From the moment I heard ‘Super Sanity’ (see June’s review) I was hooked. This one song shows the super-charged power and exhilarating frenetic fun of Bristol’s Ogives Big Band. But with Boisterous Love we now have a whole album crackling with six volcanic tracks to dive into. Record shops would need to create the category label ‘Hardcore-Progressive-Funk-Metal-Jazz-PLAY LOUD’ to describe their sound. Even the cover to the album looks loud; an eye-covered silver contraption that looks like either the stargate in Contact or a millionaire’s beartrap being propelled by soundwaves into a gas giant. Guitarist Ben Harris describes their sound, “In a lot of ways, the music could be described as complex or technical, but we try to present it in a way that isn’t overly precise or clinical. It’s very much based on push and pull, so that the human element and feel is emphasized.”
The Ogives can pummel your senses with layered chords that are not straight 1st, 3rd, and 5th but cram in as many bonus notes as the song can sustain. On ‘Chronic Thuggery’ there are passages of sonic roadworks tempered with sections of otherworldly calm and then back to the jackhammers again. ‘Brandishment’ has an opening riff presents as the start of a jazz odyssey but then ‘Hurricane Ogives’ hits land and chords, glissando riffs, and laser strikes of harmonics battle it out with fleet footed bursts of bass and drums. By the end it feels like a power station on melt down.
‘Annihilation’ gives a sense of camera travelling over a post-apocalyptic landscape taking in the scale of destruction and ends with the Ogives seemingly channelling Richard Strauss’s ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ (used in 2001: A Space Odyssey). Closing the album is ‘Absolute Unit’ a collapsing star of a track that is elastic in its use of a super-heated core that gives way in the middle of the song to a calm drift through space. I also think the star of this track is that most metal of instruments, the trumpet. It’s used to beautiful effect in the quiet mid-section but then crescendos near the end with mariachi-like force.
Ogives Big Band sit in the centre of a Venn diagram that has Rush on one side and Motörhead on the other. Instead of being clinically mathematical their deliberately loose approach to playing complex riffs, polyrhythms and switching speeds brings a humanity to their music. They are a mosh pit at a jazz festival and ‘Super Sanity’ should replace the pomp and pomposity of ‘Rule Britannia’ and be played every morning on all radio stations to wake the nation up. Listening to Boisterous Love doesn’t just blow away the cobwebs it takes a flamethrower to them. The Ogives call themselves a big band, but they deserve to be huge.
Boisterous Love is out now on Stolen Body Records.
Ogives Big Band live:
23rd July – Edinburgh, Sneaky Pete’s
24th July – Glasgow, BLOC+
25th July – Manchester, The Deaf Institute
26th July – Bristol, Rough Trade
27th July – Nottingham, The Tap and Tumbler
31th July – London, The Black Heart
1st August – Cardiff, The Moon
2nd August – Plymouth, The Junction
Ogives Big Band socials: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
Review by Paul F Cook
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