Despite being a fan of theirs for many a year, you may recall that Jackie-O Motherfucker, or in particular Jackie-O Motherfucker’s smoking-ban-flouting, support-band-disrespecting and all-round bit-of-an-arsehole-on-the-night Tom Greenwood, got up my nose a bit at a recent gig. So much so that I may have been blinded (as Dave pointed out in the comments) to the quality of the music they were producing. Not being keen to add another name to my lengthy list of grudges borne, I made the point of seeking out a copy of their first studio album in a couple of years, Valley of Fire, and to attempt some sort of objective review. Which was easier than I thought it would be, as he record is strong enough to blow away the stench of any lingering ill-will.

I had read about this being a continuation of JOMF’s progression towards song-based structures, but that turns out to be a dramatic oversimplification. As can be seen by the eight enjoyable minutes of opening track “Sing Your Own Song”, which are as much psychiatric as they are psychedelic, featuring some hippy self-help bullshit mantras being chanted (at Greenwood?) over rolling waves of wah-wah guitar, before beaching itself amidst piano wash. The songs come next: the title track,which with its spacey bleeps and cyclical acoustic phrases feels like it could tumble into early Spiritualized at any moment. The album wanders back further in time for a sweet reworking of The Beach Boys’ “A Day In The Life Of A Tree”, here called just “The Tree”, which emphasises in good hippy fashion all the stuff about pollution and trees dying. So those will be the songs done then, all eight minutes worth; on with the twenty-minute long improvisations. “We Are Channel Zero” ends the album in disorientating krautrock fashion with space-y loops, muffled screams and free drumming punctuated with a myriad of unidentifiable clatter and chatter.

Valley Of Fire is available now from Textile. Buy it, keep Greenwood in smokes.