Bingo Fury - Bats Feet For A Widow (2024)

Bingo Fury’s noirish, furiously inventive music – marrying Scott Walker-esque balladry, poised jazz and agitated no-wave – has marked him amongst the UK avant-garde’s most exciting young voices. The multi-instrumentalist and madcap producer’s debut album Bats Feet For A Widow arrives February 16th via The state51 Conspiracy.

The album was recorded in a local church in Bristol and inspired by Fury’s tangled feelings towards his strong religious upbringing. We hear the old building everywhere amidst the rich jazz performances of his band: Meg Jenkins (bass), Henry Terrett (drums), Harry Furniss (cornet) and Rafi Cohen (guitar, glockenspiel, piano). We also hear tossed house keys, wine glasses and strange acousmatic experiments: all channelled into a powerfully cinematic, deeply romantic album. At its heart is Fury’s crooning bass vocal, lending a vivid and slyly humorous voice to universal themes of love and pain.

Bats Feet For A Widow is an album of extremity. In all respects – its sonic palette, strange experiments, obscure references, offbeat one-liners, heart-breaking sentimentality and surging creativity – it is astonishingly full. Fury duly ends it on a note of maximalism: “you know I’m trying to give you everything / It all gets in the way.”