Track Of The Day : Pumarosa – Honey

We’re not sure what upset us most at Festival No.6 , the weather, the state of the carpark, the general sense of chaos or the fact that Pumarosa’s set was cancelled on health and safety grounds. (We even had half-baked idea we would try and track them down at the festival and force them to sing for us in exchange for free beer.)

However, their latest recording ‘Honey’ and their first for Fiction records has chased some of the grey clouds away and serves to reaffirm our belief that this East London based quintet are a very special proposition indeed. Their music is not really genre specific and as such is a tad tricky to classify in a de rigueur one-size fits all media-friendly (& invariably f*ckwitted) soundbite, all we can say is they are AMAZING, both live and on record.  They fuse styles effortlessly taking in electro, rock, dance and despite the damage inflicted by Kenny Gee over many years, even manage to make the much-maligned saxophone sound sexy again.

The band came together when singer-songwriter Isabel Munoz-Newsome’s previous band split and she began to write her own songs, with no specific game-plan. She reached a point when felt she needed collaborators to really bring these songs to life and so Pumarosa evolved quite naturally into the band it is now. ‘Honey’ seems more strident and angry, yet is as equally compelling as their previous offerings. Spiralling flanging guitars, electronic flourishes and Isabel’s strident vocal delivery that resides somewhere between Patti Smith and Grace Slick all combine to produce something, urgent, beautiful, impassioned and heartfelt.

If we were an incomprehensible, interminably over-excited Kiwi fruitcake like, say ooh, Zane Lowe? We’d probably say something along the lines of  ‘Pumarosa are the hottest band in the UK right now’ , the thing is we’d actually mean it …