London’s Premiere Neo-Jazz Wreckin’ Crew Turn Organised Noise Into Communion
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Sly & The Family Drone make music that treats the room as another instrument. On With Love, brass, percussion, electronics and voice are pulled into the same volatile space, shaped less by pristine separation than by the friction of musicians responding to one another in real time. Built from quick, organic takes, the album keeps those reactions intact: a drum pattern buckles, a horn forces the arrangement sideways, electronics swarm around the edges. The music breathes because nobody seems interested in pinning it down.
That collective instinct gives With Love much of its character. James Allsopp’s tenor saxophone can cut cleanly through the commotion or disappear back into it, while Kaz Buckland and Will Glaser build percussion that shifts between swing, fractured momentum and blunt physical force. Matt Cargill and Ed Dudley bring electronics, voice and additional percussion into the mix, blurring the line between ensemble playing and something closer to controlled environmental noise. Free improvisation sits near the centre of the record, but looseness never means indifference. The band listen closely enough to know when to crowd the frame and when to leave it suddenly exposed.
Tracks such as Psychic Surgery
and The Guts Of Albion
carry the reflexes of musicians accustomed to sharing a stage. Horns rise through dense passages, drums snap into new formations, and electronic textures flash around the acoustic instruments rather than sitting politely behind them. The shifts can be abrupt, but they rarely feel isolated. Even when the music begins to resemble a structural collapse, there is a strong sense that everyone is falling in the same direction.
That makes the title With Love more revealing than its apparent joke suggests. Wrapped in satin, lace and shades of pink, the album presents affection through impact rather than softness. Its tenderness is physical and collective: the trust required to improvise at this intensity, to leave space for another player, or to push into disorder knowing the group will find its way through. The humour associated with Sly & The Family Drone remains present, but here it sits alongside a warmer idea of what communal noise can hold.
The recordings themselves preserve that immediacy. Rather than sounding like compositions carefully reconstructed after the fact, they retain the heat of performance — moments when an idea seems to occur because somebody else has just created the conditions for it. The band’s experimental language stays rooted in bodies, breath and impact. Abstraction is never allowed to become weightless.
That physicality ultimately gives With Love its emotional centre. Noise becomes less an act of aggression than a way of gathering people into the same moment. The album rattles, swells, splinters and occasionally threatens to pull itself apart, but underneath the turbulence is an unusually simple proposition: listening closely to other people can itself be an act of affection.
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