Sloth Racket
A Glorious Monster
(Luminous)

THE SOUNDSCAPE of baritone saxophonist Cath Roberts was born out of her unified love of free improvisation and the heavy riffs from rock music, particularly metal and punk.

They feature powerfully on A Glorious Monster by Sloth Racket, a collective of northern free troubadours and Roberts’s “favourite improvisers,” including alto saxophonist Sam Andreae, bassist Seth Bennett and bothers Anton and Johnny Hunter on guitar and drums. Roberts writes scores combining musical notation with graphics and text, while giving the group almost total control over how the music eventually sounds.

The album has a rare and beautiful hand-printed fish-like sleeve design and perhaps it’s the inspiration behind opening track Animal Uprising. The two-saxophone riffs foment the insurgency before Andreae’s alto leaps forward with Bennett’s bass pulsating and dancing behind him. There are times when the quintet sounds like a much larger band and the saxophone duo have the power of a whole saxophone section.

The title tune follows, provoked by Johnny Hunter’s febrile and crackling percussion, with his brother’s whining guitar strings prefacing the entry of Roberts’s baritone, which sets up a palaver with Andreae’s keening alto before the onset of another menacing riff and a languorous, worrisome ending.

Bennett’s bass is the heartbeat of The Gazer, with the two horns wrapped in intense colloquy. At the end, a tender melody breaks out of Andreae’s horn, like a summation, an expression of truth after so much sonic discourse.

Two of Roberts’s current inspirations are fellow free baritonists Alan Wilkinson and Mats Gustafsson and while her horn sound is less belligerent than both these virtuosi, you can hear echoes of their mastery in the final track Octopus.

It begins with some of her guffawing phrases, accompanied by Anton Hunter’s clanking and spitting guitar, while Andreae’s alto provokes more horn conversation. Bennett’s ubiquitous bass delves beneath it all, uncovering and digging out fresh expanses of sonic earth and Johnny Hunter’s rattling drums spring the band forward, leading into another almost familiar riff to conclude.

The album comes in at just under 45 minutes but it seems much shorter. The music is so intense and unified, with each musician as much a listener to their bandmates as performer.

Roberts asserts that she is not a bandleader and that the music of Sloth Racket is the living contrary of hierarchy. It has “the collectivism of free improvisation but with compositions,” thus creating an amalgam of two vital aspects of jazz.

And there is also something vital and real about its sound, drawn from the air and streets of northern England.