Exhausting jazz-world-pop-you-name-it supergroup based in London. Such is the frantic, busy nature of their sound, you instantly imagine Melt Yourself Down involving a lot of musicians because their songs, while sometimes indicative of beautiful gelling among the players, on other occasions suggest instrumentalists performing extracts from quite different pieces of music. As much as it coheres there is a sense here of controlled chaos.
In fact, they are a supergroup of sorts, featuring as they do Pete Wareham (Acoustic Ladyland, Polar Bear), Shabaka Hutchings (Sons of Kemet, the Heliocentrics), Tom Skinner (Hello Skinny, Sons of Kemet, Mulatu Astatke), Ruth Goller (Acoustic Ladyland), Kushal Gaya (Zun Zun Egui) and Satin Singh (Transglobal Underground). And if you're getting from that list a sense of an outfit, a collaborative project, heavy on Afrocentric jazz-tinged tribal pop with avant-garde tendencies and no little funk, you'd be about right. Listening to Melt Yourself Down's eponymous debut album will be a treat for the kind of people who want a concise, condensed recorded version of Womad, only a Womad that takes into account contemporary developments in Afrocentric jazz-tinged tribal pop with avant-garde tendencies and no little funk.