Dutty Moonshine Big Band - City of Sin: Album review

Now here’s something completely different, courtesy of Dutty Moonshine Big Band, ‘a 12-piece musical force of nature’.

Their second album ‘City of Sin’ is a riot of vibrant sounds and genres. The band is renowned for blending brass, keys, drums, digital hardware and vocalists, creating ‘explosive bass music that is inspired-by the classic big band sound of days gone by.’

Here, they deliver 11 tracks ‘designed to take the listener on a uniquely multi-genre, bass-heavy, dancefloor-destroying journey.’ Picking up where their debut album left-off, ‘City Of Sin’ continues the band’s semi-fictional narrative. It tells the tale of a gang of 1930s moonshine bootleggers as they make their way to the top of the gangster food-chain.

The album opens with the ‘banging’ ‘Big Band Fam’, and takes you on a lively journey. There’s the ‘cryptic’ seven-minute love song ‘Tommy & Loretta’, with its shuffling, swing-style beat. You have to listen to the lyrics as it plays out a dramatic story.

Then there’s the South America-inspired ‘Fiança’ (based on the 150 Funk/Baile sound and featuring specialist Portuguese vocalist, Chininha), the grime-indebted ’The Arrest’, and the Afro-pop twisted ‘Locked Up’.

In 2019 they played Wilderness, Beat-Herder, Glastonbury and Valleyfest and went down a storm. They are well worth discovering.

The album is out now.

Reviewed by Zoe Myall