Soil & Pimp Sessions – Planet Pimp (Brownswood/Inertia)

Tokyo-based six-piece self-styled ‘death jazz’ band Soil & Pimp Sessions first formed towards the start of the decade amongst that city’s club scene, when founders Chacho (aka ‘The Agitator’ – vocals) and Tabu Zombie (trumpet) started incorporating live instrumental performances into their DJ sets. Since being the first unsigned act to play at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival in 2003, they’ve certainly been an extremely prolific outfit as well, managing to release no less than four studio albums in as many years. Given the increased international attention afforded to preceding efforts ‘Pimpoint’s and ‘Pimp Of The Year’, it’s perhaps no surprise to see this latest fifth album ‘Planet Pimp’ emerge through UK tastemaker Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label, and in many senses, it seems them poised for crossover success and considerably larger audiences. ‘Hollow’ certainly provides a more than worthy introduction to S&P’s signature ‘death jazz’ aesthetic – read; hot jazz action fused with furious rock drums, and while it certainly threatens to accelerate off into John Zorn-esque territory at first with the sort of drums that would make Slayer fans salivate, beneath the cymbal fury it still manages to play things fairly straight, ending with the sort of stadium-friendly grandiose finish that has you somewhere imagine lighters being held aloft, ‘Champagne Supernova’ style. It’s perhaps a good encapsulation of much of this album’s general approach – while the appropriately titled ‘Storm’ and ‘Mingus Fan Club’ manage to pack in plenty of furious rock drummer fills and tweaked-out, sinister analogue synths, the predominant instrumental undercarriage is unlikely to seriously scare off your average Compost / Exceptional Recordings fan. ‘Planet Pimp’ certainly comes loaded with plenty in the way of impressive fireworks, but I was still left with the sense that S&P are best caught live, with the exhuberant ‘hypeman’ presence of frontman The Agigator (a crucial live element to their performance) strangely subdued amongst these 14 tracks.