Bonfire Radicals - Flywheel

In any sane universe, Bonfire Radicals would be bigger than Coldplay. Indisputably the finest klezmer-funk-psychedelic-folk dance band to come out of Birmingham since… erm... anyway, the Radicals produced what was far and away the best trad (or trad-adjacent) album of 2022 with their ferociously danceable The Space Between. Two years on, they’re back with a high-energy five-song EP which manages to compress more mad-scientist arrangements, kinetic Balkan rhythms, and sheer incendiary fun into its eighteen minutes than most bands manage in an entire career.

Flywheel kicks off with a lovely traditional Epirot pentatonic tune, Zalizome. Beautifully sung by Michelle Holloway and Katie Stevens, it’s interwoven with a whirling fiddle reel by Sarah Farmer, with some fabulous Cold Sweat-era James Brown guitar riffing from Emma Reading in the background. Stevens and Holloway take centre stage again in The Lost Pick, this time on kaval (Bulgarian flute) and recorder, for a gorgeous, tonally ambiguous 13/8 dance-tune which interrupts itself halfway through for a minute-long Hawaiian interlude of unknown purpose.

One of the high points of The Space Between was Holloway’s pitch-black take on the murder ballad Mary Ashford; here, she brings the same gothic aesthetic to the traditional English song Love is Teasing, backed by an astonishing wall of guitar noise worthy of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

The wildest of the many wild things on this extraordinary EP is Sarah’s Muffins, a madly complex Sarah Farmer fiddle tune built around an infectious 11/8 groove (Ilias Lintzos’ drumming is quite superb throughout). Don’t expect to hear it at a session near you any time soon. Finally, Pete Churchill plays us out with an all-too-short accordion reworking of Satsuma Moon from The Space Between.

There is a danger of making Bonfire Radicals sound merely quirky. Not a bit of it: this is genuinely brave, risk-taking music of astonishing technical ability, at times reminiscent of Captain Beefheart at his most out-there. It’s hard to think of a band doing more to push the envelope of traditional music in the UK. If there’s a grumble, it’s that the autumn tour that they’ve just announced is only five dates long. Booooooo!