Album Review: The Sinclairs – Sparkle

The Sinclairs comprise Damned legend Rat Scabies on drums and Billy Shinbone of Flipron and the Neville Staple Band on guitar. It’s a twenty-year friendship (Scabies produced two Fliptron albums) that has now developed into one of the scene’s more interesting collaborations. What has transpired from the duo’s jamming is an intriguing album of slightly unsettling and anachronistic surf-space-punk instrumentals characterised by Shinbone‘s trademark twanging guitar. Scabies‘ drums thunder in accompaniment. There’s minimal additional instrumentation – some dreamy organ, blues harp, some jazzy vibraphone and a touch of modern synth noodling … but it’s all just colour underneath the twang and thunder.

It’s idiosyncratic – you might even say self-indulgent – stuff that twists and turns through canyons of sound. It’s like an album of TV themes for 50s space spaghetti western shows that were never made. And all drenched in industrial levels of reverb and delay that give the whole piece that anachronistic and slightly off-kilter vibe.

Disturbing at times, and often dreamy (Half Way Round Your Dreams and Stuffed Bear Rides The Rings Of Saturn), this album is probably best enjoyed while chemically unbalanced. The incongruous background effects (clocks ticking, owls hooting, horses neighing and dogs barking) add to that trippy, hallucinatory feel. The PR describes the album as ‘easy listening made difficult’, which is as good a description as any.

Despite its almost archetypal American sound, the idiosyncratic song titling (The Bin Men Found It, Plimpton 322, A New Kind Of Sandwich) points to a very British approach. Overall, a determinedly odd 27 minutes of music that manages to be comfortably familiar and unsettling at the same time: a musical vista as wide as Monument Valley with the two dusty troubadours in the foreground, to stretch the Western connection.

The album will be supported by sporadic live performances and a succession of videos starting with Half Way Round Your Dreams, which is described as ‘a spooky off-kilter lullaby brought to the small screen with a carnival of surreal characters playing a nightmare card game in a medieval barn’.

The Sinclairs release their debut instrumental album Sparkle on May 8^th on Cleopatra Records.

“Sparkle” can be pre-ordered on red vinyl here and pre-saved here