Artfully dishevelled Portsmouth collective come good with their debut album!

Those of you who keep up with reviews here at Subba Cultcha will have already come to the conclusion that we’re big fans of Jelly Maid music artists The B Of The Bang. So it’s with excitement and just a hint of trepidation (when you’re really into a band, new material is always best approached with caution lest it be a huge disappointment – ask anyone who used to like the Killers and bought their latest effort) that I slip this disc into the CD player. There are old favourites here, ‘Alfred Light The Fires’ with it’s jaunty jazz beats, the trippy minimalism of ‘Alaska’ and the heart rending beauty of ‘Lung’ (a track that, due to a personal loss, renders me a gibbering tear soaked mess every time I hear it) are all well known to fans of Wit and his collective of like minded minstrels. The album is punctuated by snippets of music, the titular ‘Beginning’, ‘Middle’ and ‘End’, but we’ll breeze past them and get to the meat of the new tracks, there are some great new tunes, from ‘Dolores’ with it’s almost upbeat feel and some great backing vocals courtesy of the lovely Roberta from Hold Fast, to ‘The Making Of The Making Of’, another minimalist effort that has echoes of a stripped back Divine Comedy. Pick of the new material though is the haunting ‘(We Used To Draw) Treasure Maps’. This song feels, in mood at least, like a companion piece to ‘Lung’, both of them propelled along by Christopher Whitear’s powerful but soothing baritone. There used to be a charmingly shambolic feel to The B Of The Bang, one backed up by their ever-changing line up, but on this evidence they’ve got their act together and, that being the case, they’ll be a force to be reckoned with.www.myspace.com/thebofthebang

Matt Merritt