In this season of gaudy whizz-bangs and empty explosions in the sky, how good is it to find something that is genuinely exciting, genuinely thrilling? The new Bonfire Radicals EP, Flywheel, may only be five tracks long but these are five tracks made for oohs and aahs, made to conjure a sparkle in the eye, a grin on the face and a warm feeling in the heart.
Birmingham’s Bonfire Radicals are Michelle Holloway (also of the dizzying Filkin’s Ensemble) on recorder and flute, Katie Stevens on Clarinet and Kaval, Sarah Farmer on fiddle, Emma Reading on guitar, Pete Churchill on bass and accordion and Ilias Lintzos on drums. They mash together all kinds of sparkly treats; Klezmer bashing into Heavy Metal, folk song shooting skywards thanks to some punchy rhythms. Flywheel is ridiculously good fun.
As the fiddle cuts in, raising the vocal to something akin to chanting, there’s a manic edge, one that borders on being slightly unhinged.
Zalizome/Den Boro Manoula stems from an Epirot (Northwest Greece/Southern Albania) tune and starts with a clacking and a plucking, the harsh tick-tock of percussion twining with clarinet and the voices of Holloway and Stevens. As the fiddle cuts in, raising the vocal to something akin to chanting, there’s a manic edge, one that borders on being slightly unhinged. There’s funk too, great splashes of sound as the tune changes. By now chanting has given way to a seriously hypnotic groove, almost Goat-like as drum, tambourine and fiddle surge against Reading’s wah-wah guitar. It’s danceable, shamanic, celebratory and deliciously noisy.
There’s celebration, too, on The Lost Pick, a song in homage to a missing plectrum, as Holloway and Stevens chatter excitedly on Kaval and Recorder. Theirs is the conversation that spills over the tables of great halls, the flighty, skittish elation of shared moments, of the thrill of exhilaration, two voices in a great wash of noise . Drums rattle until, unexpectedly, an electric guitar shimmers with beach-fronted twinkles before being dragged back into the merrymaking. Folk music is rarely as much fun as this.
Jean Ritchie sang Love is Teasing [Roud 1049] in 1952 on her Singing the Traditional Songs of Her Traditional Kentucky Mountain Family album but it never slid into a frenzied burst of heavy metal. Bonfire Radicals take it and make such an utterly beautiful noise with it, headlong dive into metal and all. There are hints of Swedish psychers, Goat, again but this is wonderful. Holloway’s voice sits right at the centre, unaccompanied to start but then matching the creaks of Farmers’s fiddle and the splash of Lintzos’ cymbals, until straining against electric guitar and frantic fiddle. It’s the sort of song that you long to play to a Folk-sceptic. The sort of song that you want to point to, jumping around, saying “This! Just listen to this!”.
If that wasn’t enough eclecticism and down-right excitement for one short EP, then Bonfire Radicals are not even close to having done with us. Sarah’s Muffins is seriously funky business, veering towards the madness of the Zappa-verse at times, and, by all accounts, in 11/8 time. It is perfectly bonkers. A cool clarinet and rubber-band bass doing most of the damage, while intergalactic guitar and Space Invader bleeps surf alongside glorious ba-ba-bas before a huge wig-out at the end continues the celebrations. Finally Squeeze That Satsuma (an unhinged reworking of Satsuma Moon from the debut album, The Space Between) is a crazed side-show, taking an accordion for a mad waltz. It’s small but wonderfully wonky.
Put down the handfuls of fireworks, allow the pets to sleep in peace. Instead, stick this in your CD player and glow with a childish sense of wonder. Flywheel will light up your sky.
Flywheel is available now on CD and digital from Bonfire Radical’s Bandcamp page.
