Opening with the quite brilliantly titled If It Works For The Cast Of LA Law, It’s Going To Work For Me, Thumpermonkey Lives! lull you into something of a false sense of security. With it’s peppered, layered harmonies and bouncy, off-kilter pianos you’d think you’re going to get an album of baroque pop melodies akin to Sunderland’s Field Music. To a certain extent you do. To a certain extent you don’t. And to a certain extent this is very hard to pin down. However, the inability to put things in boxes doesn’t necessarily mean you have to file them under “bad”. Imagine David Byrne’s career if that had been the case.

With If It Works… smoothly blending into Whateley, Thumpermonkey Lives! hit you in the face with a hot slice of distortion — dark, moody, discordant distortion. But what about the bouncy pianos!? They’re gone. What about the baroque vocals and layered harmonies? Well, they’re not gone. The track trudges through a 70′s metal-inspired dirge, while Michael Woodman’s falsetto counterpoints the thick tar that lies beneath it. At over six minutes we’re possibly even veering toward, dare it be mentioned, prog.

Prog needn’t be a dirty word though — if handled correctly. On We Bake Our Bread Beneath The Holy Fire Thumpermonkey Lives! embrace the pomp and circumstance of all the trademarks of prog (wild vocals, jazzy time signatures, longer tracks…) and run with them. And that’s why it works. If you do want to stamp an unnecessary badge on it you might do well with post-prog-metal (and how bad does that sound!)

The rest of the album continues in a similar vein. I Don’t Know if this is a Matter for Wardrobe or Hairdressing leaves the guitars set to ‘punch in the face’ and the riffs set to ‘massive’. Low tuned guitar and bass mirror each other’s moves and time signatures flip and twist, Woodman’s vocal gymnastics tie it all together. If you’re looking for modern contemporaries you could easily name-check The Black Keys, Pontiak or Tweak Bird. Proktor Cylex intersperses a spoken word narrative with guitar gymnastics and, after a deftly finger-picked opening, Abyssopelagic drops into a six minutes of razor sharp guitars and a flagrant disregard for time signatures.

Closer 419 sees the band take a more delicate approach to the sound they’ve carved on the five previous tracks. With guitars more shimmering, drums more sparse and space more open, a busy bass line and choppy piano leans 419 toward the jazzier side of life, before a rousing build on “You have the surname of the deceased” brings the album to a close.

On this relatively short album (six tracks at little over half an hour) Thumpermonkey Lives! have pitched it pretty much perfectly; any longer and it risks growing tried. Although it could be argued that We Bake Our Bread Beneath her Holy Fire is knowingly over-the-top, its makers still take it very seriously — and that’s surely why it triumphs. Their blend of poppy hooks pushed through a Black Sabbath filter leaves us with the heavy metal answer to Field Music. And surely that’s a good thing, right?

http://www.culturedeluxe.com/music/musicreview/thumpermonkey-lives-we-ba...

THUMPERMONKEY LIVES! - We Bake Our Bread Beneath Her Holy Fire (Genin/Tooting Bizarre) - In which an unnoticed Sarf London band, twinkling away doing their good and frankly slightly odd stuff down there in the badlands explodes into an outrageous supernova, outshining half the sky.

This album, these six epic songs, have ideas way beyond their station: huge depth, big sound, immaculate arrangements, and a big, big voice. It's a lot of things, and greater than the sum of its parts: unashamed proper prog, lifted, by an avant sensibility, out of cheesy traps, yet swapping the harsher elements of experimental and avant rock for something more melodic, for refined guitars and real singing. Main man Michael Woodman's downright classy voice is like a polished Peter Hammill, all power and in tune and spot-on vibrato. That fine voice is delivering twisted, complex melodies and equally twisted, happily ambiguous lyrics, the combination is thrilling.

