Black Market Karma – Aped Flair and Hijacked Ideas

By RingMaster Review on October 10, 2022 • ( 0 )

With two lead singles suggesting and promising much, UK indie rock artist BLACK MARKET KARMA has unveiled new album Aped Flair and Hijacked Ideas. Expectations were of an encounter which would leave us with a warm glow inside and a spring to the spirit. As we know such assumptions can so often be unrealised or as in this case left a touch embarrassed by their low expectations. The album is an absorbing and hungrily captivating proposition, listening to it best described as floating across the candied syrup of temptation.

BLACK MARKET KARMA is the solo project of London hailing, South Coast residing Stanley Belton. Aped Flair and Hijacked Ideas is his tenth full-length and a record which, like a mellow sunspot, shimmers with his psych rock/indie pop woven sound. It is a varied sound he weaves though, the album also bearing a sixties guitar pop inspiration to its character and a release which takes ears and imagination on a sail across golden hued, evocatively coruscating adventures.

The album opens with those two aforementioned singles with Dead Trajectory first up. The song immediately strokes ears with tranquil yet lively caresses of guitar with Belton’s tones similarly warmly inviting as a psychedelic glaze soaks and echoes in the track’s magnetic skies. Like HERMAN’S HERMITS meets THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN, the song is nostalgia and new enterprise, sonic and melodic oscillations washing the senses aligning to the familiar and individual with it all rolled into on mesmeric proposition.

The following In My Child Mind (E To A) is cast from a similar palette of flavouring with an even livelier energy and gait to its tempting. As with its predecessor, ears and emotions float across its creative surface, the inspiriting ripples beneath fuelling the addictive virulence soon greedily devoured and hypnotic jangle which only escalated our captivation under Belton’s summery vocal sun.

One of our biggest favourites within the album is immediately followed by another. 3 Foresight For Hindsight is a more indie nurtured proposal and in no time was under the skin with its melodic musing within an evolving sky of mellow radiance and rapacious flames. What ultimately fuelled our addiction though was the numbing pulsation at its core, a rhythmic twang which nagged from the first second. It is a compelling drone though which is persistently wrapped in melodic wires and hydrous intimation throughout, an aspect which only seemed to intensify the pull and majesty of the song.

There is a folkish essence to next up Kodama which marries effortlessly with its psych pop breeding, the variety of flavours within the release growing by the song. Whiffs of bands such as HOUSE OF LOVE and MY BLOODY VALENTINE emerge across Aped Flair and Hijacked Ideas too and no more elegantly than here with its shoegaze glaze to the infectious tempting while Jumble Jumble shows the rock trespass which also lies within the BLACK MARKET KARMA sound. With coarse fuzziness and an aqueous warble to Belton’s vocals, the track fascinated as it mesmerised.

Similarly, Cadet #2187 has an underwater like shimmer to its body but one also bearing the mystery and captivation of celestial seas; the imagination eagerly engaged before The Sunshine Maker weaved and swayed in ears with its own design of melodic vines and across a suggestive translucent landscape. That sixties guitar pop essence again richly tempts within the compellingly alluring temptation offered; thick persuasion just as ripe in the psych pop seduction of Urchin.

In a slight departure from the norm of creating and performing everything himself, Belton linked up with his brother Finley Belton for the next two songs, Kong and A Crying Shame, the pair co-writing the tracks with the guest also contributing his guitar craft. Both songs share emotive ballads, each a resonance of sound and thought crafted in their own realm of individual invention. The last is almost somnambulistic in its breath and sway but as all tracks with an inherent catchiness and warm spirit which orchestrated joyous involvement.

The album is completed by Ace’s Trip Through The Cosmic Ether, an entrancing glide to the beyond which instrumentally had the imagination conjuring and vocally saw thoughts musing, each with new relish by the listen.

Belton describes the album’s title as “a tongue-in-cheek reference to the idea that nothing is truly original.” You can though weave ideas and inspirations into something individual and inventively fresh to offer something new, Aped Flair and Hijacked Ideas the proof.

Aped Flair and Hijacked Ideas is out now via Flower Power Records; out now everywhere digitally, including Apple Music, Spotify and Bandcamp, with a coloured vinyl edition with a gatefold sleeve available at https://bit.ly/3QNCBjE .