In a sense, perhaps it’s just as well that 2016 has seen me dragging out my “best of year” list through to the arse-end of the following March, because, in an all-time first, my # 1 spot belongs to a release that didn’t actually arrive on my doorstep until February.

I’ve been enjoying the mp3 version of ‘The Great Celestial Purge’ since I initially put my money down in September, so it definitely still qualifies as a 2016 release, but, given that (to my mind at least) this is vinyl music in excelsis, I’m really happy that my own tardiness has allowed me some to time to take it in on wax through the nice speakers before writing this review.

Mention of the box set’s late arrival is absolutely, totally not a complaint by the way. For a band who are still relatively little known, putting out a release on this scale is an example of Thinking Big that I really appreciate, and for the small label like Golden Lab to back them up on it is admirable. Producing a quadruple LP set of exacting audio quality and high aesthetic standards must have been pretty a pretty daunting task, and I’m extremely glad that they took their time and put in the necessary effort to deliver the goods, in the form of an end product that I suspect I will be keeping close at hand through many years to come. Well done everybody!

On to the music then, and, for the uninitiated, Manchester-based Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura are basically what back in the bad old days we used to term a “jam band”, perhaps cut through with hints of what in even worse days we called a “post-rock band”, but with enough shining talent and eminent good taste to ditch the negative connotations of both these pigeonholes.

Generally foregrounding the lyrical, clean-toned exploratory playing of nominal band leader Nick Mitchell, yr average Desmadrados cut features anything up to four or five electric guitars circling around each other, with delicately applied but defiantly weird effects turning one or two of them into pure atmos and smoke, as a loose, improvised groove takes hold, quite possibly featuring bass tone so warm you could hold your hands against it on a winter morn, and minimal, unobtrusive percussion grounding the tempo.

Working in an area of music that often overflows with ego, technical bluster and obscurantism, there’s something just so straight up, and… I dunno, inclusive?.. about the way Desmarcados do business, it’s just a wonderful thing.

I mean, what can I tell you: I’ve always loved the sound of electric guitars and their accoutrements, and I love all the things they can be made to do in the right hands. These guys, to my way of thinking, are very much the right hands, and ‘The Great Celestial Purge’ finds them doing all the lovely things they do on their guitars for literally hours on end, and I love it.

The Grateful Dead (in full-on ‘Live/Dead’ mode, not the country stuff, obviously) are an inescapable reference point here, but, if you’ve ever found yourself unwilling to struggle through endless minutes of baroque sing-songy bits and grunty Pig-Pennery to reach the transcendent ‘peak moments’ on a ‘Dead set, you’ll be offering praises to your dark gods the moment you cue up ‘Defixiones’ on the first side of ‘The Great Celestial Purge’ and find Desmadrados taking us straight to that peak moment from the outset and just letting it build and build across the entirety of the next twenty minutes, endless, nameless fragments of ungraspable melody cascading ever onward into an gilt-edged spider web of dreams. Or something. It was a random online play of this track that convinced me I needed to drop the best part of a month’s disposable income on these records, and I do not regret my decision in the slightest.

Another potential touchstone in the canon of non-embarrassing jam band shit is that of Swedish communal funsters Träd Gräs Och Stenar, whose spirit can perhaps be felt ever so slightly on the equally edifying side B jam, ‘Hogback Shingles’; a more subdued piece that sees the bass gradually taking the lead as flurries of exquisitely reverbed slide guitar detritus drift hither and yon through the mix, this one creates a dense field of valve amp detritus, melting like a snowdrift hit with a shaft of sun, and is perfect just before bed-time.

Completing the triumvirate of influences of course, we need to throw in a mention of electric-era Miles Davis and the wealth of cosmic fusion excursions that followed in his wake – a unbeatable blueprint for the production of long-form, improvised music that Desmadrados fall back on throughout this set, whether consciously or otherwise. And although the general vibe here is too chilled to engage with the live-wire tension and supressed aggression of Miles’s best dawn-of-the’70s sides, the relatively agitated ‘Red-Eared Sliders’ and the grimier abstraction of ‘Iluvia Radioactiva’ do at least hint at the possibility of darker currents within their work, reminding us of ‘The Great Celestial Purge’s loose concept as a memorial for assorted musicians lost during 2016.

The main thing I think Desmadrados take from Miles though is an inherent understanding of one of the key lessons of ‘Bitches Brew’ et al – namely, that the ‘slow-build’ is for suckers. Perhaps in fact, this is the key to what makes the music of Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura so much more mercurial and intoxicating than that of the majority of practitioners of the unpalatable genres I name-checked in the opening paragraphs of this post. Instead of treading water, holding back the pay-off, counting off the minutes just for the hell of it, each one of the cuts here sees the band zeroing straight in on what they want to do, establishing their M.O. for the piece, then building upon it, twisting it, demolishing it, rebuilding it, in a suitably ecstatic fug of group-mind creation, revelling endlessly in the gleaming, multi-faceted detail they can bounce off the walls of their magnificently appointed comfort zone. It’s a sweet place to be.

I know that rock/pop music is supposed to be all about innovation and confrontation and the wild energy of youth and so on, so perhaps I’m about to make myself sound like a worthless, irredeemable old white man, but fuck it. The music on this set is beautifully played and beautifully recorded, and it proves extremely edifying and relaxing whenever I get a chance to put a side or two of it on as I sit on my bed and read my book of an evening (perhaps with an occasional snifter of single malt to complete the idyllic picture). There is an awful lot of music to enjoy across these four discs, and I am looking forward to letting it continue to sink in for quite some time to come. Who knows, maybe I can bend the rules to have it qualify as #1 for 2017 too? If this what middle age feels like, bring it on.

‘The Great Celestial Purge’ can be heard and acquired in either physical or digital form direct from Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura's bandcamp page.

Labels: best of 2016, Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura