Mandrake Handshake - Earth-Sized Worlds

Where to start with this London-via-Oxford collective? They are a dizzying prospect on every front. Their sprawling line-up numbers anywhere between seven and ten depending on what day it is, and includes a dedicated tambourine player à la Brian Jonestown Massacre as well as a synth wizard who calls himself Moogieman (get it?). They playfully describe their sound as ‘flowerkraut’, and whilst it can be broadly described as psychedelia, the sonic palette of Mandrake Handshake is a swirling, genre-fluid maelstrom, one they’ve finally attempted to get down on record with ‘Earth-Sized Worlds’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a stylistically restless affair that finds room for everything from off-kilter jazz-infused epics (opener ‘Time Goes Up’, as well as ‘Lorenzo’s Desk’) to breezy, groove-driven art pop (‘The Change and the Changing’ and ‘King Cnut’), via driving jams that reference Can and Neu! (‘Hypersonic Super-Asteroid’) and moody, atmospheric post-punk (‘Find the Tree and Dig (Deep!)’ The ten-minute title track, meanwhile, closes the record and finds room for a little of all of the above.

As a result, it is a fabulously undisciplined affair, one that nods to everybody from Stereolab to King Gizzard. Accordingly, it sometimes lacks the urgency of the Mandrake live show, and the conceptual side of the record seems pretty opaque, but there are enough vibrant musical realms to get lost in here. It’s a line from a spoken word interlude by singer Trinity Oksana on ‘Barranmode’ that sums up the record as a whole rather neatly, though: “Nobody try to make any sense of this,” she deadpans. “That’s not the point.”