Lunch Money Life is a band, or rather a roughly organized collective, with a clandestine sense of spirit and a lucid concise vision for their work. Formed in the enclave of a church practice space in London, where the band's saxophone player Spencer Martin performed the organ during Sunday mass, their sound has iterated with time and quotients of sweat into an escalating thoroughfare between the profane and the paradise upstares. While the group's sacred practice space does have an observable impact on their sound and aesthetic, the true genesis spark of the group was trombone player Jack Martin's attempts to fuse Kraftwerk futurism, Dilla-styled loops, and atmospheric jazz in a kind of live "robot music" revue. However, after many upgrades to their firmware, Lunch Money Life have settled on a model of expansive and polymorphous post-rock- a form, however distant, that still owes an evolutionary debt to the modal jazz and electronic freestyles of their origins. Their ability to direct the listener through any number of undeviating left-oriented turns throughout a single track is exemplified on their latest EP Under The Mercies. The final track off of this record, "Royalty Laid Bare Before God," conducts itself in partisan alignment with the precision chaos of a band like Battles, exhibiting a disciplined approach to groove that keeps a foot lodged in the stirrup on either side of a hellfire bass supercharge and an even current of angelic, soul seared, but soothing synth riffs- a tea-kettle sized battle as a part of a great struggle between the divine and the duplicitous. The final track's heavy-handed but graceful motions contrast nicely with the earlier numbers "Jimmy J Sunset" and "Holy Water Streaming," whose lighter, more agile structures and dancing guitar chords hint at some West African influences that symbiotically coincide with a cloudy, Mogwai-esque pressure system and a dedication to a kind of ecumenical pandemonium, one that could be expected from Enter Shikari, but is highly improbably coming from a group considered an upstart in a young jazz scene- even a culture setting as innovative as one gestating in East London. These incredibly dichotomous aspects of Lunch Money Life's sound all eventually swirl and part as a kind of an eye in the storm for the title track, where the tropical storm of jungle beats and scraping bassline magnanimous make way for a few bars of pristine pop excellence in the form of a whisper-soft and calmly firm vocal melody possessed of a restorative glow. Lunch Money Life shows the listener no leniency in their exhaustive impressionistic demonstration of defiance and embrace of an uncharted destiny on Under The Mercies. If you expected anything less, you're probably better off either repenting for your lack of faith in the group... or listening to something else.
