‘Everyone subscribes, Everybody’s fighting for a voice, To repeat the lie, Shattering, Clamoring, Capital realized’ (Specks)

Non Plus Temps are an Oakland based collective whose members share a tangled ancestry across a myriad of Bay Area projects including Famous Mammals, Naked Roommate, Preening, and The World.  As this pedigree would suggest, they lean toward the more experimental edgelands of post-punk, forging the most unexpected connections between the jarringly dissonant and the downright infectious.

This is their second full-length, following up their 2022 debut, Desire Choir.  It unfurls with an undulating, shimmering unpredictability that is impossible to readily pigeonhole and that seethes with an improvisational vitality.  The only guarantees are that it will make you want to move.  That said, your body may never be entirely comfortable that it is going in quite the right direction.

NPT weave an ever-reformulating tapestry of skronking sax, stabbing guitar, jarring synths, cavorting piano, and spryly understated percussion.  It is one that consistently challenges expectation, without ever veering into self-indulgence, as songs assertively emerge, disassemble, and then put themselves back together again often as something rather subtly different.

The vocals similarly morph in character as they segue from drawled observations to semi-shouted tirades, by way of spectrally narrated monologues and altogether more melodic expressions.  Their lyrical observations are wryly allusive as they unpick the nature of the poisonous hegemony that currently governs our lives.  The notion that value is only accrued through monetisation and that valorises capital accumulation over every other facet of existence.

As the album unfurls, it sucks you into it into its embrace with an immediacy that belies its underlying complexity.  The pulsating, squalling bounce of Heads Of State.  The hauntingly serpentine, sax fired Written In Fits.  The intoxicating, dub drenched De Chirico Desert.  The beguiling skeletal piano and martial beats of A Certain Degree. The languidly discordant Saw The Cars Free. Immerse yourself in the Conditional Bunker and you will be richly rewarded.