In a month when Jarvis Cocker released an album of such great beauty and style. When Stephin Merritt released 316,456 songs out of which 29,459 are really bloody good. When Aimee Mann released another great Aimee Mann album. When The Jesus And Mary Chain released a comeback that was in all honesty as good as it could ever be. When Johnny Flynn released his best album since A Larum.
In a month like that... best new thing I heard was an album of Scandinavian free jazz released in January.
Angles 9 are the sort of band you discover by chance, by way of some random, left-field list on which a good 90% of featured artists are pure nonsense. In fact, I was fully expecting to write them off twenty seconds into their second album (Injuries, their first, was released in 2014), but then all of a sudden it started to make perfect sense.
Disappeared Behind The Sun is free jazz with lots of conviction and little-to-no subtlety. Most of the songs are born out of chaos. Then a rhythm is formed. Then you hear a perfectly realised groove of such intensity that any free musical expression added to it seems to work. The result is a rush of blood to your head as well as to every cell of your body. The moments of calm and beauty are relative and all the more worthwhile for that.
There's nothing bland and wishy-washy about Angles 9. They seem to know their business and they do it well. Disappeared Behind The Sun is to be swallowed in one gulp. This album is what Ornette Coleman would do in a world where punk rock was the only music allowed.
* My only excuse (if I needed any) is that the vinyl version of this record was, indeed, released in March.
