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Staging an attempt to gloss their music, Gentle Stranger say it recalls “throwing a bouncy ball into a hall of mirrors”. It’s telling that normal routes of describing music - your typical band boilerplate of “such and such meets such and such” or “we just play guitar, us, and leave the writing up to you” - doesn’t suffice for the London collective; instead a more arcane, more potent image is fired back, a wonky and poetic idea that’s instantly more arresting, more substantial.

For the newly-initiated, Gentle Stranger are a self-described “post-clown” outfit that oscillate between musical forms, achieving a bewildering, almost Joycean experimental sweep; pastiche, parody, burlesque, earnest composition, genre interrogation and progression - they cover it all. Their renowned live performances see the trio cycle through an arsenal of musical instruments, apparatus, tackle, and stuff. The set (part of the reason for their now cult-like following) hangs together intricately, a fractal clockwork machine that relies on movement and spatial-awareness as much as it does timing and musicality.

Upon witnessing the Gentle Stranger live show (“show” here is most certainly in the theatrical, carnivalesque, extravaganza sense of the word), it’s tempting to question whether they could reiterate, reshape, and condense this uniquely visual and visceral spectacle into recorded music - and the answer is yes. The latest iOS update of the Gentle Stranger sound lands in the form of Upon Return, their barnstorming third album.

‘Life Without Natural Snow’ is a weirdo music box that sets the tone for the album - a song that perfectly encapsulates the “clown” aspect of Gentle Stranger, with theatrical vocals and lyrics like an Eileen Agar or Salvador Dalí painting come to life. It’s uncompromising, a bad acid trip whirligig with a menacingly nursery rhyme-esque chord progression that almost dares you to question its simplicity.

‘Dragonfly’ - the first taste of the new album - is a skeletal post-rock exercise that exists on the edge of the album’s orbit - a tender, eyes-aloft oasis of calm in the maelstrom. The glacial guitars, blushes of harmonica, and a stately trombone buttress those meditative vocals; where you’ll find shades of Jockstrap.

About the track, they explain; “A song that says shhh look at this little insect, borne by the rising heat of each consecutive patch of sun, as if its flight path were a melody. Then it zooms out past the sun and wonders what the first and last star in the universe was and will be, and how meaningless it is to try and quantify linear time at that scale. This is equated to the feeling of wanting not to die exactly, but to be unborn, to return to a state of pre-existence. Delivered imperfectly, straining, as if gazing up from the lowlands.”

Gentle Stranger reportedly enjoy “[revelling] in the disarray” of Upon Return, this ornate and finely-wrought mind palace - it’s a riveting and often joyous experience soundtracked by strange, strange, and stranger music.

TRACK LISTING

Life Without Natural Snow
Order Up
Dunce Disco
Spider Since
The Plough / Kinclaven Brig / Morpeth Rant
Flutterby
Butterfly
Do You Wanna Go?
Two To Carry Two
Insects Dressed As Birds Have Learnt Not To Dwell Upon Their Achievements
Post Clown
Where Did My Dunce Disco Go? (Dead!)
Dragonfly
N.I.L.
Lime Leaf
In The Name Of Love
Crow
Since The Hares
Imagine Roses
Last Row Sown