Music

It’s called ‘punk jazz’ and it has a long and noble history. Think the MC5 doing Sun Ra covers; think The Stooges wigging out on ‘Fun House’; think the manic tribal rock of Pigbag; the free-jazz dabblings of Sonic Youth or Yo La Tengo. Jazz musicians have occasionally made incursions in the opposite direction but they are notoriously bad at underplaying; one recalls an exasperated Miles Davis telling John McLaughlin to ‘play the guitar like you don’t know how to play the guitar’.

Acoustic Ladyland know exactly what Miles meant. They are, effectively, four highbrow jazz musicians, led by saxophonist Pete Wareham, slumming it on the punk circuit. The key thing is that they are brilliant at playing dumb. Last year’s breakthrough album, ‘Last Chance Disco’, was a thrilling take on thrash metal – all howling sax solos and 100mph drum assaults – which earned them a major label deal with V2. With ‘Skinny Grin’ the emphasis is on simple, accessible themes – the kind that jazz musicians have largely forgotten how to write – which are slowly mutilated on each track, backed by Tom Cawley’s Morse code keyboard solos, Tom Herbert’s brutal, bleeding-fingered basslines, Seb Rochford’s thunderously funky drums and Paul Epworth’s razor-sharp production.

‘Road of Bones’ is a jaunty Brechtian ballad that mutates into sludgecore thrash; the pulsating ‘Salt Water’ (remixed by Scott Walker) features a crazed, overblown sax solo from James Chance; ‘New Me’ and the title track are thrash-metal classics that veer between the terrifying and the hilarious. Seven out of the 13 tracks here are vocal-led; Pete Wareham and Alice Grant snarl deadpan, amusingly bleak, London-accented lyrics co-written by Wareham’s wife Maxine (‘If you gave me a dog it would bite me/if you planted a rose it would die’, declaims Grant on ‘Paris’).

It may well fall between two stools: too clever for Kerrang!, too stupid for Jazzwise. But that’s half the fun. The rest of us should just enjoy the infectious energy of this remarkable album.