Moonmot are a mischievous yet accomplished agglomeration of Swiss and Brit elements who play largely improvised music against strongly written themes and riffs. Going Down the Well is their debut, with the Roberts and Byrne axis being the obvious engine room, but Fuster’s analogue keys glisten and provoke, while it’s always a pleasure to revel in that increasingly rare bird, the trombone, with Petermann both brash and beautiful. 

It all kicks off with the boppish title track, Roberts’ squalls urging but never melodramatic. By contrast the gorgeously titled ‘Threnody for the English Polity’, as the title politely states, is a lamentation, a wailing ode for the dissolution of England’s body politic. ‘Avignon’, by European contrast, is altogether perkier with Fuster’s keys dancing along in an echo of the great Dave MacRae, while the assertive bass and drum groove sets up Roberts again to give it some serious welly. The band may not live up to their (ironically?) titled ‘The Impossible made Possible’ (with Fuster and especially Petermann lyrically dancing), but Going Down the Well goes down very well indeed.