Polar Bear - Peepers

While you don't need credentials to review an album (shhhh, don't tell anyone), a familiarity with the genre at hand usually pays dividends. So I'll come clean and admit my jazz-experience amounts to Giant Steps and early Miles Davis - nothing recent, and certainly nothing cut from the same experimental cloth as Seb Rochford and co. So I should probably humbly decline an opinion, right? Nah. Because removing the potentially-daunting 'post-jazz' label reveals enjoyably off-the-wall compositions which can be appreciated without a vocabulary of wailin' and burnin'. Sure, the horns honking throughout Drunken Pharaoh might test the patience of non-aficionados, but generally this is an atmospheric fifty minutes with similarities (in accessible-yet-challenging-scene-darling attitude, if not necessarily aesthetics) to the likes of Animal Collective or Four Tet. Purists may conclude otherwise, but in the opinion of this layman an infiltration of the jazz-allergic mainstream would be very nice indeed.[Chris Buckle]