Adebisi Shank - This Is The Second Album…

A word of warning: there’s a certain amount of preparation that goes into listening to this record. You need to brace yourself before starting to pay attention to the second album from Adebisi Shank, because if you don’t, you’ll be left liable to having your mind blown. The score we’re giving this isn’t even based on whether it’s any good or not - we’ll get to that later - but on merit of sheer inventiveness, it deserves such an accolade, because we’d be hard pressed to think of anyone, off hand, who’s making music like this at the moment.

The Dublin (instru)mental trio seem to have a little naming convention thing going on as regards their releases; this of course comes after ‘This Is The EP…’ and ‘This Is The Album…’. It seems to be the only conventional thing about the group, however. They juggle time signatures and flip the bird to normal song structures, and put on quite the intense live show. Added to this, the ‘album’ was only 23 minutes long. Not your average band, then.

While the sound most people know Adebisi Shank for consists of drums, guitars and bass rattling along at a hundred miles an hour, the new record seems them expanding their horizons almost to bursting point. Hence, the ‘let’s-make-sure-this-album-sounds-like-nothing-anyone’s-ever-heard’ spirit of adventure that runs through it. It clocks in at around 40 minutes as well, so it’s pretty safe to say that there’s little, if any, room to breathe.

Opener ‘International Dreambeat’ is an Eastern-influenced kick in the face that begins with stabbing synths before bursting into life with a riff that bears no relation whatsoever to anything on the debut. The song is, whisper it, bright and cheerful. They’ve toned down the instrument-abusing ferocity that characterised much of their songbook up to this point, but have lost none of their intesnity - something that becomes quite clear by the time the blistering four-minute introduction to Adebisi Shank MK II has finished.

To say they’ve left their old sound behind entirely would be just plain wrong, though: ‘Genki Shank’ features a driving bass line that wouldn’t sound out of place in an Iron Maiden song. There are some vocoders as well; they showed up in a few spots on the debut, most notably used to brilliant effect on ‘You Me’. Then there are some spiralling, harmonised guitars, and to top it all off, a crushing riff enters late on to close the song in style.

‘Micromachines’, meanwhile, displays the band’s new-found talents for writing poppy melodies. Indeed, there are a number of times here when the indication is that, if the right moves were made, this album could cross over and gain wider exposure. ‘Bones’ is a prime example of this, at times strangely reminiscent of Vampire Weekend, driven by drumming that is by turns militaristic and tribal, and some excellent guitar work.

On that note, the swaggering riff that defines ‘Frunk’ is also impressive. The song itself is quite possibly the mathiest one the band have written to date, a fabulous display of technical ability (there are quite a number of polyrhythms going on, for instance) that is simultaneously very accessible. From there, we go straight into ‘Europa’. This time, the drumming is frantic, with the rest of the band going all-out to match it. The song builds to a wonderfully euphoric climax, containing what is most likely the best melody on the entire record, as well as the ghostly, unrecognisable vocals (!) of one Conor J. O’Brien, a.k.a. Villagers.

‘Century City’ closes proceedings brilliantly. As they do so often on their second record, the band keep the song firmly rooted in melody to stop things from becoming too bewildering. The swirling synth coda that finishes the song is something that shows that the band are positively brimming with ideas. They have reinvented themselves, to say the absolute least of it, and we’re not going to start thinking about what the third album of a band called Adebisi Shank will sound like, because, on the evidence of this, it would be futile. Don’t you just love surprises?