Album Review: Sky Needle - Rave Cave

Sky Needle beggar belief. The Brisbane quartet define their sound through self-made instruments. Joel Stern plays parping horns made from soft-drink bottles and bike pumps. Alex Cuffe has wrought some kind of bass-related instrument out of a speaker box. Ross Manning is credited solely with 'string panels'. Rounded out by vocalist/percussionist Sarah Byrne, their rumbling, primitive sound is impossible to ascribe to any specific instrumentation. Forget genre.

It's fantastic, though. This is why Sky Needle are so unbelievable. A description such as the above fills the mind with images of noise, abstraction and self-indulgence – or, worse still, quirky kitsch. Sky Needle, though, simply rock it. There's an unpretentious streak of fun and funk that runs through the band's work that makes it hard not to love everything they do. Rave Cave is arguably their best work yet. Released strictly to vinyl by respected local imprint Negative Guestlist (the label run by the much-missed Brendon Annesley), the band's latest album finds them condensing their sprawling sound into nine concise nuggets of sound.

The formula is fundamentally the same for the majority of pieces – Sarah Byrne's washed out vocals echo over noisy, percussive soundscapes – but it's amazing how many variations in mood Sky Needle can find for their raw, ephemeral sound. Radical Fire rides a rumbling, swampy, primal bass figure into a hypnotic, unwholesome groove; Rest In A Well sounds both jazzy and pastoral in its seesawing horns and plucked string textures; Two Way Solo slithers menacingly by in a six-minute drawl.

It's not music easily described – but it is music easily enjoyed. It's music that's as immediately filthy as it is undeniably artistic. Music very much deserving of your time, in other words.