Ghost Mountain, Siamese Sailboats

And now, dropping by from another planet…Ghost Mountain’s Siamese Sailboats. Okay, maybe not, but that’s sure what it feels like to listen to the trio’s seemingly acid-fueled mashup of Spiritualized psychedelia, nerdcore-style rapping, and downright joyful-sounding, Atom and His Package-esque candy-pop melodies; I’ll grant that there’s probably somebody out there who’s hit on this particular combination independently, but I sure as hell haven’t ever heard ’em.

The band’s closest analogue at points is probably Bay Area freak-hoppers cLOUDDEAD, particularly in terms of the oddball lyrical imagery and the waves and washes of noise that occasionally threaten to drown vocalist/sampler-wielder Daniel’s voice, but really, I can’t bring myself to label this “hip-hop” of any flavor. It just doesn’t fit; Ghost Mountain’s vocals are primarily rapped in Daniel’s nerdy-guy deadpan, but they’re only a tool, a piece used to build the whole contraption.

At their best, Ghost Mountain plays like the love child of Animal Collective neo-psych and a syrup-slowed, heavy-lidded MC Paul Barman, incorporating vocab-heavy lines with layers of bright, warm-and-fuzzy M83 synths, cloud-sweeping atmospherics, and a gleeful sense of childish abandon (see “The Atomic Brain,” “Trees,” “Face”). At their weirdest, they near Four Tet territory, crafting intricate blankets of warm, comforting instrumental melodicism, with multi-instrumentalist Stephen (the third member of the triad is electric guitarist Max; no last names here, apparently) singing near-unintelligibly through a vocoder (see “Neon Swings,” “Furry Smiles,” “Friends”).

Oddly enough, those bits of the disc remind me of nobody more than ex-Houstonian Jody Hughes, who put out a completely obscure album of vocoder pop several years back before vanishing completely to parts unknown. Given these guys’ relatively youthful demeanor and the fact that Hughes is barely a memory these days, I’m guessing they’d have no clue who he is/was, but it’s still an intriguing resemblance.

The utter high point of the album is “Good Heart,” with its bitter-yet-restrained lyrics (which are addressed to a former lover/girlfriend but really seemed aimed, Stuart Smalley-like, right back at the singer as a kind of affirmation), head-nodding beat, thick, escalating bassline, watery keys, and — best of all — left-field, hymn-like “Stars in the sky” refrain.

It’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before, and even after repeated listens, I find myself skipping backwards through the album, trying in vain to figure out how they pieced and assembled all this together and made it work. Because it definitely freaking does, somehow.