bomber jackets: kudos to the bomber jackets

Following on from The Lister, The Bomber Jackets' debut for Alter, Kudos To The Bomber Jackets has a restlessness that takes broader strokes. It finds and holds a register of meandering hope by setting the perverted detail of domestic minutiae against an acutely self-conscious melancholy that cynically daydreams its way into an awkward middle-ground between profundity and platitude. At times they give it a bit of a desaturated garage bump, other times there's the throb of marching mono-synth wave. "Deranged Sauce Mum" comes off as a chopped and screwed hardcore, though with Russell Walker's vocals, it's less gurning glee and more furrowed brow. There are very many disparate elements across Kudos To The Bomber Jackets that come to give the new album a kind of uneasy grace, which is perhaps the group's singular force, the unchaining of an ingenious familiarity that's dizzyingly bizarre and equally bleak. Lyrically and musically the album contains the traces of many surfaces, both interior and exterior. Its dream-like qualities are formed through a kind of musical frottage, always preserving the trace of the hand, arriving at its surreal heights through fidgety non-sequiturs of an aesthetically acerbic persuasion. In this way, it never quite replicates anything that you feel to be present in its parts.