morviscous

Morviscous

Free Pop

Review by Stewart Lee

Sunday Times



Unusually for a youthful new band, Morviscous cite the forgotten 1970s art-rockers Henry Cow and This Heat as influences. It makes little sense, careerwise, to enter the theoretical prepunk cul-de-sac these admirably English experimentalists made their own, but it's thrilling to see people reappraise an approach that even its original exponents abandoned. The instrumentals here are as imaginatively unpredictable as a good free-jazz session, yet have been composed and structured with the rigour you'd expect from an overambitious 1970s prog-rock band. A stuttering sax snakes over pleasingly unresolved guitar chords on a debut album to file alongside Battles and Acoustic Ladyland in your prog-jazz section.