Review by Jason Guest
Release date: 2 June 2014
Four years in the making, London’s psychedelic prog rock perverts The Osiris Club have delivered their first full length, Blazing World. And taking bands as diverse as Voivod, King Crimson, Rush, and Goblin among many others as well as non-musical figures such as Alan Moore, Mike Mignola, George A. Romero, Hammer, Gerry Anderson, and HP Lovecraft, this cloak-and-mask-adorned quintet are a fascinating bunch. With inspiration from the 17th century sci-fi novel The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish – a fantasy about travelling through portals to a world inhabited by half-man, half-animal hybrids – the album plots an always-incredible and always-fascinating journey through jerking, jaunting, and jolly rhythms, mellifluous and meticulously mapped out melodies, and sinister, spacy, and strange textures and dynamics.
Where do you begin with an album like this? Okay. You could play a game of spot the influences, I suppose, but that’d be just a surface level approach to what is a much deeper piece of work and should be appreciated as such. This is a band that can play well, individually and collectively turning their hand to a host of styles from jazz though prog through psychedelia through rock and metal and into all that lays between and beyond those ‘orrible genre labels to create a wonderfully vibrant hybrid that is all the band’s own. And so when it comes to the songs, the writing is outstanding. Forget the predictably patterned and linear structures of your typical rock song, that’s far too simple for what The Osiris Club have to say. But the tracks are far from the pretentious meanderings through as many complex time-signature shifts, chord progressions and key changes as can be squeezed into 300 seconds of extravagantly nonsensical musical waffle that you’d expect from a band with a list of diverse influences and a penchant for adorning the regalia of a 17th century plague doctor.
There’s very little else that can be said about Blazing World other than it is magnificent. Well-written, well-produced, and well-played, an album of intelligence, this is simultaneously dark and light, mysterious and expansive, and one that can be indulged and explored time and again. Four years in the making and worth every second. Buy it.
9 out of 10
Read Jason’s interview with Chris Fullard (guiatr/synths) here
Track listing:
- That’s Not Like You
- Solid Glass
- Mystery Sells
- The Bells
- Blazing World
- Undoing Wrong
- Seize Decay
- Miles And Miles Away
