Easily the most adventurous and audacious outfit on today’s UK jazz scene, Led Bib has built a reputation over the course of seven albums for expansive improvisations and treks into genre-defying music of throbbing intensity. All Music Guide called their singular brand of jazz “explosive enough to blow up your speakers” while The Wire weighed in with: “This is the sound of a band having fun…like a hot chainsaw through butter.” For their RareNoise debut, the five-piece group from London continues pushing the envelope on Umbrella Weather.
Fueled by the muscular drumming of ringleader Mark Holub and the intense fuzz bass lines of Liran Donin, further tweaked by atmospheric washes and crunchy keyboard action from Toby McLaren and sparked by the pungent twin alto saxes of Peter Grogan and Chris Williams, Led Bib stakes out a unique spot in the musical terrain that falls somewhere between the realms of John Zorn, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy, all imbued with a very strong jazz-rock sensitivity.
From the odd-metered opener “Lobster Terror” to their raucous textures on “Too Many Cooks,” from the fuzz-inflected mayhem of “Skeleton Key to the City” to the turbulent “At The Shopping Centre,” the expansive 5-minute ambient jam on “Insect Invasion” and the surprisingly lyrical waltz-time closer “Goodbye,” this renegade outfit never fails to inject an element of surprise into each potent track. And while certain pieces like “Ceasefire”, “The Boot” or the groove-heavy “Women’s Power” may seem like well-crafted and tightly executed compositions,