great to
have them back. ‘Hunch Your Body, Love
Somebody’ takes the ‘weird’ thing to an all new level and won’t be for
everybody, while ‘In White Relief’ is a much more mainstream folk-tinged piece
(kinda like The Lumineers if they
were a bit high). The album highlight is
the storming single ‘We are Floating’, which is one of the best tracks of the
year, all spiky guitar riffs and 60s style.
What the Archie Bronson Outfit
always manage to do so well is to be both heavy and psychedelic at the same
time; these are simple and punchy riffs, but everything is always off-centre and
somehow ‘blurry’. They sound like they’ve
been living in the New Mexico desert for 20 years or something. But they’re actually from Bath. NB: this also wins best album cover art of
2014.
sample
track: We are Floating