“With a sound that combines jazz, math and post-rock with ambient and spoken word, Nottingham’s Otala are not ones to be held to genre conventions.” So we wrote back in November when covering the single ‘Patchwork’. The first taste of the band’s new EP Fire! To The River, via London’s Lil Chop Record Shop, the track introduced how Rory Allen (bass guitar), Charlotte Foulkes-Hannam (saxophone), Finley Fletcher Hills (drums), Jack McInnes (synthesiser) and Oscar Thorpe (guitar and vocals) conjure sprawling, endlessly inventive soundscapes, each track its own cohesive, near-mystical world.
With the EP out now, Otala have shared opener ‘Plates From The Kiln’ as a single to entice anyone who might remain unconvinced. Opening in near-silence before Foulkes-Hannam’s saxophone flutters in, the track is a lesson in control, the various elements introducing themselves in layers as though coalescing in real time. But within this careful build lies something else too. A sense of simmering volatility, a potential momentum wishing to realise itself. Chaos straining against its chains. Part of what makes Otala so special is their understanding of the tension which results from such a style, the listener pulled along by the suspense of a delayed crescendo. Paired with poetic, often existential lyricism, the track comes to represent a microcosm of the EP as a whole. Something at once stark and playful, quiet and thundering, bordering on the sublime.