Isla

This is red wine music, no doubt about it, but red wine music for the discerning indie intelligentsia, perfect for a long night where the only ambition you've got left is to sink so far into the floor cushions that you'll never get up again.

Portico Quartet are an instrumental music ensemble from the UK, but nothing about them sounds overtly English. Their sound is comprised of saxophone and auxiliary percussion matched to a conventional rhythm section, yet they are not jazz. Their new album Isla comes to us courtesy of Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, yet any implications of this being considered “world music” feels too broad, generic, and undermining. Isla is also produced by John Leckie, but it has nothing to do with Public Image Ltd., XTC, or the Stone Roses. So just who in the name of warm lager and Abbey Road studios are these guys, and what exactly is their style?

Despite the fact that John Leckie at Abbey Road produced it, this is jazz first and foremost, and there are segments of wild improv sure to turn off fearful jazzophobes. For less sensitive ears, though, this is a rich, rewarding, thought-provoking listen.

Isla feeds on Steve Reich mathematics, Radiohead dread, African desert grooves and ECM northern melancholy to travel into a new, chiming cavernous sound-world that is both exotic and hypnotic.

Richer and more rewarding than their Mercury-nominated breakthrough, Isla still has jazz running through it's veins, based as it is largely around sax and double bass, but the London band have broader ambitious.

Isla is nothing revolutionary. That's not to say that its originality is completely lost, but perhaps a touch more adventure and earnest into the mix would change the Portico Quartet's breeze into something much more powerful.

Isla boldly showcases an unconventional combination of instruments and melodic ideas, a revolutionary musical terrain that Portico Quartet will hopefully continue to explore.

With a sound centred around a tunable percussion instrument called a hang (think mellow steel drum), skittering jazz drums, saxophone and loops, the quartet, who live Monkees-like in a shared house in East London, serve up a fresh vision of jazz, drawing sounds from across the globe.

It might be a long time before jazzers get a truly surprising improvisational blast off a Portico album, but Wyllie plays to his strengths when he deploys texture and tonal variation over rather uneventfully free-jazzy phrasing.

The ubiquitous use of the hang, a sophisticated modern take on the old-fashioned steel pan, gives a distinctive sound to this east London quartet. It's a surprisingly versatile instrument from which Nick Mulvey and Duncan Bellamy coax melodic and rhythmic patterns to complement Jack Wylie's inventive sax riffing.

The silvery ring of the hang may be the Portico Quartet’s trademark sound, but in the end what lingers is the expressive playing of saxophonist Jack Wyllie, the graceful melodic hooks, and a general air of antique melancholy – leavened on a track like Clipper with something more rough and energetic.