Bradford’s Sister Wanzala is a family affair, consisting of Patrick Wanzala-Ryan (vocals/guitar) and his twin brothers, Mark Wanzala-Ryan (drums) and Chris Wanzala-Ryan (bass). After 2016’s debut EP, Bodies on the Loose, the band are set to release The Circus EP this spring, which they recorded with Jonny Coddington at The Crows Nest Studios. In keeping with the Sister Wanzala tongue-in-cheek spirit, the trio describe the previous release as a failure, and say they are moving away its’cold funk’ style in favour of a new direction—that of a “sub par Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds tribute act.”
Sister Wanzala have released the first single, ‘I Went Whaling in My Gap Year’, by way of a taster, and the song serves as the perfect introduction to the band’s tone. The ominous vocal style brings to mind the aforementioned Nick Cave or Wild Beasts, a kind of gloating note that rises and falls, both sinister and bizarre and wholly appropriate for the band’s character—a kind of halfway house between dread and wit.
Thematically, the record deals with the United Kingdom and its “post-empire hangover,” painting a country stirring from its imperialistic delirium to find itself sore and depressed. It seems there’s little to do in the face of such self-destruction other than try to imagine oneself back in the glory of the moment, national identity as a sad dream-chase, all underpinned by pathetic bluster and a creeping self-loathing.
Of course, this being Sister Wanzala, the result is bizarrely comic, as ‘I Went Whaling in My Gap Year’ attests. Here the past and present meet in a strange collision, Herman Melville as the sort of privileged millennial poverty tourist who thinks that foreign air might be somehow solve all their existential woes. Some vestigial imperialist impulse perhaps, realising oneself through exposure to funny languages, weird food and an orgy of violence. Wanzala-Ryan’s vocals creep along with an ominous scuttle that soon becomes ironic farce, packed with the sneering humour that such ideas deserve.