Squid

London's Squid, one of the bands of the "Windmill scene" with Black Country New Road, Shame and Black Midi, debuted with the EP Town Centre (2019) and several singles (all produced by Dan Carey) before the album Bright Green Field (Warp, 2021), also produced by Dan Carey. The band is fronted by drummer Ollie Judge, a loudly hysterical and psychotic singer in the tradition of David Thomas of Pere Ubu, and James Chance of the Contortions Behind him the band (guitarists Louis Borlase and Anton Pearson, bassist Laurie Nankivell and keyboardist Arthur Leadbetter) concocts a chaotic circus of quirky, chaotic, explosive, danceable and dystopian-themed songs. The eight-minute Pamphlets is emblematic of their Pere Ubu-esque "modern dance", contaminated by B52's-esque disco-punk and Contortions-esque no-wave neurosis. The eight-minute Narrator harkens back to the visceral atonal funk of the Talking Heads (with the addition of Martha Skye Murphy's sensual moans and witchy shrieks). The deranged boogie of the seven-minute Boy Racers sinks into the quicksands of a desolate soundscape. The post-disco quasi-synthpop of Paddling turns LCD Soundsystem upside down. The whole album defies conventions, from the funeral jazz fanfare Global Groove to the chaotic Peel St and the Caribbean-minimalist-symphonic G.S.K. All the songs are poly-stylistic, deliberately avoiding coherence and identity.

O Monolith (2023) is a mixed bag. It starts out with Swing, a flashback to 1980s dark-punk redeemed by a surreal coda that would have pleased Frank Zappa, but clearly a minor song. The neoclassical and bucolic Devil’s Den recalls a neurotic version of Jethro Tull. The autotuned singalong Siphon Song belongs to the crowded category of imitations of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, although with a surreal coda that would have pleased Laurie Anderson. Nonetheless, they reach new peaks of complexity, notably with the carefully crafted style-shifting Undergrowth which begins like a pulsing syncopated Talking Heads shuffle, then veers into dub-jazz and then psychedelic electronica and then drunk cacophony ending as a David Bowie-esque melodrama. That complexity is channeled toward emotional and cinematic effects for the politically charged The Blades. Alas, the method fails miserably in the last three songs.

Cowards (2025) marks a sudden collapse in inspiration. Crispy Skin and especially Showtime! are typical of their prog-rock fantasias that alternate boring passages and interesting ones. The latter has a section of neoclassical parody and another section of dizzying Neu-esque gallop. The sophisticated orchestration of the eight-minute (and standout) Well Met (Fingers Through The Fence) makes it sound like a mini-opera, and that's enough to redeem the others. The exotic Indian-esque Building 650 and the spaced-out Radiohead-esque Fieldworks II fail to coalesce into memorable numbers. The catchy Cro-Magnon Man belongs to the demented musichall of Gong but is hardly groundbreaking. We are left with the trivial post-rock "slow-fast" dynamics of Blood On The Boulders and with the melancholy noir ballad Cowards.