The brilliantly named Raccoo-oo-oon – scratch that, make that infuriatingly named, I’m copying and pasting from hereon in – are sneaking in to the New Weird America campsite in the middle of the night to set it ablaze.  Their fifth/first album Behold Secret Kingdom (depends how you count them…doesn’t it always with this sort of band?) is a glorious cacophony of riffs, drones and skronk.

The ominous guitar rumble and SHOTM shouty-preachiness of “Black Branches” should have set the smoke detectors all-a-bleepy in plenty of time for them to get out without their long, matted hair in flames (although I think I may hear it going off at the end of second track “Mirror Blanket”, and are those screams I hear in “Fangs and Arrows”…so perhaps…too late).  Behold Secret Kingdom continues in this fine freeform…ummm…form, although it is when the masses of sounds coalesce into some sort of order on the towering “Antler Mask” that they achieve their shamanic nirvana, with its six minutes of Albert Ayler sax, Sonic Youth riffs, JOMF scratching and a middle section of white noise.  You’ll need to stick your head in a bucket of cold water after listening to this. 

Available from Release The Bats.