Sunburned Hand of The Man - 'Fire Escape' (Smalltown Supersound) Released 01/10/07

The otherworldly oddness of album opener 'Nice Butterfly Mask' certainly fits Sunburned Hand of The Man's status as the foremost practioners of the New Weird America movement, a psychedelically frazzled caravan of skewered skronk-merchants also including Jackie O Mother****er and Bardo Pond. A funk experiment gone horribly wrong, it's an eight-minute postcard from the last stop prior to collapse into complete cacophony, a volcanoful of red-hot, restlessly bubbling aural lava held together by co-founder John Moloney's rocksteady yet fluid sticksmanship.

It's also totally spellbinding. Maybe it's due to the pacifying influence of Kieran 'Four Tet' Hebden, who guided the four-hour jam session the album's outpourings are drawn from, as well as producing, mixing and editing the results and tinkling some keys, but 'Fire Escape' finds the loose US collective retreating several notches down the scariness scale from the frankly terrifying, nerve-bursting chaos of this year's 'Z'. Whereas that pathologically ugly bombardment of noxious noise really did make you head for the emergency exit in search of sweet silence, 'Fire Escape' draws you nearer to the flames, helplessly hypnotized by the beguiling aural porridge stirred by the eight-headed improv outfit.

That's not to say 'Fire Escape' is an easygoing listening experience, but the album frequently borders on the kind of fruitful union between the avant-garde and the accessible that's hardly been a byword for Sunburned's screeching efforts in the past. Freak jazz, evil ambient, cultronica; no clumsy handle is capable of summarising the mind-bending monuments to riveting racket contained here. An infernal choir of discordant honking heralds 'What Color Is The Sky In The World You Live In', but the track soon calms down to glide gracefully towards sublime trance atop a tasty bass lick with results that could almost classify as pretty, were it not for wailing trumpets and unsettling atmospherics.

The unsteady skittering of the elemental percussion blast 'The Parakeet Beat' resembles a caveman's take on hip hop, whilst the needlessly brief 'Raw Backwards' presents 90 seconds of seriously groovy minimalism at its most mercilessly efficient, akin to prime Can rolling down a steep hill with the brake pedals removed. The first 2/3 of the nine-minute title track could be a disco killer from the Interzone, a dancefloor filler from a hallucinatory place where fins, tails, insect wings and limbs are regularly spotted growing on the same body, before Moloney's precision backbeat enters the fuzzy frame at the 6-minute mark, moulding the proceedings into what garage rock should sound like were the bracket not populated by third-rate Stooges mimics.

The platter reaches its peak (or nadir, depending on how you view these free-form rituals) with the truly deranged 15-minute plus epic 'The Wind Has Ears', an absolutely batshit collage of heavy breathing, distant strumming, vicious percussion abuse, ominous incantations sounding like Tom Waits during a peyote bender and generally far stranger proceedings than even the most out-there free-folk combos can cook up, culminating in a face-melting barrage of guitar squeal straight outta Funkadelic's 'Maggot Brain', each skewered element gelling in perfect disharmony to create a rare phenomenon - genuine psychedelia, forever dodging the easy options in order to visit regions where few others would dare to venture.