The second album from Brighton-based multi-instrumentalist Marcus Hamblett is a significant departure from his debut LP, 2015’s Concrete. Featuring six tracks of diverse styles ranging from jazzy balladry through to scratchy electronica, Detritus hangs together through Hamblett’s dexterous ability to assimilate himself into often incompatible genre reference points, ably switching between guitar, synth, cornet and vibes across the course of the album.

Hamblett is joined by a cast of similarly-minded sonic adventurers, including LNZNDRF’S Ben Lanz, synth maverick James Holden and saxophonist Etienne Jaumet, a fellow member with Hamblett in Holden’s Animal Spirits and one half of French electronic duo Zombie Zombie. These extra musicians add counterpoints to Hamblett’s own, many-layered vision for Detritus, the result being far from the trashy leftovers implied by the album’s title.

The central piece of the album is ‘Ghost Socks’, which features Hamblett sparring seamlessly with Colin Stetson’s clarinet and saxophone. Running at over eleven minutes, ‘Ghost Socks’ has a journeying, restless quality, effortlessly flicking between passages of languid jazz guitar, rigid electronic sections, noise rock and a concluding moment built out from stacked circular loops of Stetson’s playing that owes a debt to the effervescent cycles of Terry Riley’s In C. To cram this many ideas into one track is, on paper, a recipe for a dizzying, capricious sprawl, yet it feels entirely logical in Hamblett’s hands.

After a segue into Latin guitar on the reflective two-part ‘The Warren’, the second half of which features some beautiful, if mournful, strings, we find ourselves in the fizzing electronics of ‘Gardner’s Basement’. Aside from some horn sections from Mathieu Charbonneau and Ben Lanz, ‘Gardner’s Basement’ is mostly Hamblett at the synthesizer, offering a towering, cinematic piece loaded with rich detail and evolving melodic passages edged with a noir sensibility, twinned with rhythms and beats which seem randomised to the point of chaos.

The album concludes with ‘Vibraphone Piece’, for all intents and purposes an Animal Spirits track given the involvement of Holden and Jaumet, alongside flutes and strings. On this piece we are transported to a distant exoticism thanks to Hamblett’s contemplative vibraphone playing and its elegant string accompaniment, only for the mood to become suddenly unpredictable: echoing sprinkles of electronics appear out of nowhere, rasping horns that are both reflective yet curiously abrasive drift gently to the surface, and a sense of discordancy emerges as a metallic rhythm begins to underpin the whole assembly. At some point along this track’s path you realise you are no longer in a romanticised eulogy to mai tais, sunsets and palm trees but a dangerous, edgy, noisy, brilliant, harrowing vision of what it feels like to be alive right now.

Detritus by Marcus Hamblett was released on November 15 2019 by Willkommen Records.

(c) 2019 Further.