“Black Carrot play fierce, abstract, improvised, experimental jazz/rock/folk music.” This is what I’m told. If you want to describe yourself as abstract, or even experimental (how do you experiment with music anway? And then how do you decide to give your “experiments” a release on an indie record label complete with deluxe digi-packaging?) you’ve got to really earn the right. Straight away Black Forest are presenting their case: the artwork is devoid of either the name of the band or the album, instead adorned by Quentin Blake-style cartoons, and bizarre non-sequiturs and nonsense phrases the likes of which Lewis Carroll himself would be proud of. “Flares? No ”“ Cloven Hoof!” could almost be the fittingly abstract title of the album, instead it is merely the front cover’s caption. You have to earn the right to describe yourself in those terms, and Black Carrot certainly do. Much of the album channels Captain Beefheart, but lacking in the occasional flashes of pop-sensibility that made albums like Trout Mask Replica such an essential and engaging listen. That’s not to say that Drink the Black Forest isn’t engaging: it is, just for entirely different reasons. Black Carrot replace traditional hooks and song structures with sheer unpredictability, and it’s for exactly this that you keep listening ”“ you can never quite be sure where they will take you next. Croaked and gargled vocals sparsely decorate the delicate “Doves Fly Ahead of Me”, which is followed by an improvised free-jazz track featuring a recording of the band talking about the “Archriderferlisa ”“ a mad fish with ten wings, speaking in Elizabethan tongues.” This kind of wilful obscurity and desperate “quirkiness” would usually cause me to reach for the stop button, but Black Carrot have the charm, and certainly the talent, to make sure that not only does it not start to grate after fifteen minutes, it continues to be both interesting, and, most importantly of all, enjoyable, for the whole forty minute duration. “Genre-blurring” is a vastly over-used phrase, but in times where it is used to describe anyone daring enough to use a blues riff in a rock song, Black Carrot represent one of the few bands who genuinely defy classification, who simply refuse to be pigeon-holed.73%