Well, of course Walk in the Park is a cool and delicious sonic beast. How could it not be? After all, it has Harry Stafford steering its swaggering, scratchy and strutting sonic ship, a man adept at churning out Waitsian gutter balladry and Cave inspired apocalyptic blues like there is, as Cave himself would have us believe, no tomorrow. Add to that Vince Hunt of A Witness and Blue Orchids fame and Rob Haynes who has also percussed, sticked and beaten for the likes of The Membranes and more latterly Goldblade, not to mention a collective, thirty-year back story, and you can see that they have come exceedingly well-equipped for the task at hand.
The task at hand, in this case, is their eighth album, Swamp Street Soul but before you get a bite at that, Walk In The Park is here to whet your appetite. It is sort of angular and post-punk, raw yet reserved, running along at a moderate pace allowing its spartan structures and strange soulfulness – its air and graces – to be fully appreciated.
It lilts rather than grooves, its main riff sort of spirals around, above and beyond, rather than goes for the jugular, it ambles rather than attacks, yet all of that makes it somehow more creatively potent, more sonically poignant, stand out more purposefully than anything else being released in the, oft identikit, alt-rock world today.
Less is more. Weird is wonderful. Genres are a thing of the past. Expectations are there to be thwarted. (Other cliches are available on request… not that there is anything remotely cliched about Inca Babies)
If you buy one single this week, get Walk in The Park. If you can afford two, buy it twice.
[…] Swamp Street Soul, the bands’ first album in 7 years and along with the previous single Walk In The Park indicates one hell of an album is on its way in a week or so’s […]