The Witch and the Robot – On Safari
I seem to have jumped the gun when I made the rather bold statement that The Duckworth Lewis Method had released the best new album you would hear this year – back in August. Since then I have gone on to discover the sublime Circulus, who released their third album in June (reviews soon, promise) and now this cheeky little combo, The Witch and the Robot.
Set to be released on October 5th (2009), On Safari is their debut album.
Hailing from Ambleside in the Lake District, the band’s press release promises a blend of dark psychedelia, folk, shanties and spoken word – “proving that the darkest music often comes from the prettiest places” – and I’m happy to say they don’t disappoint. In fact any album actively promoting shanties, has to be a must-listen in my book.
On Safari pitches its tent firmly in the camp of the surreal, with tales of time travel, dead puppeteers, the sea, and seeking out the graves of giants nestled like a bag of spiders amidst other vaguely disturbing wierdness.
The first two tracks, ‘Giants’ Graves’ and ‘The Beatification of St Thomas Aquinas’, launch the proceedings in a robust, take-no-prisoners style before easing back for the gently lilting ‘Rapture of the Deep’, a song about finding oneness with the ocean as her opacity envelopes you mind, body and soul, en route to a watery grave!
And it’s this sense of the unsettling that lies behind the much of On Safari, with seemingly innocuous enough songs (though brilliantly executed) that when examined deeper reveal something a tad more dreadful lurking below the surface. It’s Brothers Grimm fairytales rewired by the Ramsey Campbell wing of The Mighty Boosh.
For instance, ‘The Puppeteer’ is pure Quay Bothers with its dead protagonist, without eyes, feet or a mouth, doomed to relate the tale of her demise through the child-repelling puppet show she hosts at a carnival. Elsewhere ‘No Flies on Me (Ballad of the Jam Head)’ is the tale of man whose job it is to draw the flies away from rich golfers by covering his head in jam, replete with the haunting chorus of “There must be something better than this”.
This realm of strangeness brings to mind Kevin Ayers wallowing at his darkest depths of uneasiness (think ‘The Confessions of Dr. Dream’ or ‘Song From the Bottom of a Well’), while tipping a jauntily angled trilby to fellow avant-gardists Gong, or even prog rockers Web.
On Safari is indeed a delight, fusing its different styles into one tempting whole. It’s pessimistic, pastoral, frantic, psychedelic in parts, and floating face down in a lake of lost desperation – the stuff of which nightmares are seeded.
The moral of this review – Never count your chickens in August before your psychedelic-folk-wierdness has hatched.
On Safari by The Witch and the Robot is released on Atic Records and available for pre-order on CD
The Witch and the Robot MySpace page
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