Polar Bear — Held on the tips of fingers

With this album English jazz outfit Polar Bear rightly earned themselves a Mercury music prize nomination. The award eventually went to Antony and the Johnson’s but it could have easily gone to this superbly English modern jazz record.

Polar Bear are guided by their "Mad afro" sporting drummer Sebastian Rochford who’s passionate and inventive rhythms are inch perfect regardless of whether deploying drum and bass tinged cut-ups as on Fluffy (I want you) or ska like beats on To touch the red brick.

I Was Dreaming you Called you Disappeared I slept kicks the album off in slow moody fashion with deep dual tenor sax from Mark Lockheart and Pete Wareham and curious glitch effects from Leafcutter John in the background. It sets the stage perfectly for Beartown, a funky handclappy kind of semi nursery rhyme song that really does conjure images of a toy town run by little furry bears.

Fluffy (I want you) filters off kilter drum and base rhythms through Otomo Yoshihide cut-up jazz to great effect. The editing and electronics of Leafcutter John marrying perfectly with the rhythm section and the double bass.  That’s three entirely different flavours in the first three tracks. And the fourth comes in the shape of To touch the red brick. They performed this song at the Mercury music awards where it featured a cracking noise solo by leafcutter John using what looked like a Sega game controller controlling a patch on Max/MSP. No such indulgences here though as the electronic parts are restricted to field recordings of what sounds like someone playing pool. I love the swaggering ska like sax and drumming, as if madness has gone all cool jazz.

Argumentative is perhaps the most straight forward of all the songs here. Funky cool jazz rhythms and sax solos. Stop start to begin with but it soon gets into it’s flow. Life that ends too soon is the last track and it features the only use of vocals. After a glitchy intro the bass and sax lopes into a very loungy groove accompanying the melodic almost crooning vocals. Little electronic flourishes bob and duck here and there keeping things off kilter but this is certainly the most accessible of the music here.

Cracking album from a band rightly getting their time in the spotlight.