The Balky Mule
Artist: The Balky Mule
Album: The Length of the Rail
Label: Fatcat
I honestly don't recall ever hearing Crescent - one of the many bands Sam Jones was a part of in the fecund Bristol scene that spawned many monsters including Flying Saucer Attack, The Third Eye Foundation and Movietone. But on hearing this record the sound of that scene is instantly recognisable: the damp monochrome of Movietone's Blossom Filled Streets, the clatter and skank of the some of the Third Eye Foundation's weirder corners. Where the Balky Mule differs though is the way the songs at the heart of these sketches shine through. Jones has now relocated to Melbourne and this is kind of apt as it brings Jones closer to what seems to me the real influence on this - the hermetic genius of Kiwi Alistair Galbraith (I think Galbraith might even have recorded with Flying Saucer Attack in the past). There is the same surge of ideas and experimentation, the same sense that you're listening through a screen of some indefinable material. Over the course of an album, what sounds like at times amateur noodling and self-indulgence becomes like stepping into an altered dimension, etherised on a table...
Download: The Balky Mule - Wireless
Download: Alistair Galbraith - Ember