TARAS BULBA

Sometimes The Night RIOT SEASON

Ex-Earthling Society chairman’s lockdown fever treat.

Formed in 2018 by former Earthling Society composer/multiinstrumentalist Fred Laird and named after Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 novel, Taras Bulba follow up 2020’s Soul Weaver with an album that melts hallucinogenic pagan psych into shimmering dream gumbos of lockdown exotica.

Inspired by a socially isolated diet of rockabilly cabin recordings, Nick Cave, and kung fu, horror and noir movies, Lancashire native Laird laid down cinematic mood pieces on a 24-track recorder in his spare bedroom, coating atmospheric panoramas in crackling electronic swells. Several songs are bolstered by drums and sax, while Daisy Atkinson’s spectral vocals turn the epic title and Cocteau homage Orphée into shimmering David Lynchevoking dreamscapes.

Many of the tracks are begging for movies to accompany. One More Lonely Angel’s pastoral piano is gouged with vicious guitar scrapings, the lysergic Night Train To Drug Town sits midway between Apocalypse Now and a Spaghetti Western, and House In The Snow is a piano-led funeral crawl. All told, it’s a weird, wonderful masterclass in channelling lockdown obsessions into mind-blowing music.