Wobble. Black Market Karma

Early in 2023 Black Market Karma found itself on the blog with its six song mini album 'Friends In Noise'. Come summer 2024 here is Wobble. This full length, 12 song album is aptly named, as wobbly most of the songs are. The band has produced a good mix of 1960 pop songs soaked in psychedelia. The tie-die ink, the t-shirts, lava lamps and fluid projections can all be taken out off their dusty boxes in the attic, as they can be very much of use during the band's live shows when presenting the music on Wobble on stage.

Black Market Karma is Londoner Stanley Belton, who moved to the south-east U.K. coast. He made the 11th BKM album together with friends and colleagues. The band formed in 2011 with Belton locked up in his home studio cranking out four albums in 2012. Especially after 2016 that pace slowed down.

On Wobble you will find that BKM has left 2024 and departed for the 1960s. Especially for the years 1967 and 1968 when besides the big names, band like The Move scored its hits and one hit wonders like The Lemon Pipers ('Green Tambourine') and all sorts of bands that had longer careers but hopped on the psychedelic bandwagon for a short while, like e.g. Golden Earrings and Tee Set / After Tea here in NL. Today bands playing music from this relatively short era come a dime a dozen the past ten years. Most are active for years longer than the originals were.

There's one big difference, they scored big hits back in the day. BKM will more than likely not do so. That does not stop me from listening though. It is fun and quite listenable. BKM knows what it is doing and also quite assured in what it wants to achieve. That on the one hand makes the music on Wobble far more studied and contained, than an album like the at times totally deranged 'Shazam' by The Move, from 1968. BKM focuses on songs that sound wobbly here and there but all have a head and a tail and all the right pieces in between in the right spot. If you ask me for a comparison, Sparklehorse comes to mind first.

To start your album with an instrumental song, when you sing on most of the other songs, is daring and sort of a statement. A 'we are going to do what we feel like', kind of statement. 'Mushy Conscience' contains that mushy or wobbly sound that makes up most of Wobbly. Besides the drums, nothing is straightforward. There is an effect placed on every instrument. If you like this sound, you are absolutely in the right place with Black Market Karma's new album. The intro to the next song, 'Oozer', is long, but should you not like instrumental songs, Stanley Belton will start singing soon in a slow manner, underscoring the lazy mood of Oozer. No one is in a hurry, like we all shouldn't be on a warm, tropical day like it is today (when writing). There are more instrumentals though. Belton did not feel all songs needed lyrics, that much is clear.

With Wobble, you get a slow and mostly soft to moderately rocking psych record, that draws within the lines of the genre, while offering a nice listening treat.

Wout de Natris - van der Borght

You can listen to and order Wobble here:

https://blackmarketkarma.bandcamp.com/album/wobble