SHAMBLEMATHS

Prog bands are often challenging to categorise, though goodness knows we prog fans do our best to try anyway, devising all manner of subgenres to describe our favourites. (Our cousins in the metal and jazz fandoms know the feeling too.)

Then you get a group like Shamblemaths coming along and knocking aside all attempts to draw borders. On this debut album they start in early with this intense, zeuhl-like energy, all foreboding lyrical chants and martial rhythms, but they strike out from there and ultimately end up visiting sounds as disparate as jazz fusion, folk prog, and the more theatrical sort of symphonic prog (a la the most whimsical moments of Genesis or England).

Good luck to you if you try and catch them doing it, however - Ellingsen and Husum slip and slide between one musical style and another like a duo of musical chameleons, which saves their compositions from sounding like disjointed jumbles of snippets. They are also more than willing to settle down into a particular sound ands let it play out and develop, which is good - it avoids the disjointedness which can come from eclectic groups trying to stuff in too many ideas at once, and gives their ideas space to breathe.

On the whole, a confident and capable debut.