The Big Exercise vinyl

Prepare to be confounded and confused, but more importantly hugely entertained. If this is your first encounter with The Homesick let's put it like this - the Dutch guitar-driven eccentrics baffled plenty with their debut long form, 2017's "Youth Hunt", and are back on similarly leftfield form here.

In many ways "The Big Exercise" is a more logical record, and it's just as musically accomplished. Calling on elements of post punk and epic wall-of-sound fare, while still managing to include folksy nuances (or even full tracks, such as opener "What's In Store"), it's the fact the band set these instrumentations to such bizarre themes that makes the whole thing so unexpected. But on this second album subject matters are more coherent and contextualised, from struggling with sleep paralysis to that eternal sense of longing. It's an enormously inventive work by an outfit that don't seem to care about boundaries or genre rules.