Bananfleur Overalt EP

VINYL FORMAT. Comes with a digital download code! Norway's most famous and acclaimed nine-piece jazz/alt-rock/prog/baroque/afro-beat masters return to the fray with a new EP drawing on their recent album, One-Armed Bandit. "Bananfluer Overalt" is a mixture of epic refrains, polyrhythmic mania and fiendish musicianship, sophistication and naivety being slammed together so hard that they fracture into something else altogether. After that brief reminder of the wonders of Jaga, though, Lars Horntveth and co. call in the remixers. Sprutbass comes straight out of the Scandinavian Skweee scene centred around the Dødpop label. In keeping with the central tenets of the sound, Sprutbass re-imagines "One-Armed Bandit" as three million synths riding to Valhalla on the back of a giant mechanical bird built on the offcuts of Chic's leather jackets. Final (known to his mum as Magnus August Hoiberg) takes "220v / Spektral" and makes it into sunny disco/electro. Animator and producer Andreas Paleologos aka Cuckoo, on the other hand, turns "Touch of Evil" into the soundtrack for the heartbreaking sibling rivalry of Mario and Luigi, before Prins Thomas rounds things out with a slow-building and utterly epic eleven minute "Diskomiks" of the title track, held together by a low-slung baggy groove. In an age of identikit, carefully-constructed and self-conscious acts, Jaga Jazzist are pure Nordic fresh air - pedal-to-the-metal, maverick, funny and serious, great musicians not too hung up on "taste" or appearing cool. And after all, what's cooler than that?