Birthmarks

Produced by Graham Sutton (These New Puritans, Bark Psychosis), Birthmarks is New York band Bambara's fifth, and best, studio album. A wild, musically adventurous suite of songs that follows a host of lost characters caught in a multi-generational cycle of love, violence and rebirth. An extraordinary, nocturnally-inclined modernist rock band drenched in Southern Gothic, Bambara have evolved their macabre vision to perfection with their fifth album Birthmarks. Created in collaboration with co-producer Graham Sutton from UK experimental pioneers Bark Psychosis (a man also heavily responsible for the groundbreaking These New Puritans records), it's not so much a concept album as a stunningly complex work of narrative fiction, featuring memorable characters including the Country & Western karaoke-bar siren with halo-braided hair and a one-eyed murderer begging for the electric chair all not exactly set to music, but actually born from it. Bambara are a once-in-a-generation band of intrepid experimentation and compulsive storytelling. For those who crave potent and electrifying music in the lineage of its most celebrated literarily-inclined auteurs - Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen et al - they are, without question, the real deal.