If you are reading this on the morning it’s being posted then forget your morning cup of coffee. Listening to ‘Super Sanity’ by the Bristol-based Ogives Big Band is going to launch you out of your post-sleep fug like pulling the chord on an ejector seat when you’re travelling at Mach One. The music is raw but tight with guttural vocals fired at you like angry wasps. The rhythm feels rooted but is wonderfully complex as it plays with bars of different lengths. The bass, when it’s not anchoring power chords with heavy gravity is almost jazz-like as it roams around the coruscating guitar. The guitar plays rock, paper, scissors with the song; sometimes stomping the earth with granite chords then at others flinging out lighter than air trills and using surgical strikes of glinting steel.
And what a video they have brought us to go with the thermite burn of the song. Bands without a Hollywood budget often rely on the well-worn trope of faux-live footage, but a low budget doesn’t have to mean low concept. The Ogives, with director Sam Wisternoff, have turned this into an asset and used shonky green screen to put together a series of witty and disturbing scenes. In no particular order you get the band on a volcano, in front of the pyramids, conducting a business meeting in front of the shrink-wrapped-bald-capped men, a floating-head-butterfly-singer, swirling psychedelic backgrounds and many more images that will burn themselves into your subconscious.
‘Super Sanity’ is a lorry load of high caffeine energy drinks, the kind that give you itchy teeth and a numb face, or like trying to outrun hot lava naked in a dream. It’s taken from the album Boisterous Love which is released on 3 July.
You can pre-order the album Boisterous Love from Stolen Body Records
Ogives Big Band socials: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Review by Paul F Cook
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