Bunnies – Horror Spectrum – “This ain’t pop rock nope, this is an outside variation on prog-rock. And not that slick sophisticated “proof of musicianship” type of prog. This is raw and they don’t really care that much what you think, as they should not. And that’s why I like ’em so much.” (Roger Miller, Mission of Burma). We’re with Roger on this one, we couldn’t have put ti better, this is not the type of prog rock that needs to show off, this is not clever for the tedious sake of being clever or any of that nonsense, this is just naturally good, this is just right. They’re from Northampton, Massachusetts, their music is indeed “a foggy, proggy, uniquely psychedelic, eye-opening experience… On one hand, it’s sublimely composed and structurally sound; on the other hand, anything goes and could switch gears at any second when the listeners, and sometimes the band members themselves, least expect it”.

At times with this new album we’re thinking Captain Beefheart or maybe Pere Ubu and then they hit you with a big slab of something from somewhere the good Captain would probably never dream of going, right now they’re galloping in some kind of awkwardly skipping along kind of way and that bit sounds a little Doors flavoured, a skip that would trip most people up, this really really does feel rather natural to them though, instinctive, easy as pie, some kind of strange pie, who was that band who sang about pies? Cerberus Shoal, they do sound a bit like Cerberus Shoal.  We’ve been featuring Bunnies videos on these pages for a couple of weeks or more now in the run up to this fine new album, it is the first we’ve heard of them and well, we rather like what we hear. 

Horror Spectrum is a strange album. strange in many ways, all of them good ways and yes, true, I have no idea what they’re on about or what they’re drinking in their tea, not that this is some kind of hippy nonsense, if it psychedelic then it comes with bite, it does some with a slice of horror… Three minutes into the twenty two that make up the closing track and you already know it is an epic, if it had ended after the first three minutes it would still have been an epic. Actually however long or short they are, all of their songs are epic, there’s whole books of lyrics or tales in each one of those full bodied songs. We could talk of Zappa, of Soft Machine, Gong or Genesis, we could talk of King Gizzard, Pavement, Sunburned Hand of the Man or Flaming Lips, we could talk of many thing, ultinately they sound like no one else really and those fake eyelashes probably make their eyelids look heavy. They have some exquisite detail in there, that bit just then sounded so good, whee are we now? Yes indeed, they are equal parts psychedelic hallucination, krautrock ritual, and noise rock exorcism and this record “feels like the sonic aftermath of mad scientists summoning ghosts through an analogue synthesiser they excavated from a cursed tomb”, couldn’t have put it better myself as they sing about eye sockets and…  (sw)    

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 I guess they do sound like their album cover (album artwork by Davor Gromilovic)