There's nothing quite like Thumpermonkey Lives! but I can guess where they're coming from: they're the English Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, a more experimental Van Der Graaf Generator, they've got some of the headbending melodies of Time Of Orchids. They've been threatening this for a while, with a great debut album and much time spent hothousing their talents in their Immersion Composition Society lodge (you what? Go on, Google it, I dare you) - but We Bake Our Bread Beneath Her Holy Fire is still a surprise - a classic, even. Stuffed to the gills with possibly unconscious references to good things - hints of Yes, moments of Cardiacs-like odd sounds, loads of Gentle Giant - crikey. Throw in some Alex Harvey and Bowie and The Associates and Bobby Conn, a touch of Melvins if you like. It's challenging only in that the melodies are thick on the ground and take you off in many directions, but that the complex mathyness underlying much of the songs is made easier on the ear by Woodman's voice and the warm, clarity of the arrangements. I can see both followers of hard-boiled avant-rock and fans of more traditional prog bands like Porcupine Tree getting this, and if Thumpermonkey Lives! ahem, live a bit longer, the big prog festival organisers could well be beating a path to their door. It's a shame to pigeonhole them, though - this is just compelling stuff, complete with lyrics to dig into (I love the demented Vivian Stanshall-ish storyline of Proctor Cylex, the Grendel-like menace of Whateley) and for Woodman to wrap his voice around. It doesn't matter that they sound a bit like some of the more obscure prog bands like Tamarisk, Citizen Cain or England, they're better at it; stranger and more ambitious musically than anything within the limits of that old prog rock scene.

I can imagine Thumpermonkey Lives! as they go about their lonely compulsion, like so many of the bands I love and namedrop: playing those gigs sandwiched between the local Oasis and the local Kasabian, some pub in the greasy perenieum between Croydon and Clapham or the Midlands or maybe Stateside equivalent. There's a couple of lunatics down the front who've hitched for eight hours to see them, and behind them the unmoving, unblinking rows, pints tilting, jaws thunking en mass on the floor. Their ears tell them that here in this grotty room is a band as remarkable as any that ever walked the planet, playing just for them: most of them won't believe it. Out of that audience one or maybe two will offer the hitcher lunatics a ride to tomorrow's gig, maybe the whole tour. The son of the headline band's drummer will write their name on his school rucksack, and his friends will sing the lyrics next time, and let it be known that this doesn't happen to those bands that sound like Kasabian.

It happens to the Thumpermonkeys, the real underground bands who dare to be different, to go with their convictions... Go check it out, then go tell someone, spread the word, go discover Thumpermonkey Lives - www.thumpermonkey.com (Marina)

SOUNDS LIKE? Like nothing else you've heard, only artier, more operatic, with weirder time signatures and the pomposity turned up to 42. Or Bowie if he was the lead singer of The Darkness and they attended Goldsmiths and hung out in Camden. Only better than you imagine, if you can imagine that.

IS IT ANY GOOD? "Inevitably, she began spending more and more time with my machines. I returned home one night to find a corpse, surrounded by enough oxidised toast to fill every grain silo in the Tower of Babel." A sample lyric from the song 'Proctor Cylex'. And how about this reference to self love, "One day you know someone will catch you in the act and leave a cup of tea beside you, 'cos you cut corners." from the song 'I don't know if this is a matter for wardrobe or hairdressing'. If you like what you have just read then you may like this band. I could be very wrong, and so could this band, and so could you. It's a bit serious, but in a way that talks behind it's own back and tells people about that time it cruised for missiles on Hampstead Heath, misunderstanding everyone who came across its homing beacon. It's a trial of sad love affairs and organ grinding tastlessness, a pardigm caught in the swamps of sadness, an enlightened soul waving bladders on a stick while dressed for a funeral. An ode to life itself, with all the joy whispered from behind a closed hand. I am biased. I end every communication I write with the word toast instead of sincerely or faithfully, and that is exactly how 'Proctor Cylex' ends. We were made for each other, but for very different reasons. The madness prevails, its more fun than they let on.

"Michael Woodman ex of Brand Violet...these days trading weird and wobbly punch drunk pops as Thumpermonkey who have, it should be said, had the most unnerving effects on our hi-fi system whenever their wares have come within earshot….here’s a video for a track called ’419’ from their forthcoming opus ’we bake our bread beneath her holy fire’ - an absolute gem - first listens here and we are thinking the latest class of prog revivalists Porcupine Tree, Future Kings of England and Radiohead colluding in an epically psychedelic fry up of a jam liberating as were lost nuggets from Gabriel era Genesis, Soft Machine and King Crimson - of the track Michael reflects - ’I think we’ve outdone ourselves on this one……’ - Michael is of course patron founder and president of the understatement league……begging letters have been issued post haste to secure said album for future appraisal…."