by Philip Moss

Welcome to the crazy world of Blood Wizard: the avant-folk guise of Nottingham’s Cai Burns. Following last year’s Moshi Moshi released debut LP, Western Spaghetti, Burns returns with The Slip – a song that may have been written during the socially distanced summer of 2021, but that has all the wild escapism of Arthur Russell, Cate Le Bon and Squid squeezed into one.

Different to Western Spaghetti, The Slip feels unshackled: his sprechgesang keeps rolling and rolling, fuzz guitars appear out of nowhere, its vocal melodies and harmonies keep your ear second guessing, and the brilliance of the arrangement is that it slinks and shakes in no and, somehow, every direction.

Try to place Blood Wizard into a genre shaped box at your peril. As Burns says himself, ‘There’s almost something to live up to with the name Blood Wizard. You can’t have this name and not make eccentric music.’ The Slip is the perfect embodiment of this.

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