Tom Hughes 

15-60-75 (the Numbers Band): Jimmy Bell’s Still in Town – review

The long-out-of-print 1975 live album by this extraordinary avant-R&B outfit is another thundering, juddering marvel, writes Tom Hughes
  
  

Numbers Band
Part superhuman bar band, part leftfield art-rockers … the Numbers Band Photograph: PR

From Pere Ubu, Devo and the rest to the more recent likes of Party of Helicopters and This Moment in Black History, Ohio has long been one of the great wellsprings of weird genius in US rock. The long-out-of-print 1975 live album by this extraordinary avant-R&B outfit – still gigging today – is another thundering, juddering marvel. They're part superhuman bar band (they often played four night a week, and their chops are sensational; local legend even says they were the inspiration for the Blues Brothers), and part leftfield art-rockers. There's something of Television's coiling, tangling intricacy here, with tilts at Beefheart, Afrobeat, krautrock, free jazz, and stern, striding funk besides. Robert Kidney's half-sung, half-spoken declamations only add to the drama, while the band fire off ingenious, multilayered riffs and rhythms that sometimes collapse into almost-freeform psychedelic reveries. Ubu's David Thomas once said Jimmy Bell was "the only good record ever recorded by anyone"; it certainly seems a crime that it isn't better known.

 

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