The Bly De Blyant band website is full of useful tips. “Too many products promise more than they can actually provide,” the trio’s drummer and leader Øyvind Skarbø offers helpfully. “And within the field of prescription-free coughing and sore throat-medication it seems to me that nothing really works.” Skarbø then recommends some pastilles. 

If you’re fairly unfamiliar with the trio who release Hindsight Bias on the Hubro label in early-2014, then, it might, like the pastilles, be a case of suck it and see. Their name in case you were wondering apparently means, slightly preposterously, “Lead the Pencil”, and Skarbø, joined by guitarist Hilmar Jensson and bassist Shahzad Ismaily have the album ABC already to their name, and returned to the same studio in the western Norwegian city of Bergen to record this new album.

It’s a tight prog-jazz unit, with a strong analogue flavour to it based around little and not-so-little jammed-up chunky riffs developed in odd directions sliding into improvisation. Jensson who’s straight out of classic electric jazz guitar hero central casting and Ismaily (who’s known for his work with Marc Ribot) both play several instruments and it’s a compelling brew, the trio resembling a bunch of beat poets on the rip making music in somewhat desultory fashion, the riffs the rhymes, the message in the motion, man. Yet it’s less slacker stream-of-consciousness than you might imagine that is until saxophonist Kjetil Møster (formerly of prodigiously-talented Coltranian outfit The Core) pops up on ‘Bunker Hill’ tense and moody against the scuzzy lo-fi organ and pounding drums.

“The bass line came to me in a dream”, says Øyvind Skarbø. Listen to that very bass line and more besides on ‘Laura’, from Hindsight Bias, above