Pete Cunningham's urban big band emerge from their Bristol habitat with a follow up to their highly acclaimed 2019 debut. Like A State Of Flow, this album continues to explore the intersections between club culture, indie songwriting, and cosmic jazz, skirting close to but ultimately avoiding the cliches of all three genres. ‘Feather’ uses the building blocks of loping double bass, cascading harp and dreamy vocals to create an atmospheric if rather familiar soundscape – at the other end of the spectrum, ‘Wax Werk’ builds upon a squelchy analogue synth bass to create a towering edifice of live drums, skirling electronics, haunting vocal sample and squalling sax that's somewhere between Drum n' Bass and Ozric Tentacles.

There's a freewheeling, dub-heavy, psychedelically tinged vibe to proceedings that fits well with the city's heritage: the brooding textures of ‘Soma Centre’ are ominous and shifting like rain clouds over the Severn, the crunchy downbeat rhythm track and hauntological vocals of ‘Empty Hands’ conjure up memories of Portishead's 1990s heyday, and ‘Looking Glass’ sounds like a long-lost Massive Attack/Cocteaus mash-up, with an outstanding pixie-ish vocal from STANLEY. ‘Morning Chorus’ and ‘The Gift’ cast the net wider to match Bon Iver for evocatively orchestrated melancholy. The infusion of excellent live musicianship, especially Rory O'Gorman's drums, gives added depth to proceedings, and the quality of the creative imagination at work raises this above standard trip-hop fare into something quite epic, generating some genuinely emotive intensity.