Strange Friend [CD]

Even the most adventurous alchemists return to their favoured base elements in the pursuit of maximum potency. So it was that The Phantom Band - those wilfully mercurial outriders who changed their name repeatedly, disbanded and reformed to wrong-foot potential followers before firing out two diverse albums of singular brilliance in Checkmate Savage (2009) and The Wants (2011) - reached album number three seeking a return to the first principles of performance that brought them together to begin with. Strange Friend was, in vocalist Rick Anthony's words, borne out of "a desire to try and get back to that feeling of it just being a bunch of us in a room playing music together." It's an attempt to capture the six of them live: raw, rugged, perhaps looser, but still fit to burst with earworms and oddities from every nook and cranny.

• Format Detail: CD
• Format: CD
• Genre: Indie & Alternative