It’s a crying shame but completely unsurprising that more people haven’t heard of this Portland-based six piece.

That’s the downside that comes with self-releasing three albums and only venturing on a major headlining tour last year in the wake of their much-admired Wild Mountain Nation.

Songwriter Eric Earley has described the material that makes up Furr as being ‘like Bob Dylan with a little Sergio Leone and Cat Stevens thrown in’. While this applies as well as anything else to the title track, the brutal little ballad ‘Black River Killer’ or the stunning closer ‘Lady on the Water’, the band’s sound can just as accurately be thought of as pop/rock/folk/metal/indie/experimental. Thus we get in the same neat package the effortlessly catchy pop-rock ‘Sleepy Time in the Western World’ and, via the Dylan inflected by-ways mentioned above, the metal scream of ‘Love U’.

It’s to Earley’s credit that what could have been an indulgently messy pastiche holds together as seamlessly as it does. Excellent.

Oliver Downes