JazzProgressive Rock
Is It Jazz? Records · 29 May 2026
There is a joke inside the title that explains half the record. “Ah, les vaches” are the words legend attributes to Erik Satie on his deathbed, and Bushman’s Revenge have picked their favourite composer to head the moment at which they announce they have made a “pop” album. They say it with every reservation going (“take the ‘pop’ with a massive truckload of salt”), and the first proof that they should not quite be taken at their word is “Unholy Ghost”, the opening track: one minute thirty-three that opens nothing, it only sets your ear.
The Oslo trio formed in 2003 and this is their twelfth album, the first since “All the Better for Seeing You” (September 2023). The significant change is not stylistic but a matter of personnel: Tor Egil Kreken has come in on bass alongside Even Helte Hermansen on guitar and Gard Nilssen on drums, and it shows in how the low end is shared out. It was recorded at the Amper Tone studio in Oslo in August 2025 with engineer Bård Ingebrigtsen, and Johan Lindström added pedal steel to a few tracks later on. The pedal steel is what gives the word “pop” any basis at all: it holds up the background of “Barbara” and “Velkommen Til Gards” with a layer that earlier records would have covered in distortion.
The short songs and simple melodies they promised are only half there. “Rådyrparet” runs six minutes nine and “I Am A Ghost Now” six fifty-two, and the track All About Jazz singled out for a review of its own — “One Small Misstep For Man, One Giant Mistake For Mankind”, five fifty-five — is precisely the one with the oldest manners: Hermansen leaves the guitar hanging over a slow pulse and heats it in layers until the trio blows the frame wide open at the end. There is nothing pop about it. What has changed is that this kind of construction is now the exception rather than the rule.
The “Purple Rain” cover is the most revealing moment, and it is worth saying how they get there: the band explain that they are not doing Prince’s version but Stina Nordenstam’s, which is a thinned-out, almost whispered reading. That double distance — a cover of a cover — is the procedure of the whole record: take a recognisable shape and play it as though you had just come across it. It works best on “And Gullit Was His Name-O” and “Bram”, the two singles that trailed the album in April and May, where the melody stands on its own.
The reservation is one of sequencing. Two interludes of exactly one minute thirty-three — “Unholy Ghost” and “Pauseakvariet” — placed at the start and near the end bracket a record that never quite decides whether it is a set of songs or a session. The ten tracks add up to forty-four minutes forty-seven, and with two pieces like those the middle is left with less muscle than the band can give it. Anyone coming from “All the Better for Seeing You” will find less free jazz and less rock; anyone coming from the “pop” of the announcement will find far more noise than they bargained for. Both disappointments are part of the design.
Rating: 7.6/10
Text by Aina Torrents