Inglorious Technicolor

This Brighton crew perform daubed in pallid Day of the Dead skull-masks. Their music is quite a concoction, with swirling elements from the deepest Caribbean landing in the delta of New Orleans, with hints of the very distant Balkans. There are fusions of both klezmer and samba, the latter particularly in the low, bumping bass. Definitely no purist outfit, the VLO considers almost any input as fine, so long as it's compatible with a jostling horn-line, shuffling percussion and the rumbling helicon, a sousaphone-type instrument at its most popular in Central and Eastern Europe.

Percussionist Cicely Taylor arranges almost all of the material on this second album, occasionally taking the vocals, on Koko Taylor's ‘Voodoo Woman’ and Willie Dixon's ‘I Want to be Loved’ for example. She also sings on ‘Tabaco Mascao’, but eventually her Betty Boop whoop becomes a touch tiresome – though she does have a good technique on the lo-fi distorto-microphone. Byron Lee's ‘Frankenstein Ska’ announces yet another stylistic foray, while the unimaginative selection of The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ follows later, as an instrumental. ‘Cumbia en Do Menor’ has a creaky, vintage aura, suitable for an album that often sounds quite murky in its production. The excitement isn’t really captured; this is a combo that doubtless sounds much better in the flesh.