Spinifex: Beats The Plague
ByRecorded in June of 2021, Beats The Plague is the band's seventh release. It follows Soufifex (TryTone, 2019) where the band looked East for inspiration from Sufi music. Those influences find their way here, but the themes also expand into heavy metal, punk, jazz, Indian and, like COVID, world circling music. The core of the band, guitarist Jasper Stadhouders (Cactus Truck, Made To Break), bassist Goncalo Almeida (Rodrigo Amado, Lama), drummer Philipp Moser, and alto saxophonist Tobias Klein completed the sextet a few years back with trumpeter Bart Maris and tenor saxophonist John Dikeman.
Here, as with the band's last few discs, the composing and musicianship is hitting on all cylinders. Beats The Plague opens with a heavy three-horn assault over some scripted mayhem underneaththe word scripted used because the mayhem is clearly choreographed. Heavy bass lines give way to three-way horn talk. Even the punk rock 49 seconds of "Fuck The Pest" is crisp, as is "Zoowiezoo." Both performances evoke John Zorn's Naked City music. "Four20" mimics the insides of a clock with its springs and gears driving the affair before the components disassemble into some crafty solos. Stadhouders' deconstructed guitar leads the sextet into the track's unwinding. Next up, more punk rock with the minute-long "Sex & Pestilence" before the heavy metal churn of "Sesler6" and Dikeman's saxophone assault which sounds like a full-on antibody attack on the virus.
Track Listing
Nillepez; The Voice Of Dust And Trash; Fuck The Pest; Bageshri; Zoowiezoo; Four20; Sex & Pestilence; Sesler6; I’ll Call You In A Hundred Meters.
Personnel
Tobias Klein: saxophone; Bart Maris: trumpet; John Dikeman: saxophone; Jasper Stadhouders: guitar; Gonçalo Almeida: bass, acoustic; Philipp Moser: drums.
Album information
Title: Beats The Plague | Year Released: 2021 | Record Label: TryTone