COMPOSERS: Led Bib
LABELS: Cuneiform Rune Records
ALBUM TITLE: Led Bib: The People in Your Neighbourhood
WORKS: The People in Your Neighbourhood
PERFORMER: Mark Holub (drums), Pete Grogan, Chris Williams (saxophone) etc
CATALOGUE NO: 378
This crowd-funded studio album, and the associated tour in April and May, are celebrations of the 10th anniversary of Led Bib’s first gig, back in February 2004. At the same time the band has released a limited-edition live vinyl album, The Good Egg, recorded during two London gigs last year.
Led Bib retains its original personnel (although there had been a short-lived earlier edition with guitar and trumpet) and while there’s a lot of new material here, it sticks pretty much to its established modus operandi. This is dominated by snaking, jostling, spiky polyphony at fast tempos and inexorable crescendos on the slow numbers, where the music builds from almost stately themes that increase in volume, intensity and complexity. The distinctive two-alto sax front-line weaves and collides over dense thickets of sound from the keyboards, bass and drums, with Richard Woodcraft’s production picking out detail without losing the overall clout of the ensemble sound.
Barry Witherden