It’s been an interesting year for Oxford-based four piece The Half Rabbits, featuring as it has a Rolling Stone front cover, an appearance on Smalltown America’s Public Broadcast 6 compilation and the BBC declaring themselves “smitten”. Not bad feedback, stemming as it did from one self-released EP. Follow-up release 'Disclaimer', a six-song mini-album, has a lot to live up to.
It’s fortunate, then, that it’s rather good. Though the Muse references are obvious, and there’s an occasional nod in the direction of Radiohead, 'Disclaimer' is very much its own record. There’s a swagger and righteousness to it, but it’s saved from appearing cocksure by the songs’ disconnected and stuttering style. Full of disconcerting flickers and flashes, it’s attention deficit music: an aural strobe light flickering and stumbling over a mad scientist-esque bubbling of noises and effects, leaping from one idea to another so abruptly that no one tune has a chance to outstay its welcome. The music loops and whorls under a deep crooning vocal; stumbling and lurching through unexpected mood-shifts and crescendos, occasionally pausing for breath before spiralling downwards again.
With the impossible-to-ignore volume and insistence of someone hammering a point home and a dark, foreboding compulsiveness, Disclaimer is a most impressive slab of twisted post-rock. The only problem is: how on earth do The Half Rabbits top last year’s achievements? I await their solution with bated breath…