V JAGJAGUWAR
9/10
A FEW songs into Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s fifth album, there’s an extraordinary sound. It’s not a musical one, however – at least not in the conventional sense. In the final moments of “The Widow”, a loose-limbed exercise in Headhunters-style jazz-funk, most of the instruments abruptly fall away, leaving only a final series of plaintive piano chords and the twittering of birds outside (a child’s laughter and a few noisy frogs are discernible too). It’s as if a window has been flung