What do you expect if you put two disturbed young men in the mountains by themselves for years and fill their wispy beards with dangerous hallucinogenic compounds? It’s not unreasonable to expect music like this. The first album by Marathon Tuxedo is dark and subtly terrifying throughout: even the lighter moments have a sinister taint across them. The second album, although undeniably brighter in humour, still bears the hallmarks of the borderline sectionable. As I say, what else could one expect from two lads who spent days at a time in nutmeg-induced deathlike comas who would then awake to feverishly recreate their dreams in musical form? This reviewer is often a little unsure of what to make of some of their output, but if in another dimension the mark of good music is the ability to make your audience frequently uncomfortable, then theirs is very very good music indeed.

Once Rialto and Weens returned from their mountain exile it took them a long time even to be able to stand in the same room together – the scars of their near death experience being too deep – so there was a ten year gap between completion of the two albums. The first record (“The Slightly Disappointing World of Tash Rialto and Morsten Weens,” referred to as TSDWOTRAMW hereafter) was conceived and executed entirely in their lonely draughty leaky wooden shack at 22,222 feet, but the second effort (“By The Time You Hear This We’ll Be Dead,” or BTTYHTWBD) was written there but only finished a decade later. The noticeable lack of guitars on BTTYHTWBD is merely because the men were forced to burn Rialto’s guitar to stave off certain frozen death after they’d run out of fuel by burning the furniture and all but one quarter of one of the floorboards.

They self-released TSDWOTRAMW upon their heroes' return to Exeter (everyone had long assumed they were dead) and it became an overnight success which achieved a massively obsessive cult following, no doubt helped by the news coverage of their escape from the brink, but success and wealth were not the panaceas the boys needed, and unfortunately both spent time in and out of mental hospitals.

They said they wouldn’t do a third album, but buoyed by the success of BTTYHTWBD after its eventual release early in 2010, they are currently taking the first tentative steps towards a new project. If their previous illustriousness is anything to go by, don’t expect to hear it till 2020.