Formed in late 2000, Souvaris are a 5 piece ‘erudite instrumental outfit’ who have been making waves around the UK instrumental scene and beyond for quite some time now. Both frustrating and enchanting, A Hat is their second album for the superb Gringo label, and the culmination of several years’ worth of work.

While a strong disregard for traditional song structures is fairly common in instrumental music, Souvaris take this notion of abandoning verses and choruses to the extreme, instead preferring to undertake lengthy (we’re talking nearly 14 minutes on average) explorations of musical themes and variations until the listener is left as thoroughly exhausted as the ideas that the band have worked through. 

When this approach works, such as on the awesome math-rock groove of “Hand or Finger,” it sounds completely natural, to the point where shortening the song would interfere with its fundamental appeal. Unfortunately, lightly sprinkled across the first half of the album are moments when this approach can be a little wearing; the first five minutes of “Quit Touching My Ass” (the jury’s still out on the ‘comedy’ title) meanders around a refrain best described as ‘jazz-lite’ before the second-half performs a rescue mission by developing some balls and going straight for the jugular, while the following track, “Puny Go Stompin,” could probably benefit from a little creative editing.

When they get it right though, Souvaris are right there in the upper echelons of the instrumental world. In particular, the closing duo of tracks, “Nobody Is Fine and Everyone Needs A Drink” and “The Young Ted Danson,” stand out as two of the finest songs of the year, weaving through a ridiculous number of movements and ideas with such confident ease that they should send lots of other supposedly ‘inventive’ bands running, screaming for their style-bibles (check out the crazily addictive harmonic-laden outro to the latter if any evidence is required).

While most of A Hat is great, it can be a little difficult during the first half of the album to shake off the impression that Souvaris are occasionally underperforming, especially when the highlights are so genuinely superb. Much like the way in which the work of certain directors or novelists contain moments of pure genius but run to unnecessary lengths, Souvaris could occasionally benefit from stricter editing to help draw out the more exceptional moments in their music and leave the more ‘stock’ material behind. If they can do this, then there is no doubt that they will be able to produce an absolutely monumental masterwork. Until then, there’s A Hat.

-Kris Ilic