Stanley
Album: Animals With Amazing Disguises
Label: Stanley HQ
Tracks: 13
Website: http://www.stanleytheband.com

It is sometimes difficult to decide which wall "Animals With Amazing Disguises" is off or indeed how far. It can most easily be summed up with a phrase from "Leave It Up To You", the second track on the album, 'You build it, we'll smoke it.'

Like smoke, there is something about Scottish five-piece, Stanley's debut album that's difficult to pin down. Just when you think you've got them sussed as a distorted hybrid of The Divine Comedy and Squeeze and they through in the sort of whistling song that makes you think you've suddenly become trapped in an Alex Cox spaghetti western.

This is an album that works on an epic scale, almost orchestral in places, this is music as theatre, I kept on fining myself drifting towards the like of Lewis Carrol, but filtered by Bryan Talbot, definitely more "Alice In Sunderland" than "Alice In Wonderland". (If you've read the Bryan Talbot masterpiece, you'll know exactly what I mean. If you haven't get it and come back.)

"Animals With Amazing Disguises" is prog rock for the twenty first century with the pomposity of the concept album stripped out and replaced with a series of aural sketches give your mind something to play with. Now if that all sounds a little pretentious, I guess it is, but you don't get epic records by thinking on a modest scale.

There are some bands designed for gigs and others for shows, some bands designed for intimate clubs and others for the large arenas, in both cases Stanley would fall into the latter part of the equation.

That said, there are a couple of places where I think the band lose it, "Dance Like Your Daddy" comes across as an over-reach, you can feel the band pushing at the boundary and the boundary giving one hell of a shove back, but it's those points that allow you to see just how good they are when they are right out there at the edge of the rim.

This is quite a debut, the band haven't got any preconceptions to worry about and they've very obviously put together the album they wanted to record. Whilst you can hear the influences of others in the sound, I don't recall those influences being put together in quite this way before. An album that's well worth the effort of listening to it.

Neil King