Get The Blessing: Bugs In Amber (Cake CCD78558)
Get The Blessing often attract the word punk, as in punk jazz or punk attitude, but while that word is appropriate in descriptions of Acoustic Ladyland, I’m not sure it quite suits here.

So while the gainsayers might be tempted to suggest that Get The Blessing is a bit like Acoustic Ladyland meets Polar Bear, that is a very small part of the overall story. What strikes me when I listen to this Bristol-sourced four piece made up of bassist Jim Barr and drummer Clive Deamer (who were once in Portishead), and trumpeter Pete Judge and saxophonist Jake McMurchie (who weren’t), is the prog and jazz rock of my youth.

Maybe the band’s mums and dad’s had some King Crimson or Nucleus or Colosseum  LPs next to the stereo.

The opener refers to the critics’ difficulties in pigeonholing the band – it’s called Music Style Project, and oscilates between head-banging, four-square rock with improvisations and gentle though slightly creepy floating interludes. Barr’s bass/guitar antics are particularly pleasing and the horns rise to the occasion.

The Word For Moonlight Is Moonlight is the kind of thing I like best about Get The Blessing – minimal tendencies, quieter musings, a little Mariachi feel in the trumpet, a possible soundtrack for a left-field urban cowboy movie with some really nice unusual harmonies in the horn lines. Tarp has a great drum pattern, a resonant baritone guitar riff and again the horns are reined in. So It Goes has a building rock tension and really does feel like it might have come out of the British jazz-rock scene of the 1970s.

There are quite a few of the young British post-jazz bands that do the loud thrashy, free thing very well but seem incapable of leavening it with something slower, quieter and contrasting. Get The Blessing can do big and brash but they can also do small and subtle, which is why I think they just might be head and shoulders above a lot of their contemporaries.

I think I really am starting to Get The Blessing.