This track was criminally left off their fourth album, Pawn Hearts, but deserves another listen, as in five short minutes you can almost imagine a whole scenario.
We get some tentative tom tom pounding from Guy Evans; it slowly get things started racking up the tension in their muted poly-rhythm. Then the snare bursts in, playing some marching band inspired double stroke rolls, similar to the kind employed by their dark-prog rivals, King Crimson in 21st Century Schizoid Man; where it gave an 'Iron Man' mechanical quality to a song about the rise of dystopian warfare.
It swiftly turns into a feeding frenzy as a horde of saxes break onto the scene like elephants from Hannibal's March. Squeaks of wild birds are also channelled from the very powerful lungs of David Jacksons as his fantastic saxophone parts dominate the mix. His deafening elephantine squeals could crack an ear drum but also make your most primal instincts flair up. The rabid squawking of David Jackson's 'double horn' approximate the cacophony you would hear under a jungle canopy. While the depth of the chamber reverb create a feeling as if a faint echo from a prehistoric age when beasts stomped the earth.
But the key is the reverse echo, clipping and sucking the various elements till it distorts, anteing up into swirling cauldron of sounds, panning in and out and endlessly rotating. Soon the maddening layers of drums and brass ramp up as the beat goes fully ballistic; the creatures are now in heat. Now all manner of ghastly sounds blare out from bleats to yelps; some saxes even seem to bear a guttural gargle like sound of cockerels, while others shriek like deranged monkeys going haywire under a molten sun. Reverse echoes add an urgency to proceedings as if things are spinning around and the saxes are sped up to raise their pitch before an abrupt finish; a glass pane smashes.
What follows is a collage of sounds playing out like some sort of nightmarish orgy in the middle of the African bush. A trebly signal pulses from left to right channel like tge reflections of a wiffleboard, and a key chain sound zips just like the sound a tape measure makes when it retracts. This plants an image in my mind of a grasshopper, praying mantis or smaller insects like a beetle scuttering along.
Smaller glass objects smash all around like crystal goblets dropping out of the hands of people suddenly caught off guard. You can almost picture nature launching an attack on some colonial retreat in the middle of a savage terraplane. Next are some sharp zaps that resemble ray gunfire, but ricochet out like that of aimless musket fire from heavily outnumbered imperialists. The saxes pierce simultaneously in horrid screams and booming battle cries as cymbals crash all around us to add to the mayhem and chaos; even a gong can be briefly heard. The whooping alto-sax is the key ingredient it could be any animal with it's curdling and the way the baritone saxes bay like a herd of stampeding Mûmakils marauding the dusky East African dry lands. But it's no good; the snare and saxes return in a barrelling assault as the elephants and creatures of the jungle retake man's outpost.
It ends with those insects scurrying over the debris, as if kicking over some glass shards, at the bottom of the food chain they enjoy little of the remains of the day; they may only feast once the larger mammals' bloodlust have been fully quenched.
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