Fuzzy lights shine over the fens once more; dare you stray into their playground?

Release Date : 7th November 2025

Label : Self-Released

Format : CD / Vinyl / Digital

PRETTY DAMN HEAVY

That Fuzzy Lights are still going came as a pleasant and welcome surprise. Like the not enormously dissimilar Green Diesel, they have suddenly appeared back in my in tray, after a good few years apparent silence. And this album shows that the Fenland self described kraut-folksters have moved a little further and deeper into their amalgam of folk and metal. Less motorik, less kosmische, there are darker tropes now afoot. Sticking to lazy geographical labelling, this brings in now fumes from more northerly climes.

Is Norwegian death metal still a thing, minus the silly voices? OK, I confess my knowledge for the more extreme and outré apects of what I still call hard rock is limited, largely by taste; these are flavours I leave to some of my other colleagues here. They might even find the slabs of sound compounded here pretty lightweight, but it is still pretty damn heavy to me!

AS PER BURIALS

With the line-up unchanged as for 2021’s Burials, reviewed in another life, the essential focus remains the vision of Rachel and Xavier Watkins, husband and wife biochemists in Cambridge, who first formed the band. They have kept the brand alive since around 2006/7, initially as a duo and, more recently as the 5 piece band they now are. Rachel sings and plays violin. If you sensed a pause ahead the word violin, you would be right, as fiddle was the first and the not quite right word I typed. She tends to affect a a wild banshee wail with that instrument, whereas her voice is as pure and pristine as cut glass. Xavier plays guitar. Loudly.

The additional ballast, and there is a lot, comes from Chris Rogers, Daniel Carney and Mark Blay, on additional guitar, bass and drums. A well honed unit, this same line-up has operated for around 15 years, so most the band’s lifetime.

TREPIDATION & SKITTER

First track, Greenteeth, starts as disarmingly as any such title might demand, on a scratchy riff picked out on an electric guitar. Already there is a sense of trepidation, magnified then by the clarity of Rachel’s soaring voice, the contrast between the skitter of guitar and her voice not a little transfixing. A verse like that and, then, midway through the second, another guitar drops a curlicue of notes, before a clatter of drums beckon in a deep drone of crushing guitar.

A momentary threat, it is back to the skitter-scatter, this time with a jittery drumbeat, before again they all condense into a dense ceremony of sound. And so it goes, dipping between the two aspects, each time adding additional textures, all warnings. Snatches of lyric emerge, “Jenny, dig your teeth in deep, rend my flesh til the willows weep“. confirm the need for care. An instrumental maelstrom then has one guitar howling as the other fights off marauders, all with a squall of electric violin sawing over their tops. It threatens to spiral out of control, before the funereal drums bring it all back down to a closing crunch.

GLORIOUSLY RELENTLESS

Fen Creatures, the title track, is then a more delicate construction, maybe needing to be, if nonethless blessed also with a tumbril rhythm. Violin squeals like the wheels on a cart heading somewhere you don’t want to go. I’m minded the processional aspect of Alice Cooper’s track, Killer, the more disturbing instrumental second part of the song. Vocals appear at the three minute mark, to give a salve of safety. Blay has a satisfying finality in his thwacks, and if the bass is tolling, it ain’t for thee. Nearly nine minutes long, it is gloriously relentless. A slight feel of Sabbath’s War Pigs then occupies the military ratatatat of War Ditches, appreciating that may be as much word association. Rachel is nothing like Ozzy, that much should be obvious, nonetheless opening up entertaining vistas of how the Fuzzies might tackle the BS songbook. Or vice versa.

A RATTLY JANGLE

Looking for respite yet? Sorry, it isn’t there, as The Promise rumbles in on eerie Hammer House of Horror eldritch accents. This is the closest, in the melody Rachel gifts it, to orthodox folk, or folk-rock, with the guitar taking on the rattly jangle of early Span, albeit with the gallop of drums. Choral vocals impart a ghoulishly child-like aspect that is enough to convince the story can’t end well. I dare say the word do carry narrative, but I’m almost too frightened to listen. Drums and a circular repeating guitar motif then take the listener into somewhere darker, the vocals revealed now as a sirenesque trap, before Carney’s bass ushers in a sudden and, no doubt, terrible ending. Not so much for the listener, as the the grand guignol is exciting and exhilarating, even if needing a backward glance over the shoulder.

CURDLING ON THE FOREST FLOOR

There is a some change of mood for the echoey Fables Of Beauty, a mash up of early Fleetwood Mac guitars with a nursery rhyme. Rachel’s voice is at the top end of the knowing innocence she employs so well, so much so that when she brings in some gorgeously chunky violin, more probably viola, it is unexpected. Snaking and sliding sinuously, it then all curdles slowly on the forest floor. Glorious, if requiring your apology for my overheating imagination. It’s their fault. It is a military beat again that embraces Another Eden, driving along the song with precion, before another bout of instrumental grappling, guitar and violin. Is this Swarb and Thompson on PCP, perhaps? Seriously, if Fairport had practised the dark arts, would this be where they would have arrived?

DEVILISHLY CONJURED

When the last track is called Descent, quite where have we been so far, it never feeling up? Of course, this isn’t criticism, it being very much the joy of dirge that enriches this visceral broth of textures. This song is almost a canter, as it gallivants along, with a wayward rhythm. The bass and rhythm guitar chuck in some gentle syncopation, swing and groove, ahead passages of unison slo-mo grindcore. The vocals, meanwhile, and as they have done, much throughout, occupy a different soundstage, a different story in a different film, devilishly conjured together for the additional shock of their differences. An electrical storm of guitars and violin breaks through, vibrant and vivid, before the endgame is called by Blay’s insistent rhythm. The vocals try to fight back, but with a final flam on the rim, it’s done, it’s over.

IMPRESSIVE

None of these tracks are short bursts of commerciality that you can hum along to, and tend to smack more of a bygone age, when singles were an unecessary appendage. That is no bad thing. The teenage me would love it, which, seeing as so, too, does the, gulp, pensioner, that’s pretty damned impressive. Well played, Fuzzy Lights, play on!

Green your own teeth on this, the first track from the album:

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