Spinifex: Beats The Plague

Finally, a band of brothers retaliates against the coronavirus. The scientists and the anti-vax antipodes have had their day. Time for some partisan guerrilla action. Okay, maybe just a pipe dream, but these nine tracks by the Amsterdam based Spinifex deliver a much needed counterattack to this diabolical infective agent.

Recorded 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 underneath—the 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.