It takes nerve to write music that departs from the norm. Nerve is needed to fight the ever-present temptation to round off the sharp corners and produce a more generic sound, and to silence the fearful thoughts that such music will never get you on MTV.

Nerve will take you places you never dreamed of, whereas playing to the gallery will lead to to exactly where you expected.

Pompey is an artist who has been making music for a while – so his appearance becomes one of the ‘new-as-in-new-to-ANBAD‘ variety, as opposed to the ‘only-picked-up-a-glockenspiel-for-the-first-time-last-week‘ kind.

Pompey // Bivouac Sack

None of this controversial machination will matter a jot when you’ve heard Bivouac Sack, a song so kaleidoscopically beauiful and hypnotic, that the song sows the seeds of it’s own sonic destruction half way through, lest the listening audience slips unwittingly into an inert state of comfort.

It takes a true artist to create a song so multi-layered, so loopily and beautifully colourful and so lilting that time itself drags, stupified. It takes a bold artist to then consider this not progressive enough, and to chuck a big clump of fractured, devious noise-pollution into the middle to jolt the audience awake and allow the song to move on.

Pompey‘s are the kind of songs which connect with me so directly, it feels like cheating to write about him in such glowing terms. Such is life. Pompey’s songs feel urgent, necessary and yet totally calming. Excellent.

Download the full-fat version of the excellent Bivouac Sack here