Review: Black Market Karma ‘Wobble’

Listening to music has always been my passion. Talking about it, commenting and spinning a band’s record has always fascinated me for the simple reason that I was able to describe, in my own words, what made that particular record the cornerstone of a band’s long record collection. And then, when you find yourself involved in those feelings and fascinations produced by bands that bring their musical blend, the first guitar note throws you into the past, and you know that an unforgettable journey awaits you, sometimes adorned with beads and feathers.

For Londoner, now Dover, UK-based psych rocker-singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Stanley Belton, the creative mind behind Black Market Karma, one of the most prolific psych rock bands in the land of Albion, producing music as easy as watering the plants of his garden to keep them fresh and full of life. He’s also known to be one of few musicians to have released three albums in one single year, 2012.

Since 2011, via his own label Flower Power Records, has released eleven studio albums, an introductory compilation and a bunch of singles, one of which sees the collaboration with Spacemen3’s Pete Kember aka Sonic Boom. Collaborations can also be defined as the spice of life, Belton’s outgoing personality and always in search of new musical adventures, finds himself teaming up with a variety of musicians which include Tess Parks, The Underground Youth and The Telescopes, to mention a few.

I’ve been captivated by Black Market Karma‘s music since I miraculously bumped into 2016’s Plastic Hippie, one of the records born from the collaboration with his brother Finley. A sonically blazing album blended with colourful psych fuzzy tunes, shoegaze ethereal feels and Paisley Underground reminiscence. These, in many ways, are the musical elements that characterise his heavenly insane and multifaceted sound. A tireless mind that has been able to guide its musical generator instinct for the past thirteen years and counting.

Black Market Karma’s new album Wobble, their first for London-based notable Fuzz Club, as Belton explains it’s ‘a reference to tape wobble / wow and flutter, subtle fluctuations in pitch characteristic of analogue recording equipment’. And it’s the analogue recording that produces the so much loved ‘60s psych sound. I wonder if he ever considered recording any of his albums at Toe Rag, one of London’s famous analogue recording studios?

a joyous album whose songs enhance the warmth of the summer drizzle with its evocative captivating charm…

However, here you have an album enriched with twelve songs of mixed organic musical genres. And as you go through the pleasurable listening, you can feel in the air that, at times, the music is romantically linked to the melancholy of the psychic sound of the ‘60s that wholeheartedly embraces body and soul for being fully charged with captivating and creative lyrics seasoned with peppermint flavour.

There is nothing more beautiful in a musician than following the same musical patterns that have characterised previous albums while at the same time making a different and transgressive sound flow within shoegaze and trip-hop. The fact that the album contains five instrumental melodiously flowing tracks, does not mean that Belton was short of stories. The man is a storyteller who knows how to convey them with his impeccable musical expressiveness.

This is a joyous album whose songs enhance the warmth of the summer drizzle with its evocative captivating charm reminiscent of Marc Bolan’s early T. Rex, the earthy acid folk released in the last musical period of Robin Williamson’s ISB, and the psych rock of Cartoons. Is there a song that stands out among the others? Yes, there is more than one.

From the start of the instrumental Going On Easy to the final cinematic of Stepping Loose, the journey bursts with colourful melodies making the whole of the album massively engaging. This means that you don’t have time to indulge in other activities while listening to Wobble but let yourself be lulled like a baby by their mesmerising Sonic Broth Soul Taster. A solid 8/10 and growing.

Label: Fuzz Club Records
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Scribed by: Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Caccamo