“Up for some fun tonight?” Sundara Karma’s Oscar “Lulu” Pollock politely asks his audience after getting them going with Flame, an icy, electronic funk number. Coming from a bare-legged bandleader in a black bandeau bodysuit, long leather boots and a jacket with shoulder pads so sharp you could slice lemons on them, it sounds like the kind of invitation you can trust.
The Berkshire four-piece’s second album, Ulfilas’ Alphabet – made with Everything Everything’s Alex Robertshaw and Madonna producer Stuart Price – has seen them work hard to escape easy categorisation, dicing up influences from Boney M, Roxy Music and Gothic literature into something more interesting than those who would file them alongside the likes of Catfish and the Bottlemen might presume. In tandem, singer-songwriter Pollock has enjoyed his own Ziggy-era Bowie-inspired visual evolution, making him one of his generation’s more fabulous looking performers.
Yet Sundara Karma still seem anxious to take the risks with their songs that they do with their attire. Little Smart Houses goes for clever, lissom post-punk on the level of Wild Beasts but comes out sounding hobbled by politeness and more akin to a Bombay Bicycle Club single. The most arresting selection from their new album is The Changeover, a frazzled, elegiac cowboy ballad which feels otherworldly in contrast to everything that surrounds it. For all the theatrical Bowie-isms Pollock throws into his vocal performances, Bowie would never have been caught in the same solar system as songs as ordinary as Greenhands or Sweet Intentions.
But fun is certainly something Sundara Karma are apt to provide. They’ve evidently mainlined lessons from the cream of 2000s indie: She Said is spring-loaded with hooks, while Symbols of Joy and Eternity has a madly catchy topline straight out of Empire of the Sun’s playbook. They take their time coming back for an encore: of course, Pollock is getting changed. The never-knowingly-understated singer returns wearing a headpiece that is reminiscent of the Donnie Darko bunny exploring the BDSM scene, promising a fantastically twisted finale which, for all the energy the band pour into them, the flamboyant A Song for My Future Self and the glamorously galloping One Last Night on This Earth just can’t quite fulfil.
