The Inspector Cluzo – Self Titled

During the course of Inspector Cluzo’s album, you will hear influences from The Jacksons, Led Zeppelin, Tom Morello, Jimi Hendrix, John Frusciante and Neil Young, in more acoustic moments. This might lead one to say that you have heard it before, and you might have heard a lot of the musical ideas before, but you haven’t heard the way Cluzo expresses them.

From the Physical Graffiti-style opening of the title track, they set up the expectation that this might be a cover band with a sense of humour. But as they prove with each track, they constantly take you somewhere different, often without much warning, always to great effect. The tracks present separate moods with the first half gravitating towards a mix of Zeppelin rock and Jackson 5 sweetness and the second half geared towards crunchier hard rock. The album has the sense of a band composing like DJs making a killer mix.

What Cluzo bring that will make you remember them is a sense of humour that doesn’t make you think of them as a joke band but rather as the sort of men who’d laugh in the face of danger and cry in the face of humour, if only to amuse themselves. And that is the the joy of the album: no matter what is going on the album is fun to listen to, if you’re not already up dancing to it.

7/10

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