#wax machine

Band leader and guitarist Lau Ro is half Brazilian, which may account for the fever-dreaming jungle haze of Wax Machine’s sound. But Isobel Jones contributes in a large way, with wafting, chanted vocals and an antic, syncopated jazz flute, and Toma Sapir adds the heat in wildly inventive, slanting, stop-stepping drumbeats.  Go Kurosawa from Kikagaku Moyo engineers the mix, bringing out the granular complexities in these snake-y grooves. “Shhh” ushers in a sense of wonder in the slow psychedelic bloom of wah wah’d guitars, jingling chimes and nodding bass, but it’s with “Shade” that the band settles into its mesmeric groove, a hot pulsing reverie of dub-echoing bass, jazzy guitar and mantric words, widely and precisely spaced.

The flute gives a whiff of Jethro Tull, as do the thick grinding bass riffs of “Truth,” and the muscular, guitar-driven folksiness might put you in mind of Wax Machine’s fellow Brits in Wolf People. There’s a trace of Khruangbin’s sleepy hypnosis in cuts like “Patterns” and of a wholly British whimsy (think XTC) in “Time Machine.” This music should feel like pastiche, but it has a winding, kudzu-like style of its own that covers up its forbears in massive vegetal growth.  

In “Turiya” a blissed out bass line plots anarchy with antic, limber, off-beat-heavy drums, while a sax blows out squeaks and squalls and a man and a woman trade reverb-shrouded phrases. The cut slouches and swaggers and picks its funk-stopping way through hot, steaming tropical jazz forests, and if it doesn’t seem quite real that’s because the colors are too bright, the air too humid, and we are definitely not in Brighton anymore.