Berries
How We Function
Xtra Mile Recordings
★★★★★

THE trio’s highly intelligent and committed lyrics are delivered with captivating vocal harmonies and their inventive melodies and rhythmic patterns rejuvenate and reinvigorate the rock idiom. All three are superb instrumentalists.

Four years in the making, the album addresses mental health issues.

“It is about recognising the dark times and how you get over that,” they intimate adding with unexpected sincerity: “We’ve got over a lot of mental health struggles … [and] wanted to have an empowering vibe to it as well … and we can talk more about this stuff.”

The pulsating and punchy Haze epitomises all these qualities: “Chasing forever / materialistic endeavour / how has it lasted so long?” is anchored with a magnificent riff.

We Are Machines / “It’s how we function / Flesh brings the protest / But not the most interest” reflective in tone has a delicate energy that sweeps you along.

Remakable achievement.
 

Pet Needs
Primetime Entertainment
Xtra Mile Recordings
★★★★★

CAPS off to this Colchester punk quartet on their second album. Their musical direction and ideological identity remain intact and such integrity wins loyalty of fans at home and abroad.

“We want to keep that DIY ethic,” says Johnny Marriott. They remain a humble lot but not deaf or blind to what goes around them in the lives of others: “But why should I try when the world outside is killing us all? / Why should I try?” Marriott hollers in Tried And Failed but there is room for humour in The Roof: “Let’s ignore the truth / Like none of this is problematic.”

The anthemic, exhilarating punk vigour is sustained spectacularly throughout. The Argument, Spirals, Lost Again are breathtakingly delivered by musicians at the top of their game.

Still, space was found for violin and piano embroidery in the magnificently epic title track Primetime Entertainment. Highly recommended.

Motihari Brigade
Algorithm & Blues
Creative Destruction Records
★★★★★

Motihari, India, is where the band’s patron saint, George Orwell was born — but also a place where Mahatma Gandhi initiated the Satyagraha liberation movement and Ramesh Chandra Jha poet and freedom fighter came from.

What is TV if not an Orwellian “daily dose of algorithmic groupthink carefully designed to entertain, distract, placate, indoctrinate, enforce, ridicule, destroy, and then disappear,” hence the blues of the title.

The Brigade wear, refreshingly, their left political hearts on their sleeves: “Bailing out the the banks / shared sacrifice / Concentrate the wealth / Spread out the price,” they sing in the rudimentary Revolutionary Rock and later reprise, fittingly, Street Fighting Man.

Their lure comes from employing conventional rock formulas and keeping the arrangements elemental. The emphasis on melody is their strength such as Minefields And Downfalls with a beautiful sax solo, or the love ballad Morningstar. Keep it up comrades!