reviews / 2025

WIPPY BONSTACK - Correct Irregulars

Name: WIPPY BONSTACK – Correct Irregulars
Item: Correct Irregulars
Rating: 8
Author: Marco Sgrignoli

2025 (Mogul intermissions)

Canterbury Sound, math-pop, progressive rock, Zolo

by Marco Sgrignoli

In the grand league of 2025's worst album covers, the fourth album by Ben Coniguliaro akaas Wippy Bonstack holds up pretty well. But if it doesn't turn up on many lists of the year's most interesting records, that'll be down to a lack of fame – certainly not a lack of musical merit. As much as, if not more than, the project's previous releases, "Correct Irregulars" is a dazzling, uncategorizable treasure chest: progressive rockfor lack of a more fitting label. Or perhaps in the most genuine sense of the term: guitar music that refuses to be pinned down, darting from one atmosphere to another with nimble steps, swallowing up any style that crosses its path.

Prog-rock devours prog-rock (but not only that)

You can be fairly certain you've never heard a prog track that starts out sounding like a Beck song. And yet here's the opening "Winning Ends", or rather its first 50 seconds – because right after that, the ramshackle slacker rock gives way to celestial harmonic zigzags that resist any equally quick pigeonholing (10cc? Beach Boys? Xtc? Less than a minute in, and the compass has already gone haywire!).

Carefree and wavering, "Wishtank" twirls in the middle of the Atlantic, somewhere between Canterbury and the East Coast sunshine pop of Free Design. But it's certainly not the only track to show such echoes Canterbury scene bands: that same richly colored, sly obliqueness pervades pretty much the whole record, and is, on closer inspection, one of its very few constants, both stylistically and emotionally.

Indeed, the closeness to Canterbury is immediately apparent again in the following "Glimpse Of The Echomaniac": a very brief, dazed keyboard flourish that would have been perfect on the Hatfield And The North. With a leap, the track then morphs into "Hilltide Lights", a garish, homespun synth-pop number that shares the swagger of nerd of They Might Be Giants and company Fabloo.

Moving on, the horizons widen still further, "progifying" even seemingly very distant territories – showing how, in the end, when it comes to prog, the sums always add up if you play with the right additions. "Haven C" moves between noise-rock and shoegaze, while "Shortness Of Magnitude" seems to want to compress all the math-acoustic tangles of the Gastr Del Sol into a single radiant minute.

"Easy To Peel", crackling and a bit nineties (somewhere between funk-leaning jazz and math-pop), spills into the closing "Bulstrobe", roughly Zappa-esque. And "Knowall Goes Away", with its razor-sharp stop'n'go moves and Genesis-style reversals, ends up mostly evoking other progressive mutants of our era like Crying, Magdalena Bay and Fievel Is Glauque.

It shouldn't work. And yet, against all odds, it all adds up

The game of references could multiply a hundredfold across the album's twenty-two tracks, and the temptation to dive headfirst into it is strong (the rundown offered so far is a clear sign of that). But to read "Correct Irregulars" merely as a fantastic hodgepodge of delicacies fished out here and there from the galaxy of prog and its surroundings would be doing it a grave disservice. What actually makes the album brilliant – arguably one of the most brilliant of the year so far – is the personality of the compositions. The ability to connect such heterogeneous ideas into coherent (in their own way, mind you) and memorable flows, pulling one emotion after another out of the hat while keeping a firm grip on the thread of the show.

The longest track on the album, the closing "The Separator", is the perfect example of this astonishing internal consistency. In just over six minutes, Coniguliaro strings together clattering guitar pirouettes, near- grunge, synth freakouts neoprog and spoken-word interludes in between growl: perfect ingredients for a hodgepodge with neither head nor tail… And yet (a miracle!) what emerges is a gripping, imaginative narrative, unpredictable but never losing its footing for a moment. Despite the thousand twists and U-turns. Of course, just as the flights of fancy between one style and another are disorienting, you only grasp so much of the lyrics' meaning too. And yet, the opening line seems perfect for describing the right approach to such a labyrinthine album: get comfortable, switch off rationality at least partially, and let yourself be carried away by the story that begins:

Recline your mind and let me spin you a tale…

Ride the wave of great music

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18/12/2025

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Marco Sgrignoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition