Malachai - Return To The Ugly Side

What is it with Bristol? Whenever the Avon comes calling, you can guarantee the mood’s going to occupy those acres of space between shadowy and shady, and the music will stir up a creepy mix of dub and slow-mo funk. It’s land grabbed by Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky of course, that towering triumvirate of 90s gloom, but there’s no flicker of surprise at Bristolian duo Malachai muscling in with more unsettling warped blues. It’s a city’s calling card.

This lot have closer ties with the unholy trio than mere geography. Their 2009 debut ‘The Ugly Side Of Love’ came out on Invada, the imprint of Portishead driving force (if one measly album in a dozen years suggests the presence of a prime motivator) Geoff Barrow. It was a spidery, messy affair, a blues-funk scattered with samples, noirish guitars and Gee Ealey’s wheedling voice – and this shaky proposition enjoyed some attention and a reissue on Domino. ‘Return To The Ugly Side’ implies a sequel, and yes, the theme of love going awry and protagonists generally making a balls-up of the whole relationship thing is intact, but there’s a marked sharpening of focus, some discernible songs standing out in the creaky chaos, and even a touch of polish.

It’s all relative, naturally – Ealey and partner Scott Hendy haven’t gone all Trevor Horn on us. Mind you, they’ve enlisted the services of their own Anne Dudley, composer Ben Salisbury, who until now was most famous for soundtracking a host of BBC wildlife programmes but here adds drama to a different breed of animal antics. Overture ‘Monsters’ conjures dark alley tension with Salisbury’s sick (nauseous not nang) strings, and its later reprise ‘Monster’ weaves machine gun drums and chilling bass around those same strings, nastily underscoring the lines, “I don’t want to be the monster/I don’t want to be the one you run from/I should be who you run to”. Any listener would have second thoughts about that.

Psychedelic dub is the closest pigeonhole to hand. Peaks include the fairy fey Gallic swing of ‘Rainbows’ where guest Katy Wainright entwines her voice with Ealey’s to create a dreamy boho curio; and the snakily groovy ‘The Don’t Just’, that switches between rocketing beats and Eastern guitar-adorned drop-outs. Both deeply strange, these songs draw you in and bring you back. With 14 tracks spread over 35 minutes, it’s easy to start all over again and confirm ‘Let ‘Em Fall’ really does sound like a band of reanimated skeletons attacking The Osmonds’ ‘Crazy Horses’, or painful pun ‘No More Rain No Maureen’ is the imagined result of John Lennon going hillbilly – you can even double your annual zither intake with a ripple or two on the cat-call ballad ‘How You Write’ and ‘Monster’. In fact, ‘Return To The Ugly Side’ isn’t a million miles in feel from Anton Karas’s zither-heavy Third Man soundtrack; it’s a punked-up, hip hop take on those labyrinthine trills, that melodic scratchiness, jaunty flavours undercut by intimations of danger. And it’s jolly good with it.