You probably wouldn’t have bet on Sly & The Family Drone sticking around this long. Born of a DIY scene of short-lived projects and constantly reconfiguring participants, their pursuit of transcendent abandon through noise seemed destined to burn itself out. As much as their chaotic mash up of instant composition methods and low-key spectacle made for a brilliant, exultant, live experience, the jokey name and carnival atmosphere suggested they were here for a good time, not for a long time.
Over a decade later they are not only surviving but thriving, stalwarts of the UK experimental underground. They continue to strengthen and expand their vision. Now channelling a more widescreen world than their early skronk and percussion riotm the group remain very much still in touch with it. While parts of that underground sometimes feel trapped in the twentieth-century wreckage, Sly & the Family Drone have generally ignored the more obvious signposts to wander their own path and tap richer, weirder sources. Moon Is Doom Backwards is made as much of drifting atmospheric textures as it is invigorating rushes of drums and squawk. Recorded three years ago, it follows in the vein of previous LP Walk It Dry.
On the first couple of listens I was getting the feeling of woods and sleepy rivers, like a less heated exotica. There are no field recordings of weather, water, or birds, but I could hear their ghosts. Things moving unseen. This sense only grew watching the clip for ‘Glistening Benevolence’, in which a Family Drone trip to the country leads to a mysterious supernatural encounter. Beginning softly with the breath of the saxophone and ripples of percussion, it steadily intensifies, swinging between eerie and raucous. If this is, in the broadest sense, their usual model, here it’s more subtle, less intensely overloaded and in the moment.
The instant rumble of ‘Going In’ is a spiky rolling bundle of squawk. ‘Cuban Funeral Sandwich’ returns to atmospherics, bass clarinet stirring distant flutters of sound before it picks up to a rattling march in its last minute. At the album’s centre, ‘Joyless Austere Post-War Biscuits’ rolls into ‘The Relentless Veneration of Bees’. Their playing here is thoughtful rather than joyless or austere. A breeze blows through it. Deep sounds bump below ground.
On ‘Guilty Splinters’, blasts of static bring the album’s most intense spasm of distorting anxiety (but is the title a nod to Dr John?) There’s not so much voodoo humidity but there are polyrhythmic pulses, snaking lines of baritone sax and spectral veils of sound all across this album. Spiders and spit. What is this? Junk jazz, horror lounge, noir-noise, dystopian exotica? Moon Is Doom Backwards is beautiful, smart music, and free.
