‘I can’t see the skyline anymore, there is no concept of rise and fall, I am totally eclipsed by your unmoving vision, blurry’ (Horse Eating An Apple)

Somebody’s Gotta Do It is the debut album from Team Work, a duo spanning Berlin (Lise Sutter) and Baton Rouge (Ronni What).  The chunkily elastic bass lines and crisply syncopated rhythms will immediately put at ease anyone who has had the pleasure of encountering Sutter’s other band Maraudeur.  However, they are deployed to underpin a sonic tapestry that evolves in some otherwise decidedly unexpected directions.

What emerges is an intriguing fusion of motorik post-punk that is infused with languid, dub fringed alt-folk, say in the vein of Porta D’oro, and with an equal penchant for leaning eagerly into flourishes of off-kilter discordance that bring to mind Puppet Wipes at their most abrasively obtuse.  Horse Eating An Apple emphatically captures this dynamic.  The gently murmured vocals entwine with the restrained martial drums and an ethereal melancholy, luring you into the track’s hypnotic embrace, before it sharply ruptures into dissonance, and then slips equally abruptly back into its original reverie.

This beguiling invention is matched by the psychedelic oscillations of (Bring More This Time) and the haunting closer, Would We Have A Would-Workshop?.  The latter is laced with mournfully agitated violin and clicking clock percussion to utterly mesmerising effect.  Instrumental tracks are woven throughout the album and their nimble blending of field recordings, noisescapes, and acoustic instrumentation, most notably on Crickets Speaking, further heighten the atmosphere of languorous experimentation.