Melt Yourself Down’s second shares a saxophonist, Shabaka Hutchings, and end-days theme with The Comet Is Coming’s current cosmic rave-fusion. The dangerous excitement of lives brought to crisis point is caught with more nuance and intensity here. Where Pete Wareham’s previous band as leader, Acoustic Ladyland, explored Hendrix’s intersection with jazz, this music stretches into teeming, seething, politically-engaged global dance. With Wareham’s Polar Bear bandmate Leafcutter John on production and drummer Tom Skinner in with Hutchings from Sons Of Kemet, key current players interested in ritual, dance and transcendence have themselves been melted down into a fiercely thrilling sound. Recent single ‘Dot to Dot’ drops us into a steamily exciting North African nightclub of the mind. The saxes on ‘Jump The Fire’ could be longboat horns, and join booming drums in broad, oar-like strokes; in this album’s context, it’s easy to imagine the 19th century slave-ship the Amistad, after its ‘cargo’ seized control. The digital bleeps and twitchy saxes elsewhere on the track, though, show current, post-millennial tension. The dark corners Last Evenings On Earth shines its light into are made clear by Mauritian- French singer-lyricist Kushal Gaya. “I’m your executioner… which one is the God of you?” he asks, suggesting the victims singled out by IS for death according to the narrowest definitions of faith. ‘Body Parts’ picks at suffering and guilt over darkening, deepening, claustrophobic music; Gaya’s bitter chant is a sort of tribal scat, like Cab Calloway reincarnated as the War on Terror’s prophet of doom. Many bands dealing with such themes lose themselves in dissonant, alienating chaos. Melt Yourself Down more effectively glory in dance’s transformative, pounding power.