Manchester-based Working For A Nuclear Free City don't do things by halves. Their first EP and LP were combined, along with a few extra tracks, onto Businessmen & Ghosts, a dazzling 2CD near two-hour sprawl that set about tying every musical strand to come from Manchester in the last 20 years together. Now they've returned with another 2CD effort, whose second disc comprises the 33-minute title track.
As great and as varied as Businessmen & Ghosts was, its array of musical ideas were all lifted wholepiece from other sources: a bit of Stone Roses here, a smattering of Doves there, some Chemical Brothers-style floor-filling to fill in the cracks. Whilst many of the musical touchstones on Jojo Burger Tempest remain the same, WfaNFC succeed in integrating them more seamlessly and really making them their own.
The band's love for instrumentals hasn't diminished, and Do A Stunt, which opens disc 1, is about as stellar as instrumentals get, throwing a careers-worth of ideas down at breakneck speed, as funky basslines duel with mariachi guitars, vibrato-heavy synths and electronic noise breakdowns. This bleeds into the shimmery Silent Times, instantly eclipsing Sarah Dreams Of Summer as the band's most positively lovely song to-date, whilst being reminiscent of the Rose's Ten Storey Love Song.
Those two opening songs set an incredibly tough act to follow, but remarkably the remaining 15 songs on the first disc are able to hold their own. Helped by greater production values, the wealth of sounds and ideas on display here actually make Businessmen & Ghosts sound creatively redundant at times: the cinematic orchestral pomp of B.A.R.R.Y; the gently rolling piano and clipped beats of A Black Square With Four Yellow Stars; the frazzled, Radiohead-esque Little Lenin. You think you know where a song is going, only for it dart down an unforseen avenue, like the moment the otherwise straightforward Alphaville throws down its arpeggiated guitars and electro synths. Thankfully, this wilful experimentation doesn't get in the way of some memorable tunes, the highlight amongst highlights being Faster Daniel Faster, whose almost nursery-rhyme verses ride a crest of soaring guitars into a simple but triumphant chorus.
And then it's onto that second disc. Almost as though they felt unable to lay enough ideas down within a single song, WfaNFC indulge themselves with the title track, a half-hour sound collage of everything rolling around in their heads. By the second half of its running time, it devolves more into cut-and-paste than feeling like a single seamless piece, but the results are never less than enthralling, and it makes for a highly worthwhile addition to an album that already seemed to be bursting at the seams with creativity. It also serves to touch upon the band''s clear love for the 90's Haçienda scene; the term "nu-rave" may have become much derided and quickly obselete, but it's during the most hyperactive moments of Jojo Burger Tempest that WfaNFC seem to give the term any form of definition, not to mention dignity.
That similarity between Silent Times and Ten Storey Love Song seems entirely fitting; with its merging of dextrous indie-rock, funky grooves and electronic and rave music, Jojo Burger Tempest is the album Second Coming imagined itself to be. Sure, it's a lot to take in in a single sitting, and a little uneven in places, but the end result is consistently compelling, frequently astounding. Get past that unwieldy band name, and the admittedly naff album title, and you're left with one of the year's most head-spinningly brilliant albums.
88/100
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