The Beat Surrender

Bellowhead are an eleven piece band that seem to flit effortlessly between folk, big band, jazz and soul music, with an overriding sense of fun seemingly hanging behind each track.

I very rarely listen to anything like this, so while it does make it a refreshing change, it also makes it quite hard to review as I don’t have any real peers to compare it against. To begin with listening to it I wasn’t sure it was an album you could, or were meant to take seriously. Gradually though things do settle down and after the first few tracks I found myself actually enjoying the music.

Vocally it was neither here nor there for me, but i’m pretty sure these multi instrumentalists are an entertaining live outfit if you can find a stage big enough to occupy them and their instruments. It seems they are quite at home in the Southbank Centre in London as they held a residency there earlier this year.

Matachin is out now through Navigator Records.