If ever there was a name that suited a record, it is Upping The Ante by Mr Vast. From the opening moments, it feels like we have stepped through the looking glass. What ante needs upping, precisely? The answer never fully materialises, and listening in is akin at times to a 1980s role-playing book, with eccentric nutters and ravers confronting us instead of wizards and trolls. We can also consider the sinister smiley face that dominates the cover artwork. For those who like to overthink things, there is an uneasy visual association with the illustration of the sun in ’70s horror film, The Wicker Man.
Take heed: this is wild and eccentric music. Maybe the unhappy state of the world does this record no favours, but we do need some extra bandwidth to listen in. Hearing the plummy voice on ‘Scatterbrain’ claim that “I’m the one who threads the needle / I’m the one who plucks the goose” (amongst other images that follow in quick order) can quickly cause misgivings.
Upping The Ante is not a record that ploughs a single furrow. Straight after the arch nursery-room pop of ‘Scatterbrain’, we are chivvied into getting our rave gear on with ‘This And That’, a fusty bedroom workout packed full of key stabs and blurted beats. The music builds and blisses out, and along the way supports a series of parody shout-outs to forgotten massives as police sirens blare in the background. It’s the sort of sound that left its heart on a Goan beach or Dutch bulb field back in 1999. And then, as if by magic, we’re off to another soundworld entirely. The weepy chords of ‘The Bench’ sounds like Don Ross Skinner soundtracking a Blue Jam sketch – one in which a man sits on a bench and waits for a weasel to show up.
Then, like Mr Benn getting giddy on time-travel, we experience something else. ‘Neural Preening’ is a restless bunch of blurts and bleeps that the squawking, Cope-esque vocal does well to stay on top of. Follow-up is ‘Ants’; a rambling soliloquy over a lounge bar piano that foregrounds such images as, “the toffee badger, the creamed eagle, the ant made swan crisps”; random nonsenses that remind one of the sort of late-night conversations people had when they could afford to go to bars and be bored senseless by the person sat next to them. It’s amusing and meant to be nothing. That it turns into a song by the end, albeit a slightly creepy one, is oddly affirming.
The affirmation also comes, I suppose, from us remembering that Mr Vast is not alone, even if the weasel doesn’t show up. Mr Vast has a solid back catalogue to draw on, both as Mr Vast and as part of Wevie Stonder, and “his” music tacks on to a long and noble tradition of oddball Brits and their associates making oddball music in the weed-entangled corners of the alternative pop world. To purloin a hateful modern term, “those who like Mr Vast, may like” Big Block 454, EMMplekz, Ivor Cutler, Robyn Hitchcock’s more harebrained moments, or Ceramic Hobs and those wild Pumpf Records compilations.
What more? ‘I Can’t Help’ takes us back to the eternal rave, though this is more of a drum n bass gathering. We get on down to some frenzied beats and squeaky voices until a phone rings, which pushes the music through a door and sets off a series of bizarre and sometimes funny confessions from a grufty northern lad, who “goes into town wearing my dressing gown”. ‘Guess Who’ is perhaps the most straightforward track on here, a breathy acoustic number that actually gets on with being a song. Then we get ‘Crumpet Man’, which is an endearing and witty slice of baroque nonsense. With a rich electro pulse for company, a voice begins to tell us about cave paintings from “all over the world”. The heavily orchestrated music gradually swells with its own importance. At one point Crumpet Man sounds like a BBC documentary with David Attenborough telling us about tectonic plates or gazelles mating, except, as you have probably guessed by the title, it’s an ode to the crumpet. A childlike voice and recorder eventually escort the track offstage: even a slightly forced joke at the end can’t wreck it. The title track. and then last track ‘The End’, are agreeably odd singalongs, though the premise that the end is continuously delayed should surprise no-one here: indeed, it’s the only predictable part of the record.
