RINGLEADER'S REVOLT

Debut album from this rather unstable group, where Brian Carpenter is the leader and main songwriter. This mainly instrumental music (there are spoken announcements and narratives and the odd sung passage) blends some American folk music (like Appalachian valleys festive folk and country) and the ever-present Klezmer/gypsy folkloric musics that pervade in circus circles. S the name of the band and its usual album artworks indicates Carpenter's musical world is nearly monomaniacal, where the odd weird instrument intervenes, like the big loud electric guitar, the singing saw, an embarrassing tuba or a slide trumpet?

The album is your typical circus-derived music (as the artwork rightly indicates), with tons of horn instruments, including the always/often ridiculous tuba and a personal peeve of mine: an accordion. The album is divided in two acts, but you'd be hard-pressed to know which would come first if I was to shuffle them around. Often repetitive in its ideas, sometimes nearing grotesque moods, BC's music demands a certain skill from its actors and a definitive and patient attention span from its audience, if the latter is not too demanding and can forget the usual clichés of this festive and unnerving form of formulaic folkloric music. This having been written, there are some excellent passages, but never anything close to breaking grounds outside the circus ring or at least its gates, but the album is long and you'll quickly tire of being bombarded with the same type of music, despite the different twist and tricks that appear regularly throughout the album.

The following albums will not be fundamentally different (although less improvised and dissonant), developing mostly the same Manouche/Klezmer circus-type of music, which of course implies impressive musicianship, but given the hundreds of album over-crowding that genre, BC's albums are anything but fundamental, original or essential. Unless a real addict off this kind of music, this won't be for you , unless you haven't got Miriodor, Ensemble Nimbus, Debile Menthol, Cro Magnon and many more, all of which are superior than Beat Circus, which threads a very beaten and flogged-over path.