New Release September 2020: WorldService Project present Hiding In Plain Sight
We’ve always been here, we’ve always been trying to promote a message of compassion and togetherness. We’ve always been eager to celebrate our differences but also to highlight the disproportionality that is only increasing in the world. Maybe that message has been hidden, so now we’re planting our flag in the ground.
Dave Morecroft
Over the course of its previous four albums, UK punk-jazz outfit WorldService Project carried its keen-edged, window-rattling irreverence across the globe, casting an eviscerating glance inward while spreading its message of chaotic compassion to the scattered remnants of the former British Empire and beyond. With the release of the gleefully anarchic Hiding In Plain Sight, the band’s fifth album and third for RareNoise Records, keyboardist-vocalist Dave Morecroft takes on his native land from an outsider’s perspective for the first time, having decamped for Rome in his own personal Brexit.
Not that the romance of the Eternal City has dulled Morecroft’s incisively funky edge, however. Hiding In Plain Sight combusts with the band’s trademark blend of free-jazz pandemonium, pulse-quickening grooves, daggers-drawn sardonicism and audacious punk abandon. The album perfectly channels the meltdown of modern civilisation into a cathartic dance party on the far edges of the lunatic fringe, with an open-armed embrace of all comers save the power-hungry few that led us into this mess in the first place.
For this latest incarnation of WorldService Project, Morecroft assembled a streamlined group that adeptly navigates the composer’s perilous straits between taut avant-funk discipline and feral improvisatory blowouts. Bassist and vocalist Arthur O’Hara has been a mainstay of the band since 2015, though the remainder is an alchemical admixture of newcomers: saxophonist Ben Powling, drummer/percussionist Luke Reddin-Williams and, on four of the album’s nine tracks, trombonist Kieran McLeod.
Together they summon a sound that walks the tightrope between precision avant-funk and free-form exploration, bridging eras between UK punk-jazz breakouts of the 00s (Acoustic Ladyland, the F-IRE Collective) and the modern psych-jazz grooves of The Comet Is Coming and Sons of Kemet.
Release Date : September 25th, 2020
Dave Morecroft – Keyboards / Vocals
Ben Powling – Saxophones
Arthur O’Hara – Bass / Vocals
Luke Reddin-Williams – Drums / Percussion
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Kieran McLeod – Trombone (tracks 2,6,8,9)
Hiding In Plain Sight
- Deeper
- Pomped-Up Freddie
- Where Am I?
- Sex, Lies, Lies and Lies
- The Kipper And The Pork Pie
- The Higgly Giggly Wiggly Woo
- Vendetta
- Europhiles
- Onward
All Music, lyrics and text written by Dave Morecroft
Arranged by Dave Morecroft, Liran Donin and WorldService Project
Published by RareNoisePublishing (PRS)
Recorded at Greenmount Studios, Leeds, March 2020, by Rob Slater an Liran Donin
Produced by Liran Donin and Dave Morecroft
Mixed and Mastered by Moshik Kop at NXNE Studios, Liran Donin and Dave Morecroft
Translation by Isabella Raffa
Artwork by Tom Jackson
Executive Producer for RareNoiseRecords : Giacomo Bruzzo
© + ℗ RareNoiseRecords 2020
Cat. No.: RNR121 (CD) / RNR121LP (VINYL)
