Music / Album Review
Album review: Mouse by The Schmoozenbergs – ‘Strictly classy, strictly art-house, strictly Golden Age’
It must be the February weather that makes you long for change. Long for warmer days and longer nights, long for the subtle fragrance of flowers rather than the damp mulch of waterlogged earth.
The Schmoozenbergs, Bristol’s gypsy jazz, klezmer, folk-ish, francophone four-piece, know exactly how to change the mood, to chase away February’s gloom and replace it with summer’s bounty.
Their third album, Mouse, seems to come packaged with extra air and light, a free gift to enhance your listening pleasure.
is needed now More than ever
Captain Headspin is as dizzying as its title would have you believe. Deft Django Reinhardt-isms immediately set hips swinging and toes tapping.
This is music as time travel, or something that tears a great hole in the space-time continuum. It allows you to skip from wintery Bristol straight into a sun-kissed French July.
Gina Griffin’s violin is the thing that slashes that opening, it is lyrical and playful, light enough to dance to yet utterly transporting.
On the title track she plucks at skitter-y muroid footsteps before chasing that pesky rodent around the room. She is, both, broom-wielding matriarch and capering, wide-eyed Jerry. A joyous, cartoon grin spread across a 1930s slice of French jazz.
Tango 20 opens with the lascivious slink of Ron Phelan’s double bass, it’s the steady heartbeat of anticipation before the swirling passion that is to come.
Griffin, again, whirls the whole thing around, expertly changing pace, sliding into reckless abandon one minute, holding back with a sleepy, slow-blink the next. It’s a tango that will get you hot under the collar while twisting your legs into impossible shapes.
As a subtle change of pace, Shadows is masterful. The insistent guitar of Sam Stennett and Tom Brydon-Smith sit next to slow sweeps of Griffin’s violin as late-night whispers unfurl from the darkest corners.
There’s a flickering celluloid glow peeking through black and white soundtrack-isms.
So much of Mouse is crying out to be used as soundtrack material – strictly classy, strictly art-house, strictly Golden Age, you understand.
Iseult’s Bees (revisited), a re-recorded version of a tune taken from their last album, circles back to the Django strum, and adds a delicious bass and bee-buzz hum.
It could score the opening scene of a murder-mystery-in-a-beautiful-location, one that’s all honey-smeared, hazy cliff tops and hyper coloured seas. Funk Mole has Stennett and Brydon-Smith embarking on an effortlessly cool Gallic car chase. Phelan keeping pace as guitars careen around Belleville corners.
In a short jaunt through Europe, Supermoon is the whirling of skirts around an Eastern European campfire. There’s the clarity and stillness of a jet-black night as Griffin picks out the stars with her violin. Phelan’s bass an exuberant clatter as the dust is kicked up, dancers twirling as sparks fly.
The Craic is Back takes us away from mainland Europe, into Ireland. Griffin’s violin laughs uproariously, infectiously, as garrulous as a tipsy Dubliner. It’s as jolly, as bouncy, as much fun as anything here.
The four Schmoozenbergs easing the whole tune to the edge of madness, a gleeful, joyous celebration.
The final track on this glorious album is Happy Landings and it would, back in the day, be blessed with a Jose Padilla sanctification.
There would be some sort of Cafe Del Mar remix, Balearic beats to raise it to a chill-out classic. It’s a gorgeously sunny piece, with the incipient warmth of the stones of an Ibizan terrace at the end of the day.
It starts sun-rise slow, and seems to glow as violin and guitar gambol across those sea-splashed European vistas.
Mouse is an album that reminds you that there are better days around the corner, that the very best music is made when cultures combine, that the sunshine will always replace the rain. All we have to do is wait and smile and dance.
Main photo: Gavin McNamara
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