Sanjuro  - I Want My Money Back

Any band with the sheer chutzpah to display the disregard for commerciality and supposed genre boundaries that international collective Sanjuro bring to ‘I Want My Money Back,’ their debut mini album, deserve recognition in my humble opinion. Blending an eye watering range of styles and instrumentation in the course of any single track, from thoughtful, folky guitar to blasts of accordion and fiddle drenched in the unrestrained energy of punk, along with passages of traditional gypsy music, sultry European dance (think 19th century rather than europop) and straight ahead rock, it’s unlikely that you’ve heard anything like this before, except perhaps in the grip of a cheese induced fever dream. It’s defiantly quirky, irrepressibly upbeat fare, and if it doesn’t make part of you want to get up and dance like an idiot, then frankly you may be dead inside.

Ok, in all honestly this is an acquired taste, about as likely to top the charts as... well, a band prepared to utter the words ‘accordion’ and ‘punk’ in the same sentence, but that’s irrelevant. True stylistic mavericks in our music community are sadly few and far between, and though the constituent parts of Sanjuro’s sound are far from revolutionary, together they create glimmers of possible brilliance to come. ‘What Went Wrong’ evokes images of a packed bar somewhere in eastern Europe ringing to the clamour of dancing feet, while elsewhere ‘Redundancia’ gives a prescient lyrical, street level account of the frustration and alienation of life on the dole. You couldn’t make it up really. To those with an adventurous spirit and open mind I highly recommend this, along with to those uninhibited (or inebriated) souls that can’t help singing and dancing around the tables of local pubs everywhere at the striking up of a tune.