Crazy Quilt Bouquet
Album: You Never Know
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 24
Website: http://www.crazyquiltbouquet.info

CQB live up to their name with their music, which for much of the time defies any ready description (and appropriately, you never know quite what to make of it either). The website reveals that "Crazy Quilt Bouquet is first and foremost a merry band - a band comprised of one fragmented individual who knows many imaginary friends, artists and ne'er-do-wells. His split personalities and alter-egos have been making music and several other things since they were 10 years old - an age they still aspire to".

CQB is childlike rather than childish, I would say; in its sense of adventure; and thus, whether its main protagonist is actually named Robin Cowpertwait (or Rychard Wychsideizwych!) proves more than mildly irrelevant, especially when the music of CQB is as infectious and generously fun (albeit not without serious intent) as this fulsome extended (77-minute) procession of pithy original songwriting. It takes us almost effortlessly from Schitzaphroid, a peculiarly insistent little 12-bar essay with unfathomable refrain, through to the throwaway pop of Monastery; from the endearing, "borderline cheesy" uke-fuelled Song From The Heart to the strumalong Finger Snapping; from the snappy marching kids' game 2x2 to the melting, warped reminiscence Holidays In The Sun and the cheeky referential All In This Together…

This latest CQB offering meanders purposefully across the clock-face, treading enigmatically, and perhaps a trifle surreally, through quirky, slightly absurd personal musings, at times (songs like Pulling Her Hair Out) heavily espousing the Brit-pop slice-of-life observational social commentary and at others celebrating "the ordinariness of idiocy" by residing more in indie-dom territory or obscure variant-freakout mode. But, as always with music from a typically English, quietly reclusive backwater, invariably having something interesting to say…

David Kidman