O Rang - Spoor

By the second album, I'd lost it. Even by the first album, Herd Of Instinct I was starting to lose it but Spoor seemed a genuine burst of skew-eyed otherness, in all the right ways. Whatever got tapped during the making of this, whatever barks and roots got steeped (perhaps just Gold Blend and sleep-deprivation), Spoor seems to just run with it; the music is as channelled as any I know and yet it doesn't spin off into 'my dad's bigger than your dad' (clue: he'll fucking die earlier) noodling, not even when the people involved are clearly excellent musicians, something that generally sends me swimming off in the other direction.

O Rang seemed to open something up and they seemed to have done it more or less accidentally. By the first album, the songs seemed more designed to impress and by the second album I'd completely lost the thread, as if somehow they'd recognised what they were doing and tried too hard to capture it (I can remember trying to capture the slow slurred Hamburger Lady TG sound in my bedroom when I was still at school and you could never get it right because it wasn't right).

Spoor pooled resources that it couldn't own. It sounded like everyone involved was making music during accute acclimatisation; it's music starved of oxygen or rather how music might sound when you're starved of oxygen and waiting to die. It's the music played secretly as Argentina are losing 6-1 to Bolivia. Jungle music up high. Dream-machine music.

Excellent Review of Herd Of Instinct here.