pening with the quite brilliantly titled If It Works For The Cast Of LA Law, It’s Going To Work For Me, Thumpermonkey Lives! lull you into something of a false sense of security. With it’s peppered, layered harmonies and bouncy, off-kilter pianos you’d think you’re going to get an album of baroque pop melodies akin to Sunderland’s Field Music. To a certain extent you do. To a certain extent you don’t. And to a certain extent this is very hard to pin down. However, the inability to put things in boxes doesn’t necessarily mean you have to file them under “bad”. Imagine David Byrne’s career if that had been the case.

With If It Works… smoothly blending into Whateley, Thumpermonkey Lives! hit you in the face with a hot slice of distortion — dark, moody, discordant distortion. But what about the bouncy pianos!?  They’re gone. What about the baroque vocals and layered harmonies? Well, they’re not gone. The track trudges through a 70′s metal-inspired dirge, while Michael Woodman’s falsetto counterpoints the thick tar that lies beneath it. At over six minutes we’re possibly even veering toward, dare it be mentioned, prog.

Prog needn’t be a dirty word though — if handled correctly. On We Bake Our Bread Beneath The Holy Fire Thumpermonkey Lives! embrace the pomp and circumstance of all the trademarks of prog (wild vocals, jazzy time signatures, longer tracks…) and run with them. And that’s why it works. If you do want to stamp an unnecessary badge on it you might do well with post-prog-metal (and how bad does that sound!)

The rest of the album continues in a similar vein. I Don’t Know if this is a Matter for Wardrobe or Hairdressing leaves the guitars set to ‘punch in the face’ and the riffs set to ‘massive’. Low tuned guitar and bass mirror each other’s moves and time signatures flip and twist, Woodman’s vocal gymnastics tie it all together. If you’re looking for modern contemporaries you could easily name-check The Black Keys, Pontiak or Tweak Bird. Proktor Cylex intersperses a spoken word narrative with guitar gymnastics and, after a deftly finger-picked opening, Abyssopelagic drops into a six minutes of razor sharp guitars and a flagrant disregard for time signatures.

Closer 419 sees the band take a more delicate approach to the sound they’ve carved on the five previous tracks. With guitars more shimmering, drums more sparse and space more open, a busy bass line and choppy piano leans 419 toward the jazzier side of life, before a rousing build on “You have the surname of the deceased” brings the album to a close.

On this relatively short album (six tracks at little over half an hour) Thumpermonkey Lives! have pitched it pretty much perfectly; any longer and it risks growing tried. Although it could be argued that We Bake Our Bread Beneath her Holy Fire is knowingly over-the-top, its makers still take it very seriously — and that’s surely why it triumphs. Their blend of poppy hooks pushed through a Black Sabbath filter leaves us with the heavy metal answer to Field Music. And surely that’s a good thing, right?