According to the label, Bubblemath are an Eclectic Prog / Avant-Pop / Technical Metal Quintet, while Prog Archives simply call them “eclectic”. In my humble opinion, they’re both correct, and wrong. When I put this on the player I knew immediately what this style of music was, namely “pronk”. Yes boy and girls, at long last we have a band that is determined to keep the name “Cardiacs” alive and kicking. A mere short fifteen years since the debut, the line-up (who got together in 1998) is still the same, they just had a small issues getting this finished. I’m sure they haven’t’ been recording full-time for the last fifteen years, but there are times when the listener wonders how on earth they managed to move from point A to point B in a song, as this is complex, tight, and completely off the wall.
Don’t try to work out what time signature a certain piece of a song may be in, or what chord structure they are using, and instead just relish the total insanity and musical chaos of what is going on. They use a (fairly) straightforward musical line-up, just use the instruments in somewhat unusual manners. The quintet is Blake Albinson (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, nylon string guitar, keyboards, tenor sax, vocals), Jay Burritt (electric bass, fretless synth bass, fretless electric bass, upright electric bass, vocals), Kai Esbensen (keyboards, vocals), James Flagg (drums, percussion, vocals) and Jonathan G. Smith (vocals, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, flute, clarinet, chimes, gong, glockenspiel, xylophone, mountain dulcimer, mandolin, banjo). Yes, they all sing.
I love this album, it’s just plain awesome, although I can pretty much guarantee you won’t be singing any of the songs, although they somehow manage to be melodic as well as, well, weird. Zappa would love these guys, who also have a hint of Specimen 37 in what they are doing, and if you want something so far out of both normal mainstream, and the progressive mainstream, then this is going to be worth discovering.
