Art Rock Show – Squid – Cowards (Week 17)

Het Brits postpunk combo Squid werd opgericht in 2016 in Brighton door een zange/drummer Ollie Judge, gitaristen Louis Borlase en Anton Pearson, een bassist Laurie NankivelL en een toetsenist Arthur Leadbetter. De band heeft vele gezichten en veel invloeden, denk maar aan Krautrock, Post Rock, Avantgarde rock en jazz-rock.

Alex Curle van When The Horn Blows: “It can be said that the five-piece group of Squid have come a long way since their instrumental jazz days in Brighton playing and paying off their cheap rent way back in 2016. Since then, their broody, angular tropes of British colloquialisms within their Fourth World art-rock arrangements have dazzled and delighted audiences worldwide. Their breakthrough debut Bright Green Field in 2021 arrived off the coattails of post-pandemic with an experimental jazzy avant-garde affair. Their follow-up O Monolith was equally enigmatic, albeit far more brooding and experimental in tenacity. It’s been a journey that’s allowed the band to dip into any and all blends of arrangement while still staying grounded to their original, breakthrough sound.

While both albums dealt with quintessentially British sonics and lyricism, a new year and a new project has allowed Squid to look outward. Rooted around human evil and wrongdoing, Cowards extends their reach into folk, psychedelia, jazz and electronics as it plays out sounds that are perhaps more tribal and otherworldly in comparison. This marks it as either not setting in one bracket or the other – not art-rock nor is it jazz – but rather eerie rounds unable to place or relate making it resolutely brave in sound and scope, as unsettling crescendos wane out to discrete melody. (…)

Ever since their first Town Centre EP in 2019 with Dan Carey first having the eye (and ear) to spot such an idea, Squid have leaped in stretching the very sounds that we were thought to have been bound to. Bright Green Field, O Monolith and now Cowards. Every record feels like a unique lightbulb moment for the former jazz experimentalists, with Cowards being their most ambitious to date. Spliced with incendiary melodies and dark humour underlined with a brooding tale of human evil, Squid are more than just mere experimentalists. They are wizards in their ability to craft storytelling – and Cowards is just another chapter in that. ”

Naast Squid (Cowards), Black Country, New Road (Ants From up There), Swans (To Be Kind), Coil (Musick to Play in the Dark – Vol 2), & Sprain (The Lamb as Effigy).

• Thursday/Donderdag 12.00 – 24.00
• Friday/Vrijdag 12.00 – 24.00
• Saturday/Zaterdag 12.00 – 24.00