With Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds subsiding into middlebrow gentrification on their last album Push the Sky Away, former Bad Seeds guitarist James Johnston steps up to show how it should be done.

The Soul of the Hour, his latest outing with Gallon Drunk, opens with an intense nine-minute clatter reminiscent of how the Bad Seeds once were, and the rest of the band’s eighth album continues in the same wild vein: howling krautrock on “The Dumb Room”, desperate squalls of sax and percussion on the title track, obsessive drone rock on “The Speed of Fear”.

Gallon Drunk

The Soul of the Hour

(Clouds Hill/Rough Trade)

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