Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Birmingham’s history is such that music is an inevitability, the power of attraction, the force of inspiration flows deeply in anyone who sees the city of a thousand trades as more than just the past, but as tapestry, of a weaved narrative that encompasses all from the Lickey Hills, Selly Park, Handsworth Park to the Spaghetti Junction, its rich diversity of people, and the laid down buildings and constructions designed with purpose capture something almost unique and conclusive that artists cannot but be drawn to the domination of the midland’s municipality.
For the six-piece splendour of Birmingham’s Bonfire Radicals that inspiration is once more delved heartily within as they release their new album which takes its name from one of the most complex road structures ever designed in Britain, but one to whom everybody knows as if it is an old friend or notorious companion.
Spaghetti Junction unites textures, entwines itself around surfaces, and touches with great force around the various musical journeys undertaken by the players who inhabit the soul of the sound created, and it is interlacing of many roads that lead to a specific groove that the third studio outing from the collective folk act swings with majesty, and rolls with thunder along a system of well thought out and navigated pieces that pull the listener onwards and with great pleasure available at every turn and junction.
Culture is not just people alone, it is what they create even at the fringes, and as tracks such as Balkan Replacement Service, Green Fingered Hectus, Krims Krams Rŭčenica, Birmingham Rain (which features The Choir Of No Name Birmingham), and the album title track Spaghetti Junction, Michelle Holloway, Katie Stevens, Sarah Farmer, Emma Reading, Pete Churchill, and Ilias Lintzos provide a worldwide view of how culture can become infectiously groovy, passionate, and become its own traditional freeway of composition.
The journey is one in which the straight and narrow is unacceptable, a chore, without alteration or view, but in the twisted realm of imaginative solutions, Spaghetti Junction is one incredible vision and consistent, wonderful surprises.
Ian D. Hall