Elephant9’s recent epic releases have made them the breakthrough band in Norway’s hard jazz-rock scene, which uses electric Miles and metal as the volcanic bedrock for freaky improv flights. Red Kite are a sort of scene super-group, including Elephant9’s drummer and Bushman’s Revenge’s guitarist, but this second album confirms they occupy their own territory. This is thickly textured, almost claustrophobically heavy music, powered by Torstein Lofthus’ torrentially tumbling drums, a restless, shaping energy suggesting Elvin Jones in Led Zep. Prog’s classical ornateness is trampled underfoot, subsumed into Bernt André Moen’s wild Rhodes riffing and Even Helte Hermansen’s towering guitar squalls on the monstrous ‘Morrasol’. Solos are bright streaks through roiling, stormfront music. ‘Apophenia’ is a necessary contrast, as Black Sabbath-like bass anchors an impressionistic melody, suggesting Hermansen’s beloved Wayne Shorter. Red Kite’s dogged journey through its heat-haze sultriness is wistful and weary. The closing ‘Sleep Tight’ is another mood piece, like folkish Floyd as it floats in inner space, percussion rattling in distant caverns. Red Kite’s head-crushing power is leavened not only by those softer tunes, but the sandpaper abrasiveness of the guitars’ fuzz and Rhodes’ scraping crackle, a tactile harshness giving the tapes intimate life. Explosive yet immersive, it’s like a dream of the 1970s Hendrix-Miles summit that never was - with interjections from later Brum, Oz and Norwegian metal, and inevitably held in Oslo’s new capital of headbanging, mind-expanding jazz.