Bark Psychosis: “Hex” (Circa Records)

To indicate the versatility and virtuosity of the instrumentation on this album here’s a list of some of the tools Bark Psychosis utilise for their weirdly brooding tunes: keyboards, piano, Hammond, bass, samples and programming, percussion, drums, guitar (yes, indeed folks!), melodica, triangle, vibraphone, flute, trumpet, violin, viola, cello and djembe, the strings of that compendium being supplied by people who call themselves The Duke Quartet. Certainly, Hex is not exactly your run-of-the-(Pebble)-mill pop disc even if its woofers might, in the final analysis, be a little bit worse than its (mega) bite.

Permeated by a high-class sense of melodics and distilled through a lucid jazz filter that has been injected with a knowing fusion of Schoenberg classicism, most of Hex shimmies along stealthily like a cooly seductive narcotic with a dangerously alluring ease, best exemplified by the seemingly effortless concatenation of phrases and styles of the musically buoyant but lyically morose ‘A Street Scene’ and the existentially despairing ‘Absent Friend’.

While Graham Sutton’s vocals in the main intentionally veer off-beat and run counter to the intertextualised harmonics of the quiet, almost sleazy instrumentation both he and the music join forces on the most anarchic and cacophonic track. Psychosis, they say, is severe mental derangement involving the whole personality and ‘Fingerspit’ attempts to embody this sense of chaos on a formal level with some pleasantly jarring aural results.

Hex is often stimulating, provocative and suggestive. It is also, at times, so frighteningly bleak, in particular lyrically, and so layered, instrumentally, with a low key academic acumen that there is a real threat that the beautiful melancholia of the record, especially on something like the opener ‘The Loom’, has swung from pathos to bathos by the last song. However, given that the elongated nature of most of these melodies races by unnoticed it seems apparent that Hex bewitches rather more than it demystifies and as such it articulates a magic imperious enough in its own way.

• Patrick Brennan.