Sanguine Hum

Now We Have Light (2015)

Oxford based progressive band ... 'it's a double concept album!!'

Chat Show ... 

 A quality not unlike much of the music that came out of Canterbury in the 1960/70s from groups like Egg, early Soft Machine and Hatfield and the North—the latter, in particular, one of the more important of Sanguine Hum's many touchstones (along with everything from Frank Zappa and Steve Reich to Bass Communion, Mahavishnu Orchestra and ECM Records). While the members of Sanguine Hum are unmistakably accomplished musicians who live in the world called post-progressive rock, their music possesses the same lack of self-importance, excess and "look at me" attitude that some say plagued many of progressive rock's bigger names but which those Canterbury bands managed to largely avoid.

Sanguine Hum may, in fact, be based in Oxford, England, but they're Canterburians at heart...albeit Canterburians of an unmistakably modern bent with a similarly bizarre sense of humour and a belief that, no matter how complex the music gets, melody—albeit pushed to its greatest extremes—remains paramount. Sanguine Hum may have many touchstones in the past, but its music is undeniably 21st century...in the case of Now We Have Light, perhaps, even farther ahead, as its story takes place at an unidentified future time when the story's hero, Don (just Don), has been the cause of an apocalyptic event that has reduced the earth to "The Circle"—a gated community constructed by rich survivors to protect themselves from the consequences of a ravaged planet—and the nearby village of ramshackle homes that survive only due to its proximity to "The Wheel." It's in one of these homes that Don lives, with both his neighbors and those living in "The Wheel" thankfully (for him) unaware that he was the singular creator of all their woes... allaboutjazz ...

Derision ... 

Bubble trouble ..