Friday night was a sensible choice for the launch of Voodoo Love Orchestra’s second album, Inglorious Technicolor. With influences that span continents, they are a vibrant mix of global styles with a flair for wild performance and the carnivalesque. At their live shows, sitting at the back is not an option.

Perhaps a good umbrella-term would be latin funk, although this doesn’t quite capture the strut which is essential to their style. ‘Orchestra’ is right – they’re a huge band whose ten-member makeup caters more to New Orleans jazz than anything else. They’ve abandoned guitars in favour of a five-piece brass section and three-piece woodwind. In place of bass a sousaphone hulks at the rear of the stage. For percussion, there’s just a bass drum, and the lead vocals’ snare and kit-bag.

Anyone familiar with Brighton’s big-band scene will recognise lead vocalist and percussionist Cicely Taylor, notably also a member of Lakuta. From her years studying percussion in Latin America the band has gained an authenticity to their style, incorporating rhythms from cumbia to rumba. But the band isn’t rigidly latin, they draw on each members’ experience for a package that is eclectic and broad: one of the trumpets favoured jazz in his solos, while the trombone brought afrobeat into the mix, for example.

The band opened with ‘Hong Kong Mambo’, a potent instrumental track from their first album. They brought some dancers with them who led the crowd – but they weren’t really necessary: the band set the tone themselves with this one, before moving swiftly on to a raucous cover of ‘Fever’. From here tracks from Inglorious Technicolor flew thick and fast, starting with ‘A La Memoria Del Muerto’, a quick swinger laden with screeching solos, followed by an uptempo cover of ‘Ghost Town’, which worked very well with a latin twist. Next they played the moody ‘Frankenstein Ska’, full of space for percussion solos.

They raced through a mix of old and new material, with the back and forth of ‘Cumbia En Do’ they worked the crowd to extremes, giving every member of the band a solo. Their talent for songwriting was particularly evident in the intricately layered horns of ‘Plinio Guzman’ and ‘La Piojosa’, and they revisited old favourites like ‘Linda Magdalena’, pleasing long-term fans as well as new.

While being mathematically precise, and extremely well practised, the band have a certain charm in that they manage to sound tumultuous, both passionate and disordered. All the screaming brass and stomping percussion gives the impression, at first, that they’re slap-dash or messy, while in fact the opposite is true: they’re like the bed-hair of music, actively cultivating a sense of chaos while performing note-for-note.

The band drew to a close with ‘Zombie’, a tried and tested hit with the crowd, before ending their set definitively with ‘La Samaria’, for which they left the stage and marched through the venue, taking up residence in the middle of the floor. If there was anybody in Patterns who hadn’t danced yet, they had by the end of this one.
Ben Noble

Website: voodooloveorchestra.com
Facebook: facebook.com/VLOrchestra