★★★⯪☆

James Acaster and Graeme Wicks are the duo that makes up The Wow! Scenario, and their debut album has over 20 years of work behind it. The pair initially formed their group in 2004, based in Kettering and performing sporadically. After receiving mixed feedback (shoes thrown from the crowd and some mild car-targeted aggression), the pair decided to loosely record their existing music and call it a day. The name of the group itself comes from a heckle from the crowd that aimed to say the group didn’t have a certain “X Factor”, but the heckler miss-worded the phrase, accidentally producing “Wow Scenario”.

After many years and several recent revisions, it is a great achievement for the band to finally release any music at all, let alone a full 40-minute-long album.

Those familiar with Acaster will be no stranger to his love for music. His first published book ‘Perfect Sound Whatever’ argues that 2016 was the all-time best year for music, and outrageous stories from his past bands have made their way onto the likes of ‘Would I Lie To You’ and the ‘Off Menu’ podcast, which Acaster co-hosts with fellow comedian and heavy-metal-lover Ed Gamble. Currently, Acaster is a star competitor on this year’s 'Celebrity Traitors', incidentally finding a new level of national (and international) fame.

The title ‘Stand in the Star. A Verse and a Chorus’ is a laughably misleading one - the pair make no attempt to follow the basic verse/chorus song structure, rather layering and bashing together an eclectic collection of rhythms and sounds into a seamless 40 minutes. Each track follows the example set by the band’s name, each ending with an exclamation point. 

This record strangely feels as though it should accompany a short, animated film. There is a certain cinematic quality about it, and the continuation from one song to the next keeps the listener in the record’s whimsical, clangy world. The list of instruments involved is far above the average album - Acaster makes full use of his formal percussion training, spanning from the humble triangle to impressive work on the drum kit. Violins, a piano, various brass instruments, and party kazoos each make their appearance among the interchanging rhythms and time signatures. The band’s music has been largely labelled as ‘experimental jazz’ on streaming services, an umbrella term to include the wild spectrum of sound that occurs in the track. 

Though much of the lyricism is lost through fast pace or the overlapping nature of the music, the parts that are clearly distinguishable are thought-provoking, though sometimes wacky. Notably, in the single ‘Zacuti!’, lyrics “Oh, destiny, I know you've been arranged / But in our complex culture / But can your smile remain?” jump out as quite beautiful. Other examples, such as in ‘Golf Socks!’ , “Caffeine express / Want is our will / Never sit still / Like Tommy S” can perhaps only be truly understood by the hand that wrote them.

This album will satisfy the tastes of very few people and is perhaps not your typical everyday listen; however, it is exactly what one would imagine Acaster’s mind could produce, and the 22-year run-up has given the world a brilliantly unique soundscape. It is the sort of album that will be studied over decades, but the layers of the music and lyricism will continue to produce new revelations and perspectives to no end.