Cocos Lovers
Album: Gold Or Dust
Label: Smugglers Records
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.cocoslovers.com/

Deal (Kent)- based Cocos Lovers is a close-knit seven-piece collective, a "family that plays together"-type band made up of "husbands, wives, brothers, sisters and friends of all ages", who famously upstaged Mumford & Sons at several UK festivals when they turned professional back in 2008.

Over the space of five years and now three albums, Cocos Lovers have developed their unique musical blend of alt-folk that effortlessly, and surprisingly naturally, intermingles influences from the US Deep South, Africa and worldwide folk musics. There were times, on Cocos Lovers' debut album Johannes especially, when I felt that the band's emphatically DIY stance entailed too much being tossed into the musical cookpot at once and too rapidly, and as a result their music quite often lacked a certain cohesion. But Gold Or Dust presents a succession of tracks that demonstrate just how far the band has travelled in terms of craft, maturity and vision, and an enviable tightness of expression and execution, while largely jettisoning the traces of self-consciousness that occasionally compromised their earlier efforts.

They show a persuasive and natural command of many different styles and genres, whereby unexpectedly convincing manoeuvres arise from intriguing juxtapositions that in time or retrospect will no doubt seem curiously logical. In that respect they're much more akin to early-70s folk and folk-rock-prog experimentalists than latter-day world-music innovators (let alone the dabblers or re-creators): I'd invoke Principal Edwards, Traffic, Comus, Jethro Tull, Galliard, Spirit, rather than (say) Imagined Village or Afro-Celts - but their offbeat charm and innovation is also infused with an earthy southern-states sensibility allied to a homegrown busker's open-mindedness, readily embracing and assimilating influences to express the bittersweet sentiments of self-penned songs that "explore the apocalyptic destiny of our existence" yet do so in a refreshingly unpretentious way.

Genuine instrumental versatility among the members of this extended family enables constant switching of textures to satisfying effect, with the contrasting colours of violin, accordion, trumpet, flute, harmonica and musical saw supplementing the acoustic and electric guitars, banjo, bass and drums - and they've a healthy complement of vocalists too. While animated African jive is definitely a key inspiration on several of the tracks, the disc opens with rustic Appalachian banjo, Under The Hawthorn Tree is eerie psych-folk by any other name, Emily Reprise is just under a minute of luscious a cappella choral harmony and the closing Hollow Is The Ground gives way to a weird linking passage that could have come from the Grateful Dead's Anthem Of The Sun or Aoxomoxoa period, which leads into an unidentified extra track driven by a vigorous, insistent indie-groove and capped by a flute workout.

Several of the individual tracks make a virtue of their slightly complex multi-part structure, a feature that can in lesser hands so easily work against the impact of the music. OK, there can sometimes still seem almost too much going on to take in at one or even three or four plays, but the music of Cocos Lovers both stimulates and challenges the senses and you'll surely find that perseverance will reap considerable rewards.

David Kidman