Bluebottle Kiss - Doubt Seeds
**** stars

Whose Doubt Seeds are we talking about? A double album of songs referencing artists as different as Midnight Oil and Ornette Coleman from a band with a reputation from a band being too diverse for their own good, could well re-define the word "ambitious". The opening 'Your Mirror is a Vulture' appropriates the TV Eye riff and further explores the Stooges' free jazz and garage rock experiments (with passing nod to Thurston Moore and X); disc two's 'Dream Audit' rides a warped riff that might have been discarded by the Oils from their Hercules sessions; and the country rock of 'The Women are an Army' adds a choir to the mid-Western Neil Young feel. By the time 'Miranda' investigates the modal improvisation Miles Davis used in A Kind of Blue, you could well be forgiven for giving up caring. But mercifully, you don't have to know your Ornettes from your Garys when it comes to Colemans, to enjoy 'Doubt Seeds'. At its heart it's an old fashioned rocker - an art school rocker to be sure - but a bona fide 80s brand rock album, no doubt. Bluebottle Kiss need to stop apologising, stop doubting, and keep releasing epic, multi-dimensional albums of this magnitude because nobody else in this country is.