There's a hell of a lot going on in this music. The first thing to know is that it's deeply, deeply funky. The band has a feel for the dense but unforced and smooth groove that's unequalled in my experience, combining the best of the incredibly thick rhythms of European rave music styles with the backbeat butt-shaking slap and thump of American funk. The rhythms are shaped by the didg, driven by Campbell's insistent but never overbearing drumming, fleshed out with Wiggins' superb work on synths and harmonium and topped off with the amazing Revell and his infinitely mutable guitar. Mr. Revell merits special attention.
Funky rhythms are great, but they generally hold up better live than on disc.
This is especially true when the instrumentation remains the same from song to song - and if one of those instruments is the didg, with its narrow tonal range, well, there needs to something else going on to keep my interest on CD for more than a few tunes. On two discs now that something else has been Revell, who takes an exciting, idiosyncratic approach to every song, attacking each one with a different tone, different phrasing, a whole different approach. He ranges from subtle to slick to shred to howling scream and is equally good at all of it. He transforms this music from the interesting groovy funk at its base to something much more exciting and powerful. He was hard to find fault with to start.